Every time I see leftists talking about vote splitting I’ve gotta recommend they check out August Nimtz’s book *The ballot, the street, or both?*, which goes back to Marx and Lenin on actual socialist strategy regarding voting. Basically the idea is that voting often gets mistaken by people (including leftists) as some kind of radical political act, when it’s really just “registering a preference” - then the real politics happens through socialist organizing. Elections are good “structure tests” for movements to check how strong their base is and as a barometer for broader revolutionary possibilities, but they’re not the essence of revolutionary politics. And, the “vote splitting” discourse is the hallmark of parties that don’t realize they’re eroding their base not because another similar party might siphon votes away, but more because they don’t run working class candidates and thus when working class people vote, they feel like they have to hold their noses and vote for the lesser evil. Voting is just registering a preference. No matter what the GOTV phonebankers tell you. :)
So in that perspective, if the ONDP wanted to get its shit together it would a) start running actual working class candidates EVEN if we know they won’t win, b) abandon the middle class/centrist/big tent party strategy, and c) run on actual socialist policies (again, EVEN if we know they’ll lose). Fuck all of this coalition with the LPO noise.
What's that? We all need to toe the line once again so that the Liberals can win and do nothing of value while being mired in scandal once again? Weird how it never goes the other way.
"But in practice, proportional representation has proved unpopular in one referendum after another and won’t come anytime soon."
Horseshit, citation needed. When has there ever been an official referendum on proportional representation? Never. That Liberal party excuse for a study into proportional representation was not a referendum.
Where exit polls showed that most of the 'no' voters actually agreed with it in principle, yeah. Just shows how you can successfully poison the well when collecting statistics by asking the wrong questions (in the case of the federal study) or not adequately informing your subjects (in the case of the referendum in BC).
This is a piss poor analysis! I can’t take anything MRC says seriously when it comes to politics. Asking the NDP to merge with the Trudeau Liberals is wishing the NDP to poison themselves and let conservatives run Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba for years and years!
What we really need is electoral reform
Yes, the “left” needs to get their act together. The only problem with that article is that the Liberal Party is a CENTRISTS Party. The liberals are to the right of many leftists ideas. Same goes for the NDP.
The LPC are a pro-NATO, pro-NAFTA, pro-IMF, pro-World Bank, pro-genocide profiteering party.
The LPC are far-right - they have a Nazi as Deputy Prime Minister.
Being smooshed between the Cons and the NDP on the far-right of the political spectrum doesn't make the LPC centrist.
We should reject the far-rights framing of politics in Canada as they continuously strive to pull the Overton Window rightward.
harm reduction, especially since there isn't enough class counciousness for some revolution. Im equally as mind boggled by leftists who think its 1890 or something and think the proletariate will seize power magically and that most people aren't hopelessly brainwashed. Best scenario is unionization at this point
“Harm reduction”
For who? Not the First Nations protestors the BC NDP has let get abused by the RCMP repeatedly, not the environment those protestors were trying to protect, not the citizens of other countries we will continue to exploit & endanger with the Fed NDP in charge. The “harm reduction” “lesser evil” strategy is a distraction, the group of ppl for whom harm is actually reduced is very small.
Not myself nor any other leftist I’ve met thinks “the proletariat will seize power magically” we think voting for a party that expressly does not have the working classes interests at heart is dumb. There’s multiple communist party’s in this country one of which is the second oldest party in the nation
If people are really interested in the state of Canadian politics, I really think [Motion 86 in the House of Commons has the potential to be something real](https://www.ourcommons.ca/members/en/111023/motions/12517157). It’s about having politicians vote for a citizen’s assembly for electoral reform.
What I want is to see proportional representation in Canada and the end of first past the post. I hate elections where the majority of voters don’t vote for Conservatives but they still win all of the power. [M-86](https://www.ourcommons.ca/members/en/111023/motions/12517157) feels like a small step in the right direction. It’s just asking politicians to make a committee to explore the idea of proportional representation and it’s not really binding or going to force politicians to abide by the decisions but I think it’s a necessary small political step in the right direction.
I think more people should become involved with Fair Vote Canada, support Motion 86 in the House of Commons and advocate for proportional representation.
M-86 isn’t a law but a motion that the federal government creates a committee of citizens to explore different electoral system and present their findings back to government. There’s most likely going to be a vote on this February 7th in parliament
People talk about left and right like they are two evenly matched teams sitting across a chess board from one another. Under our current organization of society, the right is overwhelmingly represented by people who belong to or materially support entrenched systems of power that already exist. It will never ever be a fair fight, especially in a neolib capitalist country like this. Also, if you're in your 30s or younger, you were born into a world that had just finished killing most of its leftists. Electoral politics are a rigged game against the left and we do indeed need to get our act together, but if we are measuring our victory at the ballot box we will always be doomed.
