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Role & Place of NDP

Excerpt From: Communist Viewpoint, Vol. 2 No. 1 January 1970

The Communist Party does not limit itself to the parliamentary arena. Communists work all year round on all fronts of the people’s battles to achieve immediate and ultimate aims. There has been too much of a conception that the united front means the endorsement of this or that NDP candidate, or the calling for an NDP government.
 
Communists strive in election campaigns to warn against the illusion that the election of the NDP will itself solve all the people’s problems or take us to socialism. Communists estimate that, because the NDP enjoys considerable electoral support, such an outcome would be the first break, as it were, with the traditional way of voting, and could lead to reforms in the best interests of the workers. But such a tactic should not be elevated to a principle that endures for all time, or read into it a political perspective that doesn’t exist. Just as important, the election of an NDP government does not automatically give reforms to the people.
 
From the foregoing it is clear that the problems the Communist Party faces do not arise from within it, or from within Marxism-Leninism. Concern about the smallness of the Communist Party is because we want it to become a mass party of the working class. But this concern has, at times, led to an opportunistic obsession with becoming popular at the expense of principle.
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