felis_ultharus: The Pardoner from the Canterbury Tales (Default)
felis_ultharus ([personal profile] felis_ultharus) wrote2008-09-24 08:00 am

(no subject)

So I just finished reading Fences and Windows, a collection of short articles and speeches by Naomi Klein.

Klein never set out to be spokeswoman for the anti-corporate, pro-democracy movement that gets mislabelled "anti-globalization." She considers herself a journalist documenting a movement that was there before her, and doesn't consider it right for such a diverse movement to have a single spokesperson. But with the publishing of No Logo, she's been thrust into that role anyway.

The book is overall excellent, spanning her writings from the "Battle in Seattle" to just after the terrorist attacks in New York. Mostly, it's an expansion and update of No Logo, but there's enough in the way of new ideas here to make it worth the read.

The one place the book really clunked, though, was in her analysis of Canadian party politics at the federal level.

The allergy to party politics is quite common in the anti-corporate movement, which tends to see politics through the most cynical of lenses. The problem is, of course, that if you don't have viable alternative parties to vote for, nothing changes. The single greatest reflection of how democratic a country is is how many parties are sitting in its elected assembly. One party is a dictatorship, two are teetering over the brink of it.

It's also strange, because she confines her attacks to the federal level, defends the devolution of powers to the provinces. Yet most of the evil policies she attacks are provincial jurisdictions, and provincial parties are traditionally far to the right of their federal counterparts.

Like a lot of activists, she's really down on the NDP. Some of her criticisms are valid, especially granted that they were written in the days when Alexa McDonough was trying to fill the gap abandoned by an increasingly right-wing Liberal Party by moving to the centre-left and abandoning the activist base.

Now, though, her complaints ring much more hollow. While Layton is more likely to address the centre-left, he hasn't abandoned the radicals at the base. He attacks NAFTA's section-11 effects, defends the Insite needle-exchange program, defends cultural programs (including controversial ones), and whipped the vote on same-sex marriage.

He never tries to tell one crowd one thing and another something else -- when asked, he's up front about policies he knows won't play as well to the particular crowd he's addressing.

Nor are the changes just cosmetic. The rabble-rousers Klein documents are increasingly becoming our candidates, and voting in our riding associations, and volunteering for us. They are the future of the party. Our candidate here in Jeanne-Le Ber is a founder of the largest Quebec-based anti-war-in-Afghanistan and pro-Kyoto organizations, and has organized a lot of those protests that Klein documents.

It's a natural evolution. You can't bring in new policies without the power to do so, and a lot of well-meaning movements -- such as the pre-WWI peace movement -- failed to change much policy precisely because they snubbed mainstream politics.

And that seems to be something Klein herself has realized. After all, she's helping out Tom King, the writer and First Nations activist who's our NDP candidate in Guelph, Ontario.

I have high hopes for what's coming. The movement Klein documents is really our hope for the future, and now that it's seeking really power through the NDP, maybe we can finally get this country back on track. there's still a lot of anti-political cynicism to overcome.

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