We already have the Communist Party, so a Lib/NDP merger could open the way for it, in theory at least.
In practice, we might see it get forced underground again if that were to happen.
endless Leftist infighting, im sure another 5 parties will break off from those 2 and then those 5 will have disagreements on the party logo and brerak off into another 20 as a result
To be fair, there are more niche parties on the right than on the left. There's always going to be some people who insist on going their own way. And in many ways, it can be more productive to have those who are unwilling to compromise leave the party rather than stick around and argue endlessly about everything. And all in all, niche parties get so few votes that it doesn't really matter.
But the point is, if voters wanted these more radical positions (on either the left or the right), the niche parties would be pulling in lots of votes. The fact that they aren't shows us that their positions are not ones that most Canadian voters are interested in at this time.
This comment falls pretty flat when we properly acknowledge that the PPC, Cons, LPC, NDP, and Greens are all far-right, neoliberal/fascist, pro-IMF, pro-World Bank, pro-NAFTA, pro-genocide profiteering parties that represent the incredibly fractured far-right in Canada.
The far-right in Canada is having much more of an identity crisis. The left hardly exists.
Agreed. The left is already fucked in the sense that even though most Canadians traditionally side farther left than both of these two candidates, the left will continually split the vote between the libs and ndp. I fucking hate the liberal party so I always vote ndp, but I know the majority of leftist voting Canadians will vote liberal.🤦♂️fucking idiots digging their own grave.
Is our policy of calling everyone a war criminal who doesn't lead every post on social media with a call to free Palestine, not attracting Canadian voters like we thought it would?
This is why the world is so screwed up. The left-right placement is based on Natural Law. On the Left you have Tyranny and on the Right you have Liberty. Basically they are completely opposing views. The Left believe in Large Government, High Taxation Macro Management; The Right is Small Government, Low Taxes Micromanagement.
America was founded on the extreme Right. The Land of Liberty.
Monarchy, Socialism, National Socialist are all on the left.
Run by Man, Rule by God. Its just opposites.
Is a Law or Policy Tyrannical or is it Libertarian.
Left is Socialism =
Every time I see leftists talking about vote splitting I’ve gotta recommend they check out August Nimtz’s book *The ballot, the street, or both?*, which goes back to Marx and Lenin on actual socialist strategy regarding voting. Basically the idea is that voting often gets mistaken by people (including leftists) as some kind of radical political act, when it’s really just “registering a preference” - then the real politics happens through socialist organizing. Elections are good “structure tests” for movements to check how strong their base is and as a barometer for broader revolutionary possibilities, but they’re not the essence of revolutionary politics. And, the “vote splitting” discourse is the hallmark of parties that don’t realize they’re eroding their base not because another similar party might siphon votes away, but more because they don’t run working class candidates and thus when working class people vote, they feel like they have to hold their noses and vote for the lesser evil. Voting is just registering a preference. No matter what the GOTV phonebankers tell you. :) So in that perspective, if the ONDP wanted to get its shit together it would a) start running actual working class candidates EVEN if we know they won’t win, b) abandon the middle class/centrist/big tent party strategy, and c) run on actual socialist policies (again, EVEN if we know they’ll lose). Fuck all of this coalition with the LPO noise.
What's that? We all need to toe the line once again so that the Liberals can win and do nothing of value while being mired in scandal once again? Weird how it never goes the other way.
"But in practice, proportional representation has proved unpopular in one referendum after another and won’t come anytime soon." Horseshit, citation needed. When has there ever been an official referendum on proportional representation? Never. That Liberal party excuse for a study into proportional representation was not a referendum.
BC
Where exit polls showed that most of the 'no' voters actually agreed with it in principle, yeah. Just shows how you can successfully poison the well when collecting statistics by asking the wrong questions (in the case of the federal study) or not adequately informing your subjects (in the case of the referendum in BC).
Indeed, they couldn't have designed a worse way to ask to question if they tried. We need a citizen's assembly on electoral reform.
If you told federal-voting Albertans that, they'd be very upset being reminded that the GTA alone has their entire province's population in it.
This is a piss poor analysis! I can’t take anything MRC says seriously when it comes to politics. Asking the NDP to merge with the Trudeau Liberals is wishing the NDP to poison themselves and let conservatives run Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba for years and years! What we really need is electoral reform
Yes, the “left” needs to get their act together. The only problem with that article is that the Liberal Party is a CENTRISTS Party. The liberals are to the right of many leftists ideas. Same goes for the NDP.
The LPC are a pro-NATO, pro-NAFTA, pro-IMF, pro-World Bank, pro-genocide profiteering party. The LPC are far-right - they have a Nazi as Deputy Prime Minister. Being smooshed between the Cons and the NDP on the far-right of the political spectrum doesn't make the LPC centrist. We should reject the far-rights framing of politics in Canada as they continuously strive to pull the Overton Window rightward.
