The Left’s Joyous Cherub: Keith Locke, 1944 - 2024.

The Struggle Continues: Keith Locke belonged to a generation that still believed in a world that could be, through struggle, relieved of its chains. That struggle constituted the core of a life lived with purpose, courage and determination. 

MANY NEW ZEALANDERS would, no doubt, have been surprised to discover that Keith Locke was 80 years old. There was always something of the cherub about the man which generally prompted guesses well south of his actual age. That youthfulness could also be applied to his ideals, which never soured with the passing of the years. Certainly, he reached the age of 80 without losing either his heart or his head. Indeed, there was a joyous naiveté about the man who finally succumbed to the twin ravages of Parkinson’s and Cancer on Friday, 21 June 2024.

Locke was what the Americans, rather unkindly, call a “red diaper baby”. The son of confirmed socialists Jack and Elsie Locke. That being the case, Locke had only two “historical” choices: to follow in his parent’s ideological footsteps, or execute an about-face and become a fierce champion of capitalism. It no doubt came as an immense relief to Jack and Elsie that their son not only kept the left-wing faith, but became (along with his sister Maire Leadbeater) one of its leading New Zealand missionaries.

It is telling, however, that when he returned from tertiary study in Canada to take up a lectureship in sociology at Victoria University in 1970, Locke declined to devote himself to either of the orthodox communist parties then operating in New Zealand.

When Moscow and Beijing parted ideological company in the “Sino-Soviet Split” of 1962, New Zealand and Albania were the only communist parties which sided with Mao Zedong and the Communist Party of China. After much internal wrangling, Moscow’s loyalists finally broke away to form the Socialist Unity Party in 1966.

Given that the SUP had all the flair and pep of a Soviet stamp-collectors congress, and the CPNZ’s ultra-leftism made Mao’s Red Guards look like Labour Youth, Locke’s decision to throw in his lot with the Trotskyites of the Socialist Action League (SAL) is entirely understandable.

Leon Trotsky, alongside Lenin himself, was indisputably the most able of the Bolshevik revolutionaries. His upper-class background, however, proved problematic. In a party increasingly composed of hard-bitten working-class battlers, Trotsky’s ostentatious love of “bourgeois” culture raised more than a few comrades’ hackles. Anyone who read French novels during meetings of the Central Committee was asking for trouble – which duly followed him into exile, and caught up with him in Mexico City where, in 1940, he met his death at the hands of an ice-pick-wielding Soviet assassin.

Was there ever any historical figure better suited to attracting the allegiance of middle-class rebels than this cinematic combination of dazzling intellectual, ruthless revolutionary, and sensitive reader of French literature? As the crimes of Stalinism became increasingly obvious, the global appeal of Trotsky – the man who should have succeeded Lenin – grew and grew. Although most of them will be quite unaware of the fact, whenever any politician consigns their political adversaries to “the dustbin of history” they are quoting Trotsky.

Trotskyism certainly found a loyal follower in Locke who, as editor of its newspaper Socialist Action, soon became one of the SAL’s key figures. It was in this role that Locke was to provide future opponents with statements that were, to say the least, embarrassing.

His too-early celebration of the Khmer Rouge’s takeover of Cambodia was to strike him again and again, like an avenging ideological boomerang, throughout his years as a Green Party Member of Parliament. While it is true that he didn’t know about Pol Pot’s killing fields when he wrote his celebratory articles – he should have guessed.

Locke’s naiveté was again in evidence following the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which Locke hailed as a victory for the Iranian working-class and its communist cadres. History would render a very different judgement – as would the Ayatollah Khomeini and his legions of deeply conservative Shite Muslim “revolutionary guards”, who never saw a crane that could not be improved by hanging an Iranian leftist from its hook.

Locke’s sojourn in the SAL proved personally costly in other ways. Like so many of his comrades, Locke allowed himself to be buried alive in the bowels of industrial capitalism. This “turn” to the New Zealand working-class involved men and women with impressive academic credentials – Locke had an MA from the University of Alberta and and was working toward a PhD in Sociology at Toronto when he returned to become a lecturer at Victoria – taking the jobs of honest workers in the car plants and freezing works of the nation.

Perhaps this “turn” was inspired by the sneering contempt in which the “bourgeois intellectual Trots” were held by their Maoist and Muscovite competitors. Nowhere is this scorn better captured than in “Socialist Action”, an excoriating parody of Peter Cape’s satirical ditty “Taumarunui – On the Main Trunk Line”. The Maoist bard was merciless:

They run the revolution

From the student union hall.

We’re down here on the picket-line

And we don’t see them at all.

They bring around a pamphlet

Maybe once or twice a year,

Saying ‘Forget about your wage demands,

You’re better off being queer.’

What is clear is that Locke, after 15 years in the SAL, many of them devoted to assembling cars and disassembling sheep, was ready for something else. He threw himself into international causes and became the proprietor of One World Books in Auckland’s Karangahape Road. But, if he remained hopeful of revolution breaking out overseas, Locke had finally reconciled himself to the fact that the only leftists who were going anywhere politically in New Zealand were those prepared to follow the “parliamentary road”.

Locke joined Jim Anderton’s NewLabour Party in 1989 and was quickly elected to the roles of foreign affairs and defence spokesperson. He could not, however, overcome Anderton’s ingrained suspicion of any NLP member further to the left than he was. Some up-and-comers Anderton had to endure – like Laila Harre and Locke’s old SAL comrade, Matt Robson – but at Locke, himself, the Alliance leader drew the line. Anderton was not prepared to ease him into Parliament. At Number 24 on the 1996 Alliance Party List there was little chance of that.

Locke’s chance came when the Greens decided to part company with Anderton’s Alliance in 1997. Alongside the former Maoist, Sue Bradford, the former Trot, Locke, secured himself one of the top seven slots on the Green Party List. If the party crossed the magic 5 percent MMP threshold, then this former lecturer, editor, car-assembler, freezing-worker, and bookseller would do what the spooks who had contributed so generously to his bulging SIS file believed to be impossible – enter the New Zealand House of Representatives.

Locke would serve four terms as a Green MP, acquitting himself impressively as the Party’s foreign affairs spokesperson. Few New Zealanders outside the circles of the more-than-rhetorical Left have any real appreciation of how steeped its members are in the great causes of their time. To a degree that would put most Labour, National, Act and NZ First MPs to shame, Locke was able to discourse knowledgably on every one of the many international issues for which he was expected to articulate the Greens’ position.

Locke departed Parliament in 2011, the same year as Phil Goff, whom he’d first encountered as a young left-wing firebrand back in the early 1970s. In sharp contrast to Goff, Locke kept the socialist faith right through, but, that said, both men almost certainly left Parliament at the right time. Because neither of them were truly ready for the changes that were, even in 2011, transforming the New Zealand Left – including Labour and the Greens. Locke was a good communist, and a passable eco-socialist, but he was not “woke”. His retirement was shrewdly calculated.

