However, Finance Minister Bill English promptly shot them down, observing that these recommendations are nothing new. English stuck to the party line, stating, “We won’t be doing anything with GST. We are focused on personal tax rates.”

National’s tax cuts primarily benefit the rich, as with those of Labour. Introduced by the Fourth Labour government, GST is a tax on workers and consumers. Neither Labour nor National shows any inclination to increase it, or get rid of it. Despite the hopes of Treasury, and the fears of some on the left, National continues to maintain the centre ground; to pay for stable capitalist exploitation.

If the economy requires it, either party will attack.

The end was swift. Stepping down on election night Helen Clark ended 16 years as the Labour Party’s leader and nine years as Prime Minister. As Labour’s longest serving head, she was one of its most capable and helped shape the organisation into an urban liberal capitalist party.

Clark personified the new type of Labour politician. She came from a middle class farming background and was university educated. She studied politics and lectured for a few years at Auckland University, then headed straight to parliament in 1981.

In 1984 Labour won the elections and launched Rogernomics. There was not a peep of opposition to this rabidly neo-liberal programme from Clark. Later on she would try to distance herself from that period but as David Lange once quipped, Clark “was so dry she was combustible”. According to Michael Basset, who was a minister in that government, Clark begged Roger Douglas to return to the finance minister’s role in January 1990 when the party was rife with internal divisions over Rogernomics.

By 1987 she was a cabinet minister, and in 1989 held the important Health portfolio. She sacked the elected health boards and closed down around 20 hospitals with the sort of gusto that would make any Act MP today proud.

In 1993 she became leader of the party by ousting Mike Moore with the time-honoured method of the knife in the back. Unfortunately for Clark Moore’s vanity wouldn’t let him die a quiet political death, and he haemorrhaged resentment all over the house. The messy takeover left Clark’s popularity rating close to the margin of error for years to come. In 1996 she was nearly toppled by Phil Goff, but she managed to hang on through sheer determination and a new hair do. While Muldoon’s grizzly mug, and the porcine proportions of Lange had never affected their popularity, Clark’s bowl hair cut and makeup-less face were the subject of endless public comment. The sexist scrutiny never entirely went away but her popularity grew with each makeover and in 1999 Labour won the elections and Clark became prime minister.

The new Labour and Alliance coalition had promised to repeal the anti-union Employment Contracts Act. They did that, but the Clark years can in no way be described as a revival of unionism. She kept in place most of the restrictions on strike action and while union membership stopped declining it generally failed to expand. Strikes became more rare each year and the pro-Labour union leadership failed to find a way forward. Whimpering “vote Labour” for decades was never going to be the basis on which to build a strong workers’ movement.

Clark clearly had a desire to make history and she had dreamed of becoming New Zealand’s first woman prime minister, but that prize was Jenny Shipley’s. While Clark’s leadership was seen as a sign that women’s rights were advancing in New Zealand, and a number of top posts  were held by women, the gender pay gap remained almost unchanged. Overall, the Clark years were not a period of significant progress for women.

When it came to causes like pay parity or paid parental leave Clark was no trail blazer. Reluctant to even introduce paid parental leave, she proposed a pitiful six week payment. While a campaign outside parliament was building, and inside the government the Alliance Party was promoting legislation for 12 weeks paid parental leave, Clark’s response was to say it would be “over my dead body”. In 2002 the 12 week provision was introduced, and five years later it was extended to 14 weeks. Eventually Clark even talked of extending paid parental leave to 12 months but quickly ditched that idea at the first sign of the financial crisis.

While Clark’s government introduced measures to ease the pressure on the working poor with the Working for Families tax cuts, there was nothing for the most severely impoverished. National’s extreme benefit cuts imposed in 1991 were never reversed by Clark’s government. Throughout this period of significant economic growth, 200,000 children languished in poverty. Their parents were mostly beneficiaries. Meanwhile corporate welfare grew. Despite the common perception that National was the party of tax cuts, it was Labour, not National, that gifted the corporates with tax cuts. Clark  cut company taxes from 33 percent to 30 percent in 2007, an echo of Labour’s company tax cuts of 1988.

While the people on the Rich List saw their wealth grow by 300 percent under Clark, the government’s “closing the gaps” policy was short lived. It was supposed to narrow the disparities between Maori and Pakeha but was shelved early on. Labour’s hold over the Maori seats waned as people began to question the value of loyalty to the party. Clark’s handling of the  Foreshore and Seabed Act 2004 was uncharacteristically clumsy and was seen by Maori as disenfranchising and arrogant. When the newly formed Maori Party won 4 seats in 2005 Clark was reluctant to engage with the party and referred to it as “the last cab off the rank” at coalition talks. There was a growing sense among Maori that they had been taken for granted by Labour for too long.

