She Says She Wants A Revolution.

Heads Up: Jeremy Corbyn’s greatest mistake was to give the ruling elites and their enablers advance warning that he was coming for their power, their purse, and their privilege. Candidate for the Green Party co-leadership, Chloe Swarbrick, appears to share Corbyn’s naïve assumption that those who own the system will sit idly by while a genuine left-wing leader organises a revolution at the ballot box to take it from them.

CHLOE SWARBRICK WANTS A REVOLUTION. Her “announcement speech” has been hailed as a “once in a generation” oratorical triumph. I wouldn’t go that far, but there’s no disputing that Swarbrick took full advantage of the media’s interest in her candidacy for the Greens’ co-leadership to lay her programmatic cards on the table.

“Conventional, incremental politics has failed to rise to the challenges we face”, Swarbrick declared, “those intertwined climate, inequality, biodiversity and housing crises.”

So far, so good left-wing boilerplate. But, it was in the next few sentences that the young MP’s revolutionary intent was revealed:

“What is possible in politics is only ever defined by the willingness of those in power. As Co-leader, I want to show everyone in this country the power running through their veins to choose our future. We cannot leave politics to the politicians.”

Opined the Green politician.

And it is here that the problems confronted by all revolutionaries begin: with those beguilingly inclusive words; “everyone in this country”.

There was a time and place – late-eighteenth century France, to be precise – when appealing to “everyone in this country” made a certain kind of sense.

When the King, supported by an aristocracy encompassing approximately 1 percent of the population, ruled over everybody else, most notably a rightless and impoverished peasantry comprising 90 percent-plus of the population, “everyone in this country” (who wasn’t a king or an aristocrat) had a strong and direct interest in transforming their society.

But that was more than 200 years ago. The power that runs through the veins of New Zealanders, today, does not, alas, run uniformly. Some Kiwis are better equipped to choose their futures than others. Indeed, there are hundreds-of-thousands of New Zealand citizens so bereft of cultural, social and economic capital that speechifying to them about choosing their futures could be seen as grossly insensitive.

Swarbrick is a highly intelligent person, with an impressive and oft-demonstrated capacity to marshal facts and figures in support of her arguments. It is strange, therefore, that her announcement speech largely fails to address the manifest power differentials in the society she is proposing to transform. Especially when she goes out of her way to preface her call for a grass-roots uprising with the eminently sensible – and accurate – statement:

“What is possible in politics is only ever defined by the willingness of those in power.”

Like the willingness of farmers to shoulder the not inconsiderable cost of cleaning-up their rivers and streams and reducing their greenhouse-gas emissions.

Like the willingness of small business owners to pay a capital gains tax.

Like the willingness of big businesses to redistribute the lion’s share of corporate surpluses from their shareholders to their employees.

Like the willingness of landlords to shoulder the costs of upgrading their properties, and empowering their tenants.

Like the willingness of those whose salaries place them in the top quintile of income-earners to pay higher taxes.

Except, of course, the willingness of all the above groups to redefine politics in ways that not only make them poorer, but also undermine their ability to set the boundaries of acceptable change, is NIL.

These New Zealand socio-economic interests are no more willing to surrender their power and privilege than were their British counterparts when the Labour Party membership elected a leader determined to govern “for the many, not the few”.

That last was a powerful rhetorical flourish – adapted from the final verse of Percy Bysshe Shelly’s incendiary poem “The Masque of Anarchy”.) Too powerful, as it turned out.

Jeremy Corbyn’s greatest mistake (apart from his failure to back Brexit) was to give the ruling elites and their enablers advance warning that he was coming for their power, their purse, and their privilege. Corbyn’s political destruction is thus attributable to his naïve assumption that those who owned the system would sit idly by while he organised a revolution at the ballot box to take it from them.

Clearly, Swarbrick has not learned the lessons embedded in the depressing saga of Corbyn’s rise and fall.

“I will grow the Green movement to achieve tangible, real-world, people-powered change - as I have since I first signed up - but now, at even greater scale.”

That’s telling ‘em, Chloe!

“I will challenge this Government’s cruel agenda and communicate the imagination, potential, and the necessary hope to mobilise for the sustainable, inspiring and inclusive Aotearoa that I see reflected every day in our communities”

And that’s telling them even more!

“They” will not move immediately to remove the potential threat that is Chloe Swarbrick. Like the British ruling-elites, New Zealand’s defenders of the neoliberal status-quo will wait to see if the putative Green co-leader’s revolution at the ballot-box amounts to anything more than yet another middle-class firebrand’s pipe-dream.

There’s no denying that “they” have every reason to be sceptical. After all, Jim Anderton’s Alliance had promised something very similar thirty years ago. It’s unashamedly socialist component, the NewLabour Party, had also set out to make its followers “local body members, councillors and mayors” They, too, promised “more [Alliance] MPs in Parliament and ultimately, our nation’s first [Alliance-led] Government.”

Didn’t happen. With the notable exception of Anderton’s proletarian redoubt of Sydenham, the Alliance did well (even, like Swarbrick, capturing Auckland Central) where, thirty years later, the Greens still do best. Those central-city electorates composed of university students and young professionals. Where it mattered, however, in the electorates of the poor and marginalised, the Alliance failed miserably. Against their most formidable competitors, Labour voters, and those who didn’t vote at all, Alliance candidates struggled to reclaim their deposits.

Just how steep a mountain Swarbrick has set herself to climb is evident in the votes received by Labour and the Greens in the electorates where citizens’ life choices are most seriously constrained. Let’s look at Mangere. Labour: 61.40 percent; Greens: 7.85 percent. Or, Mana. Labour: 62 percent; Greens: 9.8 percent.

It is always possible, of course, that Swarbrick, unlike Anderton, will succeed in heating the blood of enough New Zealanders to turn those stats around. That in 2025 there will be a Green tsunami that lifts unabashed insurgents into council chambers and mayoral offices all across New Zealand. That the polls will register a massive shift from Labour to Green and, month after month, confirm Swarbrick’s preferred prime minister status. It is possible that, against all the odds, her revolution at the ballot-box progresses from pipe-dream to probability.

If that is the case, however, then Swarbrick’s troubles will only just be getting started. Every weapon the Establishment possesses will be pointed in her direction, and every right-wing journalistic scalp-hunter will be powering-up his keyboard.

By the time the Powers That Be were through with Corbyn, working-class Brits were cursing his name. By the time our own elites are through with Chole Swarbrick, she’ll either be a broken political doll – or New Zealand’s first Green prime minister.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 5 February 2024.

If You Want To Know Why Clinton And Corbyn Lost - Watch This.

This short documentary explains brilliantly why the candidates and parties of the Left keep on losing to the Right. Highly recommended viewing.

Video courtesy of YouTube

This posting exclusive to Bowalley Road.

The Trick Of Winning Power Under Capitalism.

“Power resides where men believe it resides. It’s a trick. A shadow on the wall. And a very small man can cast a very large shadow.” - Varys to Tyrion in Game of Thrones.

CORBYN’S DEFEAT, and the defeat of the Labour Party his leadership made possible, is a defeat for the Left everywhere. All over the western world social-democrats are pointing to the British Labour Party’s electoral catastrophe and saying: “See? This is what happens when you try to sell “Democratic-Socialism” to those not already convinced that it’s a good idea.” What happened to Labour’s “Red Wall” will be used to undermine AOC; batter Bernie Sanders; and demoralise Elizabeth Warren. Closer to home, it will be used as a prophylactic against the merest hint of Corbyn-style thinking inside the New Zealand Labour Party.

