Some Fundamental Aspects of Our Policy Towards the NDP (adopted by the Socialist Action Convention in 2019)
Our political analysis and tactical approach to the mass labour party in English Canada, the New Democratic Party, was elaborated in a report by Gary Porter to the January 1974 Plenum of the Central Committee of the League for Socialist Action/Ligue Socialiste Ouvrière. Porter’s report represented the majority view of the Political Committee. It was adopted by the plenum and published in the LSA/LSO Internal Information Bulletin, Vol. 2, No. 4, February 1974. Our work in the NDP and its predecessor, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, began in the 1940s, years before 1974 discussion. The 1974 report, however, represented a major clarification of our position as well as a further development and clarification of our political line.
It is vital to state at the outset that our NDP policy and our fraction work in the NDP occurs within our fundamental framework. We are building an active, independent and public revolutionary socialist party through action in many areas and through socialist education and propaganda under our own red flag. Our NDP policy and fraction work is simply part of that process.
This document outlines and reinforces that position, updated to the present reality. In general, we are applying the Marxist-Leninist method to worker-based parties with petty bourgeois leaderships and bourgeois programs that aim to reform capitalism, rather than to overthrow it in favour of the construction of a workers’ state towards building socialism.