The contemporary New Zealand Left is many things, but “joyous” isn’t one of them. Locke belonged to a generation that still believed in a world that could be, through struggle, relieved of its chains. That struggle constituted the core of a life lived with purpose, courage and determination. At times, Keith Locke could be naïve, but he was never cruel. Even as the afflictions that claimed him wore down his body, he remained a gentle left-wing cherub. Aware of the darkness in the human soul, but always walking hopefully towards the light.

This essay/obituary was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 24 June 2024.

Losing The Left.

Descending Into The Dark: The ideological cadres currently controlling both Labour and the Greens are forcing “justice”, “participation” and “democracy” to make way for what is “appropriate” and “responsible”. But, where does that leave the people who, for most of their adult lives, have voted for left-wing parties, precisely to advance the causes of “justice”, “participation” and “democracy”?

IN THE CURRENT MIX of electoral alternatives, there is no longer a credible left-wing party. Not when “a credible left-wing party” is defined as: a class-oriented, mass-based, democratically-structured political organisation; dedicated to promoting ideas sharply critical of laissez-faire capitalism; and committed to advancing democratic, egalitarian and emancipatory ideals across the whole of society.

While some may argue that New Zealanders have not had a genuine left-wing party to vote for since the Labour Party abandoned its goal of “socialising the means of production, distribution and exchange” in 1951, it is more common to date the loss of a recognisably left-wing electoral alternative to Labour’s embrace of the “free market” in 1984.

Jim Anderton’s NewLabour Party and, later, his considerably less radical Alliance, attempted to make good that loss, and enjoyed some remarkable, if limited, successes. By 2002, however, the Alliance had broken apart, leaving only the Green Party of Aotearoa to carry forward the left-wing banner.

Problematically, the Greens, like their Values Party predecessor, are a post-scarcity political movement, driven less by class than by environmental and cultural concerns. As the party has come to embrace what is often abbreviated to “identity politics”, its earlier anti-capitalist impulses have been overwhelmed by the party’s increasingly strident discourses on ethnicity and gender.

The Greens move away from the system-challenging principles upon which the international Green movement was founded: Ecological Wisdom. Social Justice. Participatory Democracy. Nonviolence; is instructive. Displaying a disconcerting facility for Orwellian rewording, the Green Party of Aotearoa now lists its own core principles as: Ecological Wisdom. Social Responsibility. Appropriate Decision Making. Non-Violence.

The deletion of the words “justice”, “participatory” and “democracy”, amply confirms the Greens’ ideological trajectory: moving away from the emancipatory principles traditionally associated with the Left, and towards the uneasy marriage of technocratic “governance” and post-modern subjectivism so neatly personified in the party’s current co-leadership of James Shaw and Marama Davidson.

A very similar trajectory is discernible in the post-Rogernomics Labour Party. By embracing neo-liberalism, the party decisively abandoned its anti-capitalist ideology, rendering its use of the Left’s political vocabulary increasingly problematic. A semblance of radicalism and social transformation could, however, be maintained by moving deeper and deeper into the ideological territory of identity politics. In many respects, the alienating impact of this transition on its traditional followers was offset by the synergies it offered with Labour’s most “obvious” MMP coalition partner – the Greens.

Like Caesar Augustus’ Rome, today’s Labour Party presents to the world only the empty shell of its former self. Labour has held onto its revolutionary red. It continues to convene conferences at which (we are told) party policy is democratically debated and determined. And, just as the Emperor’s legions marched under standards emblazoned with the acronym of the defunct Roman Republic – SPQR [Senatus Populusque Romanus – the Senate and People of Rome] – Labour’s constitution still proudly references the “principles of democratic-socialism”.

It’s all a sham, of course. A carefully controlled exercise in deception. Once a political party embraces identity politics, traditional democratic mechanisms have a nasty habit of atrophying. Allowing conference delegates to determine the party’s direction in open plenary sessions would risk the wholesale repudiation of ethnic and gender discrimination as the prime movers of social injustice, and the re-elevation of class. Appointed policy committees are much less prone to cause such ontological difficulties.

Which is not to say that class plays no role in the contemporary Labour Party, merely that the class which now controls the party is the class responsible for managing the real-world social and inter-personal conflicts generated by class, ethnicity and gender. Labour has no more need for the trade union “sergeants” who managed the class warfare of yesteryear; the apparatchiks it needs today are the identity, diversity and equity commissars who manage the twenty-first century’s culture wars.

To gain a flavour of the post-democratic Labour/Green operational style, one has only to watch the video recording of the parliamentary select committee hearings into the legislation empowering citizens to change the gender assigned to them at birth, and recorded on their birth certificates, more-or-less at will.

Held during the Covid-19 Pandemic, the hearing took place on Zoom. Those speaking to submissions opposing the legislation were subjected to vicious cross-examination by Labour and Green committee members. The notion that citizens appearing before a parliamentary committee have a right to be heard respectfully clearly no longer applies to those who step outside the ideological boundaries of transgenderism. Clearly, in Labour’s and the Greens’ moral universe, TERFs have no rights.

When a shocked Nicola Willis rose in the House of Representatives to record her own, and the National Party’s, dismay at the treatment meted out to gender critical submitters by Labour and Green MPs, Labour’s Deborah Russell proudly owned-up to her behaviour and, to the applause of her colleagues, promised the same to all such ideological apostates appearing before her.

These are the drums that Labour marches to in the 2020s. They are the drums of the Professional-Managerial Class – and that class does not march to a democratic beat. Like the Greens, Professional-Managerial Labour is wedded to “appropriate” decision-making: that is to say – decisions made by itself.

But, if the ideological cadres currently controlling both Labour and the Greens are forcing “justice”, “participation” and “democracy” to make way for what is “appropriate” and “responsible”, where does that leave the people who, for most of their adult lives, have voted for left-wing parties, precisely to advance the causes of “justice”, “participation” and “democracy”? What is to be done when these concepts, like the institutions of the fallen Roman Republic, are emptied of their original purpose and replaced by the iron strictures of a new ideological imperium?

When asked by journalists why he was leaving the Labour Party, Jim Anderton’s reply was always: “I never left Labour, Labour left me.” But, did Anderton ever fully appreciate the crucial role he himself had played in allowing Labour to drift away from its working-class roots?

Because, it was Anderton’s determination – as President of the Labour Party between 1979 and 1984 – to select what he described as “first-class, highly-qualified, parliamentary candidates” that kick-started the separation. Engineers, university lecturers, lawyers, successful public servants: such were the people Anderton caused to be selected in preference to the unqualified working-class trade unionists of yesteryear. Paradoxically, it would be Anderton’s protégés who, by embracing “Rogernomics”, finally drove him to abandon Labour in 1989. The Professional-Managerial Class’s takeover of Labour would have been a lot harder, and taken much longer, had it not been for Jim Anderton’s determination to conduct it safely within the party’s walls!