The question is: What lessons should democratic-socialists, themselves, draw from the Corbyn Labour Party’s historic defeat? Because the UK General Election has more lessons to teach us than Dominic Cummings has wickedly clever ideas. Not the least of which is that you receive fewer scratches when you pat a cat from its head to its tail, rather than from its tail to its head.

It is one of the great paradoxes of radical left-wing politics: that the people who rail most uncompromisingly against the evils of capitalism are genuinely shocked and horrified when capitalism unleashes a fair old swag of those evils against them.

Jeremy Corbyn was unfairly pilloried in the media, they complain. Every major media outlet was against him. The guy couldn’t get a break – not even from The Guardian and the BBC!

Well, duh! What the hell did they expect? That the leader of a party promising to restore the trade unions’ right to engage in “secondary picketing” was going to be given a fair shake by newspapers owned by billionaires? That Rupert Murdoch, the man who broke the power of the print unions in the 1980s, was going to say: “Come on in, Jezza! Sit down and tell me how I can help you devise the sort of inheritance tax that will break the power of families like my own forever.”

If you accept the proposition that we are all living in a capitalist society, then, surely, you must also accept that anyone posing a genuine threat to that society will be subjected to unrelenting political attack? And, doesn’t that oblige you, as the democratic-socialist leader of a serious electoral party, to offer the capitalist press the smallest possible target? In fact, wouldn’t the smart move be to convince the mainstream media bosses that you weren’t any kind of democratic-socialist at all?

Come to think of it, wouldn’t it mean doing exactly what Tony Blair did? Making the pilgrimage to Rupert Murdoch’s corporate lair and convincing him that from you and your “sensible” Labour Party he had absolutely nothing to fear? That way, when the election campaign got rolling, The Sun could come out and endorse you, and urge its readers to vote Labour.

Obviously, I’m not saying that Tony Blair was any kind of democratic-socialist. What I am suggesting, however, is that if you are a Labour leader who genuinely subscribes to the principles of democratic-socialism, then it would probably help a lot to keep your true ideological colours under wraps. Tactically, at least, it would make more sense for the powers-that-be to see you as a reasonable moderate – not a scary radical. Impress the electorate with your economic wisdom; demonstrate your deep understanding of, and sympathy for, the hopes and aspirations of your core working-class supporters. Speak with pride and passion about the contribution their party has made to the nation’s history. Whatever you do, don’t refuse to sing God Save The Queen. It would also probably help if you refrained from meeting with representatives of terrorist organisations – especially those hostile to the State of Israel!

A democratic-socialist leader possessed of a sophisticated strategic sense would understand that election manifestos are best restricted to promoting policies that the electorate actually wants – not policies his (or her) comrades believe the electorate should want. Let the drift of events – economically and socially – propel the party in directions which the capitalists may not like, but which they no longer feel able to redirect. Most importantly, identify the one reform most likely to undermine the institutions upon which their opponents’ rely most heavily for protection. Implement it early, fast, and without compromise.

Think of Jim Bolger, Bill Birch and the Employment Contracts Act. Radically reducing the reach and power of the trade unions – the working class’s most effective defence against exploitation and declining living standards – was the one reform most likely to enhance and entrench the power of capital. The moment it became law, everything else National and its backers wanted to do was made ten times easier.

It is worth recalling that the unprecedented scope and radicalism of the Employment Contracts Act had not been signalled to the electorate prior to National racking-up a massive majority in the 1990 General Election. Bill Birch had reassured New Zealand workers that their hard-won industrial rights – guaranteed hours and penal rates – would not be affected by the changes National was proposing. By the time the draconian provisions of the bill became clear, the leaders of the trade unions had lost all confidence in their ability to prevent its passage. This loss of confidence was crucial to the National Government’s success. A successful democratic-socialist government should be similarly positioned to demoralise their capitalist opponents.

Perhaps, then, that is the exercise democratic-socialists around the world should now be undertaking. Quietly identifying the single reform that would effectively disarm the capitalists and fundamentally diminish their ability to effectively resist the introduction of further progressive economic, social and environmental reforms.

As Varys in Game of Thrones so wisely tells Tyrion: “Power resides where men believe it resides. It’s a trick. A shadow on the wall. And a very small man can cast a very large shadow.”

It’s high time the Left learned the trick of winning power under capitalism: positioning a very big man in such a way that he casts a very small and non-threatening shadow – until he doesn’t.

Jezza, old son, they saw you coming!

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 17 December 2019.

Some Thoughts On Socialism As Jeremy Corbyn Loses The UK General Election.

Forlorn Hope: When the call came down to make Corbyn unelectable, the Establishment's journalists and columnists rose to the challenge. Antisemitism was only the most imaginative of the charges levelled against the old democratic-socialist. There were many more and, sadly, they appear to have worked. Boris Johnson may not be much liked or trusted, but he’s more liked and trusted than Jeremy Corbyn.

WHAT BETTER DAY to assess the latest contribution from The Daily Blog’s resident Marxist than Election Day in the UK? I’m pretty sure Dave Brownz will be as gobsmacked as I most certainly will be if Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party ends the day with the makings of a majority in the House of Commons. Should the impossible happen, however, the issues raised in Dave’s post will take on a new urgency. The question of whether socialism and democracy can operate successfully together will instantly, in the UK at least, cease to be a matter of academic debate.

The essence of Dave’s argument is that any attempt to introduce socialist policies, while all the core institutions of the bourgeois capitalist order are still standing, is doomed to fail. According to this argument, every socialist reform attempted by a Corbyn-led government of the UK would end up being thwarted. Either, Labour’s changes would be welcomed as a much needed intervention on behalf of Britain’s beleaguered capitalists. Or, if Corbyn’s reforms did, indeed, strike at the heart of UK capitalism, his government would be deposed. Peacefully, if possible. Violently, if necessary.

Dave’s (and Marx’s) way out of this no-win situation is to call for “the dictatorship of the proletariat”. In place of the social forces which currently run, justify and benefit financially from capitalism, set up an entirely new system operated by its victims. Only then, say the Marxists, can socialism have the slightest chance of surviving and flourishing.

There is a grim logic to this position. Certainly, a socialist government surrounded by capitalist institutions will very swiftly find its room for political manoeuvre shrinking. The courts will intervene on behalf of those affected by its most radical policies. Senior public servants will leak its transformative plans to the capitalist press. Right-wing middle-class students take to the streets in protest. Foreign corporations will threaten to seize the nation’s overseas assets in the event of inadequately compensated nationalisations. Hostile capitalist powers will impose sanctions in order to “make the economy scream”. Dave’s argument: that if all these forces are not first swept away by the revolutionary masses, then they will conspire to strangle an infant socialist government in its cradle; is pretty compelling.

To date, Corbyn’s fate lends credence to Dave’s case. In the four years he has led the British Labour Party he has been the target of an unrelenting campaign of personal vilification and political destabilisation. With hindsight, it is clear that the Labour Party has, for decades, been kept “fit for office” through a combination of destruction and creation. The careers of potentially successful Labour left-wingers have been destroyed, while the reputations of those considered a “safe pair of hands” have been enhanced – mostly by Capitalist Britain’s well-positioned defenders in the security services and the news media. Corbyn’s success was a slip-up – a big one. Exactly how big is indicated by the sheer viciousness of the campaign set in motion to destroy him.

