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THE 10 MAIN POINTS:
LIBERATING THE IMAGINATION
Herschel Hardin Leadership Campaign
Policy Circular 4 • May 25, 1995 |
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Each of these points is elaborated in separate policy circulars.
1.
Taking charge of economics. Turn the NDP into the natural authority on economic matters the first, crucial step in making ourselves a complete party rather than just a fragment. Lead the way in matters of enterprise, technology, the workplace, and financial management, going well beyond the social safety net. Become, again, the party of economic creativity and imagination.
2.
Ecological economics. Develop a whole new ecological political economy in theory, in practice, and culturally which will push market dogma right off the table.
3.
Fighting waste and excess in the private sector. Eliminate waste in the private sector, starting with inflated executive compensation, and working one's way through takeover games, stock market churning, speculative commodity trading, other financial paper shuffling, advertising and marketing, and the commercialization of sports and culture. Pull back the Ideology Curtain behind which this waste occurs.
4.
Community centred enterprise. Rebuild and pioneer enterprise which, because of its crown or co operative ownership, or other share participation, is socially rooted in the country. Rebuild the crown enterprise stream into a dynamic, creative force once again. Open the door for credit unions to use their organizational and financial strength in an enterprise role. Strengthen community economic development. Establish a leading public presence in the exploding world of electronic communication.
5.
The deficit! The deficit! Who wants a deficit? Seize control of this issue from the Reform Party, the Liberal Party, the financial press, and private sector corporate bureaucracy, by outspokenly taking charge of eliminating the deficit. Do it our way. Start with wealth and inheritance taxes, the elimination of tax expenditure giveaways, cutting back excessive interest rates, and move on from there. Use the elimination of the deficit imaginatively to reduce privilege and create a more egalitarian society.
6.
The Post Propaganda Society. Create the first Post Propaganda Society of the electronic age. Liberate our media, especially television, from brand name and other commercial propaganda, with its waste and its profound negative consequences. Replace this commercialism with a vibrant, humanist, popular culture of our own and with independent consumer and environmental information. Phase out the commercialization of sports and culture.
7.
Making media and culture an issue. Several crucial issues are involved: (a)Day to day media bias; (b) Structural media bias (for example, separate business/finance sections in newspapers, but no equivalent coverage of the public sector, the workplace, labour unions, or environmental practices); (c)Unrepresentative mass media ownership and concentration of ownership; (d) The marginalization of Canadian cultural expression, in everything from film production to book publishing. Make these major electoral issues. Bring them up at every possible opportunity.
8.
One kind of membership. Everyone, including people in the labour movement, to participate as individual members. Accentuate our work in reaching rank and file union members as potential party members and voters. Recreate our historic link with labour and build similar links with the environmental movement and the cultural community. Reach out to those who, in adapting to the changing nature of work, have become self employed, and to non unionized employees. Advocate limiting political contributions to individuals, for all parties, and placing a ceiling on those contributions.
9.
Public sector: holding heads high. Tackle head on the media bias which downgrades the public sector. Articulate the role of community as primary in human society. Lay bare the wrong headed dogma that markets, an economic device, are primary and sacrosanct.
10.
Beyond globalization. Debunk the globalization bureaucracy and its pretensions of representing the future. Articulate the general logic of not being prisoner of an impersonalized, distant bureaucracy of not being brusselized or naftized. Develop, both for ourselves and others, like Mexico, a dynamic, positivist working model for freeing countries from the globalization bureaucracy.
Note that I have not said anything specifically about the social safety net, medicare, unemployment, and the disadvantaged, and only commented indirectly on NAFTA and its threat to employment, environmental, and social standards. I have done so deliberately, because concern with those issues is already part of our party's culture. We know this. It cannot be any other way. Unless we become a party of much more, however, we are just catching a piece of reality and are foredoomed to failure. It's like being in a wrestling match with one arm tied behind one's back and one's ankles also bound up
Instead, I am concentrating on the rest of the party that we should become. Only by becoming a more complete political party touching reality in all its variety are we going to succeed. Only in this way, too, are we going to protect the "social political economy" to begin with.
Let me give you an example. In the last federal election campaign, I attended an anti NAFTA rally at a theatre in downtown Vancouver. It had high profile speakers, including Dave Barrett, Maude Barlow, and George Watts, representing the native community, among others. They did well, making one valid point after another and stirring my emotions. One knew, however, as the event proceeded, that it was a hollow, futile ritual. The pro Nafta side purported to represent enterprise, creativity, modernism, changing times, and the new global world linked instantaneously by electronic communication. The anti Nafta side that evening appeared, by comparison, to be whiners in a corner talking to their little crowd of the already converted. The anti Nafta side was right in what they were saying, but their message covered too small a part of reality and, in a short election campaign, there was no way of doing anything more, even if they were so inclined.
The same thing occurs by our continuously portraying ourselves as not much more than the party of the social safety net and the disadvantaged. We marginalize ourselves and marginalize the disadvantaged in the process. We don't do anybody a favour.
Democratic socialism is a political philosophy for all of the variety of life. |
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