UNLOCK 26.1 Springtime for Democratic Socialism in Canada

ANTI FASCIST DAD PODCAST Episode 26, Part 2: Springtime for Democratic Socialism in Canada MATTHEW: Welcome, Patrons, to part two of episode 26 of Antifascist Dad Podcast: Springtime for Democratic Socialism in Canada. I'm really grateful for your support. I hope this project brings some joy and hope and utility to your works and days. You can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name, and I'm on YouTube and TikTok as antifascistdad, and the Patreon for this show is Antifascist Dad Podcast. Now if you're listening to this on Patreon on the day it was published, you already know that. Thank you. Maybe send this link to friends, because subscribers get early access to every second part of the main-feed episodes. And also I'll direct you to the pre-order link for my book. It's coming out soon, April 26th. So as the last skeletal fingers of ice recede from the shadows at the base of my raised garden bed walls -- Ciarra does not have that ice issue in Sacramento, but I do -- I've got a brief rundown for you on the March 28th NDP first-ballot leadership victory of Avi Lewis in Winnipeg, after a seven-month contest between five candidates who together repped the spectrum of center-left to leftist politics in what remains of the party. Now Lewis was up against Heather McPherson. She's the only sitting MP in the race. She is the MP for Edmonton Strathcona. She's pragmatic, center-left, she's backed by labor. She's positioned as a bridge between prairie resource politics and progressive values. She came in second with 29% of the vote. So this was a ranked-choice ballot. Avi won on the first ballot with 57% of the vote, which is basically landslide territory. It's a very strong finish. Tenille Johnston from Campbell River, BC, from the Kwakwaka'wakw Nation. She's a social worker with an indigenous rights and decolonization focus. Came in third with 7% of the vote. Rob Ashton is the president of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Workers of Canada. Solid working-class credentials. He's a flat-capped dock worker and he got 6% of the vote, which was really surprising to a lot of people, because the unions that endorsed him represent about 650,000 folks around the country who evidently have turned away from party politics. And that's something that people are going to be talking about and sorting out for years to come. And then coming in with 1% of the vote was the straw-hatted and overalled Tony McQuail, an organic farmer and rural environmentalist. So really good representation across the board in this slate of candidates. And Lewis's first gesture after the numbers were announced was to gather these opponents of his on stage and to praise each of them for their efforts and contributions. Now over on Instagram, beginning with the day after his win, I posted a series of explainers for my US and international followers, because justice seekers everywhere should pay attention to and learn from each other's positive news and history. And I'm thinking particularly of the pretty amazing global effect of the Mamdani win. And I think the Lewis win is in that category. And so what I'm going to do today is expand on those comments: covering Lewis's background, covering the challenges his movement faces, covering the blowback he's already provoked, and then also talking at the end about the perennial conflict that he is now at the center of in leftist history, which is: do we want revolution or do we want reform? What is our choice at this fork in the road? So, Avi Lewis is a journalist and filmmaker. He's a former video disc jockey for a TV station here in Toronto called MuchMusic. And he won through an uncompromising platform of decolonization politics, land rights, opposing Canadian complicity in genocide and American imperialism, opposing unchecked generative AI. And then for the kitchen table, proposing public options for groceries, food, housing, childcare, and college, all to be paid for by taxing mega-corporations, banks, and billionaires. And also demilitarizing. And he would also say these crazy things that suggest that maybe we should stop burning the planet. And here's one of his best lines. AVI LEWIS: I think no one has ever bombed a factory full of sunlight. No one's ever gone to war over the wind. MATTHEW: It's really hard to beat a line like that. I looked around, I tried to find an antecedent for it. There's kind of stuff in that category, but if that's his, that's incredible. Two sentences tying climate to militarism to imperialism, with a cadence like Neruda or Whitman. And I think any socialist organizer anywhere in the world can bring those sentences into their communications today. But this was not his magic alone. It comes out of a heritage. A couple of weeks ago, for my episode with Jasmine Peardon, who was running for NDP party president -- and she lost, by the way, but she's continuing her advocacy to pressure the party from the left just as hard as ever -- I covered some of the Lewis family history. So I want to review that here. Starting in July 1933, Regina, Saskatchewan is as good a place as any, because it's the place where we have the founding convention of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, which issued the Regina Manifesto, which opens like this: We aim to replace the