Can The Left Assemble A Winning Coalition?

Voting Together? Collectively, Māori and Pasifika workers, professionals and managers employed by the state, and “progressive” Baby-Boomer superannuitants, possess the electoral clout to defeat the Coalition Government. But will they?

TO WIN THE NEXT ELECTION, “The Left”, as we still rather hopefully refer to it, needs three key demographics. Voting together, the Māori and Pasifika working class, professional-managerial staff employed by the state, and “progressive” Baby Boomer superannuitants, cannot fail to return a combination of Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori to the Treasury Benches. The Left’s great challenge, as it approaches 2026, is developing an electoral pitch capable of mustering all three – and keeping them mustered – until the people’s votes have been cast and counted.

Voting together, Māori and Pasifika workers, professionals and managers employed by the state, and “progressive” Baby-Boomer superannuitants, can defeat the Coalition Government. But will they?

It’s a tall order. None of these groups present a homogeneous mass guaranteed to respond with Pavlovian reliability to the Left’s electoral stimuli.

Although in excess of three-quarters of Māori live in towns and cities, and are employed in occupations traditionally designated as working-class, the appeals of the left-wing parties are seldom presented in ways that prioritise the challenges of urban, working-class, Māori life. Indeed, they are much more likely to be presented with by policies reflecting the priorities of the iwi-based capitalists dominating the Iwi Leaders’ Forum.

The powerfully nationalist flavour of the Forum’s determination to “build the Māori Economy” obscures the socio-economic deprivation of its urbanised working class. The latter’s decline is reflected in the alarming statistic that, fifty years ago, more than half of urban Māori owned their own home, while, today, that figure has fallen to less than one-fifth. Even so, the social costs of liberalising the New Zealand economy, borne so disproportionately by Māori workers (especially those in the freezing and forestry industries) are only rarely presented unequivocally in class terms by the parliamentary Left. Certainly, in this century, Māori deprivation is much more commonly attributed to the ongoing impact of white supremacist “colonisation”.

Of the three left-wing parliamentary parties, Labour has by far the best chance of garnering the votes of Māori workers. To remind itself how this might be done, it has only to watch the television and social-media advertising Labour broadcast to voters in the Māori seats back in 2017. Whether by accident or design these ads proved to be little masterpieces of class-based communication. They portrayed the life-world of urban Māori in a way that conveyed both understanding and admiration. Unsurprisingly, Labour won all seven Māori Seats.

Pasifika workers’ loyalty to the Labour Party, and the impact of their votes, is legendary. The power of the “South Auckland booths” to save the day for Labour was never demonstrated to greater effect than in 2005 when, late in the evening, the votes cast by the Pasifika community tipped the scales in Labour’s favour, denying Don Brash’s National Party the victory which, just 72 hours earlier, had seem a dead cert.

That the surge in Pasifika voting had been achieved by Labour’s eccentric reading of the National Party’s housing policy is less enthusiastically recalled. Certainly, since 2005, there is evidence of the old adage “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me” gradually but unmistakably diminishing Pasifika voter participation. In 2008 Labour supporters waited in vain for the South Auckland booths to “come in”. They are still waiting.

Could it be that the failure of Labour’s Pasifika Social Development minister to implement welfare policies that would have benefitted Pasifika working-class families hugely has convinced them that it is wiser to be guided by Labour’s deeds than its words. Delivering their vital support not in recognition of promises made, but in gratitude for promises delivered.

But, if the votes of Māori and Pasifika workers must be earned, then the votes of the state-employed members of the professional-managerial class are pretty much a given. It is, after all, the class responsible for supplanting the Pakeha working-class that had ruled Labour from the party’s foundation in 1916 to the “Rogernomics” reforms of the 1980s. Young, university-educated, and openly disdainful of the conservative social mores of most of New Zealand’s working-class families, these were the ones who deliberately transformed Labour from a mass party to a cadre party – them being the cadres – in the decade spanning 1990 and 2000.

And there was no coming back for the workers – not when their unions had also been taken over by the meritocratic beneficiaries of Labour’s welfare state. No, the state-employed professionals and managers will vote Labour, overwhelmingly, because Labour has made itself the party of state-employed professionals and managers.

Any credible indication that Labour is returning to its working-class roots: prioritising what Chris Hipkins dubbed, euphemistically, “bread and butter issues”; is likely to be answered by a wholesale shift of state-sector employee support to the Greens in protest. This largely confirms the Green Party’s’ status as a handy escape-pod from Labour’s mother-ship.

Regardless of their faux-Marxist rhetoric, the Greens have always been, and show every sign of continuing to be, a party of middle-class utopians, stubbornly unreconcilable with a world that consistently fails to follow their excellent advice. That they have turned into something more substantial will be made evident only when the bulk of their electoral support ceases to be concentrated in the university suburbs of Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin.

For the “progressive” Baby-Boomer superannuitants observing these peregrinations of the Left from the safety and security of their mortgage-free villas and/or swanky retirement villages, the once straight-forward business of casting a vote is growing increasingly fraught. Their great advantage (or disadvantage – it rather depends on one’s point of view) is that their memories of the “old”, twentieth century, New Zealand are every bit as vivid as their encounters with the twenty-first’s “Aotearoa”.

Sadly, this ability to compare and contrast is of little use. Like every younger generation in the long history of humankind, their own children and grandchildren have little time, and even less patience, for the ideological antiques so prized by their parents and grandparents.

Gen-X and the rest of the generational alphabet show every sign of being completely relaxed about pronouns; will “chest-feed” their own offspring without ontological misgivings; and enthusiastically celebrate their shape-shifting Treaty as a very good thing indeed. They simply cannot understand their elders’ reluctance to meet the requirements of diversity, equity and inclusion.

What’s worse, the “progressive” Baby Boomers do not seem to be sufficiently seized by the awfulness of the National-Act-NZ First Coalition. As beneficiaries are bashed and te Tiriti is trashed, the “democratic-socialists” of yesteryear witter on interminably about free speech, feminism, and the colour-blind content of a person’s character. Whatever happened to taking one for the left-wing team?

It probably ceased when the left-wing team started playing a different game.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 19 August 2024.

Democracy Denied.

Political Intervention From Above: From the early-1970s on, lobbying firms and think-tanks have grown like Topsy all across the capitalist world. Had the progressive middle-class not drawn its teeth and clipped its claws, an angry working-class might have risen to meet the Robber Baron’s challenge as it did in the 1890s, the 1930s and the 1970s. Without the kratos of the unruly majority of the demos behind them, however, the paternalist strategies of the progressives were easily countered.