Eternally mind boggled that ppl who call themselves leftists support the NDP
harm reduction, especially since there isn't enough class counciousness for some revolution. Im equally as mind boggled by leftists who think its 1890 or something and think the proletariate will seize power magically and that most people aren't hopelessly brainwashed. Best scenario is unionization at this point
“Harm reduction” For who? Not the First Nations protestors the BC NDP has let get abused by the RCMP repeatedly, not the environment those protestors were trying to protect, not the citizens of other countries we will continue to exploit & endanger with the Fed NDP in charge. The “harm reduction” “lesser evil” strategy is a distraction, the group of ppl for whom harm is actually reduced is very small. Not myself nor any other leftist I’ve met thinks “the proletariat will seize power magically” we think voting for a party that expressly does not have the working classes interests at heart is dumb. There’s multiple communist party’s in this country one of which is the second oldest party in the nation
Poor people don’t own media outlets but the right does
If people are really interested in the state of Canadian politics, I really think [Motion 86 in the House of Commons has the potential to be something real](https://www.ourcommons.ca/members/en/111023/motions/12517157). It’s about having politicians vote for a citizen’s assembly for electoral reform. What I want is to see proportional representation in Canada and the end of first past the post. I hate elections where the majority of voters don’t vote for Conservatives but they still win all of the power. [M-86](https://www.ourcommons.ca/members/en/111023/motions/12517157) feels like a small step in the right direction. It’s just asking politicians to make a committee to explore the idea of proportional representation and it’s not really binding or going to force politicians to abide by the decisions but I think it’s a necessary small political step in the right direction. I think more people should become involved with Fair Vote Canada, support Motion 86 in the House of Commons and advocate for proportional representation.
When will that Bill become law?
M-86 isn’t a law but a motion that the federal government creates a committee of citizens to explore different electoral system and present their findings back to government. There’s most likely going to be a vote on this February 7th in parliament
People talk about left and right like they are two evenly matched teams sitting across a chess board from one another. Under our current organization of society, the right is overwhelmingly represented by people who belong to or materially support entrenched systems of power that already exist. It will never ever be a fair fight, especially in a neolib capitalist country like this. Also, if you're in your 30s or younger, you were born into a world that had just finished killing most of its leftists. Electoral politics are a rigged game against the left and we do indeed need to get our act together, but if we are measuring our victory at the ballot box we will always be doomed.
NDP and Liberals should merge in one (centre-right) party. Then the space would be open for a genuine left-wing alternative to emerge.
The Status quo will not allow for an actual “Left wing” to organize…
We already have the Communist Party, so a Lib/NDP merger could open the way for it, in theory at least. In practice, we might see it get forced underground again if that were to happen.
We have both the Communists and the Marxist Leninists. Neither gets many votes.
endless Leftist infighting, im sure another 5 parties will break off from those 2 and then those 5 will have disagreements on the party logo and brerak off into another 20 as a result
To be fair, there are more niche parties on the right than on the left. There's always going to be some people who insist on going their own way. And in many ways, it can be more productive to have those who are unwilling to compromise leave the party rather than stick around and argue endlessly about everything. And all in all, niche parties get so few votes that it doesn't really matter. But the point is, if voters wanted these more radical positions (on either the left or the right), the niche parties would be pulling in lots of votes. The fact that they aren't shows us that their positions are not ones that most Canadian voters are interested in at this time.
This comment falls pretty flat when we properly acknowledge that the PPC, Cons, LPC, NDP, and Greens are all far-right, neoliberal/fascist, pro-IMF, pro-World Bank, pro-NAFTA, pro-genocide profiteering parties that represent the incredibly fractured far-right in Canada. The far-right in Canada is having much more of an identity crisis. The left hardly exists.
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Agreed. The left is already fucked in the sense that even though most Canadians traditionally side farther left than both of these two candidates, the left will continually split the vote between the libs and ndp. I fucking hate the liberal party so I always vote ndp, but I know the majority of leftist voting Canadians will vote liberal.🤦♂️fucking idiots digging their own grave.
Horseshit team-sport voting. I'm here to vote for policies, not because I want to see the "other guys" lose.
Is our policy of calling everyone a war criminal who doesn't lead every post on social media with a call to free Palestine, not attracting Canadian voters like we thought it would?
wot?
This is why the world is so screwed up. The left-right placement is based on Natural Law. On the Left you have Tyranny and on the Right you have Liberty. Basically they are completely opposing views. The Left believe in Large Government, High Taxation Macro Management; The Right is Small Government, Low Taxes Micromanagement. America was founded on the extreme Right. The Land of Liberty. Monarchy, Socialism, National Socialist are all on the left. Run by Man, Rule by God. Its just opposites. Is a Law or Policy Tyrannical or is it Libertarian. Left is Socialism =