present capitalist system with its inherent injustice and inhumanity, by a social order from which the domination and exploitation of one class by another will be eliminated, in which economic planning will supersede unregulated private enterprise and competition, and in which genuine democratic self-government based upon economic equality will be possible. Amazing. Now as I mentioned in that episode, one contributor to that convention was 23-year-old Russian Jewish immigrant David Losch. His father Moishe had headed up a Jewish Labor Bund in the shtetl of Svisłach, in what's now Belarus. And the family was socialist but also anti-Bolshevik, out of a commitment to democracy. And we'll get to this later, because this figures heavily into the notion of what democratic socialism is and its relationship to revolutionary theory. But this is a family -- and a community -- that was also very interested in Jewish cultural autonomy, which the Bolsheviks were just not fans of. So yeah, let's put a pin in that. This is the history that will influence Avi Lewis toward democratic socialism. The family comes out of a vibrant culture of endless debate in which the coercions of revolutionary theory are pretty much off the table. The family is also anti-Zionist. They held a philosophy called Doikayt -- Yiddish for "hereness" -- the idea that Jews should fight for justice where they live rather than occupy Palestine. And to give you a sense of how Avi navigates this minefield, where he's already being attacked by pro-Israel Jewish groups for his alleged antisemitism -- and "alleged" here means that they are downright lying -- here's an exchange from his very first news conference following the win. JOURNALIST: Just as a follow-up, Mr. Lewis, on a separate topic -- you know, at least one prominent Jewish group and a few others have accused you of harboring anti-Israel sentiments that this group and others believe are harmful to the Jewish community. I know you yourself are Jewish, and you have of course supported Palestine over the last few weeks, the last few months, and during this campaign as well. I wonder what you have to say about that -- that these Jewish groups are calling you anti-Israel at this point? AVI LEWIS: Well, I come from a long tradition, a multi-generational tradition of Jewish anti-Zionism. My great-grandfather was a leader in the Jewish Labor Bund, which was founded in 1897, five weeks after the first meeting of the World Zionist Congress. So as long as there have been formal pro-Israel Zionist organizations, there has been a tradition that has disagreed with that within the Jewish community. I believe there's a significant number of Canadian Jews who feel the way I do. And it's been very welcome to feel so at home in the NDP, a party which has expressed moral clarity over the genocide in Gaza consistently. As we express our outrage over the illegal attack on Iran, which is destabilizing our daily lives, NGO politics, and the world economy all at the same time. And this is part and parcel of being anti-war, pro-international law, and fundamental human rights. And that's my legacy as a Jewish person. It's part of my culture and it's part of my Jewishness. And not all people in the Jewish community in Canada agree. And those are harder conversations and harder debates which we have in our own families, which we have in our community. And they're not going anywhere. But I've been clear and consistent in my position, and my position is pro-human life. MATTHEW: So I have been listening to anti-Zionists attempt to express this since Israel's response to October 7th was clearly heading into genocidal territory. I've heard a lot of great responses, but this really is the most succinct, accessible, and even forgiving answer that I have heard. He leaves a lot of doors open there. So going back in time: in 1921, Moishe fled both Soviets and nationalists to Montreal, changed the name to Lewis, and sent for the family. And David grows up to become the secretary of the CCF and then Federal NDP leader in the 70s. His son Stephen Lewis leads the Ontario NDP in the 1970s and then works for the UN. And one of his most extraordinary accomplishments there was that he shamed Global North powers into releasing patents on HIV drugs so they could be accessed by people in Africa. And the poignant legacy footnote here: Stephen Lewis died the day after Avi's win. Avi's mom is Michele Landsberg. She is a titan of second-wave Canadian feminist journalism with two National Newspaper Awards. She was awarded the Order of Canada, wrote three bestselling books, and spent 25 years of feminist advocacy at the Toronto Star. She was also chair of the Women's College Hospital Board. And Avi is married to Naomi Klein, who has popularized the Marxist analysis of crisis, among many other things -- or how capitalism uses emergencies to steal more of our stuff. So if Lewis is radical, and radical means roots, I would say, given the conversation last week about Gordie Howe, these ideas have roots in Canada as deep as hockey. People say that Avi comes from political royalty, but I think it's much more like a network of influences, and he is quite adamant about decentering himself. However, what the hell did he just win? And does he really want this job? Because he's taking the reins at a real low point for socialism in Canada. Over