DEMOCRACY WILL ALWAYS BE HATED by the rich and powerful. This is a truth that should never be, but all-too-often is, forgotten. If the kratos (power) really does reside in the demos (people) then it cannot reside in the clubs and boardrooms of the corporate elites. The stronger the people become, the more determined the elites will grow to destroy the institutions through which popular power is expressed. Much has been made recently (not least by the Democracy Project) of the political influence of lobbyists and think-tanks, as if this was somehow a new and disturbing development. It is not. All that the growing power and influence of lobbyists and think-tanks reveals is the growing weakness of our democratic institutions.

Rather than devoting their energies to building up the strength of those institutions – by aggressively re-democratising the Labour Party and the trade union movement, both of which have long-since ceased to evince the slightest democratic energy – more and more leftists are avoiding the implications of their crushing political defeat by jumping down the rabbit hole of Mihingarangi Forbes’ Atlas Network conspiracy theory.

According to Forbes’ narrative, New Zealand’s political life is increasingly falling under the influence of unseen bad actors. These dark forces are unfairly resourced with all the talents and resources needed to shape and steer decisions critical to New Zealand’s future without the public’s knowledge.

If this all sounds like the plot of a Dan Brown novel, it’s because both Forbes and the author of The Da Vinci Code both deal in fiction. Forbes’ dark forces are, in fact, openly acknowledged and registered pressure groups, like the Taxpayers’ Union, which operate in the broad light of day and are constantly seeking to engage with the public via electronic newsletters, public meetings, and the media. Real conspirators do not behave like this. Prior to flying hijacked planes into the Twin Towers, Al Qaeda did not issue a press release!

What Forbes is attempting to paint as sinister and illegitimate is actually a very real tribute to the power of grass-roots organising. What makes the Taxpayers’ Union so effective is what made Halt All Racist Tours (HART) so effective: a popular cause; generous donors; dedicated leadership; powerful propaganda; and a bloody huge mailing-list. It is ironic that the organising model which the Left now attempts to pass-off as diabolical, is what made the left-wing pressure groups of the past so politically effective.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of the New Zealand Right borrowing the tactics of the New Zealand Left is the New Zealand National Party. National’s founders were determined that their fledgling organisation should grow into a mass party – as large, if not larger, than the New Zealand Labour Party. How else could they hope to defeat it?

Just like Labour, National gave itself a branch structure which penetrated deeply into ideologically sympathetic communities. Membership fees were kept within the reach of the ordinary voter, and the members themselves were constitutionally empowered to choose parliamentary candidates and participate in the formation of National Party policy. The “divisional” structure of the party guaranteed a large measure of regional autonomy from the party’s central office.

In short, until Stephen Joyce transformed it into a self-perpetuating oligarchy in 2003, National was a thoroughly democratic organisation. Had it not been, the party would not have been able to dominate New Zealand’s post-war politics so emphatically. At its peak in the mid-1970s, National’s membership topped a quarter-of-a-million.

What Forbes and her fellow conspiracy-theorists fail to grasp about democratic success, is that the exercise of real political power by working-class people (as evidenced by Labour’s dramatic economic and social transformations of the 1930s and 40s) does not just alarm the corporate elites.

When confronted by a confident and increasingly insubordinate working-class, broad swathes of the middle-class grow fearful that their superior social status is about to be eroded. To resist the rise of the working-class, two strategic options present themselves. The first is to effect a middle-class alignment with the ruling elites. The second is for the middle-class, using its credentialled expertise, to overwhelm the organisations of the working-class, turning lions into lambs and effectively giving the bosses two parties to play with.

The New Zealand middle-class has chosen both options. It’s commercial and industrial half backs the corporate elites in National, while its professional and managerial half makes sure Labour remains the neoliberal party it helped it to become in the 1980s and 90s. Middle-class idealists may have migrated to the Alliance and the Greens, but their more “progressive” policies have not yet contributed, in any meaningful way, to the re-empowering of the working-class.

Historically, “progressivism” represented the educated American middle-class’s answer to the brutally democratic working-class solutions developed by immigrant communities living in the United States’ largest cities during the Nineteenth Century. Dubbed “machine politics” by middle-class reformers affronted by its ruthless majoritarianism and unabashed clientism (which the reformers called corruption) progressivism successfully tamed the unruly beast that was American democracy, and made sure that working-class Americans kept their red crayoning safely inside the lines.

But, just because the kratos has been relocated in the hands of the more respectable sort of demos doesn’t mean that the corporate elites were willing to leave the political stage to those who clearly saw themselves as stepping nimbly between the Scylla of an angry working-class, and the Charybdis of Robber Baron Capitalism. Progressivism (a.k.a social-democracy) needs working-class votes if it is to wield political power, so, at least some of its measures must be to the obvious advantage of the whole population.

Not acceptable. As the capitalist elites discovered in the 1970s, even the middle-class version of democracy has a nasty habit of eventually encroaching on those parts of the system which capitalism has ruled off-limits. Give people of colour, or women, or the environment, enforceable rights and the next thing you know the cheeky so-and-sos will be wanting to use them.

What to do? Easy. Raise several well-equipped ideological divisions and throw them into the battle of ideas. From the early-1970s on, lobbying firms and think-tanks have grown like Topsy all across the capitalist world. Had the progressive middle-class not drawn its teeth and clipped its claws, an angry working-class might have risen to meet the Robber Baron’s challenge as it did in the 1890s, the 1930s and the 1970s. But, without the kratos of the unruly majority of the demos behind them, the paternalist strategies of the progressives were easily countered.

When the corporate elites discovered how intensely the working-class hated the educated middle-class that had shut them out of power, they must have known they couldn’t lose.

And, that’s the problem with democracy, isn’t it? It’s indivisible. Deny it to some, and you end up allowing its enemies to deny it to all.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project of Monday, 19 February 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.

So Little To Defend, So Much To Punish.

Weapon? Shield? Tool?: How will the majority of voters use their votes in the forthcoming General Election? As a weapon to punish their enemies? As a shield to protect them from their enemies? As a tool to build a better world? Given the febrile political temper of the times, only the bravest punters would put their money on the constructive option.

MOST OF US use our votes in one of three ways: as a weapon; as a shield; as a tool. With early voting commencing in a month’s time, the overwhelming majority of New Zealanders would appear to be preparing to use their vote as either a weapon or a shield. All the signs point to those intent upon weaponising their vote being the largest fraction of the electorate. The number intending to use their vote as shield against their enemies is, however, unlikely to be significantly smaller than that of the weaponisers. Sadly, only a tiny minority of voters will be brave and/or principled enough to cast their votes positively in 2023. This is not going to be a happy election.