Political scientists would shrug at this tale of class transition and ideological supersession. With some justification they would argue that the trend towards the professionalisation of political parties and trade unions was well underway by the turn of the nineteenth century. It was, after all, Vilfredo Pareto, (1848—1923), who characterised democracy as a political system for securing “the orderly circulation of elites”. That being the case, the best the voter can hope for is to choose the least evil collection of elitists.

Except, to acknowledge this as the only viable solution to the problem of political homogenisation requires the voter to deny even the possibility of securing social justice and social progress through collective action from below. And that proposition is flatly contradicted by the history of the last 250 years – a period which saw ordinary men and women aspire to and claim life improvements of unprecedented scope and scale. Indeed, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that halting the forward march of this “social” democracy is exactly what the elites mobilised all their resources to achieve. Humanity’s present predicament is the result.

Breaking free of this predicament will require, above all other things, unity. But unity is achievable only if people are free to debate how, and upon what basis, it is best secured. That cannot happen where the principles of liberty, equality and solidarity are despised, or where the citizens’ freedom of expression is constrained. In other words, it cannot happen in political parties where ethnic and gender identity trumps the common heritage of humankind, and where saying as much is condemned as hate speech.

As happens in today’s Labour and Green parties.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project website on Thursday, 28 September 2023.

The Choice: Giving Up, Or Keeping Hope Alive?

Which Way Should We Go? How I wish this country possessed a playwright of Edward Albee’s skill. Someone who could give us our very own version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. A dramatist with the ability to peel back all the layers of posturing political rectitude and fashionable self-criticism until we are able, finally, to look upon the hard-boned determination of those who “have”, to make sure that nothing of theirs is wasted on those who “have not”. To see the grinning neoliberal skull beneath the superficial “progressive” smile.

DECIDING whether Bernard Hickey or Megan Woods deserves a big fat raspberry is the task I’ve set myself. To understand why, I’m afraid you’ll have to visit The Spinoff website (a trial, I know, but there’s no other way) and read their respective contributions. (Spoiler Alert: Bernard gives up all hope for a better future, while Megan struggles to keep hope alive. ) What are they arguing about? Housing supply and affordability – what else! Is there a clear winner? No. Neither of the protagonists offers much in the way of convincing answers. Even so, after considerable cogitation, I’ve decided that the big fat raspberry should be blown at Bernard. Self-flagellation, middle-class guilt, and a gutless capitulation to the status-quo is a pretty ghastly combination – but Bernard pulls it off.

At the root of Bernard’s despair lies his inability to think outside the market square. Like so many of his generation he drank deeply of the neoliberal Kool-Aid, and it left him with a permanent aversion to left-wing ideas. Being born and raised in rural Waikato (New Zealand’s equivalent of Alabama) wouldn’t have helped. Nor would his decision to become a financial journalist. (You don’t find many Marxists on the world’s business pages!) It does, however, explain why, when confronted with the irrefutable evidence of the markets’ failure, Bernard flounders in ideological and moral confusion. Like those poor old codgers who invested all their intellectual and emotional capital in the Soviet Union, he had nowhere to turn when reality laid his ideology low.

Conveniently missing from Bernard’s history of the Neoliberal Era in New Zealand is any reference to Jim Anderton’s Alliance. Now, he would no doubt object that he was out of the country for most of the 1990s – earning the big bucks in Australia and Europe. But that’s the whole point. People like Bernard bade their country farewell at the first opportunity. All that free education and health care, all that social security: the tens-of-thousands of dollars invested in him by his fellow citizens; it all went to foreigners. If all the Bernards and Bernadettes of the 1980s and 90s had thrown in their lot with Anderton and his followers, the tragic failures detailed in Hickey’s Spinoff post might have been avoided. But Bernard and his ilk sneered at Anderton and the Alliance. The Left were economic Neanderthals. Losers.

Which is why, even now, with the evidence of neoliberalism’s failure all around him, the best advice Bernard can offer young New Zealanders is to do what he did. Leave their country to its fate. Run away. Refuse to stand and fight for a future worth living in. Abandon ship. Abandon hope.

Gutless.

But he’s not alone. Something tells me that a great many young New Zealanders remain secret adherents of the debunked mythology of free market forces. That underneath all that lovely woke window-dressing (which Bernard buys into with his guilt-ridden confessions about “endowments”) lies a disreputable grab-bag of neoliberal assumptions about how economies work, and, perhaps more importantly, about why economies run along any other lines won’t work. With a guilty thrill, Generations X and Y will own up to being racists and sexists – but not socialists. At least, not the sort of socialists who refuse to be guided by properly credentialed professionals and managers.

How I wish this country possessed a playwright of Edward Albee’s skill. Someone who could give us our very own version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. A dramatist with the ability to peel back all the layers of posturing political rectitude and fashionable self-criticism until we are able, finally, to look upon the hard-boned determination of those who “have”, to make sure that nothing of theirs is wasted on those who “have not”. To see the grinning neoliberal skull beneath the superficial “progressive” smile.

Not that Housing Minister Megan Woods vouchsafes too many smiles these days – progressive or otherwise. These days Megan’s more into frowns. The earnest frowns of the political realist who knows that there is no simple or quick fix to New Zealand’s housing crisis. The stoical frown of the left-wing politician who yet remains unflinching in her determination to keep on doing what she can with what she’s got.

The problem, of course, is that what Megan’s got is a bunch of Labour people whose view of “practical economics” is not that far removed from Bernard’s. I’m pretty sure that Megan – who did join the Alliance and did battle against the forces of neoliberalism – would like nothing more than to initiate a full-scale mobilisation of the state’s resources to build, build, build and build some more. Build until, at last, the supply of houses exceeds the demand, and – horror of horrors! – the upward curve in the price of housing flattens-out and – yes! – commences a slow but unmistakable decline.

Frustrated? I’m sure Megan is incredibly frustrated. Angry? That too, undoubtedly. But for all the obstacles placed before her; for all the stupid and unhelpful decisions of her colleagues; for all the carefully rehearsed talking-points prepared for her by overpaid former journalists who should be ashamed of themselves; Megan Woods is still fighting. Still hoping for a better tomorrow.

Unlike Bernard, Megan hasn’t given up.

So, a big fat raspberry for Mr Hickey. And for Megan a gentle (but no less sincere for being just a little bit muted) round of applause.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 2 July 2021.

Now And Then.

Extraordinary Leadership: Jacinda Ardern sails serenely above the fray: resplendent in her all-conquering empathy and internationally feted for her heart-stopping hymns of peace and love. Were an election scheduled, then she and her party would be utterly invincible.