Clark was socially liberal but not a champion of full equality. So Muldoon’s anti-abortion legislation remained on the books, while doctors simply ignore the backward restrictions.  Civil unions were established but whether this becomes  a step forward or a block to full equality is yet to be established.

The campaign to raise the minimum wage to $12 an hour was fought outside parliament by Unite union, and supported inside parliament not by Labour but by United Future and New Zealand First. By the time Labour enacted a $12 minimum, three years had passed and the cost of living had soared.

Critics and admirers all agree Clark was a capable manager and leader. Few people could have pleased both warmongers and peaceniks as Clark did. She showed what a close relationship there was with the US when she  signed New Zealand up to the “Coalition of the Willing” in the invasion of Afghanistan and sent in SAS forces. She just as effectively positioned New Zealand between the competing US and European powers on the question of Iraq, keeping the US happy with a token involvement in Iraq while not going in boots and all kept her on side with the Europeans. At home this enabled her to maintain an anti-war façade.

Clark’s government has been well supported by big business.  With Labour occupying the political “centre” National had little option but to adopt most of Labour’s policies to recapture this ground. In the end Clark’s liberal capitalist party was usurped by Key’s liberal capitalist party.  One prime minister moves out, another steps in, seamlessly.

The Green Party has caused some controversy recently by releasing its Population Policy for New Zealand just prior to the election. The Greens estimate the maximum population that Aotearoa can sustain at 5.7 million. In order that we do not exceed this figure, they propose policies including: “initiatives to raise awareness amongst parents and potential parents regarding the issue of sustainable global population levels.”

They also propose to “regularly review NZ’s immigration policy to ensure that we are retaining capacity to absorb climate change refugees and returning NZ citizens.”

It seems strange that the Greens should have made this an issue in a country that is sparsely populated with an ageing population. But in today’s political discourse, “sustainability” is becoming an essential green veneer to reactionary measures such as immigration controls and restricting working class people’s consumption.

The proposition that population growth is the cause of all manner of social ills is not new. It is worth examining the origin of this idea.

In 1798 the English clergyman Thomas Malthus published an essay entitled An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Effects the Future Improvement of Society; with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr Godwin, M. Condorcet and Other Writers. A polemical work, it aimed to counter claims to the possibility of unending human progress made by influential Enlightenment thinkers like William Godwin and the Marquis de Condorcet in the wake of the French Revolution.

Malthus maintained that the human population, if unchecked, tended to increase at a geometrical rate (1, 2, 4, 8, 16 and so on), while food supply tended to increase only at an arithmetical rate (1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and so on). This principle represented an insurmountable barrier to the very realisation of a more egalitarian society.

The idea of the arithmetic ratio was quickly disproved by empirical data, but it fitted with the pre-Darwinian view of nature of the time that there was only limited room for “improvement” in plant or animal species.

Malthus wrote that “a man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents on whom he has a just demand, and if the society do not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and in fact, has no business to be where he is.” He attacked the English Poor Laws for providing relief to the destitute, arguing instead for workhouses, which the New Poor Law of 1834 duly provided.

It was in response to Malthus that Friedrich Engels developed the concept of the reserve army of labour. Malthus was “right in his way that there are always too many people in the world; he is wrong only when he asserts that there are more people on hand than can be maintained from the available means of subsistence.” An “unemployed reserve army of workers” existed at all times within industry, fluctuating according to the extent that the market encouraged employment. But the workers, far from actually thinking of themselves as superfluous, “have taken into their heads that they, with their busy hands, are necessary, and the rich capitalists, who do nothing,” constitute “the surplus population.”

Despite being repeatedly discredited, Malthus’s ideas have persisted in one guise or another to defend reactionary projects, including eugenics. Its latest Green incarnation must be exposed as equally fraudulent. The ecological and economic crises of our planet are fundamentally caused not by the level of population, but by the way capitalism controls resources.

Our planet is capable of sustaining the billions, but not the billionaires.

Before the election, NZCTU President Helen Kelly had much to say about the two main parties. On April 13th she told the Labour Party Congress:

“Working people have been given the chance to get back on their feet with this government. This is not just because of good policies. It is because we have a Government made up of people who care about workers, who understand the difficulties they face, and who try to make things better.”