It was never going to be easy for Labour to live up to the hopes and encouragement of the voters in 2020. Not since the joyful election of 1972 made Norman Kirk New Zealand’s twenty-ninth prime minister, and gave him a whopping parliamentary majority of 23 seats, had so many Kiwis used their votes constructively, as a tool. Not only were their ballots deployed as an enormous “Thank you, Jacinda!”, but many were also given to Labour as a way of facilitating the “transformation” which its leader had promised, but which Covid-19 had interrupted so dramatically.

Tragically, the Labour cabinet, caucus, and party organisation proved unequal to the challenge of using the tools which an astonishing 50.01 percent of the voting public had given them. Something strange and sinister appeared to overtake Jacinda Ardern, darkening her sunny political disposition. Her Cabinet was no help, and neither was her caucus. It was almost as if they were annoyed and/or affronted by the tools thrust into their hands. It was for them to set the agenda, not 1,443,545 presumptuous voters.

All of Labour’s team had failed to read the events of 2017-20 correctly. Most especially, they had failed to grasp that the success of their Covid response was based almost entirely on the state’s decisive intervention on behalf of the “Team of Five Million”. Those aligned to the ideologies of the Right knew exactly what they were looking at as the government seized control of the pandemic response. That’s why they were so furious. Allow the voters to see what a mobilised state could do for them and, inevitably, they would want more.

Painful though it may be to acknowledge, Labour’s ministers were as ill-disposed to keeping the state’s shoulder to the wheel as the Right. Rather than being inspired by the mass support for their Prime Minister and Party, they seemed terrified of it. Rhetoric was one thing, reality another. On the re-elected government’s agenda their was just one item: getting everything back to normal as quickly as possible.

In politics, executing such an unheralded handbrake-turn will always exact a high psychological price, and the Ardern-led government proved no exception. Working against the expectations of her supporters changed “Jacinda” – and not in a good way.

But, the political price incurred by Labour’s refusal to keep on moving forward was much, much higher. Hopes raised, and then dashed, will swiftly curdle into a witches’ brew of disappointment and fury. When next they enter the polling-booths, those who believe themselves betrayed by “Jabcinda” will wield their ballot papers like a butcher’s knife.

In doing so they will add their numbers to the roughly one-third of the electorate who have always wielded their votes as weapons against those who would upend what their “betters” still believe to be the natural order of things.

At the core of this army of nay-sayers are the inhabitants of rural and provincial New Zealand. These “Heartlanders” have always looked upon the cities as sinks of iniquity and havens for the undeserving poor. Every three years, National and Act supporters grind their teeth in fury as impoverished citizens, many of them brown, turn out in support of Labour’s redistributive policies – using their votes as shields against the threatened depredations of the Right.

In uneasy alliance with the Heartlanders are the wealthy citizens of the big cities. Although they live, safely sequestered from the poor and the brown, in the leafiest suburbs of the cities, it is more difficult for these citizens to weaponise their votes in the manner of the farmers and their small-town allies.

The people who work in their factories and warehouses, clean their offices, serve in their shops and fast-food joints, and build the nation’s infrastructure for them to make profits out of are, after all, people they see every day. Somewhere in the recesses of their social consciousness, they understand that the working-class is something their own class cannot do without. When things are going well, they may even be persuaded to help the workers. When things start going badly, however, or when – God rot them! – their employees start joining unions and taking their destiny into their own hands, that’s when the wealthy turn their ballot papers into pistols and start shooting.

It is the working-class voters who, most of all, yearn to use their votes in the way their grandparents and great-grandparents did, as tools to build a better world. Every three years they hope-against-hope that Labour will ask them to create something worth having with their votes, but election-after-election they are disappointed. Reluctantly, and without enthusiasm, they lift the protective shield of the franchise against the worst the Right can offer – keeping Labour viable solely out of fear of meeting something worse.

Labour, as the lesser of two evils, remains the workers’ choice. Even if, in 2023, it no longer represents the working-class who peopled its ranks in 1923. Labour, now, is the party of the people who teach the working-class; who take care of it when its sick; who keep it afloat when jobs are scarce and puts its worst casualties up in hotels when they have nowhere else to go. They’re the people who, when the kids of the working-class start breaking bad, defend them in court, write reports about them, give them counselling, and mange them when they’re released from prison. There are tens-of-thousands of these people: not quite bosses, but not quite workers either. The American sociologists, John and Barbara Ehrenreich, called them the “Professional-Managerial Class” – and they have made the labour and social-democratic parties of the world their own.

The problem with this intermediate class is that its top two priorities are: to preserve the institutions that employ them; and, to keep the power relationships within those institutions from changing in ways that threaten their status. These essentially conservative priorities make the Professional-Managerial Class extremely difficult to like. They may talk the talk of “progressive politics”, but they are far too risk averse to walk it. Indeed, they offer living proof of the early-twentieth century “muck-raking” American journalist, Upton Sinclair’s, famous quip: “It is very hard to make a man understand something, when his salary depends upon him not understanding it.”

In this election, the National Party has its knives out for the professionals and managers of the public service, so no one should be surprised to see them voting defensively for their own party. Labour’s problem, however, is that it has given far too many New Zealanders far too many good reasons for wanting to punish it.

Because, when all is said and done, Labour was the party which, in 2020, led half the country to the mountain-top, only to decide that if the promised land had no need of bosses, then it might also have no need for managers and professionals like themselves. Daunted by this terrifying prospect, they opted to proceed no further.

But you cannot show people the gates of heaven, and then turn around and go home. Not when there’s another election in three years’ time. Not when your party has ended up giving the New Zealand electorate so little to defend, and so much to punish.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 1 September 2023.

Progress, Or Restoration? Which Way For The Left?

God Given, Or Man Made? Historians might quibble that the “rights and freedoms” which a great many nineteenth century industrial workers (especially in the English-speaking world) believed their forefathers had enjoyed were more imaginary than real. But, for English socialists like William Morris and Oscar Wilde, the “Revolution” was, indeed, about a restoration of the social equilibrium and mutuality which many workers were convinced had characterised the pre-modern era.

YOU GOTTA LOVE the pseudonyms people come up with. “Pope Punctilious II”, for example, combines orthodoxy and accuracy, with just a hint of the nit-picker. Not a bad combination of talents to bring to the wild and woolly business of political analysis. The comment he appended to my recent Daily Blog post really set me thinking:

One beef with this article. Trotter claims the country’s current isn’t ‘progressive’, suggesting he’s still attached to a word which has become thoroughly disreputable. I wonder, do we need ‘progressive’ policies, or ‘restorative’ policies?

Progress or Restoration? That struck me as a particularly interesting question.

Does human progress actually have an end-point? Or, is it something that goes on forever? And, if it is continuous, then what will happen to us? If every aspect of the human experience is subject to improvement, then, surely, it is at least theoretically possible that the species will one day “progress” to a point where it becomes something else – something non-human? And is that really what most human-beings want?