IT’S A RACE NOW between a transcendent Labour Party and a National Party determined to get back in the game. For the moment, at least, the winds of fortune are at Labour’s back. Jacinda Ardern sails serenely above the fray: resplendent in her all-conquering empathy and internationally feted for her heart-stopping hymns of peace and love. Were an election scheduled, then she and her party would be utterly invincible. Unfortunately, for Labour and its leader, the next scheduled general election is still 18 months away.

And that is Labour’s biggest problem. In 18 months the bright, poignant images of late-March 2019 will have faded. Five hundred ordinary suns will have bleached out all but the most solid outlines of the Christchurch Mosque Shootings. Other priorities will intrude – as other priorities always do. Life is a series of special moments imperfectly recalled. And politics is a kind of life.

National’s best hope of getting back in the game is to craft its conduct around the sad but irrefutable truth that powerful emotions cannot be sustained indefinitely. Eventually the electorate’s momentarily numbed hip-pocket nerve will reassert itself. It would be a wonderful thing if “They Are Us” proved to be a more durable slogan than “What’s In It For Me?” National’s election strategists no doubt privately agree – but they’re not counting on it.

What they are counting on, however, is that the Christchurch Mosque Shootings have holed the pocket battleship NZ First below the waterline. In eighteen months it will have long since slipped below the waves. The tried and tested political themes that have lifted the NZ First Party and its leader back into electoral contention: Anti-Maori, Anti-Immigrant, Anti-Muslim; have been rendered electorally toxic.

What else could Winston Peters have been contemplating so deeply in Istanbul? He is much too astute a politician to have missed the brute fact that the Christchurch Shooter, in addition to slaying his Muslim victims, has also killed any chance of NZ First mounting a right-wing populist comeback.

That leaves Labour with only one potential coalition partner – the Greens. And therein lies Jacinda’s other big problem.

Unless there is a pretty firm laying-on-of-hands within the Greens’ caucus – and soon – there is a better-than-even chance that in 18 months’ time the Greens’ own eco-socialist sloop will have joined NZ First at the bottom of the sea.

It is becoming ominously clear that the “strategy” of bifurcating the Green Party’s image between its calm and responsible Ministers Outside Cabinet (James Shaw, Julie Anne Genter, Eugenie Sage) and its “woke” firebrands (Marama Davidson, Golriz Ghahraman) is on the point of sending the whole crew to the bottom.

The Greens would not be the only progressive political organisation to have allowed itself to be steered into the wild waters of Maori sovereignty and revolutionary leftism. Who now remembers that formerly highly-reputable overseas aid organisation, Corso? Or the Unemployed Workers’ Rights Union? When hitch-hikers are encouraged to take over the driving, the destination of the original passengers is apt to change.

A radical environmental party committed to making climate change the nuclear-free moment of this generation is one thing; but a party dedicated to challenging the white supremacist assumptions of New Zealand’s settler state, is another.

In 2002, the Alliance Party cast aside the moderation and pragmatism of its leader, Jim Anderton, and invited the New Zealand electorate to carry its socialist agenda into Parliament. The voters responded by giving the Alliance 1.27 percent of the Party Vote.

Labour can no more afford to remain indifferent to what is happening to its left in 2019 and 2020 that it could in 2002.

The arithmetic of MPP is as brutal as it is simple. If the 2020 General Election is reduced to a straightforward scrap between Labour and National: a battle fought without the distractions of minor parties; then the most likely outcome is a National victory. Labour’s vote, minus 7 percent (NZ First + Greens) will, almost certainly, leave it with a smaller share of the Party Vote than National.

That wouldn’t be the outcome if the general election was held now. Even without the support of NZ First and the Greens, the Labour Party of late-March 2019 would carry all before it.

But, New Zealanders now know how long a fortnight can be in politics.

Eighteen months is agonisingly longer.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 29 March 2019.

Who's Left In The Country?

In The Most Unlikely Of Places: The store of left-wing votes in the countryside, revealed in the Taranaki-King Country by-election of 1998, was forgotten about almost as soon as it was discovered. Which was a great pity. Because left-wing Kiwis living in rural and provincial New Zealand have facts to share about life in the countryside: facts their urban comrades urgently need to hear.

IT’S ONE of those facts that stick in the back of your mind. Information that forces you to consider carefully the difference between important and significant. That the event which gave rise to the fact happened 20 years ago doesn’t matter one bit. Some happenings continue to resonate long after their occurrence. That’s why the left-wing Alliance winning polling-booths in the Taranaki-King Country towns of Eltham, Stratford and Te Kuiti will always be a fact that counts.

Those small victories remain significant because they show that even in the most conservative of blue-ribbon electorates there are pockets of left-wing support. Hundreds and, quite possibly, thousands of voters with a radically different take on rural life from the occupational groups that dominate the countryside: farmers, contractors, stock-and-station agents, bankers, accountants and agricultural supply companies. Voters who, given the right incentives, could become politically important.

Back in the days of First-Past-The Post, no one paid much attention to these voters. Since there were never enough of them to affect the outcome in National’s blue-ribbon seats, their votes simply weren’t worth the effort of soliciting. Whether they made it to the polling-booths was essentially up to them. For the Labour Party such seats represented little more than useful training-grounds for ambitious young activists like Helen Clark and Jacinda Ardern (both of whom were blooded in the National Party’s Waikato heartland).

Everything should have changed with the advent of Mixed Member Proportional Representation (MMP). The new electoral system, which got its first run in 1996, transformed the country into what was, essentially, a single electorate. Under MMP, every vote cast for a political party counted. It no longer mattered that practically all of your neighbours voted for the Nats because there were plenty of other communities where Labour voters hugely outnumbered supporters of the National Party. Winning under MMP was all about getting every last one of your party’s supporters to a polling-booth so that their all-important Party Votes could be added to the nationwide tally.

The 1998 Taranaki-King Country by-election, necessitated by Jim Bolger’s appointment as New Zealand’s ambassador to the United States, was a politically crucial test for all the political parties represented in Parliament. As such, voter mobilisation was critical. The Alliance, in particular, was determined to show Labour how far away it still was from recovering its former easy dominance of the left-wing vote.

In the process, the Alliance persuaded upwards of 3,000 voters to get themselves to the polling-booths on its behalf. Who were they? No one really knows. The hewers of wood and the drawers of water of rural and provincial New Zealand probably: the people you never see on Country Calendar; the ones the cockies and their mates look down their noses at; the men and women who keep the roads passable and serve behind the counter in the local store. Who knew there were so many!