Kelly was not ­ quite – absolutely obsequious in her praise of Labour, adding:

“Of course this does not mean that we live in paradise! There is more to do. And workers are really feeling the pinch at the moment with high food prices, rising petrol costs and high rents and mortgage payments.”

Then, even this mild admonition was hastily qualified into nothingness, with the soothing:

“So we need more change and with the continuation of a Labour led government we know that will happen. Labour is the Government with a proven record of change for the better and we need more of it.”

And, after the vision of heaven ­ the warning of hell:

“We have seen National’s industrial relations policy and it is dramatic and will have a major negative impact on working people.”

“National’s plans for industrial relations are the same as in 1991″.

Just before I began writing this, I took a look at the NZ Council of Trade unions website, to see if there was any comment on the election result. Still, after two weeks, not a peep. As we supposedly teeter on the brink of another 1991! It would seem that if National’s plans for industrial relations are really the same as in 1991, so too are the plans of the CTU. Determined inertia. Remember when the top leaders refused to take up calls for a general strike to defeat National’s Employment Contracts Act?

If National is poised for launching a major negative impact on working people, wouldn’t it be the task of union leaders to start rallying and mobilising opposition from day one?

In fact, John Key has already met CTU leaders. Business is going on just as usual; CTU heads know and practice only the narrow strategy of themselves lobbying the government of the day. Mass organising is anathema to them. Even explicit criticism of the former bogey man is quietly put aside; you can’t very comfortably have polite chitchat with someone over morning tea and then call them a bastard in the afternoon. For top union leaders there is really only one difference between Labour and National; Labour offers them more individual career rewards in terms of safe Labour seats. Apart from that, it’s just another day at the office.

Of course, while all this mutual backscratching goes on, workers rights, relative incomes and living standards continue to fall away. The last few years have seen the greatest growth of income inequality in New Zealand’s history. A central problem of unionism today is top union leaders’ servile accommodation to capitalism. When praising Labour in her speech to their congress Kelly said:

“We know that when the party manifestos come out, there will be a stark difference. Labour’s manifesto will contain policies that continue to make New Zealand a good place for all to live in and actually for business to operate in (Labour’s achievements in building successful businesses in this country is also well worth noting)”.

Union leaders know that the idea of a party capable of serving workers and bosses equally is bullshit. When a majority of workers realise the treachery and act on it civilisation will make a huge advance.

The Workers Party has been rationally assessing the two main political parties for many years. This cartoon appeared with an article in The Spark February 2007 on the similarities between Labour and National.

Whereas a considerable section of the left had illusions in Labour and delusions about National, our analysis has proved to be sound.

The Workers Party is primarily an organisation of activists who fight for workers’ interests on jobs and in the streets. We recognise that the struggle for workers’ rights and workers’ power mostly takes place outside of parliament. Taking mass actions against an employer offers workers more chance of controlling their destiny than voting. However, parliamentary elections provide a chance to raise alternative ideas, and socialists should make use of the opportunity. The reports below show some of the initiatives taken by the Workers Party in the 2008 general election. You can see that we got stuck in and stood up for socialist ideas without mincing our words. If you like the look of our approach, why not join us and help make the socialist voice even louder in 2011!

Workers Party grows in Wellington

The Wellington election campaign effort raised the branch’s morale and fostered Workers Party growth and consolidation in the district.

Activity for Tramways, the union representing Go Wellington bus drivers, fed into election activity. Under WP secretary Nick Kelly, the union held a one-hour strike which resulted in a day-long lockout by the company. Drivers showed organisation and determination, while other unions held fundraisers in support. Workers Party members joined the picketline, contributing placards, stickers and posters. Under pressure from the public and the City Council, Go Wellington lifted the lockout and improved on its previous “final offer.”

The Wellington branch designed, produced and posted hundreds of posters, as well as hundreds of small hi-viz stickers. We also put up over sixty A2 billboards proclaiming “Workers should be running the country!”

Street speaking was undertaken in Cuba Mall, Kilbirnie and Newtown. Party branch teams leafleted and talked to passers-by while taking turns to stand on a beer crate and speak through a megaphone. The quality of our street speaking improved as the campaign went on, with comrades increasing in confidence. This activity will be ongoing after the election.

Wellington Central electorate candidate Don Franks was interviewed on Te Upoko o te Ika radio and Radio Active. He also gave substantial interviews to local papers The Wellingtonian and Capital Times.