A few years ago, I recall watching an animated propaganda film from the Soviet era. It anticipated the evolution of “Soviet Man” – a superhuman being capable of subduing all things to his will. Although it was clearly intended to be inspiring, the film struck me as horrific. Its Soviet makers defined super-humanity as the power to subordinate the whole material world (i.e. the planet) completely to Soviet Man’s progressive will. His monstrous machines consumed forests, straightened rivers, levelled mountains and drained seas. Nothing was impossible. The film ended with Soviet Man boarding the ultimate machine, an interstellar spacecraft. Off he went to spread his planet-consuming socialism across the universe.

Soviet Man reaches for the stars.

But, before all you conservative readers out there start shaking your heads knowingly and getting ready to tap out a comment identifying the above story as just one more example of the historical and moral bankruptcy of socialism, I would invite you to pause, and think.

How different, really, is the vision of those “progressive” Soviet animators from the vision of today’s charismatic billionaires? The Bransons, the Bezoses, the Musks: aware of this planet’s imminent descent into the doom-spiral predicted 50 years ago by the Club of Rome; haven’t they also succumbed to the fantasy of exporting their special brand of superhuman, hyper-capitalist, progressivism across the universe?

Is there a fatal flaw in progressivism?

As with most things, the answer lies in its beginnings. The post upon which Pope Punctilious II was commenting, identified the emerging social-liberal revolution as the ideological defence mechanism of the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC). Tellingly, the “discoverers” of the PMC, American academics Barbara and John Ehrenreich, linked its rise to the related and simultaneous rise of the so-called “Progressive” movement in the United States:

The generation entering managerial and professional roles between 1890 and 1920 consciously grasped the roles which they had to play. They understood that their own self-interest was bound up in reforming capitalism, and they articulated their understanding far more persistently and clearly than did the capitalist class itself. The role of the emerging PMC, as they saw it, was to mediate the basic class conflict of capitalist society and create a ‘rational’ reproducible social order […..] ‘Class harmony’ was the stated goal of many outstanding PMC spokespeople, and to many in the capitalist class as well, it was clear that ‘professionals’ could be more effective in the long run than Pinkertons [professional strike-breakers].

So, Progressivism – far from being a simple synonym for “socialism” – was actually a way of entrenching the principles, and modernising the practices, of capitalism.

In the professional opinion of PMC reformers, the raucous and rowdy conduct of American democracy, with its “machine politicians” and their disreputable knack for “delivering”, in the most unprofessional (not to say corrupt) fashion, the big city, mostly working-class, immigrant vote, needed to be reduced to something altogether more manageable. Democracy, the Progressives argued, was much too important to be left to the people.

The “primary” system of winnowing candidates; the recall of governors; the placing of “propositions” on the ballot-paper: all of these were Progressive initiatives aimed at breaking the power of party caucuses, and curbing the influence of the men who wheeled and dealed in smoke-filled rooms.

New Zealand’s own progressives, gathered in the Liberal Party, were no less dedicated to professionalising capitalism than their American counterparts. New Zealand’s arbitration-based system of industrial relations was intended to obviate the need for union militancy. The Liberals may have attracted working-class voters, but socialists they most emphatically were not!

If the PMC was busy making plans for the proletariat’s own good, what ideas were driving the workers themselves? Were they “progressives” too? Or, were they actually more inspired by the notion of restoring to ordinary working people the independence and autonomy which they fervently believed to be the birthright of all “freeborn” human-beings.

Historians might quibble that the “rights and freedoms” which a great many nineteenth century industrial workers (especially in the English-speaking world) believed their forefathers had enjoyed were more imaginary than real. But, for English socialists like William Morris and Oscar Wilde, the “Revolution” was, indeed, about a restoration of the social equilibrium and mutuality which many workers were convinced had characterised the pre-modern era. Morris’s focus on traditional craftsmanship, and his horror of the cheap, machine-produced, commodities pouring out of William Blake’s “dark satanic mills”, stands in sharp contrast to the “scientific socialism” of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

It is no accident that the vast working-class crowd which gathered outside Transport House (headquarters of the British Labour Party) to celebrate their historic electoral victory in 1945 did not sing The Internationale, or The Red Flag, but William Blake’s Jerusalem. And the words of Blake’s great poem do, indeed, have more about them of Pope Punctilious II’s “restorative” politics than anything today’s “progressive” politicians would own up to:

Bring me my bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire.

I shall not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 16 December 2021.

New Zealand The Way THEY Deserve It.

Rage, Rage, And The Crying Of The Right: Retributive populism is founded on the principle that the past was better than the present: and that unless there is a strong and unapologetic reassertion of the values and policies that dignified the past, then the nation’s steady decline will persist into the future. The truth or otherwise of this core populist assertion is irrelevant since the voters most likely to respond positively to it are aggressively unwilling to entertain anything in the way of counter-arguments. Evidence is for snobs. Real people are guided by their emotions.

THE NATIONAL PARTY is to be pitied. Those within its ranks whose personal political philosophies match the zeitgeist are inadequate to the task of expressing it. While the handful of genuinely talented politicians National possesses have convinced themselves that power can only be reclaimed by competing fiercely with Labour for the right to implement the same policies. This anything-she-can-do-we-can-do-better strategy is unlikely to succeed. If New Zealanders are happy with a cautious liberal party, committed to incremental reform, then why would they exchange Jacinda Ardern for Judith Collins, or Chris Bishop, for that matter?

If National wishes to remove Labour from office it must be willing to embrace the anger and vengefulness of all those who have not found a physical and/or spiritual place to call ‘home’ in 2020s New Zealand. This will require the party to cease pretending that the policies of the 1980s and 90s can somehow be rehabilitated and set to work with the slightest prospect of success. They can’t. Like the rest of the world, New Zealand is fast becoming ripe for retributive populism. Not so much “New Zealand the way YOU want it” as “New Zealand the way THEY deserve it”.

This is the populism of Victor Orban’s Fidenz Party, Poland’s Law & Justice Party and, less successfully, of Donald Trump’s Republican Party. It is founded on the principle that the past was better than the present: and that unless there is a strong and unapologetic reassertion of the values and policies that dignified the past, then the nation’s steady decline will persist into the future. The truth or otherwise of this core populist assertion is irrelevant since the voters most likely to respond positively to it are aggressively unwilling to entertain anything in the way of counter-arguments. Evidence is for snobs. Real people are guided by their emotions.

ALL OVER THE WESTERN WORLD there has been an explosion of what the German dissident philosopher, Rudolf Bahro, called “surplus consciousness”. In essence, advanced industrial societies have a tendency to impart more knowledge than they can usefully exploit. Increasingly, those who have passed through all the stages of education: primary, secondary and tertiary; are left knowing much more than they can sell.