I thought about these voters earlier this week as I watched Jacinda Ardern deliver the Labour-NZF-Green Government’s verdict on Mycoplasma Bovis. To see a Labour Prime Minister and the head of Federated Farmers seated side-by-side, united in a common cause, was presumably as jarring for rural and provincial voters as it was for an old socialist like me. It set me to wondering how Labour’s numbers in the Newshub and One News opinion polls might be improved if the party trained-up some organisers and put them to work in all the little country towns studded across this country’s beleaguered dairy heartlands. After all, Jacinda herself was raised in Morrinsville, not Mt Albert. Come to think of it, isn’t Helen Clark a Waikato farmer’s daughter?

There’s a widely held view among farmers (especially dairy-farmers) that Labour and the Greens have it in for them. That the Left doesn’t understand what it means to work on the land – just one biosecurity failure away from disaster. Well, there’s some truth to that. And, in many respects, the responsibility for this growing urban-rural split lies with the Left.

The store of left-wing votes in the countryside revealed by the Taranaki-King Country by-election was forgotten about almost as soon as it was discovered. Which was a great pity. Because left-wing Kiwis living in rural and provincial New Zealand have facts to share about life in the countryside: facts their urban comrades urgently need to hear.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 1 June 2018.

No Enemies To Labour's Left?

Why Is James Shaw Smiling? Labour's motto, when it comes to potential political challengers, has always been: "No enemies to our left!" Given the recent history of Labour's left-wing competitors, the Green Party co-leader's broad smile is probably misplaced - especially given where he's standing!

THE BIGGEST THREAT to NZ First’s and the Greens’ political survival is Labour deciding that it doesn’t need them.

Practically from the moment it moves into the Beehive, the Labour Party has a nasty habit of displaying an entirely unjustified confidence in its own political competence. This unfortunate mindset may be traced all the way back to the fourth Labour government of 1984-1990.

The so-called “Rogernomics Revolution” was very much a top-down affair for which the new Labour government possessed not the slightest electoral mandate. David Lange and his cabinet justified this turning away from democracy by convincing themselves that ordinary Kiwis were neither ready, willing nor able to make the tough economic choices being demanded of New Zealand. They masked this frankly elitist view of politics behind the slogan: “There is no alternative!”

Labour’s extraordinary arrogance persisted into the MMP era. Scant respect was given to the ideas and priorities of coalition partners by senior Labour ministers who tended, if they were feeling charitable, to dismiss their allies’ policies as unsophisticated and ill-conceived or, less charitably, as just plain nuts.

Little has changed.

Labour’s core assumption still appears to be that only its ministers possess the skills and credentials necessary to deliver effective government. What do they mean by effective government? Once again, the legacy of Rogernomics is evident. “Effective government” generally appears to mean implementing policies designed to earn Labour the respect of the other members of the power elite: business leaders, the news media, senior civil servants.

These policies are embraced by Labour because its leaders are either already convinced or, at the very least, prepared to be persuaded, that no other policy prescriptions possess the slightest chance of working. It’s a mindset best illustrated in the oft-quoted parliamentary response of the Labour cabinet minister, Steve Maharey, who described a broken policy commitment as: “Just one of those things you say in opposition, and then forget about when in government.”

Such a mindset would regard it as politically suicidal for NZ First and the Greens to resist the power elite’s effective government policies. It would argue that, in the face of such recalcitrance a snap-election would have to be called and the recalcitrant parties (Labour’s erstwhile coalition partners) would be bundled unceremoniously out of Parliament. With the support of NZ First’s and Greens’ more “realistic” voters and the assistance of a significant “Trash Vote”, either of the two major parties would be well-placed to win the election outright. Hence the Labour leadership’s confident assumption that their allies will always be persuaded to see sense – just as they were over the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

The recent history of populist parties in New Zealand demonstrates the enormous danger of entering into political relationships with parties more interested in the good opinion of the power elite than the people. As NZ First, the Alliance, United Future, Act and the Maori Party have discovered, the only reliable companions for populists are – other populists. Certainly, formal coalitions and confidence-and-supply agreements negotiated with “mainstream” political parties have proved extremely costly to their junior partner/s electorally.

The explanation for the sometimes-fatal outcomes of these political deals is simple. Large political parties – be they of the centre-right or the centre-left – have absolutely no interest in allowing electoral competitors to grow at their expense. In the ruthless political calculations of political centrists not even ideological soulmates, such as Act, the Alliance (and now the Greens) should be spared.

Consider the actions of the National Party under Don Brash. Having seen upwards of 13 percent of the right-wing vote drift across to Act and United Future, he was determined to reassemble National’s errant supporters under the party’s tattered banner. In this, at least, Brash was astonishingly successful. National’s share of the Party Vote rose from a record low of 21 percent in 2002, to 39 percent in 2005.

Labour’s long-standing motto: “No enemies to our left!” references identical strategic thinking. In the 2002 general election, Labour’s “enemy” was the socialist rump of the Alliance. Had Helen Clark wished to preserve a radical “pathfinder” party to her left, she could have tipped the wink to Labour supporters in Waitakere to cast their electorate vote for the Alliance’s Laila Harre – just as she had to Labour’s Coromandel voters in order to get the Greens’ Jeanette Fitzsimons into Parliament in 1999. In 2002, however, no wink was tipped and the Alliance died.

It might be objected that the present Labour-led government, by fulsomely fulfilling its promises to its partners – especially the Greens – is demonstrating an entirely new approach to coalition politics. Upon closer inspection, however, it is clear that all Labour has done is convey an impression of environmental activism. As the former Green Party co-leader, Russel Norman – now the NZ Director of Greenpeace – was quick to point out, Labour’s decision to issue no new oil and gas prospecting permits offers no impediment to utilising fully those already granted.

The greening of the Labour Party may be more apparent than real. Which is why, as he listened to Jacinda Ardern talking-up Labour’s environmental credentials last week, James Shaw's broad smile may have been misplaced. Did he not realise that, looking out from the stage, he was standing to her left?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 17 April 2018.

James Patrick Anderton 1938 - 2018

James Patrick Anderton 1938 - 2018

JIM ANDERTON has died, peacefully, at the Cashmere View Hospital in Christchurch, aged 79.

It was Jim's fate to be both the Labour Left's greatest strength - and its greatest weakness.

For all his faults, however, the parties he led in the Alliance, most especially the NewLabour Party which he founded in 1989, carved out a position on the left of New Zealand politics which made it impossible for the Labour Party to drift any further to the right.

The Labour-Alliance Coalition Government 1999-2002, in which he served as Deputy Prime Minister, ushered in a period of important reforms - not least the establishment of his pride and joy, Kiwibank.

More than any other single political leader, he restored the electorate's belief that progressive, centre-left policies were, once again, achievable in New Zealand.

For that feat, alone, he deserves to - and will - be remembered as a political leader of rare ability and significant achievement.

Rest in peace, Jim.