It has, however, been an extremely costly exercise for “The Establishment”. To “get” Corbyn, the supposedly left-wing Guardian newspaper was forced to reveal its unshakeable allegiance to the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”. When the call came down to make Corbyn unelectable, the Guardian’s journalists and columnists rose to the challenge. Antisemitism was only the most imaginative of the charges levelled against the old democratic-socialist. There were many more and, sadly, they appear to have worked. Boris Johnson may not be much liked or trusted, but he’s more liked and trusted than Jeremy Corbyn.

The temptation to subscribe to Dave’s critique of democratic-socialism’s contention that liberal capitalism can be dismantled and reassembled without sacrificing its “progressive” features – such as Freedom of Expression, the Rule of Law and Personal Liberty – is very strong. Especially once it becomes clear that, as I used to tell my fellow trade unionists back in the 1980s, “all the rights we possess as citizens of a democracy are given to us on just one condition – that we never use them”. But, to move from this bleak realisation to the Marxists’ wholesale embrace of proletarian dictatorship strikes me as a step too far. It requires us to pretend that the terrible events of the twentieth century never happened. That the exigencies of dictatorship – regardless of whose particular class interests it is established to serve – do not lead inevitably to censorship, concentration camps and mass executions.

The trick, it seems to me, is to so conduct yourself as a democratic-socialist government that the capitalists are insufficiently motivated to overthrow you. There is, as alluded to above, a high price to be paid for exposing the iron fist of fascism inside liberal capitalism’s velvet glove. Nevertheless, convincing the Powers-That-Be that your left-wing government has more to offer them alive than dead isn’t easy. It requires a mixture of political wisdom and cunning not often found among the men and women of the Left. Harold Wilson almost had enough to achieve his goal of fusing the interests of British capitalists and British workers in “the white heat of technology” – creating thereby a “producers’ alliance” that would overpower the City of London and “Put Britain First”. Had he been Prime Minister at any other time but the Cold War, who knows, he might have succeeded.

Could Corbyn have made a similar case for a “producers’ alliance” to restore Britain’s waning economic fortunes? If he had somehow contrived to link Wilson’s project to the economic and cultural frustrations fueling Brexit – maybe. A democratic-socialist European Union: offered to Labour voters as an alternative to the present, bureaucratic, neoliberal monstrosity; now that might have been worth voting “Leave” to achieve. Barring some sort of miracle, however, it’s too late to make that case now.

No doubt Dave Brownz will shake his head at such naivety. But, even as Labour goes down to yet another defeat in the UK, I refuse to abandon the hope that one day we’ll find the right person at the right time. Because, in the end, if your socialism isn’t democratic, then it’s not worth having. No one ever said achieving social justice and freedom would be easy, but then, as my dear old dad used to say: “Nothing worthwhile ever is.”

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 13 December 2019.

Pissing-Off The Israelis Is A High-Risk Strategy.

Dangerous Foes: For those readers of Bowalley Road who feel disposed to dismiss any prospect of an Israeli destabilisation of New Zealand politics, the example of the United Kingdom repays close attention. Ever since the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the British Labour Party, the Israelis have sanctioned, funded and organised one of their most shameless interventions, ever, in the domestic affairs of a sovereign nation.

NEW ZEALAND’S GOVERNMENT faces a difficult choice between doing the right thing and the expedient thing over Israel’s latest outrage. This country has a proud record of lending its voice to the United Nations’ condemnation of the Israeli state’s repeated violations of international norms in its treatment of the Palestinian people. In the current international climate, however, upholding that proud diplomatic record risks making New Zealand politicians targets for Israeli destabilisation.

The latest, and potentially one of the most dangerous, Israeli threats to the Palestinians has been issued by the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. His proposal is, in essence, to annex the entire Jordan Valley to the Israeli state. Were he to be in a position, following the pending Israeli elections, to implement this promise, all hope of a “two state solution” peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority would evaporate completely.

For those readers of Bowalley Road who feel disposed to dismiss any prospect of Israeli destabilisation, the example of the United Kingdom repays close attention.

Ever since the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the British Labour Party, the Israelis have sanctioned, funded and organised one of their most shameless interventions, ever, in the domestic affairs of a sovereign nation.

Utilising every individual, group and institution responsive to Jerusalem’s guidance, the Israeli national security apparatus first redefined and then weaponised the concept of antisemitism, unleashing it upon Corbyn and his supporters with unprecedented political fury. Challenges to the foreign and domestic policies of the Israeli state – such as Corbyn has made for the past 30 years – are now routinely presented as incontrovertible proof of his antisemitic prejudice.

Such a self-serving redefinition of antisemitism would, almost certainly, have been laughed off the political stage had it not been for the extraordinary support it received from the mainstream British news media.

It is no accident that the two media organisations responsible for prosecuting Corbyn’s “antisemitism” most forcefully are the BBC and The Guardian. Had these two leaders of liberal opinion refused to buy into Jerusalem’s campaign, the attack would have had to be carried out by all the usual right-wing media suspects. That apparently “left-wing” journalists and columnists were willing to brand Corbyn an antisemite was crucial to the campaign’s impact.

So, how does the definition work? The proposition advanced is a very simple one.

The State of Israel represents the last, best hope of protecting the Jewish people from persecution and genocide. To suggest that the Jews can rely upon anybody but the State of Israel in this respect is to wilfully misread the lessons of history. To undermine in any way the strength and coherence of the Israeli state is, therefore, a hostile act. Those who do so represent a clear and present danger to the Jewish people’s sanctuary. Only those who seek to do the Jews harm could countenance such a policy. They are, ipso facto, antisemites.

That this simplistic formula actually works on well-educated and otherwise progressive individuals is explicable in no small measure by the identity of those who have, over the course of the last 70 years, made no secret of their wish to destroy the State of Israel. Journalists over 60 recall the Six Day War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973, and ask themselves what would have happened had the Israeli Defence Force not prevailed. Younger intellectuals remember the terrorist campaigns of the PLO, Hamas and Hezbollah, and ponder the ethics of “ proactive self-defence”.

“If you’re looking for a good reason to stand with the Jewish people,” say Israel’s defenders, “just take a look at who’s standing against them.”

The Israeli case is strengthened by the geopolitical considerations that have never ceased to drive the policies of both the United Kingdom and the United States – especially when it comes to oil. The repeated trashing of the Middle East by the UK and the USA, from the end of World War II to the present day, has, among many other effects, increased immeasurably the military and economic strength of Israel. All three states have a powerful vested interest in keeping the balance of power firmly tilted in Israel’s favour.

Such are the considerations that New Zealand’s diplomats must weigh before responding to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s incendiary promise. Our convalescing Foreign Minister, Winston Peters, will, therefore, be asking himself two vital questions.

Dare we remain silent in the face of a policy that can only lead to the wholesale ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Israeli-occupied territory?

And.

Will Jacinda thank me for adding the fearsome capabilities of the Israeli national security apparatus to a plate already piled high with troubles?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 13 September 2019.