the past several decades, the federal NDP has skidded rightward from its socialist roots in the Great Depression, losing its internationalist and anti-capitalist ethics, depoliticizing its mandate down to protecting dwindling union jobs, even if they're jobs that scorch the planet or extract resources from the Global South. Now that's a long story, but the last season finale saw the party get shredded, losing 17 of their 24 seats, with which they had held the balance of power with Trudeau. And during that period they did manage to extract accommodations from capital: more dental care, more childcare, more worker protections. But the price for that was appearing to prop up Trudeau, who was increasingly unpopular. And with the rise of what we can call Maple MAGA in the figure of Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Federal Conservative Party, the 2025 electorate was scared into playing it safe and laying their hopes on Mark Carney. Now, as a Marxist, I believe the deeper reason the NDP lost almost everything in 2025 is that, firstly, they did not offer an actual anti-capitalist vision to a fascist world. And secondly, this left the door open for a population propagandized for a century against socialism to believe that a central banker would protect them from that same rising fascism. So now they are starting at ground zero. No party status. MPs can't ask questions during the regular question period, they can't sit on committees, they have no government funding for research. Lewis doesn't even have a seat in Parliament, so he can't speak from the floor. His leadership is going to have to float and find visibility wherever it can. And the current red-scare media backlash has me wondering whether that's actually a good thing, whether being outside of the House is a real benefit. He can travel anywhere, he can talk to anyone, and the microphones will follow him around like he's an exiled prime minister. Now, I chatted about many of these things with Jasmine, and also about the fact that last year's shredding gives the democratic socialist movement a tabula rasa starting point that they can fill up with a century of ideas and traditions. Because obviously the centrist old guard lost. And this should work -- and we've got evidence that it should, that goes beyond this gut feeling that many people have -- of why would any political centrist vote for the center-left when they could just vote for mainstream Liberals? There's a 2021 paper entitled "The Rightward Shift and Electoral Decline of Social Democratic Parties under Increasing Inequality," by Michael Polacko of the University of London, who studied how between 1965 and 2019 social democratic parties across 22 advanced democracies systematically moved rightward on economic policy, adopting so-called third-way neoliberal positions of privatization, deregulation, and welfare retrenchment to appear fiscally credible and attract centrist voters. So Polacko drew on 336 elections and found that this strategy backfired -- that rightward economic shifts in policy significantly reduced social democratic vote share, particularly when conditions of high income inequality are rising. When economic moderation is combined with rightward movement on socio-cultural issues -- because those things are going to go together, because of the scapegoating instinct -- electoral damage to the social democrats compounds. So these parties abandoned their working-class base but also failed to secure any kind of lasting centrist loyalty, and this produced long-term decline rather than the electoral gains that the strategy promised. So we have evidence for this, and it's pretty strong. It does not work to run center when there's no socialist option. But then there's an aspect of the Lewis movement that's interested in something beyond the electoral sphere altogether. When I went to the Toronto Lewis town hall back in February with my dad, speaker after speaker basically said: you know, the NDP is broken, it's horrible, it's wasted our time and energy for decades. But it's an empty building -- we can move in, we can make something of it. And Lewis got up and spoke at length about the fact that the infrastructure can be used for so much more besides central election organizing. He talked about the 300-plus riding associations possibly becoming activist hubs that operate both within and outside electoral cycles, in which you usually only get as much democracy as capitalism will allow. So for my anarchist friends out there, here's a new party leader not tied to an MP's seat yet, who's approaching leadership like a meeting facilitator, or the VJ that he used to be. He's not putting all his eggs in the basket of the state, and I don't think any of us do, actually. Now I'm going to turn to the response. Rachel Gilmore did a great report on the right-wing meltdown. These are liberals and fascist apologists who loathe ideas like wealth redistribution, communal care, and not burning the planet to a crisp. And they also take advantage of a completely infantilized public -- in my opinion -- who have been taught that words like socialism and communism mean the same thing, which is that you're supposed to run out of the room screaming. So Quillette ran a piece titled "Avi Lewis and the NDP's Road to Irrelevance," calling Lewis a "radicalized anti-Israel activist" who