Left of Labour, or Bereft of Sense?

Oliver Woods

THE extraordinary success of the Alliance in the 1990s was both a blessing and curse for the New Zealand Left. A blessing, because, by its very existence, the Alliance forced the Labour Party to purge itself of the most dangerous elements of the neo-liberal clique which had seized control of the Parliamentary Labour Party in the 1980s (after which it was able to pressure Helen Clark and her colleagues to return to a more recognizably social-democratic policy course). A curse, because the Alliance’s undoubted (although limited) achievements have convinced individuals and organisations to the left of the Labour Party that the creation of a viable left-wing electoral option to Labour is a viable political project.

A good example of this flawed thinking is contained in this posting by Oliver Woods, the Residents’ Action Movement (RAM) candidate for the seat of Auckland Central in the last election. Joining the debate initiated here by Bryce Edwards, a left-wing political studies lecturer at the University of Otago, and taking strong issue with my response ("You Say You Want A Revolution?" – see below) Oliver writes:

There seems to be a major underlying problem in the post he made. Namely, he has conveniently forgotten his own political background. He omits that he was part of the current of people that quit Labour during the late 1980's because of the party's swing to the extreme libertarian right. He quit Labour because it was no longer a party that helped the working class. Chris was a staunch NewLabour and Alliance Party supporter, remaining true to New Zealand's social democratic tradition.

In a depressingly crude argument, he attacks the Workers Party based on how many votes they received and uses Labour's high votes to illustrate that it is the "true" Workers Party. This is the crass argument of a bully, not Chris' usual intelligent analysis and commentary.

Even more bizarrely for Chris' normally very coherent work, his argument is fundamentally illogical. He manipulates the Alliance into his pro-Labour story. He argues the Alliance's influence on Labour as an argument to prove that Labour is really left wing. Yet he argues that without the Alliance in coalition, Labour would not have followed a pro-worker, left program.

Which leaves me bemused. How can he simultaneously argue that Labour isn't really for the workers, yet really it is?

Well, the first thing to acknowledge is that Oliver is quite correct in identifying the lacunae in my earlier posting. I was wrong to assume so much willing compression of the historical and political narrative concerning Labour and the Alliance on the part of my readers.

Let me remedy that now by making explicit what I mistakenly believed was implicit in the posting: i.e. that the Alliance (and the NLP before it) were born out of, and were, in fact, all about – the Labour Party. What they represented was not a departure from the social-democratic project in New Zealand, but a reaffirmation of its centrality to the nation’s political life.

As I wrote in 2001 (in Ray Miller’s New Zealand Government & Politics):

"With only 8 percent of the 1999 popular vote, the Alliance has made its future utility to Labour highly questionable. If the organisation’s historical task was to act as a transitional vehicle – from the aberration of the 1984-90 Labour Party, to the much more recognisable social democratic force that Helen Clark has fashioned – then surely that task has been accomplished? Its constituent membership notwithstanding, the Alliance’s future may now lie in a more-or-less amicable reabsorption by Labour – the party it devoted so much energy to destroying, and then saved."

There is nothing illogical, therefore, in citing the Alliance as evidence of the futility of attempting to establish an electoral organisation, anchored in the New Zealand working-class, with a programme well to the left of Labour’s. On the contrary, the ultimate fate of the Alliance demonstrates quite conclusively the very real constraints that will inevitably be brought to bear on all those radical social-democrats (not to mention revolutionary socialists) who attempt to extend the boundaries of political praxis beyond what the majority of their own party comrades, their party’s leadership, their coalition partner’s leadership, the capitalist ruling class, and public opinion generally, are willing to tolerate.

The Alliance split over the US invasion of Afghanistan – an issue singularly ill-suited to the purposes of those who wished to boost the Alliance’s dwindling electoral fortunes. And to those who say: "Oh, if it hadn’t been Afghanistan, it would have been something else.", I would only reply: "Well, I wish it had been something else!"

Splitting the Alliance over making the restoration of free tertiary education a non-negotiable element of the 2002 Labour-Alliance coalition agreement, for example, would, at the very least, have offered the prospect of bringing a significant number of the public in behind the radical faction’s demands – thereby applying maximum political pressure to Anderton and Clark.

Dying in a ditch for the Taleban never did strike me as the radical Left’s best way of convincing the Alliance’s 200,000 voters that it was anything other than a collection of self-indulgent, terrorist-appeasing, twits.

I fear Oliver will again accuse me of adopting a bullying tone, but really, what does the radical Left expect? Its blunt refusal to face political realities is not something it is in any left-leaning individual’s interest to ignore. Take Oliver’s own "party" – RAM – as a case in point. Earlier in the year a critic of RAM’s decision to contest the 2008 General Election wrote:

Any attempt by RAM to break into the national political scene will, therefore, almost certainly end in failure. Thousands of person hours, and tens-of-thousands of dollars, will be expended for what, when all the votes have been counted, is likely to be a tally well short of one percent of the Party Vote. Not only will this outcome prove profoundly demoralising for those candidates/activists who participated in the election campaign, but it will also constitute a significant opportunity cost for the Left as a whole – and for the Far Left in particular.

The history of New Zealand elections is studded with examples of Far-Left groups who put their policies to the democratic test and were aggressively rebuffed by the electorate. The consequences of these repeated rejections have been very damaging in at least two important respects.

First: the derisory election results powerfully reinforced the entrenched Centre-Left belief that Far-Left parties have no genuine constituency of any size among the New Zealand population. Centre-Leftists were, therefore, further encouraged to write-off ‘revolutionary’ political aspirants as Quixotic – at best, or dangerous nutcases – at worst.

Second: among the revolutionaries themselves, poor election results powerfully reinforced the argument that the ‘masses’ were suffering from ‘false consciousness’. They – the ‘Genuine Left’ – had seen the issues all-too-clearly, but, up against the lies of the news media, the schools and universities, and the ‘treacherous mis-leaders of the working-class’ the ‘truth’ was unable gain a hearing. This self-pitying attitude only served to widen the distance between the Far- and Centre-Left, and the electorate as a whole.

Sadly, these predictions have all been borne out – practically to the letter. Oliver, in spite of the investment of hundreds of hours, and the expenditure of huge amounts of emotional energy (and, I suspect, a not inconsiderable amount of his own cash) attracted just 132 votes, a figure which, to his credit, was eight times higher than the number of Party Votes cast for RAM in Auckland Central. (Indeed, across the country, RAM managed the extraordinary feat of actually attracting fewer Party Votes (435) than the 500 members required to register it as a political party!)

Oliver, a young comrade of enormous political potential, would be far better engaged in the vital process of building up the growing strength of the progressive forces within the Labour Party. Joining with new MPs like Grant Robertson, Clare Curran and Phil Twyford to develop practical solutions to crucial issues like child poverty, the strengthening of the trade unions, the introduction of a universal student allowance, and the revitalisation of our public broadcasting services.

Men and women of Oliver’s intelligence, erudition and commitment are rare enough in New Zealand politics, without pissing their energies into the wind by cynically involving them in attempts to establish electoral options for the working-class to the left of Labour – a project as bereft of sense as it is lacking in even the remotest possibility of success.