Orbiting A Dying Sun?

A Dying Sun?  Perhaps one hundred years of Labour is enough.

 

AS THE OLD YEAR shuffles towards the wings of the political stage, the Infant Year arrives garlanded with many questions. For those who position themselves on the left of the political spectrum, the biggest of these questions concerns the future of the Labour Party.

 

Love it, or hate it, Labour is the sun around which all the other progressive parties and institutions of New Zealand’s political life must orbit. It’s gravitational pull being inescapable, Labour’s fate, and the fate of the Left in general, are inseparable.

 

Significantly, 2016 marks the centenary of Labour’s birth.

 

In July 1916, in the midst of a monstrous war whose gargantuan appetite had already consumed thousands of young New Zealand lives, representatives of the “democratic public” arrived in Wellington determined that Government plans to conscript men must be accompanied by plans to conscript wealth. The delegates were also seized by the effects of the hitherto all-conquering Liberal Party’s inability to any longer honour its mandate as the democratic public’s principal standard-bearer. Progressive New Zealand was in the mood for something new.

 

The temptation to compare and contrast the Labour Party of 1916 with the Labour Party of 2016 is irresistible. And, no matter how hard the party’s supporters try to convince progressive voters that the opposite is true, it is not an exercise from which Labour emerges with any credit. In 1916, Labour was led by heroes. One hundred years on, perhaps predictably, it is led by colourless political careerists: men and women lacking the character, courage and creative intelligence to be genuine revolutionaries – or even effective reformers.

 

Labour in 2016 is a party dominated by Members of Parliament who seem to be simply waiting their turn to form a government. Labour’s view of politics is, at best, instrumental. Her advisers argue that if the voting public can no longer be inspired (a proposition with which they heartily concur) then it must be manipulated. Cynicism on this scale, however, is only ever successful when backed-up by copious quantities of cash – and the Labour Party of 2016 is broke.

 

Accordingly, about the only thing 2016 has in common with 1916 is the growing sense among progressive voters – the democratic public – that the hitherto all-conquering Labour Party has lost its way.

 

International trends in progressive politics provide considerable encouragement for this point of view. In Europe and the United States there is growing evidence of the emergence of a new progressive paradigm: one which takes as its starting point the necessity of challenging and defeating the dominant neoliberal worldview.

 

2015 began with the stunning electoral victory of the radically left-wing Syriza in Greece, and ended with the much-better-than-expected showing of the equally radical Podemos in Spain’s general election. In September, to the consternation of just about everyone, the radical leftist, Jeremy Corbyn, was elected Leader of the British Labour Party. One month later, the first Democratic Party presidential candidates’ debate in Las Vegas was dominated by the self-proclaimed “Democratic Socialist”, Senator Bernie Sanders, and an at least rhetorically radicalised Hilary Clinton – who promised, incongruously, to “save Capitalism from itself”.

 

Not that the news has been all good for the Left. Syriza’s, and by democratic extension, the Greek people’s, brutally enforced submission to the European Union’s financial diktats offers a terrifying object lesson about the very real dangers inherent in challenging the neoliberal world order. As does the vitriol directed against Jeremy Corbyn, not only by his Tory opponents and the right-wing press, but also by members of his own Labour caucus!

 

Mention Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders, Syriza or Podemos to the New Zealand Labour Party, however, and you will be met with a mixture of impatience and hostility. As if New Zealand is in any way comparable with the UK, the USA, or Europe! As if this country has ever before fallen victim to political trends originating in these utterly alien cultures!

 

The year following the Labour Party’s foundation, revolution erupted across the Russian Empire. Labour’s leaders in New Zealand were excited, enthralled and inspired. That dour Scot, Peter Fraser, who was later to become New Zealand’s 24th Prime Minister, proudly proclaimed that: “If I was in Russia, I’d be a Bolshevik!”

 

Can anyone imagine Andrew Little proclaiming: “If I was in Greece, I’d be a member of Syriza!”

 

Perhaps one hundred years of Labour is enough?

 

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 Saturday, 2 January 2016.

Democracy Triumphs - Long Live Greece!