Why Isn’t JA Channelling AOC?

Red Star Rising: A very similar set of perceptions fuelled the rise of both Jacinda Ardern and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In the case of "AOC", the twenty-something, student-loan-burdened, former-waitress from Brooklyn, who proudly proclaims herself to be a “democratic-socialist”, has come to stand for everything that the contemporary Democratic Party is not – but urgently needs to become. In Jacinda's case, however, the radicalism is more apparent than real.

WHY ISN’T JACINDA ARDERN channelling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC)? This is not a frivolous question. Labour found itself swept into a winning position at the end of 2017 almost entirely on the strength of Jacinda’s extraordinary appeal – especially to voters under 40.

Central to Jacinda’s appeal was the widespread perception that Labour’s new leader represented a definitive ideological break: not only with the Labour Party of Roger Douglas, but also with the woman who did her best to clear away the worst of the mess Rogernomics had made, Helen Clark.

A very similar set of perceptions has fuelled the rise of AOC. This twenty-something, student-loan-burdened, former-waitress from Brooklyn, who proudly proclaims herself to be a “democratic-socialist”, has come to stand for everything that the Clinton-dominated Democratic Party is not – but urgently needs to become.

So far, AOC hasn’t put a foot wrong in the complex dance routine that must be executed to secure a hearing for the aspirations of her locked-out generation. Her energetic sponsorship of a “Green New Deal” for America has made it impossible for House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, to nudge the radicalism of AOC and her newly-minted congressional comrades into the long grass. In similar vein, the young Brooklynite’s outspoken call for the USA’s wealthiest citizens to be taxed at 70 cents in the dollar on all income in excess of $250,000 has given Overton’s Window a much-needed shove to the left.

A politician of Jacinda Ardern’s acute sensitivity can hardly have failed to notice the bright red glow currently pulsing from the heart of the zeitgeist. She would have watched in awe as Bernie Sanders’ “Children’s Crusade” forced Hilary Clinton to call in all her favours (and Super-Delegates) to head the old socialist off at the pass. But that awe would have turned to horror as Jeremy Corbyn’s socialist revival rolled up Blairism like a threadbare carpet and set the crowds cheering at Glastonbury.

Suddenly, Jacinda’s carefully scripted lines about being a “pragmatic idealist” seemed likely to have a very limited shelf-life. Certainly, her “politics of kindness” trope continues to inspire, but the problem with throwing around such kindly words is that, sooner or later (and preferably sooner!) they have to be matched by kindly deeds. Helping with the barbie at Waitangi looks good on the six o’clock news, but more is needed. Much more.

Does Jacinda get this? Does she understand the huge political potential – and risk – posed by the “surplus consciousness” of tens-of-thousands of young adults laden-down with professional credentials and student debt but denied the security and status attached to well-remunerated employment and a solid career-path? The precarious position of young people in the labour market is amplified even more pitiably for them in the marriage and property markets.

These voters are too well-educated to find solace among the angry populists of the Alt-Right, but they are signing up in droves to the system-challenging – and changing – agenda of democratic socialism. After all, what favours has neoliberal capitalism ever done them?

It’s one of the great mysteries of this government that, on the night the Labour-NZ First coalition was announced, Winston Peters got this – and Jacinda didn’t.

Then again, maybe not. One of the first big political gigs offered to Jacinda was an internship in Tony Blair’s Cabinet Office. It’s hardly the sort of ideological grounding to generate a surge of enthusiasm and support for Bernie Sanders or (God forbid!) Jeremy Corbyn.

Nor should it be forgotten that Jacinda was for a good portion of her life a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. One has only to recall the shining eyes and broad smiles of those Mormon missionaries on your doorstep, or tipping you that friendly wave as they ride by on their bicycles, to remember suddenly where you have seen Jacinda’s political style before.

Those familiar with Jacinda’s CV will object that her stint as President of the International Union of Socialist Youth (IUSY) equips her even more impressively than AOC for the struggle to advance democratic socialism. A little more is required of a true democratic socialist, however, than the ability to call people “comrade” with a straight face. Nor is the IUSY quite the bastion of radical socialist internationalism that its name might suggest. Any organisation that welcomes a far-right CIA stooge like Venezuela’s “Interim President”, Juan Guaido, into its ranks, has some explaining to do!

Finally, there is the problem of the company Jacinda has trained herself to keep. Throughout her entire political career she has surrounded herself with – and been surrounded by – right-wing social-democrats. Blair’s New Labourites; Clark’s incrementalists; Cullen’s DNC-endorsed economic policies; and, most recently, Grant Robertson’s “Budget Responsibility Rules”. She was an enemy of David Cunliffe and, by implication, the hopes and dreams of the thousands of Labour Party members who supported him. And, lastly, it’s a pretty safe bet that, like Labour’s current president, Nigel Howath, she has no time at all for that bane of Blairism, Jeremy Corbyn.

No. Jacinda may envy AOC’s extraordinary political savvy and covet her social media skills. She may even decide to crib some of her best lines about saving the planet and soaking the rich. But anyone anticipating an Ardern-led shift towards democratic socialism (which is still, ironically enough, the official ideology of the NZ Labour Party) is bound to be disappointed.

Democratic Socialism, as practiced by AOC, will be DOA in Jacinda’s NZLP.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 12 March 2019.

Is Corbyn Allowing Yesterday’s Enemies To Win Again?

The Ghost Of Futures Passed: Does Jeremy Corbyn have the political ability to rise above his preoccupation with Labour’s past? Can he recast himself as the progressive champion of the UK’s European future? That would require him to align himself unequivocally with the Remainers by forcefully demanding a second referendum. It’s a big ask. But, surely, he understands that those who hesitate to climb on board History’s bus when it pulls up at their stop invariably get left behind.

JEREMY CORBYN’S fatal political error has been to look over his shoulder rather than over the horizon. As is so often the case with politicians who have had their party’s agenda wrenched from their hands by ideological rivals pursuing radically different goals, the temptation to start again from where they were forced to leave off is very strong. The 1980s Labour Party of Michael Foot and Tony Benn – the lodestars of Corbynism – was taken over and completely reshaped by Tony Blair in the 1990s. Rolling back Blairism and resuming Labour’s march towards democratic socialism has always been Corbyn’s mission. It was not, however, the mission imposed upon Labour by the relentless march of events. That, it turns out, is Brexit.

Corbyn has always been deeply conflicted by the evolution of the European project. Originally conceived as a means of preventing the powerful nations of Western Europe from ever again going to war with one another, the European Economic Community (EEC) had much to commend it. Its transformation, from the EEC into the European Union (EU), changed perceptions considerably. What began as an essentially social-democratic dream has morphed into what more and more leftists have come to regard as a neoliberal nightmare.

This trajectory (from social-democracy to neoliberalism) was, of course, mirrored in the domestic histories of practically all of the EU’s member states. Corbyn’s assessment, that a rejection of neoliberalism in the UK would be next-to-impossible if it remained an EU member, made him a very tepid advocate of his party’s official policy of encouraging Labour supporters to vote “Remain” in the 2016 Referendum. That so many of Labour’s heartland constituencies favoured the “Leave” option didn’t make things any easier.