In the former socialist states of Eastern Europe, this surplus consciousness manifested itself in movements determined to open up political, social and economic space for the highly educated. In late-capitalist societies, the possessors of surplus consciousness are used to manage and police those poorly educated citizens for whom the globalised economy is, increasingly, reserving only intermittent and poorly-paid employment. According to sociologist Beverly Burris, the role of this new Professional Managerial Class (PMC) is “objectively antagonistic to the working-class”, and that its “most essential and general function is … the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.”

In the past, political parties dedicated to the smooth functioning of the capitalist system would have looked upon the emerging PMC as an important ally. The unceasing expansion of the PMC in both the public and private sectors of the economy, however, has given right-wing political thinkers cause to question the long-term political trajectory of the PMC. In the process of reproducing capitalist culture and class relations, these highly-educated servants of the system are also radically changing it. Capitalism, itself, is fast developing its own surplus consciousness. Far from integrating workers ever more closely into the capitalist system, the changes demanded by the PMC are alienating them from it.

A globalised capitalist system may derive no benefit from racist, sexist and anti-LGBTQI prejudice: indeed these thought systems constitute a barrier to its smooth functioning. At the level of the nation sate, however, the rational altruism of the PMC runs counter to just about every single one of the social traditions that have shaped its history.

NEW ZEALAND, for instance, is a nation state founded upon the deliberate subjugation and dispossession of the indigenous Maori. Racism is in its bones. New Zealand’s emphatically British cultural traditions constitute the bedrock of its Pakeha citizens’ identity. The country’s deeply-ingrained settler consciousness: sternly individualistic; aggressively heterosexual; proudly egalitarian; is not even remotely sympathetic to the politics of identity out of which a new multicultural “Aotearoa” is being fashioned. Well below the official radar, an ethno-nationalist backlash is, almost certainly, gathering force.

Labour’s current grip on the electoral loyalty of a plurality of the Pakeha working-class, as well as comfortable majorities of the Brown working-class and New Zealand’s own PMC, gives the party a huge advantage over National. Its ideological commitment to feminism, anti-racism and gender equality is perfectly congruent with its broader role as the principal facilitator of globalised capitalism within the New Zealand political system. If National is entertaining hopes of supplanting Labour in that role, then someone should “tell them they’re dreaming!”

The National Party’s only real hope of shattering the fast-setting concrete of Labour’s electoral hegemony is to take to it with the jackhammer of right-wing populism. What Labour and its media allies in the PMC will instantly decry as racism, sexism and homophobia, National will characterise as the bedrock values upon which New Zealand was founded, thereby announcing to all those who feel put-upon by the PMC and its “woke” avant-garde that the National Party has their back.

To make this realignment work, National politicians will have to surrender their disdain for the nation’s underachievers. Like Donald Trump, they are going to have to learn to “love the poorly educated”. They are also going to have to learn how to disengage from rational discussion with “mainstream” journalists. Aggressive repetition of a few key slogans – and a few key falsehoods – is all that’s required of right-wing populist politicians. And if they can master the art of representing leading journalists as purveyors of “fake news” as well as dangerously biased “enemies of the people”, then so much the better.

The other habit National will have to lose is its habit of mouthing neoliberal platitudes. If the workers want their jobs protected by tariffs, then tariffs they must have. If the underclass needs bigger benefits, then implement the WEAG Report in full. If the housing crisis requires an all-out effort by the state to build more homes, then resurrect the Ministry of Works and start building them. If red-blooded Kiwi blokes are worried that climate change will require them to give up their SUVs and utes, then proclaim the global warming a hoax. Tell conservative Kiwis what Dick Cheney told conservative Americans: that their way of life is “non-negotiable”.

It won’t be pretty: right-wing populism seldom is. It won’t bring New Zealanders together: but that’s not the point. To win back power, National must make itself the champion of every person who senses the old certainties crumbling beneath their feet. Every Baby Boomer who feels too old to change. Every Millennial who despairs of ever owning their own home. Every Maori resentful of being looked down on because she can’t speak te reo, and who just wants a fair crack at the sort of life the Pakehas enjoy for herself and her kids. Every factory worker offended by the salaries his union pays middle-class kids fresh out of university to tell him he needs to work on his “white male privilege”.

The zeitgeist of the 2020s is rage: suppressed, inchoate, stomach-churning and tongue-tying. Rage at the loss of, well, you name it. And that’s the trick, National: to name it. But, before you try, you need to get mad. Really, really mad.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 1 April 2021.

2021 Will Be About Brown Poverty And White Guilt.

Whose Priorities? If Labour MPs, under pressure from guilt-ridden white radicals, opt to offer legislative validation to the most divisive elements of the so-called “Culture Wars”, then the broad social unity needed to buttress a colour-blind programme of social uplift will be undermined. The war against poverty and homelessness will be fatally compromised by the war of the woke against the un-woke.

IN THE COMING YEAR New Zealand politics will be driven by two inter-related forces: brown poverty and white guilt. Jacinda Ardern’s government will not be given a choice on the issue of brown poverty. Dealing with white guilt, however, will be very much a matter of opting to behave wisely or foolishly. It remains to be seen whether Labour possesses the wisdom to not act like a fool.

The capital city rumour mills have recently been grinding out an intriguing story involving a head-on stoush between Grant Robertson and Willie Jackson. It seems that Robertson carelessly reassured a group of Treasury bureaucrats that spending across all portfolios would be strictly constrained for the foreseeable future. Grant’s big mistake was to say this in front of the Maori Development Minister.

As a general rule, ministers do not contradict each other in front of their departmental advisers. As Don Corleone admonished his eldest son, Sonny, in The Godfather, it is most unwise to display the slightest disunity in front of anybody other than “family” members. Apparently (and understandably) Willie called BS on that – openly contradicting Grant’s fiscal reassurances, at least as far as spending on Maori issues was concerned.

The ensuing barney was, reportedly, so intense that the whole dispute was handed-up to Jacinda for resolution. The fact that Willie is still in his post strongly suggests that if the rumour about this epic ministerial battle is true, then Grant did not win it.

What is indisputable about the current predicament of Maori New Zealanders is that if it is allowed to worsen, then some sort of explosion is likely to result. Poverty and homelessness are not improving with anything like the rapidity required to head-off major disturbances in the most deprived “brown” suburbs. One has only to read the Maori Party MP for Waiariki, Rawiri Waititi’s, maiden speech to appreciate how angry Maori are becoming:

I refuse to allow my tamariki or my mokopuna to one day sit in the same seat asking the same question. We will no longer accept this approach, as it allows the State to continue to feast on the dysfunction that it has created amongst our people. We will no longer accept that the State continues to fund itself every year to allow Oranga Tamariki to steal more of our babies, a justice system to lock up more of our people, a welfare system that keeps my people dependent and poor, an education system that keeps my people dumb, a health system that keeps my people sick, and a housing system that keeps my people homeless. This has to stop.