Over the course of the campaign Don addressed seven combined candidates meetings, one NZCTU local affiliates’ meeting, one MUNZ meeting, a gathering of bus drivers locked out by Go Wellington and four meetings organised by the Workers Party.

Highlight of the branch’s campaign was the well-attended Workers Party “left of Labour” debate. This assembly of Green Party, Maori Party, Alliance, Independent and Workers Party candidates debated radical ideas instead of the usual personality politics. For more about this meeting, see ” A vision of workers’ freedom“.

Workers Party Christchurch branch election campaign report

While for the capitalist establishment parties election year is all about votes, for the Workers Party Christchurch branch the 2008 election has been all about the opportunity to connect with a bigger working-class audience and recruit activists. In both these areas we have had some success, and whatever our final vote tally, Christchurch WP members will have reason to feel that our intervention in these elections has been worthwhile.

Since August, party members in Christchurch personally delivered over 4000 leaflets containing our WP election manifesto to residents in working-class neighbourhoods such as Wainoni and Linwood. as well as on street stalls and at election forums. We have also been using the election campaign to talk to council housing tenants about the need to form a tenants’ action group to fight recent rent rises, doorknocking around 500 council flats in the Christchurch Central and Christchurch East electorates where we have been standing candidates.

During the campaign, members of the Christchurch branch also travelled to Dunedin and in conjunction with local WP supporters helped to organise public meetings and street stalls there, boosting our party profile in that city.

Particular credit must go to our Christchurch East candidate Paul Hopkinson, who has undergone three weeks’ suspension without pay from his teaching position for challenging the undemocratic restrictions on public servants standing for parliament. While he had originally only intended to campaign during school holidays and weekends, in the final weeks Paul ended up working almost full time on the campaign as a result of his employer’s decision to suspend him!

Despite failing to gain much traction in the capitalist media, our campaign has resulted in a modest increase in membership for the Christchurch branch. The task now is to translate this increase in membership into more activists as well as (to use Gramsci’s phrase) more “organic intellectuals of the working class”.

Auckland: Laying a solid foundation

Solid efforts at Otara market in South Auckland and at other working-class venues laid the foundation of the party’s nationwide election campaign. Auckland comrades netted a huge proportion of the more than 500 people signed up so that the Workers Party could get on the official party list. That meant that for the first time ever, the red flag and a socialist party option were on every ballot paper in the country. Official party status also gained us a one-minute opening address on television and a one-minute radio advertisement on student radio Bnet, the Edge and the Rock.

For five weeks running up to the election the party ran soapbox forums at the Otara market. Workers Party candidates and members spoke about the party’s policies, the world financial turmoil, the economy and job losses. Comrades explained about Labour’s anti-worker laws and why Labour isn’t worker-friendly. We and highlighted the similarities between National and Labour, noting that the choice is rather like Pepsi and Coke. Around 10,000 Workers Party leaflets were distributed in Auckland. Comrades were also involved in the ongoing McDonalds pay dispute.

Auckland comrades attended three combined candidates meetings in the Manukau East electorate where Daphna Whitmore stood for the Workers Party. Daphna also spoke for the party at the Auckland left candidates meeting organised by Global Peace and Justice. For more about this meeting, see “Why we need fewer cops” .

At a recent election meeting at the University of Auckland, the prominent anarchist Omar Hamed of the Auckland Anarchist Network presented “an anarchist view on elections” but then admitted he would be voting for the Greens. This was a good example of how the left-wing friends of what is increasingly a party of the establishment must construct a false reality to justify their misfit between theory and practice. Like Christian obscurantists who, despite mounting evidence, continue to present their creationist themes, anti-capitalists who present the Greens as some form of progressive force not only obscure the facts but present an overwhelmingly deceptive image of reality.

The political nature of the Greens
To discover the truth of what the Green Party is all about, who better to go to than its fresh new leader. Russel Norman, a former anti-capitalist associated with the Democratic Socialist Party of Australia, has made explicit his desire not just to save the planet but to save the capitalist system. He has compared the role of the modern-day Greens to that of social democrats of the 1930s who introduced counter-measures against capitalism’s self-destructive tendencies.
In a revealing blog posting in 2007 on Frogblog, Russel Norman presented his thesis on the role of the Greens:

It’s a funny position we find ourselves in. Just as the social democrats (Europe), labourists (UK, Australia, NZ) and new dealers (US) of the 1930s and 1940s had to save capitalism from its own destructive tendencies by introducing a range of modifications and interventions on the market system, so now the Green Parties of the world find ourselves in possibly a similar position. The best of the old social democrats like Michael Cullen are too locked in the old paradigm to understand it, and the sectional interests like the business roundtable and Employers Federation are too narrow to see it, but we have to intervene in the market system to place a price on resource use and pollution so that we can save the planet. And in the process we will quite possibly save the market system from its natural tendency to destroy or consume all resources leading to its own demise as well as the demise of the planet and all of us living on it.