Theresa May’s doomed attempt to increase the Conservative Party’s majority in the House of Commons by calling a snap-election in 2017, poured almost as much acid on the Leader of the Opposition as it did on the Prime Minister. Labour’s astonishing electoral performance was partly fuelled by its immensely popular “For the Many, Not the Few” manifesto, which, like Bernie Sander’s “democratic socialist” platform of the previous year, inspired and enthused tens-of-thousands of young, well-educated, but economically marginalised, voters. Mostly, however, Labour’s success was built on these younger voters’ conviction that Labour represented a forward-thinking alternative to the Tories’ reactionary “Little Englander” Brexiteers.

In the minds of the only voters that truly mattered – the ones who would spend most, if not all, of their lives in the Twenty-First Century – Labour stood for an open-hearted, multicultural and European future. If Labour wanted to endure as a viable political force (rather than a declining legacy party of Britain’s industrial past) then it had no choice but to make those young voters’ perceptions reality. Tragically, Corbyn was too mired in the politics of the Twentieth Century to rise to the challenge. Rather than lead the debate against Brexit; rather than mobilise his young supporters behind the call for a second referendum; Corbyn equivocated – and thereby surrendered the initiative.

What is currently unfolding in the UK is the direct consequence of Corbyn’s error.

Any politician who can count has worked out that for the Prime Minister to secure her “Brexit Deal” all she has to do is run down the clock to the point where the Labour Party – absolutely opposed to the UK “crashing-out” of the EU with no deal – is left with no alternative except to give May what she wants.

If Labour swings-in behind May’s deal, the Tory Brexiteers’ leverage instantly disappears. Would the humiliation of being outmanoeuvred by May and Corbyn cause the Brexit hardliners in the European Research Group to split the Tories? Of course! But the sheer intractability of the Brexit crisis has for some time indicated that some sort of break-up of the Conservative Party is unavoidable. It seems pretty clear that May accepts this. Willing to settle for the historical legacy of being the PM who fulfilled her “sacred duty” to take the UK out of the EU, May seems ready to ‘retire hurt’: limping, but with her head held high.

With the Conservative Government hopelessly divided, and May’s parliamentary majority in tatters, a new election becomes inevitable. Nothing could better please Jeremy Corbyn and his followers. With the Tories torn and bleeding, Labour would be swept to victory. Safely removed from the EU’s clutches, the battle against British neoliberalism could then begin in earnest.

This is the terrifying prospect that caused first the Labour Right, and then the Tory Left, to step forward as the vanguard of a new electoral force conceived to achieve two, brutally simple, strategic objectives. The first: To prevent, by any means necessary, Corbyn’s democratic-socialist Labour Party from taking power. The second: To secure, with all possible speed, the UK’s membership of, or re-admission to, the EU.

What the world is currently witnessing in the UK, is the “pre-emptive split” that simply has to happen if the looming, uncontrolled, disintegration of the British Right, and the left-wing victory such an unmediated break-up will permit, is to be circumvented.

As always, to save the Right, the Left has first to be rendered electorally harmless. Look, then, for the rise of a British version of Emanuel Macron’s “Le Republique En Marche” – a media-driven, City of London-funded, manifestation of the so-called “radical centre”.

It’s not as if such a re-alignment has never happened before. To get the UK through the Great Depression of the 1930s, without capitulating to the far-Right or the far-Left, required the formation of a “National Government” – led initially by the renegade Labour Leader, Ramsay MacDonald, but held up by the votes of the shires. The Labour Party proper was reduced to an impotent parliamentary rump. It required the massive social and economic upheavals of the Second World War to restore Labour to electoral competitiveness.

Clearly, there is still a great deal to do before this unfolding political re-alignment can be brought to a satisfactory conclusion. What its organisers need most is time.

And time, strangely enough, is precisely what the EU leader, Donald Tusk, appears to be offering Theresa May. The last thing the EU’s German and French masters want to see is a securely entrenched democratic-socialist government unsettling the people of Europe from the other side of the English Channel. The EU looks set to give the UK’s political class all the time it needs to prevent such a dangerous development.

Does Corbyn have the political ability to rise above his preoccupation with Labour’s past? Can he recast himself as the progressive champion of the UK’s European future? That would require him to align himself unequivocally with the Remainers by forcefully demanding a second referendum. It’s a big ask. But, surely, he understands that those who hesitate to climb on board History’s bus when it pulls up at their stop invariably get left behind.

In the end, Corbyn’s obsession with fighting yesterday’s battles may only make it easier for yesterday’s enemies to win again.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Sunday, 24 February 2019.

2019 - If We Get Lucky.

Sweet Dream Scenario:  As Vice-President Mike Pence is being sworn-in as the 46th President of the United States - following Trump's sudden resignation - he suffers a massive heart attack and dies. His constitutionally designated successor is the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi. By a strange twist of fate, the United States of America gets its first female president after all.

PREDICTING THE FUTURE is a mug’s game. If it could be done, then gambling would be impossible and stockmarkets would crash. Not that these and a host of equally strong objections ever prevented professional seers from giving us the benefit of their prognostications. Some of them, by the simple law of averages, will be correct. Most, however, will not. This is because, as a wise woman once said: “We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

In that spirit, allow me to describe the coming year as it might look – if we get lucky.

If we get lucky, then Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller will present a report which damns President Donald Trump in ways unanticipated in even his worst nightmares. Republican and Democratic legislators, alike, conclude that his continuing occupation of the White House has become untenable.

Congressional leaders privately inform the President that there is more than enough support in both the House and the Senate to secure his impeachment. The President reaches for his cell-phone – only to discover that the Deep State has prevailed upon Twitter to shut down his account. Realising that the jig is up, the President resigns.

As Vice-President Mike Pence is being sworn-in as the 46th President of the United States he suffers a massive heart attack and dies. His constitutionally designated successor is the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi. By a strange twist of fate, the United States of America gets its first female president after all.

If we get lucky, then the House of Commons decisively rejects Theresa May’s Brexit Deal. Defeated and exhausted, the Prime Minister advises the Queen to dissolve Parliament and call an early General Election. May then resigns.

A Special Conference of the Labour Party votes decisively in favour of making a Second Brexit Referendum the centrepiece of its election manifesto.

With the Conservatives torn by all manner of political and personal conflicts, Labour cruises to a landslide victory. For the first time in forty years, the United Kingdom has a socialist prime minister and an unashamedly left-wing government. The Second Referendum records upwards of 60 percent of Britons opting to remain in the European Union.

If we get lucky, then the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, negotiates a general peace settlement and mutual defence pact involving Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran. The Kurds secure regional autonomy within the Syrian state, guaranteed by the Russian Federation.

If we get lucky, then the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party, fearful that President Xi Jinping is about to launch a massive purge of senior party cadres, deposes him. A hastily-summoned National People’s Congress, in a climate of unprecedented independence, elects a moderate reformer as Xi’s successor.

If we get lucky, then the National Party responds to a sharp decline in public support by jettisoning its current leader, Simon Bridges, and replacing him with Judith Collins. The choice of Collins is itself a reaction to the rapid rise of the right-wing populist New Conservative Party. Collins, it is hoped, will staunch the flow of National support to the NCP.

Appalled by this dramatic shift to the far-right, thousands of moderate National Party supporters swing in behind NZ First and Labour, lifting their combined support to nearly 60 percent of voters.

