Our campaign all about dragging conversation leftward

A socialist review published an interview about “Reclaiming Socialism” in Canada’s NDP but ghosted a Socialist Caucus instigated campaign promoting a platform titled “Capitalism can’t be fixed — onwards to a socialist future”. The omission highlights the professional left’s hostility to an insurgent bid to expand the “Overton window” that launched with call for a “mainstream voice willing to challenge capitalism and imperialism while promoting de-colonization, de-growth and economic democracy.”

Recently Jacobin published “Reclaiming Socialism in Canada’s NDP Leadership Race: Interview with Avi Lewis.” The 7,000-word article ignored a widely supported anti-capitalist campaign as well as the party brass’ hostility towards democracy.

“Not a single question about the exclusion of Yves Engler from the leadership race”, noted a Reddit comment on the interview. The article ignored the three person NDP vetting committee’s rejection of my and Bianca Mugyenyi’s candidacy even though it devoted significant attention to party democracy. Despite both our campaigns effectively surpassing the high financial threshold to participate in the race, the secret NDP body wouldn’t let either of us formally participate.

They rejected me on a series of spurious political and behavioural grounds, prompting 5,000 individuals to email the NDP federal council criticizing the three-person vetting committee’s decision. Subsequently, the vetters blocked Mugyenyi, co-manager of my campaign and wife, claiming she was a proxy. Before being excluded from the race we devoted significant energy to challenging the NDP’s vetting process and concentration of power in the hands of the party brass.

As such, it’s strange that interviewer Luke Savage raised party democracy while ignoring a major recent scandal. For his part, Lewis spoke to leftists uncomfortable with his family’s legacy by criticizing his father and grandfather’s role in purging the left from the party. He’s right to criticize what transpired half a century ago, but it’d have been more useful to hear Lewis’ position on the vetting committee excluding Mugyenyi, who led the launch of the Leap Manifesto.

More substantially, Savage simply ignored an important campaign with a comprehensive platform titled “Capitalism can’t be fixed — onwards to a socialist future.” Crafted by 45 activists and researchers over three months, the platform has likely been the most widely read anti-capitalist document in Canada since its October release. It has laid down a marker in the race and put pressure on the other campaigns to offer policy details and to criticize capitalism.

Before releasing our platform, we published memes calling to “Abolish Capitalism” and for “Economic democracy not capitalist tyranny”. After the three-decade old NDP Socialist Caucus asked me to run in the summer, I began publishing articles such as “Time to put economic democracy on NDP platform” and “10 steps to replace capitalism with economic democracy”.

Over the past seven months of campaigning, we’ve questioned our ecocidal, wealth-concentrating, economic system more than all branches of the NDP over the past few years.

Unlike Lewis who calls to “tax the rich” and establish new publicly owned firms, we’ve argued that “Capitalism is a system of minority and class rule that is based on the private ownership of the means of livelihood. Capitalist collectives (corporations) have socialized labour while operating as privately owned workplace dictatorships that centralize power in the hands of a small elite… Economic democracy is based on the principle of one person, one vote decision making in all parts of the economy that rely on social labour.”

Savage is but one of numerous self-declared socialists who ghosted, or worse, an insurgent anti-capitalist campaign. They see us too controversial, too rebellious, too real. A sizable share of the professional left (paid commentators, union bureaucrats, academics, conference circuit speakers, NGOs, NDP staffers, etc.) fear a disruptive anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist campaign more than the undemocratic neoliberal party brass.

They’ve effectively sabotaged what the left should be seeking from the NDP race above all else, namely dragging the conversation leftward. The leadership race is an opportunity to push the so called “Overton window” in the direction of social and economic justice. To expand the parameters of what is politically acceptable in mainstream politics.

But, even as the party brass and many ‘socialists’ have sought to box us out of the race, we’ve helped shape the discussion. We’ve discredited the odious vetting process and the other candidates have taken up our positions on housing, a jobs guarantee and Canadian complicity in genocide. Avi Lewis is also now talking about socialism.

Check out our platform at NDP2026.ca to see if a socialist publication should be discussing the campaign.