wants to nationalize grocery sales and shut down oil production. And the article described the NDP as a party that once championed the country's unions but was now captured by ideologues. Now, just a point of clarification: Lewis has only ever talked about stopping oil expansion, because he's paid a lot of attention to this very difficult problem of how to help over 200,000 Canadian oil and gas workers out of the industry and into environmentally sustainable jobs. So his main focus has been on creating and nationalizing electric bus production. That's his big-ticket idea there. And that kind of gets glossed over. It gets ignored regularly, because there's this scaremongering about how he's going to shut down all oil, nobody's going to be able to drive their cars and whatever. But he realizes that there's a transitional process, and so he's spending a lot of time talking about that. The Alberta newspapers run by PostMedia spiraled into straight-up redbaiting. Dawn Braid in the Calgary Herald had this headline: "Under New Leader Avi Lewis, Federal NDP Looks More Communist than Social Democratic." City News followed up with "Communist Party: New NDP Leader Lewis Bashed in Alberta." CTV News reported "Federal NDP Pretty Communist: Smith on Avi Lewis" -- referring to Danielle Smith, the Premier of Alberta. And writing for The Tyee, David Climenhaga, covering this redbaiting wave, noted that Alberta Premier Smith's evidence of Lewis's communism was that he wants everyone to have a heat pump in their house. However, there's another kind of backlash that I didn't see anybody cover. It's a little bit more difficult to describe. I would call it a dissociative meta-response that cascades through the online world. I'm going to call it amateur punditis, or Moneyball fugue state. And I believe it's a hallmark of the gamification age, emerging downstream of the instant pundit sessions assembled after a moment like this. Because while the election numbers are going up on that orange board in Winnipeg, TV studios across the country are buzzing. Hair and makeup people are swarming all over figures like Jenny Byrne and Nick Nanos and Max Fawcett and Laurie Turnbull and Tom Mulcair on networks like CPAC, CBC, and CTV. The editors are spinning up the graphics. They're isolating the clips. The producers have the talking points written down on the whiteboards. And so what you get within minutes of Avi Lewis's speech ending is this flood of abstracted horse-race infotainment, where technocrats and retired party hacks with their little partisan angles on the polling are tripping over themselves to provide betting tips to their media consumers who, I think, at most want to feel like they're smart at dinner parties. It just gives me this whiplash feeling of being invested in the content, the argument, the vision, the material gravitas of the issues on the table -- and then suddenly getting these performances of abstract commentary on a flat screen. And so when I published a little historical primer on Instagram about Lewis, about his socialist heritage and what it says and how it addresses our present condition, the people who are already following me are locked into those ideological and moral issues. But then that video goes viral. And when something like that escapes containment and bursts into the mainstream liberal-conservative mosh pit, I will suddenly get this flood of comments from people I don't normally interact with. And they're all about Lewis's electability, about the danger of splitting the Liberal vote. They're asking questions like "how fringe is he?" -- as though we're talking about hot peppers on the Scoville scale. In short, the commentary quickly switches to just anything at all that avoids talking about the substance of the material conditions of our lives -- where we are, who is suffering, what we should do, what history shows us about capitalism, imperialism, and war, and how these things can be faced down or ended. And when I call it dissociative, what I mean is that it's a form of pseudo-political distraction that can only really get aroused by the idea of having the inside track about how something is going to turn out. Feeling smart because you know how the horse race is going. And maybe you'll form your values around that, but that's never really clear because the values aren't really spoken about. It's really the sound and the feeling of a million college-educated white folks aspiring to this pundit class, dreaming about being on that TV set and getting their hair and makeup done, each rubbing their chins and saying, hmm, I believe that Canadians are more moderate than that. And then I get this picture of a whole country of people talking about who Canadians are when they are actually the Canadians who are talking. And 99% of them are having their figurative blood sucked out of their veins by Galen Weston, the CEO of Loblaws Groceries, who's worth $20 billion and whose corporations have had to pay fines recently on decades of fixing the price of bread. So let me just repeat that. Galen Weston is worth $20 billion and his companies have cheated customers on the price of bread. But no one sitting in those studios offering their expertise on Lewis seems to feel any of that. And if they did, they wouldn't last long as pundits. So I'm seeing this in the wild, I have done for many years now, and