Norman’s comparisons between the Greens and social democratic saviours of capitalism is relevant; however, it needs to be stressed that the Greens are significantly to the right of the old social democratic parties of the 1930s. Traditional social democratic parties, with their working-class base and socialist rhetoric, offered an array of social reforms, partly to dampen growing social divisions and radical sentiments amongst the masses. The Greens’ lack of any substantial social programme shows that they are similar to all other parliamentary parties in operating within the limits set by the reality of modern capitalism. “Oh, but you just don’t know what our economic policies are,” is one reply of the left-wing friends of the Greens. Shall we have a look, then?

The Green Party put forward their left-wing MPs, Keith Locke and Sue Bradford, alongside a number of progressive-sounding policy platitudes. For students they offer moves towards “establishing a public ‘fee-free’ tertiary education system” in the unspecified future while, for the moment, they will kindly cap and maybe reduce fees. For workers faced with the draconian restrictions on the right to strike with Labour’s industrial legislation they dispense with detailed policy and offer support for “a complete review of the Employment Relations Act’”.

Like Labour, the Greens do not presently call for reversing the savage benefit cuts enacted by the Bolger-led National government in the 1990s. Instead they offer beneficiaries “benefit amounts at a level sufficient for all basic needs of the individual/family” and protection of all benefit levels “by linking rates to a fixed percentage of the average wage”.

All this vagueness serves a purpose. Specific policy details can be problematic when moving towards the reins of power and working in the realm of realpolitik. Vague policy statements coupled with statements of long-term desires and principals allow Norman and co to enter negotiations post-election with no “bottom lines” and awkward specific policy commitments that hinder their chances of gaining precious cabinet seats.

Of course, the Greens are no different from the other parliamentary parties with their non-specific policy platforms and flexible maneuvering to stay in the political centre. However, this jars against the attempts by the party to pretend that they are some sort of fresh alternative to political “business as normal”.

With the Green Party’s latest billboards deliberately obscuring what political programme they have, the party conveniently offers its left wing friends a blank canvas on which to paint their desires of what the Greens stand for. That the Greens don’t explicitly distance themselves from their radical supporters points to the usefulness of having a bunch of anarchists and radicals providing them with a left-wing cover.

This left wing cover is particularly important as the Greens move to the right. For example, whereas left-wing supporters of the Greens do occasionally point to capitalism as anathema to an environmentally sustainable economy, the Greens have adopted a controlled market approach to the environment. As pointed out previously on this blog, the Greens are increasingly adopting a pro-capitalist orientation towards environmental issues:

Note, for example, the Greens’ new climate change plan announced recently called “Kicking the Carbon Habit”. In this, the Greens propose that global warming can be averted by making use of an international emissions trading market in which New Zealand businesses essentially buy and sell permissions to emit pollution. This market approach has been welcomed by everyone from Labour and National through to the forestry industry. Right-wing and business interests are starting to realise that they can actually do business with the Greens.

The Green Party’s distance from progressive politics is most strongly exposed with its statements on immigration and economic nationalism. In these areas they have often competed with the xenophobic New Zealand First party for appealing to reactionary ideas about economic nationalism.

In 2006 the Green Party reacted strongly to proposals from a visiting Chinese minister who put forward the position for allowing increased numbers of Chinese workers here on temporary visas. A Dominion Post article of 5 October 2006 said “but the Green Party says it would trigger a ‘race to the bottom’ for New Zealand wages and conditions”. Also: “Dr Norman said there would have to be a genuine shortage of New Zealand workers and the Government would have to prove it had made efforts to offer training to local workers to fill vacancies.” Such statements are not only reminiscent of Peters’ revolting racist rhetoric directed against Asian immigrants in the 1990s, but also of the White New Zealand policy implemented for much of the last century.

The German Greens
The experience of the German Greens offers a sobering reading of where the New Zealand Greens could be heading. The German Green Party formed in the mid-1970s and drew in a number of activists, including many active in the anti-nuclear movement. In the early 1980s they won seats in the West German parliament. In the late 1990s they formed a coalition with the Social Democratic Party of Germany in a so-called Red-Green Alliance and were a partner in the federal government from 1998 to 2005. The Greens’ leader, Joschka Fischer, acted as Germany’s foreign minister.