This posting is exclusive to Bowalley Road.

A Second Chance For Labour To Put Things Left.

Victory Lies Ahead, Comrades! Allowing the Greens to make the case for change; assessing the force and quality of the Right’s objections; and then, following a period of extensive consultation, fashioning a suite of reforms acceptable to a solid majority of New Zealanders. Such is the royal-road to making Labour the dominant force in New Zealand politics.

IT’S NOT OFTEN in electoral politics that a party is given a second chance to get it right. In 1999, Labour and the Alliance (with the Greens more-or-less in tow) were gifted the chance to craft a political relationship that could have grown into a near-permanent lock on New Zealand’s still-new MMP electoral system. That neither partner in the Labour-Alliance coalition had the wit to seize, or even understand, the opportunity before them is a testament to the woeful immaturity of the New Zealand Left.

Perhaps the best way to describe the opportunity missed by Labour and the Alliance (and, after 2002, the Greens) is by deploying a military analogy.

Think of Labour as a large army marching through enemy territory. (The analogy works best if the army you’re imagining is a nineteenth century one – think of Napoleon’s Grande Armée, or Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.) The much smaller army of the Alliance is spread out well ahead of Labour’s line of march. Its role: to reconnoitre the territory into which Labour is marching; noting the disposition of the enemy’s troops; their strongpoints; and the places where their defences are weak and vulnerable to attack. Should the enemy encounter the smaller force, the resulting engagement will give the larger army plenty of time to prepare its defences.

For a while, it looked as though the Labour-Alliance combination had decided to work in precisely this fashion. The radical policies of the Alliance – especially those relating to employer-funded Paid Parental Leave and the rolling-back of the Employment Contracts Act – provoked a vehement backlash from the business community. Labour was, thereby, warned in advance of exactly where and how the enemy would attack these measures if they were adopted as official government policy.

Unfortunately, Labour failed to make good strategic use of this advance warning. When the business community’s counterattack came (in the form of the infamous “Winter of Discontent” of the year 2000) Labour fell back in confusion. The Alliance’s policies were slaughtered. Never again would the centre-left armies of Helen Clark and Jim Anderton engage the forces of the Right across such a broad front.

Indeed, in the General Election of 2002, the forces of the centre-left found themselves fighting each other. Labour and the Greens, at loggerheads over the issue of Genetic Engineering, were unwilling to march together. Abandoned by its natural ally, Helen Clark reluctantly joined forces with Peter Dunne’s United Future Party.

Reassured that there would be no more left-wing offensives, National concentrated on reinvigorating its worn-out fighting machine and prepared to take the fight to Labour. In 2005, Labour just managed to hold them at the border. But, in 2008, National brushed aside Helen’s broken army and occupied huge swathes of Labour territory.

Nine years later, under the command of its Joan-of-Arc-like leader, Jacinda Ardern, Labour is again presented with the opportunity to take the fight to the Right. Once again, they have an opportunity to send their radical allies out ahead of their main force to draw enemy fire and provide Labour with the information required to seize the strategic initiative.

If Ms Ardern and her advisers decline to accept this second chance to put things right – or, in this context, left – then they will, once again, have denied to themselves, their party, and their radical Green allies, the opportunity of making steady progressive reform New Zealand’s political default setting.

Allowing the Greens to make the case for change; assessing the force and quality of the Right’s objections; and then, following a period of extensive and authentic public consultation, fashioning a suite of reforms acceptable to a solid majority of New Zealanders. Such is the royal-road to making Labour the dominant force in New Zealand politics.

The test will be whether or not Ms Ardern is willing to follow the example of her mentor Helen Clark. In 1999, with the Greens under sustained attack from National, Ms Clark tipped the wink to Labour’s Coromandel supporters to give their electorate vote to the Green co-leader, Jeanette Fitzsimons.

If, next week, the Greens are still at risk of falling below the 5 percent MMP threshold, and Ms Ardern tips the wink to Labour’s Wellington Central voters to back James Shaw, then we can be sure that the forces of Centre-Left are, once again, on the march.

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 15 September 2017.

Leaving Babylon: The Effect Of A Jeremy Corbyn Victory.

Jeremy Corbyn Makes His Case: Some will argue that the events of the past 30 years, in both the UK and New Zealand, have so eroded the electoral support for democratic socialist principles and policies that any Labour manifesto based upon them is bound to fail. And yet, opinion polling in both countries shows solid majorities in favour of the public ownership and/or provision of those utilities and services considered essential to a wholesome and inclusive society.

 

ON 12 SEPTEMBER, the world will learn if the British Labour Party has opted to move sharply to the left. If that is the result, and, as the polls suggest, Jeremy Corbyn is decisively elected Leader of the Opposition, then the impact of the Labour membership’s decision will reverberate around the English-speaking world.

 

The reverberations of a Corbyn win will be especially loud here, in New Zealand. Not only because of the very strong personal links between the British and New Zealand labour parties, but also because of their very similar experiences vis-à-vis the policy aggression of their parliamentary wings, and its consequences for internal party democracy.

 

The year 1983 figures very prominently in the stories of both parties – and not only because that was the year Jeremy Corbyn entered the British Parliament. The British Labour Party ran for office in 1983 on a frankly socialist manifesto and were soundly defeated – receiving just 28 percent of the popular vote. This defeat prompted Labour’s critics to describe the party’s pitch to the voters as “the longest suicide note in history” – implying that an open appeal to vote for socialism was pure electoral poison.

 

This was certainly the lesson that the right-wing of the New Zealand Labour Party was to draw from the British Labour Party’s electoral drubbing. Labour MPs Roger Douglas and Richard Prebble argued strongly that their own party must, at all costs, avoid its British counterpart’s disastrous example. Very few New Zealanders, however, were aware that even as Douglas and Prebble were denouncing the policies of the Labour Left, they were eagerly imbibing far-right economic and social theories from selected Treasury officials.

 

The other factors leading to Margaret Thatcher’s 1983 victory were, naturally enough, downplayed (or not mentioned at all) by Labour’s right-wing faction. The effect of her stunning victory over Argentina in the Falklands War was conveniently ignored – as was the defection of British Labour’s leading right-wing MPs. These turncoats set up the Social Democratic Party to prevent a Labour victory, and, by forming an electoral alliance with the Liberal Party, that’s exactly what they did. Though the Conservative Party’s support fell by 700,000 votes in 1983, it was able, thanks to the vagaries of Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system, to celebrate a landslide victory.

 

The full-scale assault on Labour’s core values, unleashed by Douglas and his faction, following the party’s 1984 general election victory, both demoralised and divided its supporters. Membership of the party shrank dramatically (from 85,000 to less than 10,000) and its outraged left-wing, frustrated at every turn in its efforts to wrest back control of the party, eventually split away to form the NewLabour Party (later the Alliance) in 1989.