Willie Jackson, with his longstanding and very close ties to urban Maori, knows that if he and Labour’s Maori caucus do not produce meaningful progress on the failings enumerated by Waititi, then the Maori Party will be quick to exploit their failure. That’s why Jackson is unwilling to keep silent about the prospect of an austerity budget. If they are to make a real dent in poverty and homelessness, then he and his Maori colleagues are going to need money – lots and lots of money.

Almost against its will, Ardern’s government is going to have to engage in massive amounts of public spending. What’s more, it will not be politically acceptable for this mobilisation of state resources to be directed solely at Maori communities. Working-class Pakeha, Pasifika and other immigrant families will have to be offered the same fiscal support. Jacinda and her colleagues are going to have to become socialists in spite of themselves!

It is at this point that the so-called “woke” elements of the Professional & Managerial Class (PMC) will have to choose whether or not to make, or break, the Ardern government. This includes members of the PMC inside Labour’s caucus, as well as those outside it. If Labour MPs, under pressure from guilt-ridden white radicals, opt to offer legislative validation to the most divisive elements of the so-called “Culture Wars”, then the broad social unity needed to buttress a colour-blind programme of social uplift will be undermined. The war against poverty and homelessness will be fatally compromised by the war of the woke against the un-woke.

Sadly, there is a real possibility that the PMC will do exactly this. So great is its guilty sense of having been born with far too many advantages, and so certain is it that Pakeha workers, denied its guiding hand, will never be able to understand the true extent of their “privilege”, the PMC is perfectly capable of deciding that homelessness and poverty are second-order issues. Matters to be addressed only after the Pakeha working-class has proved itself worthy of enjoying the socially integrative benefits of warm, dry, affordable houses and well-paying jobs.

The woke are very big supporters of “intersectionality” – the concept of fighting all the ills of society simultaneously, rather than “privileging” one form of injustice over another. It’s a concept that conflicts fundamentally with the idea of politics being all about the ordering of priorities. What is often called “the art of the possible”. With Labour’s Maori caucus prioritising action on poverty, housing, education, justice and health, about the best thing the PMC’s woke intersectionalists could do to assist the Ardern government, and working-class people of all ethnicities and genders, is maintain a solidaristic silence.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 24 December 2020.

A Caucus Of Velvet Gloves.

Uniformly Diverse: There is one very simple reason why this government, comprised overwhelmingly of members of the Professional-Managerial Class, will find it almost impossible to understand what the bottom half of New Zealand society needs: because it is supremely confident that it already does.

NEW ZEALAND now boasts one of the most diverse parliaments on the planet. In terms of gender, ethnicity and sexuality, the governing Labour Party’s caucus, in particular, bears testimony to the work of many progressive politicians, over many years, to transform “diversity” from a pious ideological aspiration into a flesh-and-blood political fact. Quite an achievement.

But, it is also an achievement fraught with danger. Because, as Bryce Edwards points out in his recent Guardian article, the Labour Party’s diversity does not extend to class. The fact is that New Zealand has a parliament – and a government – drawn overwhelmingly from the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC). The perils of this social monoculture should be obvious. It can only raise a formidable barrier to understanding – and hence addressing – the needs of those living in the bottom half of New Zealand society.

This is not simply a problem founded on ignorance: a case of Labour not knowing what it doesn’t know about life in the Otaras and Flaxmeres of New Zealand. It’s much worse than that.

The PMC is distinguished by the role it plays in mediating Capitalism’s relationship with its most injured victims. Without the PMC army of lawyers, probation officers, social workers, health professionals, academics, teachers, journalists and “communications specialists” to extinguish the fires ignited constantly by economic exploitation and social exclusion, the whole of capitalist society would soon be engulfed in flames.

The PMC is what you create when the price of relying exclusively upon police officers, judges, jailers and soldiers to keep the bottom half under control grows too high. It’s the velvet glove that Capitalism pulls on to hide and soften its iron fist. For this subterfuge to work, however, the PMC has to believe that it knows much better than Capitalism’s casualties what’s good for them. There is one very simple reason why a government comprised overwhelmingly of members of the PMC will find it almost impossible to understand what the bottom half of New Zealand society needs: because it is supremely confident that it already does.

Nowhere has this “we know best” attitude been on display more clearly than in Oranga Tamariki. A more compelling example of the PMC’s inability to comprehend the sheer scale of its failure is hard to imagine. The idea that the “lower orders” might actually have a better grasp of what is needed to keep their children safe is simply inconceivable to the bureaucrats set in authority over them. These people are the “problem” – so how could they possibly be included in the search for solutions?

One has only to watch Melanie Reid’s harrowing Newsroom video to see the PMC at work. The employees of Oranga Tamariki quite literally put themselves between the victim and the Police – not to protect the young Maori mother, but to do everything possible to ensure that the “uplifting” of her child is effected without recourse to actual force.

The PMC’s stock-in-trade is institutional violence. The injuries it inflicts may be no less severe, but they are certainly more easily hidden than those caused by physical violence. For Capitalism, internal bleeding is always preferable to blood on the streets.

Those Labour supporters feeling confused and distressed by the Government’s apparent deafness to the cries of need arising from the poorest and most exploited New Zealanders should understand that when it comes to Labour’s caucus that deafness is a feature, not a bug. Alert Labour MPs to overt displays of misogyny, white supremacy, anti-Islamic prejudice and/or homophobia, and watch them spring into action. These are injustices that Capitalism is only too happy to help progressive politicians eradicate. Socio-economic injustices, however, are a different matter.

Any serious attempt to eradicate these wrongs would constitute a direct challenge to the capitalist system as a whole, and since the PMC looks upon capitalism as the most effective and efficient system for allocating resources that humankind has so far developed, undermining its operation in any serious way would be considered irrational. While it is perfectly acceptable to help those “doing it hard” to respond to capitalism’s needs, expecting capitalism to respond to their needs (in any meaningful way) is politically unrealistic.

The Ministry of Social Development (the clue to its mission is in the name!) will organise job clubs and offer help with beneficiaries’ CVs, but it will not pay a benefit which ensures them a secure and dignified existence. What incentive would there be to kowtow to the boss if, secure in the knowledge that they could live easily on the unemployment benefit until a better opportunity came along, employees felt free to tell employers where to stick their lousy jobs? For capitalism to work, so must the rest of us, at wages and under conditions set by the bosses – not the workers. Employees who no longer fear the sack are capitalism’s worst nightmare.