The Coalition Government, buoyed by this sudden shift in its fortunes, decides to reject the Tax Working Group’s recommendation favouring the imposition of a Capital Gains Tax. The Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, is persuaded by Winston Peters that such a tax would turn every farmer, small business owner and landlord in the country into her personal enemy. Finance Minister, Grant Robertson, resigns in protest. Jacinda replaces him with David Parker.

If we get really lucky, then the leadership changes in the USA, the UK and China produce a sudden and radical shift in the global approach to anthropogenic global warming. Rather than relying on yet another international conference, the leaders of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council meet in secret and thrash out a concrete plan for keeping the planet’s remaining reserves of oil and gas in the ground while they co-ordinate a planet-wide “Green New Deal”.

According to the wise, the only sure thing about luck is that it changes.

I’m counting on that being true.

Happy 2019!

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 4 January 2019.

The Warning Bells Of Absurdity.

Noises Off: This is the nightmare quality of current events. That, beyond the wafer-thin screens of normality, vast beasts go prowling in the dark. We can hear them barking and roaring: sometimes far away; sometimes frighteningly close. There’s a skittering of claws on marble floors. Eyes glowing green in the shadows. And, try as we may, we cannot wake up. Painting by Otto Dix.

HOW CAN YOU TELL when a system is falling apart? That the load-bearing walls of everyday reality are beginning to weaken? The simple answer is absurdity. Words spoken and positions taken that simply make no sense. Behaviour that raises suspicion of complete madness. Sums that stubbornly refuse to add up.

Think about the extraordinary display put on by Australia’s governing party, the Liberal Party. What was that all about? For some time the party has been declining in the polls. So, what does it do? It convulses itself in a bloody and ultimately pointless bout of political fratricide. Hurling aside an urbane, accomplished and highly intelligent politician, Malcolm Turnbull, and replacing him with an intellectually stunted and morally vacuous religious zealot whose primary political accomplishments have been the persecution of refugees and the punishment of the poor. Entirely unsurprisingly, the Liberal’s primary vote has sunk to record lows.

Then there is the ongoing campaign by the United Kingdom’s liberal establishment to destroy Jeremy Corbyn. Unable to counter the Labour leader’s policies: for fear of exposing their unshakeable allegiance to the “loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires” (thank you Paul Simon) that constitutes the actual government of the world; these ostensibly “progressive” politicians and journalists have embarked upon a barking-mad effort to paint Corbyn and his allies in the Labour Party as “antisemites”. By which they mean opponents of the State of Israel.

Now anyone who knows anything about Jeremy Corbyn (which includes the people who are levelling the charge of antisemitism against him) cannot possibly believe that he is prejudiced against Jews simply because they are Jews. Corbyn’s quarrel is with the ideology of Zionism, and with the unjust and often downright murderous actions of the Israeli state: a stance he has maintained with admirable consistency for more than thirty years.

Clearly, the prospect of such a man being just one general election away from No. 10 Downing Street is of profound concern to right-wing Israeli politicians and supporters of Zionism all around the world. That such people are attempting to undermine Corbyn is perfectly understandable. But, the campaign being waged against him on the pages of The Guardian isn’t about Israel – or Jewish people. It’s about something else; something all the more unnerving for being unspoken. It’s about who is entitled to govern the UK and who is not.

Corbyn constitutes an existential threat to the UK’s governing elites, whose formerly vice-like grip on the nation’s political and cultural institutions has been seriously weakened by a bottom-up political insurgency from the left of UK politics for which the veteran left-wing MP has acted as a lightning-rod. They are calling Corbyn an antisemite because they can’t plausibly call him a paedophile and because they are not yet desperate enough to call for his assassination.

That’s why it all sounds so mad. Like the accusations which Stalin levelled against the old Bolsheviks in the Moscow show-trials of the 1930s. They are lies – obvious and terrible lies – but with the power of the apparatus behind them they risk acquiring the character of Truth. So we go on reading the articles in The Guardian: noting the rising pitch of hysteria between every line; and the world lurches sideways under our feet.

And then we look at Donald Trump’s America, and Corbyn’s woes fade – overwhelmed by the dazzling image of the planet’s most powerful nation spontaneously combusting.

It’s all about race, of course. The whole history of the United States has been about race. About being white, or, more accurately about not being red, black, yellow or brown. The history of the United States of America is a series of evermore urgent reiterations of a consistent ruling-class strategy of making sure that the consciousness of class oppression is forever being displaced by the awareness of racial privilege.

The election of Barack Obama was the trigger. A black man in the White House was the ultimate symbol of white decline. From that moment on, a majority of white Americans were seized by a racial distemper that rotted their brains and inflamed their spleens. Though Trump has yet to speak or tweet the words explicitly, “Making America Great Again” has the ring of a genocidal call-to-arms. What else could it be? When demographic trends threaten to submerge white Americans in a diverse, multicultural morass?

When Trump talks about “draining the swamp” the assumption has always been that he is talking about cleaning up Washington DC. But what if he means draining away or diverting the waters that are lapping at the feet of white Americans? What if he intends to leave white America high and dry by simply getting rid of all those forces that are threatening to swamp it?

This is the nightmare quality of current events. That, beyond the wafer-thin screens of normality, vast beasts go prowling in the dark. We can hear them barking and roaring: sometimes far away; sometimes frighteningly close. There’s a skittering of claws on marble floors. Eyes glowing green in the shadows. And, try as we may, we cannot wake up.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 30 August 2018.

Zionist-Inspired Definition Of Antisemitism Deployed Against Jeremy Corbyn.

Targeted: For more than a year now, charges that Jeremy Corbyn is antisemitic have been driving a debilitating wedge into the British Labour Party. Why are these accusations being made and, more importantly, why are they being taken seriously? The answer is to be found in the efforts of Zionists (an ideology to be carefully differentiated from the beliefs of Jewish people in general) to expand the definition of antisemitism to include any negative references to the origins, policies and actions of the Israeli state.

THE NEW ZEALAND LEFT is not alone in being torn apart by what should and should not be tolerated. Only yesterday (17/7/18) the British Labour Leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was publicly upbraided for being “an antisemitic racist” by Margaret Hodge, a senior British Labour MP. Hodge was furious that Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC) has refused to accept, in full, the definition of antisemitism issued by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).

For more than a year now, charges of antisemitism have been driving a debilitating wedge into the British Labour Party. Not that very many people around the world find these charges even remotely credible. The British Labour Party has a long and proud history of standing up for the rights of all Jewish people suffering persecution on account of their religious beliefs and/or supposed “racial” identity. Why, then, are these accusations being made and, more importantly, why are they being taken seriously?

The answer is to be found in the efforts of Zionists (an ideology to be carefully differentiated from the beliefs of Jewish people in general) to expand the definition of antisemitism to include any negative references to the origins, policies and actions of the Israeli state.

On these matters, the British Labour Party can speak with some authority. It was, after all, the 1945-1951 Labour Government, led by Clement Attlee, which withdrew the last remaining British troops from Palestine on 14 May 1948 – clearing the way for the creation of the State of Israel on 15 May 1948.

British military forces, who were responsible for enforcing what was known as Great Britain’s “mandatory power” in Palestine, had come under increasingly violent attack from Zionist terror groups, such as Irgun and the notorious Stern Gang, since the end of the Second World War in 1945. In September 1947, war weary and close to insolvency, the British state announced to the world that it was no longer willing or able to carry out its duties to the Arab and Jewish populations of Palestine.

