Photo by Matt Jiggins/Flickr

Despite being far more animated than the leadership transition that followed Jagmeet Singh’s acclamation in 2017, the current NDP leadership race remains constrained by a narrow understanding of what political parties are—and what they can do. Until progressives broaden that understanding, the left is likely to keep falling short, even when it manages the occasional electoral win.

The dominant approach views the success of parties as being a function of two variables: how left-wing (or right-wing) the platform is, and the personal charisma of a party’s leader. It is striking how much political commentary remains preoccupied with these two variables, often at the expense of deeper questions about power, organization, and strategy.

Much contemporary debate is dominated by confident declarations that victory—and even utopia—are within reach, if only the right platform can be put forward. The other side presents equally hollow arguments that victory is only possible if the NDP moderates itself in pursuit of centrist voters. Compared to these recurring mantras, debates about the “likeability” of candidates can begin to seem like a more concrete, if still limited, form of analysis.

Implicit in this dominant approach is an unusually optimistic faith in state power. The entirety of politics, as in how we organize and order our societies and lives, is flattened into elections, which are construed as a magical black box. We simply have to plug the correct progressive platform into the NDP, the party wins an election, and voilà, progressive outcomes follow. Underlying every leadership candidate’s campaign is an assumption that elections translate directly into power. This belief reduces politics to a narrow sequence of campaign inputs and policy outputs.

In reality, political contestation continues between elections. Political outcomes are determined by the balance of political forces, which is a separate issue from the partisan composition of Parliament. For example, Avi Lewis’s platform calls for a public telecom option to compete with the monopolistic pricing power of Canada’s private carriers. This is a welcome idea, but one that runs headlong into the power of Bell, Rogers, and Telus.

Bell, on its own, posted annual revenues of $24 billion in 2024. The company also has 45,000 employees working full-time to advance its interests. On the other side, the NDP has an annual budget of around $6 million, a few dozen employees, and around 100,000 paper members. Under what model of politics can we believe that the latter could defeat the former—let alone defeat every other entrenched economic monopoly? The only way to square this circle is to believe state power to be entirely neutral and easily wielded; a vision of the state as a neutral and highly effective instrument, readily usable by whoever happens to control it.

In reality, modern public bureaucracies are gargantuan and notoriously difficult ships to steer. For outsiders and counter-elites, it can take an entire political term just to understand how they function. In the meantime, the incumbent elite, already well-organized, can utilize their economic, social, and media power to break the governing........

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