“Bullshit!” That’s how Naomi Klein summed up the macho dynamic between NDP MP Svend Robinson and anarchist anti-leader Jaggi Singh at a panel discussion sponsored by the New Politics Initiative (NPI) this past Saturday in Toronto. With Judy Rebick as moderator, Robinson, Klein and Singh debated the question, “What is new politics?”

For most of an hour, the two male panelists re-enacted the left’s historical internecine strife, as century-old debates about reform versus revolution danced in our heads. Singh, the revolutionary, and Robinson, the parliamentarian, exchanged barbs while the women on either side of them tried to keep the discussion constructive.

“Men are so emotional,” Rebick wryly said at one point. The tension summed up the challenges facing the NPI in its attempt to forge a radically democratic, non-sectarian alliance of traditional left forces and younger activist movements.

Singh began by accusing the NPI of using the phrase “new politics” as cheap marketing jargon to capitalize on the work of activists, while ignoring the important differences between these activists and traditional politicians: “I’m suspicious of ‘new politics’ that masks questions like ‘What is anarchism?’ and ‘What is democracy?’” Suspicious of masking differences, perhaps; but Singh happily lumped together parties as diverse as the Argentine Peronists, the German Greens, and the BC NDP as examples of how good intentions of the parliamentary left are always corrupted by power.

Robinson, like Rebick a co-founder of the NPI, could not but rise to defend the NDP from Singh’s charge of irrelevancy. “Who makes the decisions that affect our lives? Parliamentarians. It is absurd to suggest that we abandon this and that we not confront [the right] directly … We want governments that support people’s needs, such as public transit.” The question, for Robinson, is not whether to engage in parliamentary politics, but how the activist movements can work together with parliamentary politicians to achieve the things that both desire.

Singh gave this idea short shrift. Having accused the BC NDP of attacking working people and perpetrating the worst kind of colonialism on the Nisga’a Nation, he expressed his contempt for parliamentary politics by saying, “I have never been involved in parliamentary politics, as I am doing other things twenty-four hours of the day. Maybe if I had fourty-eight hours, I might give it five minutes then. But real social change comes from elsewhere” — because in capitalist society real power lies elsewhere.

Klein, exasperated by the sparring, exclaimed, “You are working together — you worked together in Quebec, you worked together in Ottawa at the G8, and you’ll work together in Kananaskis … we can respect each other.”

Ironically, Singh’s position is one of the very arguments that the founders of the NPI have been making: real social change comes from the social movements. The women’s movements, environmentalists and sexual liberation movements have shown that profound transformation of society can take place through the work of activists outside the parliamentary system. But where the left is weakest now is in electoral politics, with the vast resources this provides access to, and its ability to challenge power where it is most directly exercised. Political parties need movements, and social movements need electoral politics; in the long run, neither can get by without the other.

If power could only be challenged through extra-parliamentary activism, then the idea that political institutions are wholly corrupt or ineffective still wouldn’t hold water: if they were, activists couldn’t influence political decisions in their favour, unless revolution was around the corner. Since it probably isn’t, the question is how to participate in electoral politics in an honest, effective way. The NPI argues that a deep democratization of Canadian politics is needed, to involve citizens in running their own lives and to limit the power of unaccountable institutions. This also speaks to the movements’ growing sense that there should be something to fight for, and not only against.

“I have noticed a change in the past two years, that there is a real limit to just saying ‘No,’” remarked Klein.

In the end, it was Klein, the sceptical but sympathetic outsider, who seemed to articulate the NPI’s own ideas best: “We need to build networks. We need to be about reclaiming the commons. We need experiments in democracy. For example, we should start in communities and, let’s say, democratize a school in opposition to mega schools. We need to start small. We should think of citizens’ assemblies town by town.”

Singh, too, was inspired by the example of the popular assemblies now forming in every neighbourhood in Buenos Aires, while at the same time, he dismissed the possibility of such assemblies, or the participatory budget process of Porto Alegre, happening in the political “backwater” of Canada.

Yet Argentina, as Rebick pointed out, demonstrates the dangers of leftwing movements that are not represented by any party: they can’t take power.

So, is Canada ready for a new leftist party? Klein doesn’t think so: “We are so not ready for a new [leftist] political party in this country. The failure to connect with each other is profound and deep.” And the NPI, said Klein, went about it the wrong way, by first fixating on the NDP’s November convention, where the NPI resolution calling for a new party was defeated.

Perhaps the most significant things about the discussion between these representatives of different left tendencies were that it was mostly in good spirit, and that it took place at all. As Klein herself said, the left has begun working together, in spite of itself. The stakes are too high for failure; there is also a growing sense of new possibilities.

There may yet be magic in the idea of democracy.