This did not, however, mean that they were blind to the strategies and tactics of their Zionist antagonists. As the party in power at the time, Labour has always known a great deal more about the nature and birth of the State of Israel than its Zionist defenders would like.

Hence the co-ordinated attack upon the Jeremy Corban-led Labour Party. As a principled leftist, Corbyn has always refused to buy into the Zionist characterisation of Israel as a state more sinned against that sinning. He has never stopped caring about the Palestinians who, for a variety of reasons (some good, some bad) were made homeless by the circumstances of Israel’s bloody birth. Corbyn’s empathy for the people whose survival has, for the past 70 years, depended upon the support and concern of the international community has been unwavering.

The prospect of such a man becoming Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is not something the Israeli Government and its supporters are ready to accept without a fight. Corbyn’s contacts with Palestinian leaders have been challenged.

Does he subscribe to their desire to wipe Israel off the map? Is that why he refuses to declare his unequivocal support for the Jewish homeland. Is he providing aid and comfort to his antisemitic supporters among the Labour Party rank-and-file? And, if he is, doesn’t that prove that he is, indeed, “an antisemitic racist”?

Crucial to the success of this campaign has been the refusal of its promoters to draw that all-important distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. They allow their target audience to assume that their charges relate to behaviour conforming to the traditional definition of antisemitism: hostility to or prejudice against Jews; when what they are really talking about is the IHRA definition of antisemitism – which includes inter alia:

Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.

Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour.

Applying double standards by requiring of it a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.

Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

Small wonder that the NEC balked at accepting such a tendentious definition “in full”. To do so would render criticism of Israeli policy and Zionist ideology virtually impossible.

Confirmation that proscribing criticism is, indeed, the goal of the campaign against Corbyn and his supporters in the Labour Party has been provided by what the Guardian describes as “a coalition of 36 international Jewish anti-Zionist groups”. The latter have released an open letter in which the definition of antisemitism supplied by the IHRA (an organisation which began as a genuine Pan-European effort to ensure that the lessons of the Holocaust are never forgotten but which has subsequently been hijacked by Zionists and turned towards the protection of Israel) is condemned as a “distorted definition of antisemitism to stifle criticism of Israel”.

Margaret Hodge owes Jeremy Corbyn an apology.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 19 July 2018.

Generating Our Own Momentum.

Radical Millennial: As one of the most articulate and progressive representatives of “Roger’s Children” – those young New Zealanders who have grown up knowing nothing but neoliberalism –– Max Harris (above) is constantly searching for the raw materials with which to launch in his own homeland the same sort of fightback made possible by Jeremy Corbyn and Momentum in the UK.

CAN A “MOMENTUM” be built in New Zealand? This, in essence, was the question posed by millennial political scholar extraordinaire, Max Harris, to the sixty-or-so leftists who showed up at the Kai Pasifika restaurant on Wednesday night (30/5/18) for the welcome return of Laila Harré’s political “salon”.

The question is important because, as Harris made clear, it is the 30,000-strong Momentum movement which can claim most of the credit for consolidating Jeremy Corbyn's grip on the leadership of the British Labour Party, and most certainly it is Momentum which is keeping him there. Harris, himself, seemed less than optimistic that such a movement could get off the ground in this country, citing the profound depoliticization wrought by 30 years of extreme neoliberalism. Not helped, he might have added, by the New Zealand Labour Party (NZLP) hierarchy’s ingrained hostility to “Corbynism” and all forms of “bottom-up” organisation.

The reason for that hostility may be traced back directly to the 1989 split in the NZLP, when hundreds of left-wing activists followed the late Jim Anderton out of the organisation to form the NewLabour Party (NLP) – later to become a dominant force in the Alliance. The centrists who remained in the NZLP never forgave their erstwhile left-wing comrades for leaving them alone with the Rogernomes (who themselves decamped to form the Act Party in 1994). The key consequence of these centrists’ political traumas was that, throughout the 1990s and well into the 2000s, the NZLP’s default ideological setting was a rather bloodless version of Tony Blair’s “Third Way-ism”.

It is interesting to speculate what might have happened had the NZLP not split. Would the enormous energy and imagination that went into the formation of the NLP, and then the Alliance, have been devoted instead to hurling the neoliberal cuckoos out of Labour’s nest? Could New Zealand have given birth to its own intra-party generator of left-wing organisation and power a good twenty years before the British Labour Party generated its own Momentum?

The answer is – probably not. The extraordinary fact remains that it was the NZLP which accepted the task of introducing neoliberalism to New Zealand. In so doing it denied itself the historic role of leading the fight against it. The contrast with the British Labour Party, whose members waged a long and bitter struggle against Thatcherism, is a stark one. After eighteen years in the wilderness, Tony Blair may have been able to overlay his Third Way message on the British Labour Party, but its deep-in-the-bone hatred of the Thatcherite project was ineradicable. Had it not been, Momentum and Corbyn (who, almost alone, kept the flame of Labour’s core values burning for more than thirty years) would have had nothing to work with.

Even with British Labour’s proud history of resisting Thatcherism, Blair’s capture of the party’s “commanding heights” in the mid-1990s allowed him to populate Labour’s parliamentary contingent with careerist clones of their master and his minions. Corbyn undoubtedly faces powerful opponents in the all the usual bastions of the British establishment, but his bitterest enemies continue to be seated behind him on the Opposition benches.

Had Anderton and the Labour Left stayed put in 1989, and then flexed their muscles in the aftermath of the fourth Labour government’s inevitable defeat in 1990, the party would still have split. A good proportion of the caucus and much of the organisational hierarchy would have refused to accept a left-dominated NZLP. The legal battle over who had the right to call themselves the Labour Party would have raged on for months – possibly years. There would have been no winners.

The depoliticization of New Zealand society which Harris noted in his address was inescapable either way. It is simply not possible for a party of the Left to oversee the imposition of policies which the Right could only have introduced with the assistance of policemen’s truncheons without fundamentally deranging the entire political system for at least a generation.

As one of the most articulate and progressive representatives of “Roger’s Children” – those young New Zealanders who have grown up knowing nothing but neoliberalism –– Harris is constantly searching for the raw materials with which to launch in his own homeland the same sort of fightback made possible by Corbyn and Momentum. With the Alliance dead by its own hand, however, and with the NZLP allergic to “Corbynism” in all its forms (who was the one person Jacinda didn’t exchange public kisses with on her triumphant European tour?) the chances of building a Kiwi Momentum here are heartbreakingly slim.

Harris’s “politics of love” will require a very different vector. One which, given the history of Aotearoa-New Zealand, is most unlikely to have anything British about it at all.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 1 May 2018.

Carrying The Torch.

Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans – born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage – and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world. 

–  John F. Kennedy

NOTHING IN PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S inaugural address resonated in the hearts of young Americans, and the youth of the world, like the words quoted above. Asking what you can do for your country is all very well, but unless what you’re proposing elicits a sympathetic response from the seat of power; some sign that your motives are understood and your values shared, then your question will be lost on the air. It is from this rejuvenated sense of connection that generational shifts in politics acquire their transformational power.

The big question for 2018, therefore, is: what are the motives and values connecting New Zealand’s 37-year-old prime minister with the generations born after the post-war Baby Boom?