increasingly all I can think of is: are you a citizen or a pundit? Are you here to discuss values, or just screw around as though it's Polymarket? Are you a worker or are you a brain in a jar? Now another form of backlash that I need to mention emerged from media coverage of the convention itself. And this came from extremely online right-wing influencers who clipped moments out of the convention to focus on mocking people with queer haircuts. So these clips showed charged points of order discussed on the convention floor involving the order of speakers, points of privilege, and the use of gender equity cards. And clearly the people involved are non-normative -- otherwise known as interesting. Now I'm not familiar with the equity card system, but it's clear to me that what these young people are doing is working out the mechanics of social power and justice in real time, in ways that the dominant culture avoids because it just doesn't care. If you can dominate a space, you should. Why not? And so when the normies mock them, they prove the point. Now right-wing actors have no choice but to focus on things like this when people are coming to the microphone at a federal party convention to talk about things like nationalizing housing or stripping oligarchs of capital -- anything that a working person would actually resonate with. But what bothers me most is the substantial number of liberals and centrists who take the culture war bait and say, see, these leftists look ridiculous to Joe Sixpack. I'm worried they're going to set us all back. They're going to ruin our movement. So they're basically having a cringe or disgust response and then covering it up with an appeal to respectability politics. Folks like this might feel morally clear because they personally avoid direct attacks on non-binary or marginalized folks discussing in public how to have a more equitable space. But it's not enough to be passively polite to the targets of culture-war bullshit, for the same reason that it's not enough to just not be racist, or just not be fascist. These forces grow in the sun of your neutrality. The MAGA movement built itself on the demonization of non-normative culture because that's what fascists do. So it's understandable if people don't understand, or vibe with, or are confused by the prickliness of internal leftist debate culture. No one has to be on board with that. But if we know anything about feminism, disability rights, neurodivergence, structural racism, queerness, settler colonialism, and a bunch of other things that have made us into more self-reflective and better people, it's because of argumentative, awkward processes like this, down through time. And ultimately, if any worker engaging in or enabling mockery of people like this is doing that, they are a class traitor. They are finding petty fault with people they need -- not only for their ideas and passion, but because they're standing up to the dominator class that is exploiting everyone. So I saw all of this unfold. I became even more convinced that class treachery in the form of mocking the marginalized will eat the soul from within and leave a person with a mouthful of ash. Because everyone will one day be marginalized by illness, disability, or fascism. And when that happens, we will need comrades. Finally, we know that Lewis faces a long uphill battle. But that's not just about the NDP being at a historically low ebb. It's also about a deep historical rift in leftist politics and how he manages it -- how we all manage it. So here's the question: have you heard Bernie Sanders, the DSA, Zohran Mamdani, Zack Polanski of the Greens in the UK at this moment, and now Avi Lewis get attacked from the left, and wondered what the hell the problem could be? Now this might be elementary for many, but I see a lot of muddiness on this out there, and I think especially young people need a rundown on this tension. Why it is ancient, why it is legitimate, why it is valid, why it's not about preferences or vibes, and why it's certainly not about purity testing. The conflict is about the nature of the capitalist state and whether socialism can meaningfully change it by participating in it. It's a paradox that also has relevance in discussions about whether No Kings Day protests are radical enough, or whether, as permitted events in which protesters and police stand side by side, they merely absorb, disperse, and co-opt revolutionary energy that would otherwise topple the system. Perhaps the most famous articulation of this dilemma comes from Rosa Luxemburg, back in 1899: With the entry of a socialist into the government, and class domination continuing to exist, the bourgeois government doesn't transform itself into a socialist government -- a socialist transforms himself into a bourgeois minister. Now, Luxemburg knew this as well as anybody could, because she was actually murdered by this logic. In 1918 the German socialists capitulated into the Weimar coalition, and that enabled a 1919 sequence of events that led to a massacre of the revolutionary working class of which she was a part. She argued that the bourgeois state is a form of class power with its own logic, imperatives, and constraints -- downstream of capitalism, designed to facilitate it. And so the minister must function within it, and that means managing capitalism and not