The members of Labour’s parliamentary caucus – the largest ever – will undoubtedly bridle at the very suggestion that they belong to a class made up of capitalism’s little helpers. Many will, no doubt, wax eloquent about their working-class origins, or the years they spent on the DPB. Not the point. The effectiveness of the PMC is, in large measure, guaranteed by so many of its members’ historical proximity to poverty. Being able to say: “I know what you’re going through, I’ve been where you are.”, makes the PMC’s advice and solutions all the more credible. After all, if these important people got up and away from the shitty world in which the poor remain trapped, then maybe they can too.

This is, of course, capitalism’s oldest and most persuasive narrative: from rags to riches (or, at least, from a benefit to a six-figure salary). Except of course, the story is only ever about individual – not collective – emancipation. Capitalism can cope with people moving from rags to riches one at a time; but not all at once. Celebrating identities over which we have no control (ethnicity, gender, sexuality) poses no threat to the institutions that keep the capitalist system on its feet. Telling people that they have the collective power to build a new world, on new foundations, does.

I, for one, would be delighted to hear capitalism’s little helpers in the Labour caucus giving voice to such dangerous ideas. I am much more likely, however, to hear them bragging about their caucus being, at last, a true reflection of New Zealand society. And if, by that, they mean Labour’s team faithfully reflects the forces preventing New Zealand society from becoming a fairer and more compassionate society, then I can only agree.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 26 November 2020.

Making The Tradies Pay.

Crunching The Numbers: On the subject of the Capital Gains Tax, it is simply not sufficient to assert that all income is the same and, therefore, must be taxed the same. Those who say this ignore the fact that, as RNZ’s Guyon Espiner so rightly observed, not all income is made the same. The working life of the small business owner is very different from that of wage and salary earners. In addition to plying their trade and/or providing their service, they are saddled with a great many other responsibilities.

IT’S A CLASS WAR – of a most unusual kind. The looming battle over Labour’s Capital Gains Tax (CGT) pits a pampered and overpaid Professional and Managerial Class (PMC) against the constantly expanding class of tradespeople, service providers and independent contractors: the tens-of-thousands of small businesspeople whose daily labours continue to make, move and mend this country.

The PMC is determined to protect its cosy position in New Zealand society by making sure that any expansion of the state’s revenues is secured by taxing something other than their salaries.

They have been made aware of the rapidly rising incomes of the “tradies”. How could they not, with their brand new SUVs clogging the streets outside the local school every morning and afternoon? What’s more, they strongly suspect that all this new-found wealth is not being taxed in the same way that their incomes are taxed. They may not know much about running a business that isn’t funded by someone else’s money, but they’re pretty sure these nouveaux riche boofheads are dab hands at short-changing the IRD.

Clearly, these upstarts need to be taxed at the same rate as themselves – 33 cents in the dollar. And because, as the owners of small businesses, they can get away with paying themselves ludicrously low wages, they must be made to hand over to the IRD one-third of the currently tax-free capital gains they make when they sell their businesses.

They’ll squeal and moan, of course, but a CGT is by far the fairest fiscal solution. Capital gain is a form of income – and all income must be taxed. Besides, it’s just not right that people with nothing more than a trade certificate (or whatever they call it) and often with no qualifications whatsoever, should be making more money than someone who spent four or five years at a university getting properly qualified. A university, mind you, not a dreary polytechnic tucked away in some provincial hell-hole like Wanganui or Invercargill!

But simply saying that all income is the same, and must be taxed the same, ignores the fact that, as RNZ’s Guyon Espiner so rightly observed, not all income is made the same.

The impressively credentialled members of the PMC, large numbers of whom are employed by the state, turn up for work every day and are paid every fortnight. All the necessary deductions for tax and ACC have been taken care of by their employer. If they’re teachers, nurses, social-workers, or just plain, common-or-garden civil servants, there’s a very high probability they’ll be members of a union. Regular pay-rises and improved working conditions are expected – and delivered.

Life for the small business owner is very different. In addition to plying their trade and/or providing their service, they are saddled with a great many other responsibilities. They have to take care of their own tax payments – as well as the tax payments of any staff they may employ. Then there’s Kiwisaver and ACC payments to sort out. They must conform to the provisions of OSH legislation and deal with the infernal complexities of the RMA. For many, being able to pay their bills depends upon other people paying theirs – and getting some debtors to cough-up can be a nightmare.

So, Guyon is right. Not all income is made the same. Which is why not all income is taxed the same.

Which leaves the PMC with a problem. They are only too aware of the need for increased government spending on health, housing, education and the environment. After all, so many of their jobs are about providing these public goods. On the other hand, they have a lifestyle to maintain; overseas trips to pay for; kids to finance into university and home ownership. Yes, their salaries may be large – but they’re fully extended. They are not keen on paying higher income tax. Not keen at all.

It might not be so bad if all these tradies; these restaurateurs; these independent contractors were caring and responsible citizens. But dammit! What’s with all these monster SUVs? Haven’t they heard of global warming? And the things they say! Honestly, it borders on hate speech. Sexists, racists, homophobes: the whole kit and kaboodle. To call them “deplorables” would be to seriously understate the problem. And then they get to retire with a cool million bucks – tax-free.

No bloody way!

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 12 April 2019.

The “Over-65 Vote” May Be “Funkier” That National Expects.

We Didn't Die Before We Grew Old: It is sobering to realise that by 2020 roughly half of the Baby Boom Generation will be drawing a pension. The “Over-65 Vote” will no longer be composed overwhelmingly of what Colin James dubbed “The RSA Generation”. More and more of these older voters will cherish youthful memories of sex, drugs and rock-n-roll.

PICTURE THIS. It’s a just a few weeks before the 2020 general election and social media is smoking. A superb piece of digital fakery has the National Party leader, Simon Bridges, inhaling enthusiastically. Over a Pink Floydesque soundtrack, Bridges exhales an impressive cloud of marijuana smoke. “My party is opposed to legalising pot” he explains, grinning broadly and winking knowingly. “But, if the people of New Zealand vote yes to dope in the forthcoming referendum, then a new National Party government will honour their decision and end cannabis prohibition within its first 100 days.” The clip ends with a rather glassy-eyed Bridges flashing his viewers the peace sign. The video’s tag line flashes up on the screen: Simon says, VOTE YES – AND NATIONAL.

Now, the prospect of a “funky” National Party mobilising the “Head Vote” will no doubt  strike many readers as a most unlikely proposition. For a start, the staunchly conservative Mr Bridges would certainly not take kindly to being portrayed as some sort of peace, love and mungbeans hippie. Less certain, however, is whether his campaign team would be all that bothered by such a clever piece of guerrilla advertising. Not all fake news is bad news.