Kennedy was, of course, a member of what some have called “The Greatest Generation”. Raised under the pall of economic depression, and then thrown into the most destructive human conflict of human history, they were nevertheless determined to create the fairest and most prosperous societies the world had ever seen – and in that regard, they’d been spectacularly successful.

The full measure of that success is captured in Kennedy’s proud boast that, thanks to humanity’s technological prowess, “man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.”

The Ancient Greeks would have called this hubris – and they would have been right.

But what of the generation for whom Jacinda now speaks? Untempered by war; undisciplined by the existential stakes attached to global ideological competition; unimpressed with their nation’s colonial heritage; and uncommitted to the universal definition of human rights for which Kennedy pledged his country’s all on that chilly January morning in 1961: for what will the Millennial Generation “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe”?

Well, for a start, they would probably refuse to be bound by such an open-ended and reckless pledge. “Any Price?”, they would respond. “No, not any price. The world has had enough of men who commit the lives of millions to the fulfilment of promises they had no right to make.”

For a great many millennial women, JFK, himself, is a problem. “If #Me Too had been around in 1963,” they ask, “how many women would have come forward to denounce the President?”

No, Jacinda’s millennials are not well disposed to big promises, all-encompassing systems and unyielding ideologies. They have grown up amidst the havoc wrought by a generation far too prone to alternating fits of selfless idealism with bouts of hedonistic excess. That all their Baby Boomer parents’ enthusiasms boiled down to, in the end, was the cold and selfish cynicism of neoliberalism, taught them all they need to know about the malleability of human aspirations. The Labour Leader’s brisk “Let’s Do This” slogan was perfectly pitched to an audience more intent on achieving small dreams than grand visions.

The two great exceptions to this rule are Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. On the face of it, their ability to draw tens-of-thousands of young people into their campaigns seems counter-intuitive. What could these two, ageing, Baby-Boomer males possibly have to say to the Millennial Voter? They had, after all, spent most of their adult lives achieving sweet-bugger-all: two old leaves swirling aimlessly in the stagnant backwaters of left-wing politics.

But that was the whole point. Unlike so many of their contemporaries, Sanders and Corbyn simply refused to surrender the hopes and dreams of their youth. While all around them lay the jettisoned ideals of former comrades, they had kept on singing the hallelujah song.

Sanders and Corbyn were the proof that growing old did not have to mean growing cynical and cruel. The Millennials looked at the career politicians of their own generation and saw far too much evidence of wholesale generational surrender. How had so many twenty-something minds been taken over by so many hundred-year-old ideas? Sanders’ and Corbyn’s bodies may have been old, but their thinking was as young as the kids who cheered them on.

This, then, is the torch which the Prime Minister is being asked to carry into 2018. The inspirational torch of authenticity which dispels the darkness of hypocrisy. If she truly wishes to change their world, Jacinda must first prove to her generation that the world is not changing her.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 2 January 2018.

No Jeremy Corbyn

Few So Beloved By The Many: Jeremy Corbyn addresses the Glastonbury crowd. The British Labour Party looms so much larger now than it did just two months ago when the British commentariat was predicting electoral catastrophe on a scale not seen since the 1930s. Were an election to be held in Britain tomorrow a sweeping Labour victory is the most likely result.

 

"OH, JEREMY CORBYN! Oh Jeremy Corbyn!" The half-chant, half-song rose out of the Glastonbury crowd like the roaring of the sea borne on a rising wind. The slightly built 68-year-old received it all with the aplomb of a veteran rock-star. Microphone in one hand, a sheaf of speech notes in the other, he delivered an address that mixed soap-box oratory with the poetry of Shelly: "Rise like Lions after slumber/In unvanquishable number/Shake your chains to earth like dew/Which in sleep had fallen on you/Ye are many - they are few." How the young lions roared!

 

Now, delivering a speech is not the same as delivering a government, and Glastonbury is not Britain, but there there's no disputing that Jeremy Corbyn has redrawn his country's political map. Labour looms so much larger now than it did just two months ago when the British commentariat was predicting electoral catastrophe on a scale not seen since the 1930s. Were an election to be held in Britain tomorrow a sweeping Labour victory is the most likely result.

 

In New Zealand, however, it's a very different story. Here, with a general election less than three months away, Labour is languishing in the political doldrums. When Kiwis mutter "Oh, Andrew Little!", it is with a mixture of exasperation and despair. If we had a Glastonbury, it's hard to imagine our own Labour leader receiving the same rapturous reception as the Brits'. Hard because the voters' ability to imagine a better tomorrow is critically dependent on their political leaders' ability to describe a future worth living in.

 

That was Corbyn's most important achievement: to infuse the future with a sense of hope and promise; to re-cast the lives of ordinary Britons as something more than a grim struggle to pay the rent; to envision a world in which poetry had as valid a claim to their attention as the company's spreadsheets. As one young festival attendee at Glastonbury remarked when asked for an explanation for Corbyn's extraordinary popularity: "He's brought Labour back to its old self again."

 

And that, of course, is precisely what Labour in New Zealand hasn't done. Whether it be the party's pledge to uphold a self-imposed set of Budget Responsibility Guidelines, or, it's latest promise to excuse the farming community from its responsibility to protect the natural environment, the NZ Labour Party's key political strategy appears to involve anticipating how high the bosses will expect them to jump - and then training hard for the event. Corbyn's immensely popular election manifesto was entitled (with a nod to Shelly!) "For the Many - Not the Few". In fine antipodean style, Little has turned Corbyn's winning formula on its head!

 

The question that arises whenever three or more Kiwi leftists gather together in the name of social-democracy is: Why? What is it that holds Little back from making the same sort of unequivocal, old-fashioned Labour promises as Corbyn? What does he think he has to lose - apart from an election which nearly all the polls say he cannot possibly win? The American political writer, Thomas Frank, asked the same question of the US Democratic Party, and the answer he came up with was brutally simple. Today's social-democratic politicians are middle-class professionals who are, by-and-large, as disdainful of the electorate as they are uninterested in its inner emotional life. Not only have they forgotten how to dream dreams and see visions - they don't see the point.

 

Labour’s campaign to turn out the chimerical “missing million” courtesy of the unpaid efforts of several dozen young American interns is an embarrassing case in point. No one involved in this exercise seemed to understand that to replicate the outpouring of youthful energy that characterised the campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Corbyn one first has to lay one’s hands on candidates capable of inspiring such unstinting effort.

 

Corbyn’s magic cannot be summoned-up out of a phone-bank staffed by well-meaning foreigners. Young volunteers will pour in to staff a Corbyn or Sanders-style political crusade – but only after they have themselves been mobilised by the fiery rhetoric of such political crusaders. There is no algorithm for passion, no playbook for inspiration.

 

Labour in New Zealand - like the Democrats in America and the New Labour Party of Tony Blair - are locked into the politics of subtraction. All their energy is devoted to shifting voters from the Government's column to the Opposition's. They have forgotten that the parties of the Left have always and only been about the politics of addition: of bringing new social classes and forces into the electoral equation; of adding new and exciting possibilities to the lives of ordinary citizens.

 

Politics isn't a profession - it's a calling. And when a political leader answers that call with sincerity and love - oh how the people respond!

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 4 July 2017.