 

Accordingly, it is possible to argue that, in the charismatic figure of the principled left-wing maverick, Jim Anderton, New Zealand has already had its Jeremy Corbyn. Certainly, Anderton played a crucial role in hauling Labour back from its “free-market” apostasy under David Lange, Geoffrey Palmer and Mike Moore. By the time Helen Clark (in coalition with Anderton) led Labour back to power in 1999, most of its far-right deformities had long since been lopped-off.

 

In Britain, however, Labour first had to endure the rise and rise of the man who, with the benefit of hindsight, might be called its “Anti-Corbyn” – Tony Blair. Rather than lead his party back to its ideological roots, Blair and his “modernisers” persuaded it to embrace what might best be called “Thatcherism-Lite”. In doing so, however, Labour effectively capitulated to an unforgiving coalition of the Left’s most effective opponents: the right-wing tabloids; the right-wing electoral spoilers in what was now calling itself the Liberal-Democrat Party; and that implacable enemy of all forces hostile to the claims of untrammelled greed – the City of London.

 

It is, however, a common feature of both the British and the New Zealand labour parties that, for the duration of their Babylonian captivity, by the waters of Neoliberalism, neither of their respective memberships ever forgot, or gave up hope of returning to, the Zion of democratic socialism, from which they’d been so ruthlessly uprooted.

 

Some will argue that the events of the past 30 years, in both the UK and New Zealand, have so eroded the electoral support for democratic socialist principles and policies that any Labour manifesto based upon them is bound to fail. And yet, opinion polling in both countries shows solid majorities in favour of the public ownership and/or provision of those utilities and services considered essential to a wholesome and inclusive society.

 

If Corbyn wins on 12 September, many political commentators are convinced that the reaction of left-wing voters, across the English-speaking world, will mirror the reaction of the French to their liberation by the Allies in 1944. Flags will be waved, and kisses freely exchanged, as the people welcome themselves back home.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 1 September 2015.

Ten Years Ago This Week: Sic Transit Gloria Shipley

The Spirit of '99: "I'm appropriating this wine in the name of the people!"

HEH, HEH, HEH! Our side won. Their side lost. Isn’t life grand!

The worst thing about being stuck in a television studio on the night of an historic left-wing victory is that you have to be so damned well behaved. (Okay, okay, singing The Red Flag was a little bit over the top, but - hey – it had been a long evening!)

Other people, I am told, celebrated the Labour/Alliance win with much more gusto. One young fellow, sporting a Maritime Union of Australia T-shirt, and a PLO head-scarf, gate-crashed Rodney Hide’s election-night party in Epsom, and proceeded to terrorise the unfortunate ACT candidate with what he later claimed to be a Muhammad Ali impersonation. "We’re gonna get it on, cos we can’t get along!" he shouted at the bewildered Hide. "You can’t win cos you’re too ugly!"

At about this point the gathering, already seriously depleted, and obviously a little downcast at the results, began rapidly to shrink.

Sensing he was losing his audience, our left-wing rogue deserted the unfortunate Mr Hide for the stage, upon which he proceeded to perform a fierce haka.

The sight of a drunken (and quite possibly dangerous) Lefty chanting out warlike challenges in Maori, was clearly not something the good people of Epsom were all that familiar with, which probably explains why, by the time the haka had reached its ferocious conclusion, the hall was virtually empty.

But wait, there’s more. As he thumped out his challenge from the stage, our hero had espied a veritable cellar-load of unopened wine carefully stacked beneath a nearby table. (Clearly Mr Hide had been anticipating a much more satisfactory outcome to the day’s proceedings.) Leaping down from the stage, and seizing four of five of the unopened bottles, our beturbaned urban guerrilla bellowed: "I’m appropriating this wine in the name of the people!"

No one dared to stop him. Calling down imprecations upon the heads of all ACT and National Party supporters within earshot, and surrounded by a bevy of admiring young supporters, our hero passed out of the hall and into the excessively pluvial Auckland night.

Sic transit gloria Shipley.

But if you’ll forgive me for being serious for just a few paragraphs, I would like to offer a few pithy observations about last Saturday’s result.

First, it was a lot closer than it needed to be. Labour’s tactics in the final week cost the Greens (and the entire Centre-Left) six or seven seats in Parliament. This was brought home to me only a few hours ago when I dropped my daughter off at school. One of the mums, in discussing the election result, admitted that she had been going to vote Green, but decided in the end she couldn’t risk Labour not getting in. She was furious, to learn that the Nats would have been defeated regardless of which of the three main centre-left parties people voted for. She’ll not make the same mistake in 2002!

Second, the Alliance surrendered a fifth of its 1996 support (which was, in turn, only three-fifths of its 1993 vote) to Labour because Jim Anderton made a conscious decision not to fight for it. For securing her left flank so generously, Helen Clark owes Jim at least two extra seats around the Cabinet Table.

And finally, those two extra seats must be filled by Laila Harré and Phillida Bunkle. If the Alliance insults its supporters by appointing Democrats (who’d stand about as much chance of getting elected in their own Wright as the McGillicuddy Serious Party!) they should stand by to repel boarders.

I know just the guy to lead the charge.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion of 3 December 1999.

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.

You Say You Want A Revolution?

Lenin instructs the masses, as Trotsky looks on. Revolution was far too important to be left to ordinary working people.

IT is always a pleasure to respond to the critical writing of left-wing comrades – even when it is my own newspaper columns that are being critiqued!

Bryce Edwards, here, has taken me to task for a series of satirical jibes which I directed at the far-Left in my Dominion Post "From the Left’ column published on Friday 12 December 2008.

What appears to have upset Bryce most about the column was its underlying assumption that in New Zealand the revolutionary Left enjoys (if that is the right word) a reputation for being a motley collection of political Jeremiahs, who delight in the misery of the working class and positively welcome hard economic times on the grounds that such adverse conditions can only "heighten the contradictions" inherent in all capitalist societies and, hence, hasten their demise.

Bryce also takes exception to the other big assumption in my column: that the NZ Labour Party has always enjoyed, and will continue to enjoy, much greater success than the revolutionary Left in attracting mass working-class support - especially during periods of economic hardship.

Like many revolutionary socialists, Bryce regularly condemns the Labour Party for being a "right-wing" and "anti-worker" party.

On the face of it, this is a rather absurd charge. As I pointed out in my column, the Labour Party attracted 796,880 Party Votes in the recent election - most of them from working-class voters. (By way of comparison, the far-Left Workers' Party received just 932 Party Votes.) What Bryce's characterisation of the Labour Party as right-wing and anti-worker implies, therefore, is that the working-class is either blind (or has been blinded) to its own self-interest; or has itself become a hot-bed of right-wing and anti-worker beliefs.