It is, similarly, important to realise that by 2020 roughly half of the Baby Boom Generation will be drawing a pension. The “Over-65 Vote” will no longer be composed overwhelmingly of what Colin James dubbed “The RSA Generation”.

More and more of these older voters will cherish youthful memories of sex, drugs and rock-n-roll.

On a darker note, their personal experience will have confirmed over and over again the brute reality that alcohol is capable of inflicting immeasurably more harm on families, friends and workmates than cannabis sativa.

Their children will point out the absurdity of preserving the market for increasingly deadly iterations of synthetic cannabis by prohibiting the cultivation and use of the real thing – a substance with no known fatalities to its credit.

The idea that the careers of their grandchildren may be jeopardised by engaging in what is, essentially, a harmless habit, will fill them with a mixture of exasperation and dread.

What’s more, as the Baby Boomers’ bodies begin to fail them and the aches and pains of old age make themselves known with ever-increasing intensity, the analgesic and stress-relieving qualities of cannabis will recommend themselves with ever-increasing force. Why should the law be interested in the consumption of a slice of hashish-infused chocolate-cake to relieve arthritis?

These are the considerations that National’s campaign strategists will be inviting Simon Bridges and his conservative colleagues to consider. Active Christian worship is now very much a minority sport. Likewise the misogyny and homophobia of those involuntarily celibate keyboard warriors who daily defile the Internet. The overwhelming majority of New Zealanders are men and women of good will and good humour. Those responsible for developing National’s election manifesto would do well to remember that.

Good will and good humour does not, however, signal soft-headedness. Sixty-five years and more on this earth has a habit of exposing the weaknesses of youthful propositions concerning human nature. Monty Python mercilessly satirised the notion that all individual failings could be laid at the door of “Society” by offering to “book them too”.

The explanation for the rock-solid character of National’s massive electoral support owes a great deal to older New Zealanders’ reluctant acceptance that many of the wounds which their less fortunate fellow citizens are expecting them to heal have almost certainly been self-inflicted. For the past forty years, doubt has been growing steadily in “Middle New Zealand” about the Welfare State’s capacity to improve the lives of either its “clients” or the society in which they live.

Bill English recognised this growing doubt and attempted to address it by means of his “Social Investment” initiatives. Much more work on these is required before they are ready to be rolled-out as the replacement for the First Labour Government’s “Social Security” model. There is, however, the whiff of the future about English’s ideas, so, if Simon Bridges is as wise as he is ambitious, then social investment will be the project into which he and his caucus colleagues hurl themselves in the run-up to 2020.

Bridges simple message to Middle New Zealand could be: “National’s not hard-hearted – just clear-headed”.

Except, of course, when it’s stoned.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 3 August 2018.

Capitalism's Saviours: The Professional-Managerial Class.

"Hi! We're from the Professional-Managerial Class, and we're here to help!" The PMC downgraded the common experiences of economic exploitation which had formerly bound the Left together, supplanting them with exploitation narratives grounded in the experiences of race, gender and sexuality. Capitalism doesn’t oppress humanity, went the PMC’s argument, racism, sexism and homophobia do.

 

BARBARA AND JOHN EHRENREICH spotted the looming disaster on the Left nearly 40 years ago. This was an impressive achievement given the temper of the times. For right-wingers, the 1970s were a decade of dread. They feared that the Left was on the cusp of an irreversible victory. They would have been delighted to learn that their ideological foes faced disaster, but they would have struggled to identify the vector of their demise.
 

But the Ehrenreichs knew what it was. They had even given it a name: “The Professional-Managerial Class.” (PMC)
 

In the rather leaden Marxian prose then in vogue, the Ehrenreichs defined the PMC as “consisting of salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labour may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.”
 

In slightly less daunting language: the role of the PMC was to explain and justify the workings of capitalism to everyone who was not a capitalist, a professional, or a manager.
 

Who were they talking about? Well, in addition to the more obvious groups “hidden within the processes of production” i.e. “middle-level administrators and managers, engineers and other technical workers”, the Ehrenreichs controversially nominated “workers who are directly concerned with social control or with the production and propagation of ideology”. These they identified as “teachers, social workers, psychologists, entertainers, writers of advertising copy and TV scripts”.
 

Now, if you’re thinking: “Hey, that sounds like a description of the membership of the Labour Party and/or The Greens!” Well then, take a bow, because you have grasped the essence of the Ehrenreichs’ troublesome prophecy.
 

The PMC was already on the rise politically when the Ehrenreichs’ seminal paper was published in 1979. Its impact was clearly visible in the Democratic Party where a new generation of liberal politicians were ruthlessly marginalising the defenders of Roosevelt’s New Deal in preparation for the Carter Administration’s turn towards the “monetarist” ideas of the right-wing economist Milton Friedman.
 

The “turn” in the United Kingdom had come even earlier, in 1976, when the Labour prime minister of the time, Jim Callaghan, told his stony-faced party conference:
 

“We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession, and increase employ­ment by cutting taxes and boosting Government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists, and that in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion since the war by injecting a bigger dose of infla­tion into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment as the next step.”
 

If Callaghan’s pronouncement prompts the thought: “But that sounds just like the sort of thing David Lange and Roger Douglas used to say!” Then, once again, take a bow.
 

The institutions that Callaghan’s and Carter’s little helpers were most concerned to rein-in were the trade unions. Organised labour represented a dangerously independent repository of economic, political, social, and, most crucially, class power. While they persisted there was always the worrying potential for explanations and justifications unfavourable to the “reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.”
 

By the 1970s, trade unions in Scandinavia and the United Kingdom had even begun to construct practical alternatives to the capitalist way of doing things. The arguments of class solidarity and collective action were acquiring an unprecedented degree of persuasiveness.
 

The policies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan eventually put paid to the union threat. But the iron fist of neoliberalism urgently needed covering with a velvet glove.
 

The PMC was there to take on the task. They downgraded the common experiences of economic exploitation which had formerly bound the Left together, supplanting them with exploitation narratives grounded in the experiences of race, gender and sexuality. Capitalism doesn’t oppress humanity, went the PMC’s argument, racism, sexism and homophobia do. Eliminating these evils requires education, training and a willingness to embrace cultural diversity. A task far beyond the capacity of the working-class Left.
 

The Ehrenreichs knew how this would end. With the politics of identity and the politics of class in conflict – and left-wing unity shattered. The PMC and the working-class could have confronted the capitalists over who should own and control collectively created wealth. Instead, they confronted each other over the barricades of knowledge, skills and culture.
 

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, 17 February 2017.