Like the Greens here, the German Greens shifted to the right as they moved closer to the reins of power. In contrast with the New Zealand Greens, this opportunist political shift caused a split in the German Greens between the “fundis” who held some attachment to the party’s radical-pacifist traditions and the “realos” who were maneuvering the Greens into being a mainstream capitalist party.

The formal break from its past came when the party, at a Green conference in Bielefeld, endorsed foreign minister’s Fischer’s support for NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia. Also, the German Greens as part of the coalition government took part in comprehensive attacks on social services and working-class living conditions.

The Green Party in Germany’s rapid move to the right can be seen as partially a result of the social make-up of the party. Like the Green Party here, the German Greens have a predominantly “middle-class” make-up. With few ties to organised labour in the form of unions, the party could easily swing from being one focused on concerns of the liberal middle class, such as nuclear proliferation, to being a party promoting right-wing austerity measures.
Although the German Greens’ shift away from pacifist politics certainly disquieted many of their supporters, its participation in attacks on social services and working-class conditions can’t really be seen as a betrayal, as the Greens never had a working-class base or significant working-class support.

The Greening of the left
What has led to anarchists, socialists and anti-capitalists embracing the Greens, or at least giving them some form of “critical” support? Is it a matter of the party being viewed as a lesser evil, whose elevation will alleviate some of the suffering caused by the all-embracing capitalist system?

Certainly the presence of former radicals Sue Bradford and Keith Locke provides hope for left Green supporters. Yet the presence of former anarchists, Maoists and Trotskyists in the German Greens equally excited many on the left there.

Does their support go even further than this – is there an honest belief in the transforming possibilities of the Greens? In the way that Barack Obama, with his vague calls for change, has become a blank canvas for the American electorate to paint their hopes and fears on, the New Zealand Green Party is a broad church accommodating many.

Take the Green Party caucus. The caucus, rather than being a cohesive unit, appears as a collection of single-issue individuals held together by an implicit pact to be accommodating, or maybe neutral, towards each other’s pet projects – workers’ rights, anti-imperialism, consumer issues, etc. That this pact extends out into the wider party is partly an explanation for the accommodation towards anarchists and other anti-capitalists who have made the Greens their home. That these anti-capitalist Greens feel no need to engage in any serious reflection on the rightward drift of the party points to them at least subconsciously buying into this pact.
Another explanation for the greening of the left is to see this process as an extension of the tripod theories that became fashionable in the 1980s. The tripod theories held that class should no longer be the primary concern of the left – gender, race and class where to be given equal status in terms of analysing society and in terms of engagement in political action. Disillusioned Stalinists and Maoists, who were desperate to discard their unfashionable baggage, enthusiastically embraced this new approach.

Tripod theories can be seen as a variant of post-modern approaches to struggle, with no form of oppression or identity given primacy and a tolerant, non-critical approach given to various avenues of struggle. That most of these struggles, although progressive, not only do not challenge the capitalist paradigm, but also have been actually embraced by the establishment (for example, anti-racism, gay rights, anti-sexism) is telling. Has the tripod approach extended out to be a quadpod approach, with environmentalism having equal status alongside class, race and gender? Does this offer some explanation for the left’s embracing of the Green cause?

Taking the red pill
In the Matrix film Neo, the protagonist faces a seminal moment when he is offered a chance to see the truth. Neo is taken to Morpheus, a resistance leader, who explains that he lives in a false reality, that what appears as “real” is a constructed mirage to hide the truth. Morpheus presents Neo with two pills. If he takes the blue pill, Neo will wake up and “believe whatever you want to believe”. Neo takes the red pill and faces an epiphany where he is shown the world as it is, “the desert of the real”.

Metaphorically taking the blue pill and waking up to “believe whatever you want to believe” is often the less painful option. Being faced with reality can hurt. Many seek comfort within constructed realities. For those who recoil from the mystery and growing uncertainties of capitalist existence, what better comfort than a party that offers an easy panacea to the nightmare of the real.

The Green Party in New Zealand has openly reconstructed itself as a party of the centre, willing to do deals with any other capitalist party with no “bottom lines”. Despite the deceptive image various leftists hold up of the party, the scenario played out in Germany with the Greens may prove not to be a unique one.

So, will the Green Party’s left-wing friends dare to take the red pill and see this party for what it is? The truth can be painful.