Now, I don’t know for sure, but I'm assuming that Bryce, like most of those who adhere to the revolutionary socialist tradition, still subscribes to the principles of Marxism-Leninism. If so, his rather condescending attitude toward the working-class is perfectly consistent with the revolutionary model he espouses. As Lenin so arrogantly expressed it in What Is To Be Done?:

"The history of all countries shows that the working class exclusively by its own effort is able to develop only trade-union consciousness."

In other words, revolution is much too important to be left to ordinary working people! Far better to leave it to, oh, I don’t know – university lecturers – perhaps?

Sometimes, however, ordinary working people see the world a great deal more clearly than revolutionary academics. Ordinary working people just might, for example, regard advice from Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky as something to be taken with a very large grain of salt.

After all, if Rosa was such a visionary, how come in January 1919 she allowed a troop of demobbed soldiers, now serving in the notorious Garde-Kavallerie-Schützendivision Freikorps, to abduct her off a Berlin street, club her senseless, fire a bullet into her brain, and throw her lifeless body into the Landwehr Canal? And if Leon Trotsky was such a socialist seer, how was Stalin’s special assassin, Ramon Mercader, able to disaggregate his skull with an ice-pick in Mexico City in 1940?

I ask these brutal questions with a serious purpose. Because it is almost always posterity which invests individuals with the extraordinary qualities for which they are remembered. Luxemburg and Trotsky were both immensely talented revolutionary politicians, but just as prone to getting caught up in the day-to-day exigencies of their craft as the rest of us – and equally blind to their ultimate fates.

It is as foolish to abstract from their political context the political writings and observations of Luxemburg and Trotsky, as it is to quote at random from the commentary of a left-wing political columnist like myself.

Luxemburg was wrong about the revolutionary potential of the German working-class, and she paid for that misjudgement with her life. What she correctly identified, however, were the elitist and ultimately tyrannical tendencies within the Leninist revolutionary model – and for that she is justly remembered.

Trotsky, too, was wrong in his assessment of capitalism’s strengths and weaknesses. Far from being a brief respite, the economic recovery noted in his 1921 pamphlet marked the beginning of a capitalist boom lasting almost a decade. What’s more, when boom turned to bust, it was not the socialists who benefited, but the fascists.

What today’s revolutionaries always seem to overlook, when quoting Luxemburg and Trotsky, is the signal fact that their respective assassinations were not the work of the Right, but of their fellow socialists (Noske in the case of Luxemburg, Stalin in the case of Trotsky). They died because they refused to accept that the revolutions in which they’d played such an important role had reached the limits of what was politically and economically feasible.

And it is this, the recognition of what is – and what is not – politically and economically feasible, that distinguishes the political movements capable of attracting 796,880 votes, from those capable of attracting just 932.

As I recall, Bryce was, for a period, a member of Jim Anderton’s NewLabour Party (and worked for a while in the Alliance's parliamentary office). For more than a decade these organisations represented the most successful parliamentary assertion of democratic socialism in the Western world. That the Alliance, in 1999, secured four Cabinet seats in what was internationally regarded as the most left-wing Labour government in the world, was a huge achievement.

Indeed, such was the pull of its political gravity that the Alliance carried Helen Clark’s government several degrees further to the left than, left to itself, it would ever have felt comfortable travelling.

Would the renationalisation of ACC, the restoration of income related state-house rentals, the repeal of the Employment Contracts Act, the creation of a state-owned bank, and the introduction of paid parental leave and four weeks annual leave have occurred without the Alliance? Certainly not as quickly, and possibly not at all.

Were these reforms of benefit to working people? Absolutely.

Would a right-wing, anti-worker government (such as the one we have now) have introduced such measures? Never.

As it was, in threatening a full-scale investment strike, New Zealand’s capitalist ruling class, in "The Winter of Discontent" of 2000, signalled how very close to the limits of what was politically and economically feasible the Labour-Alliance coalition had come. When, in 2002, the Alliance Left indicated that it intended to test those limits further , Clark and Anderton (like Noske and Stalin before them) ruthlessly organised its destruction.

And when Labour, itself, took the revolutionary step of illegally appropriating sufficient public funds to mobilise its working-class base against the threat of a Don Brash-led National Government in 2005, the New Zealand ruling class made it very clear that the limits of its tolerance had been exceeded.

What followed Labour’s 2005 election victory: the "Establishment’s" three-year campaign of non-stop political aggression against the entire parliamentary Left and its NZ First allies; stands as an object lesson in what happens to social-democratic governments which mobilise their core working-class vote without a coherent plan for keeping it mobilised.

For Bryce should make no mistake, it is the latter variety of social-democratic governance that I have always stood for – and fought for. But, to pull off that sort of governance you have to box clever – very clever.

In my book, No Left Turn, I used a classical myth to illustrate the method adopted by the First Labour Government for slaying the capitalist monster:

"The conduct of Savage, Nash and Fraser calls to mind the legend of Perseus and Medusa. Befriended by Athena, the goddess of wisdom, and Hermes, the keeper of secrets, Perseus is provided with the weapons necessary to slay Medusa. But the gods also warn the hero that when the critical moment arrives for him to put an end to tyranny by striking off the monster’s head, he must be guided only by Medusa’s bright reflection mirrored in the metal of Athena’s shield. It was fatal to confront the Gorgon face-to-face: any man who gazed directly upon the true horror of her countenance was instantly turned to stone.

"Like Perseus, the first Labour government’s heroic achievements were secured by its wise refusal to confront its enemy directly. Capitalism in New Zealand was mastered not by staring it down, but by addressing its many institutional reflections: the private control of credit creation; the private provision of health and housing; the master-servant relationship in the workplace; the disciplinary effects of mass unemployment; and the class-based allocation of educational and cultural resources. By concentrating their reforming zeal on these institutional representations of capitalist power, Savage, Nash and Fraser avoided the massive social resistance which would inevitably have attended the wholesale expropriation of private property."

New Zealand politics, since the end of the long post-war boom in the mid-1970s, has been about little else apart from the New Zealand ruling-class’s single-minded determination to tear down the institutional walls in which social-democracy had immured it. The ferocity of that effort, and the limited nature of its success, reveals the deadly efficacy of Savage’s strategy.

It is also highly significant that in order to breach those walls, it was first necessary to subvert the Labour Party. No other political movement in New Zealand could have done it.

And no other movement in New Zealand will ever rebuild those walls. Only the labour movement – political and industrial – possesses the historical and cultural power to lead the counter-attack against the Right’s counter-revolution.

Ultimately, it is the wisdom and courage of ordinary working people – not academic Marxist-Leninists, or even erratic newspaper columnists – that will re-imprison the capitalist beast.

And the party they turn to for that purpose will be Labour – the real workers’ party.