ending it. So the revolutionary understanding says: Bernie Sanders, the DSA, Zohran Mamdani, Zack Polanski, and Avi Lewis are all on a conveyor belt to maybe reforming capitalism, but in ways that cannot hold and will kick the crisis can down the road. And we can revisit what we've learned about the history of socialism in Canada as a test case, because after the revolutionary socialism of the antecedents to the NDP, Lewis's party was softened into a democratic socialism that was able to negotiate things like universal health care and the Charter of Rights. Those social goods have been relentlessly attacked by capitalists for generations, to the point now where core provinces are selling public health care off to the rich. And Carney is writing exemptions to Charter protection so that he can more quickly increase oil extraction. These pressures are corrosive in all mixed economies, because the oligarchs will not and cannot stop killing people. Luxemburg says they must be stopped. Democratic socialists say they can be slowed down and possibly reversed from within. And that's where things can get really bitter along this dividing line. When the revolutionary tendency says that Sanders, Mamdani, Polanski, and Lewis actually function to funnel revolutionary energy into reforms that reproduce the status quo. And that's where you might hear something like hatred from the revolutionary left -- that these people are figures of betrayal and they actually know better. I don't see it that way. I've followed Naomi Klein for years. I've interviewed her. I know enough about her to say that her intellectual and educational role in leftist politics globally has been to expose countless liberals and progressives to Marxist analysis. And she's done so from within the institutions of bourgeois journalism, academia, and now politics. In a Leninist period, she would be part of the professional revolutionary class, producing the theoretical materials needed for workers to educate themselves, to develop revolutionary consciousness, and take the next steps. But these days there is no homogeneous group of workers primed for such encouragement. There is no mass movement yet she could call on to revolt, if that were her choice -- and I'm not sure it would be. And yet she has critics who will say that she and those in her zone of activity are part of what is inhibiting revolutionary passion. I don't buy it. Avi is in that same zone. He's highly educated in anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist theory. But he has emerged in a landscape in which we're a long way off from anyone reliably being able to galvanize a revolutionary movement at scale. And so what do you do? What can you do? So what do I believe? I believe this paradox is valid. It's generative. I believe that fighting over it teaches us a lot about human nature and our theories of change. And I have no instinct to choose sides. I believe I need revolutionary comrades and reform comrades. And I will lean more into one group or the other for support and solidarity, depending upon my strengths, my vulnerabilities, and what's possible in the moment, and even the season of life. And then there's also this. Speaking as the host of Antifascist Dad, I'm also a parent, and I'm mindful about how safer strategies are often good starting points for more dangerous ones. There's a line Leonard Cohen has somewhere in relation to the most intractable aspects of human -- there are some things you don't tell the children. Now, I would never go that far, and I haven't. My kids both understand what revolutionaries believe, what they do, what they're up against. But that is the adult world of zero-sum conflict. What can they do in relation to that world, except to wait and see what it will feel like when they arrive in it? It's very natural to talk to young people about why socialist reform makes sense, how smart you have to be to figure it out and integrate it, how you can learn about people and processes through the long work of electoral uncertainty, how you can catalyze small and unstable improvements in the world by working within the system -- all while realizing that small and unstable can exhaust you, and that over time you too will see that capitalism is relentless, that it will take everything. You can learn a lot about yourself and your friends and the world by organizing in the time of monsters. In the end, the monsters might have to die. But you have to be sure about why. You have to have exhausted all other possibilities, and you have to have built up the friendships that people in movements like Lewis's rave about, in order to go forward into that more dangerous territory without losing your mind or your values or your relationships. I've said something similar before. At the scale of the family or the neighborhood, at the scale of mutual aid, democratic socialism seems like the organic process we always already have at hand, and that we'll always protect, because it's baked into our attachments. And it's the most ready way in which love becomes material. And that can be true even if we know that ultimately, at a planetary scale, reformism may never be sufficient to end the capitalist tide looming over us. That's it for this week, folks. Thank you for listening. Look forward to your feedback and your comments. As always, take care of each other.