(This article first appeared as a guest blog on Liberation.)

One thing the election and the days since have confirmed is the inability of many on the left to make a sober analysis based on reality and, in particular, the way in which bourgeois politics is related to the economy and how bourgeois politics is centrally concerned with the maintenance of conditions such as social stability which are necessary to the operations of the market. Instead much of the left has cried wolf about the new government, seeing it as a re-run of the 1984-1993 period of ‘new right’ dominance.

For instance, the headline on the Socialist Aotearoa blog is “RESISTING THE NAT-ACT JUNTA- What is to be done?” Does the author of that piece really believe that we are about to be ruled by a “junta”? Are they unable to distinguish between bourgeois democracy and military dictatorship? If they are able to make the distinction why use terminology that bears no relation to the reality and simply misleads and misorients people?

Although, in the context of a worsening economic situation, there would certainly have to be attacks on the working class, Key is not creating a junta of any kind. In fact, he appears to not even be creating a National-ACT coalition but opting for Clark’s own strategy – a minority government with ministers out of cabinet from what he sees as both the ‘left’ (Maori Party) and ‘right’ (ACT) and support on confidence and supply. The temptation for the Maori Party to go for this will likely be pretty substantial, as Key and co. well know. This was apparent before the election – and was reiterated by Key on Saturday night, by Matthew Hooton on ‘Eye to Eye’ on Sunday morning, by Key again on TV on Sunday night and Monday night. In fact, Key even wants to talk with the Greens. (Since this was written on Monday 11 November, things have moved along further with the Maori Party.)

The Maori Party is going to be as much involved in Key’s government as Act – no surprise to us, of course, but probably quite a shock to the left groups who have illusions in what the Maori Party represents in real political terms, a thoroughly exaggerated idea of the ‘threat’ represented by ACT and who fail to appreciate that the modern National Party is not the party of rural reactionaries and upper crust racists and hasn’t been for a long time.

What National does in terms of economic policy will be overwhelmingly conditioned by how much of an economic downturn there is. They’re not going to attack the working class because they have some ideological fixation with making workers poor (they don’t have such a fixation and, in fact, the Nats never really have had such a fixation) and least of all are they going to try some pitbull job on the working class just because Roger Douglas might want them to.

The attacks of the 1984-93 period were the reflection that NZ capitalism was up shit creek without a paddle. The capitalists had absolutely no alternative. That’s not the situation at present and it remains to be seen how deeply the woes in the financial and banking sector in other countries will hit NZ. Because the NZ economy depends on exports, and to some extent easy foreign money, it could be hit quite hard – on the other hand, the decline of the NZ dollar (which is a product of these woes) is good news for exporters because it makes NZ products cheaper in export markets than those of their rivals.

Unless they’re really in a huge crisis, the capitalists prefer not to make big attacks on the working class. Especially when they’re blessed with social stability and a tame-pet union leadership like the CTU brass. Why screw that up unless the economic situation is so totally dire that you have to?

One of the things that a large part of the far left has in common with the market rules ideologues is that neither really understand that the market is just a thing and can’t organise the preconditions for its own existence and continuance. The operation of the market depends, for one thing, on social stability yet the operations of the market undermine social stability by trying to commodify everything and individualise society.

Any smart capitalists – and any good Marxist – understands that capital, because it’s a thing, requires conscious human planning and organisation to maintain social stability and manage society so that the market itself can operate successfully and deliver maximum profitability to the capitalists. In the First World, the capitalists are prepared to pay for stability too. And, generally, they’d rather pay a bit for it than have a big scrap with the working class. This only changes when there is a really serious economic crisis – ie a real crisis across the whole of the economy, not just problems in the finance sector.

It’s interesting that, every time you see him, Key has a big smile on his face. He’s in a very strong position because he has options and is not beholden to Act, let alone to Douglas. He’s perfectly prepared to make concessions to the Maori Party – because, despite the rubbish from a lot of the left that the Nats are some kind of dinosaur backwoods racists, the Nats these days (ie in terms of who they are) are essentially an urban-liberal petty-bourgeois party like Labour. The Nats have more actual capitalists in their ranks, and are a bourgeois party in the sense that that is the class interest they defend, but in terms of personnel and ideas they’re an urban-liberal petty-bourgeois party.

A few of them like Lockwood Smith have bits and pieces of racist ideas, just like a chunk of Labour MPs do, but few of them are dyed-in-the-wool racists and none of them want to impoverish Maori, suppress Maori cultural rights etc. What they actually want is to wed Maori cultural rights to the market as much as possible. Since there’s nothing radical about Maori cultural rights in the context of 21st century New Zealand – there may have been at some point in the past, there just ain’t today – this is a project in which the Nats and the Maori Party can happily marry.

What the Maori Party represents politically (the views of upwardly mobile Maori middle class and burgeoning Maori entrepreneurs) is more significant than what they represent sociologically (a large chunk of Maori workers as well), so the Maori Party will likely be way more interested in winning more contracts and control for (essentially private) Maori service providers in the health and education sectors and stuff like that is where they and National meet ideologically. That will likely trump any pressure from within the party and its support base by Maori workers around class demands such as the protection of union rights, increases in the minimum wage and so on.

Also, when you take in what support the Maori Party has among Maori, they’re actually not in an especially strong situation. The party vote for the Maori Party was only a little above 2 percent. Maori are nearly 15 percent of the population. Taking into account that proportionately there are more Maori under 18, that still means that only about one in six Maori gave their party vote to the Maori Party. In all the Maori seats Labour won the party vote. So the Maori Party hasn’t achieved what NZ First achieved in the Maori seats in 1996 – a clean sweep of the seats plus the largest share of the party vote. This position of the Maori Party may mean they will want to buttress up their party vote for 2011 by being seen to deliver in the one or two areas they could deliver – separate services for Maori and some cultural rights stuff.

Another thing to keep in mind is that there is no class-based opposition in the Maori Party. There’s no force within the party that will call the likes of Turia, Sharples and Flavell to account. And, while NZ First lost all the Maori seats back to Labour in 1999 because of its coalition with National, the situation today is quite different. National was widely hated in 1996 when Winston did his deal with Bolger, people had voted NZ First to get the Nats out and were very angry about Winston First coalescing with National, and the ideological differences (and personal differences) between Winston First and the Nats were probably greater than the differences between Key/National and Turia, Sharples, Flavell and co. Unlike 1996, National isn’t widely hated today – in fact quite the opposite – and there wasn’t a massive groundswell of Maori voting for the Maori Party to keep National out the way people in 1996 voted for Winston to get the Nats out.

Although it’s possible that a Maori Party deal with National could make them dog tucker like NZ First, it’s important to keep in mind that 2008 is not 1996. The Maori Party may well only be dog tucker if the Nats are forced by an economic crisis to attack the working class and the Maori Party stays wedded to the Nats in that kind of situation. But in the absence of much conflict, and in the absence of a deep recession, the Maori Party could deliver on Maori-provided services, some more cultural identity stuff and so on, and keep one-sixth of the Maori electorate happy and win 3-4 Maori seats again in 2011.

All this has completely failed to register with a lot of the left, which prefers over-the-top scenarios to the more mundane reality. These over-the-top scenarios are used to whip people up into the next round of mindless activism and prevent any sober assessment of the fiascos produced by the last round of mindless activism.

So-called ‘from the left’ political commentator Chris Trotter posed the following question to his post election column in the Sunday Star times:

 “What led the majority of the New Zealand electorate to reject a government that has not only done it no great harm but might even be said to have done it some good?”

 The answer according to Trotter is this:

 Last night’s result was manufactured out of the besetting sin of the last 150 years of western history – the crisis of masculinity. What, exactly, is a man in a world of corporate and public bureaucracies?

It was these: the men who just couldn’t cope with the idea of being led by an intelligent, idealistic, free-spirited woman; the gutless, witless, passionless creatures of the barbecue-pit and the sports bar (and the feckless females who put up with them); who voted Helen Clark out of office

John Key - you’re welcome to them.

If the NZ public were so anti having a Labour woman prime minister for the reasons Trotter outlined, then why did they re elect her three times?

Left: Young workers, led by Unite union protesting against youth rates under Labour.

Helen Clark has been the leader of the Labour Party since 1993, and in that time has won three out of five of the last elections. The last 9 years has been the longest time the NZ Labour Party have held power since the end of the second world war. As the Workers Party booklet The Truth about Labour has documented, the last 9 years of Labour government has not been a “worker- friendly” government. The 100 wealthiest New Zealanders have increased their wealth by over 300% under Labour according to the NBR rich list, while workers wages remain abysmal.

Labour did virtually nothing to reverse the attacks on workers by the previous National administration, or those carried out by the fourth Labour government.

The reality is that voters rejected Labour after a decade of them not delivering.

For real analysis of the New Zealand political situation, forget about Trotter’s nonsense – read the Spark instead.