 

The Greek Interior Ministry's official projection of the Referendum Result has just been released:

 

Yes: 39 %

No: 61%

 

 

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

 

Can Democracy Save The Greeks?

Ode To Joy! Syriza supporters cheer as their party's victory is announced, But will the people of Greece be able to successfully reoccupy the democratic institutions emptied out by the twin evils of neoliberalism and austerity?

 

GREECE, the birthplace of democracy, is now the test of whether democratic governments still possess the power to effect meaningful change. If it passes the test, then the election of the left-wing Syriza Party, on 26 January 2015, will mark the beginning of the end of the 30-year neoliberal experiment. But, if it fails, then the growing perception that democracy has become an empty shell, incapable of delivering anything more than more of the same, will harden – not only in Greece, but across the whole world.

 

There are those who suggest that, when it comes to democracy, the neoliberal doctrines of the political class have acted like a neutron bomb. For those unfamiliar with the term, the neutron bomb was one of the Cold War’s most abhorrent creations. It’s great “selling point” was that its detonation, while killing human-beings by the million, would leave key infrastructure intact. Ready and waiting, following a suitable interval, for occupation and use by the “victors”.

 

According to the neutron bomb metaphor, neoliberalism has eliminated the vital human elements of our democratic system. The mass participation in political life for which New Zealand was justly famous (roughly a tenth of our adult population once belonged to a political party and the numbers voting frequently exceeded 90 percent of registered electors) has dwindled dramatically, reducing our democratic institutions to empty, echoing shells. The awful uniformity, both in terms of the political choices on offer, and the politicians offering them, is thus explained.

 

The Syriza Party’s stunning victory in the Greek general election is significant precisely because it has allowed the Greek people to re-occupy their country’s democratic infrastructure. The resulting surge of hope that has swept through the Greek population – evident in the highly emotional responses of ordinary Greek citizens interviewed on the streets of Athens by the world’s bemused media – is at once the new Prime Minister’s, Alexis Tsipras’, greatest asset and the source of his greatest vulnerability.

 

The neoliberal financiers of the European Union are adamant that the Greek people will not be released from the debt obligations imposed upon them by the profligate borrowings of corrupt politicians more than a decade ago. The devastating austerity programme overseen by the so-called “Troika” (the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund) which has seen unemployment soar to 1 in 4 of the workforce, and the incomes of those lucky enough to still have a job slashed by as much as 40 percent, must, according to Greece’s unyielding European creditors, remain in force.

 

The neoliberal elites’ assumption has always been that by forcing savage reductions in the size and scope of Greece’s public sector, the confidence of her private sector would soar, investment would surge, and before you could say “Long live the Eurozone!”, the Greek economy would have grown its way back to prosperity.

 

In the real world, however, events have unfolded very differently. Health cuts left the chronically ill without medicine. Wage cuts led to mortgage defaults and homeless families. Confidence collapsed. Investment dried up. Emigration soared. And when the desperate victims of austerity protested, their political representatives, pledged to defend the almighty Euro, called out the Riot Police.

 

When the Greeks voted-out the politicians responsible, they discovered to their horror that the replacements were just as committed to implementing the Troika’s austerity programme as their predecessors. When tested, political parties nominally of the Left turned out to be practically indistinguishable from their supposed ideological rivals on the Right. In the end, politicians from the traditional parties felt obliged to join forces against what they saw as the unrealistic and unreasonable demands of the electors. Isolated and vilified as traitors, the Greek political class would have struggled to detect the irony in Berthold Brecht’s famous suggestion that it might be easier for the Government “To dissolve the people and elect another.”

 

Greece’s electors have now delivered their emphatic reply to the brutal economic absolutism of successive neoliberal governments. The halls of the democratic Greek Republic, for long the exclusive preserve of neoliberal technocrats and their local political collaborators, are now ringing with the excited voices of the Greek People.

 

And the peoples of the European Union, themselves no strangers to the brutalities of austerity, are listening. If Syriza is to succeed, it is to this audience that it must appeal.

 

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, 30 January 2015.

Greece Chooses Hope

 

The tears and the heartache will follow soon enough, but for now let us celebrate with Greece the wild carnival of hope that is democracy.

 

 

Video courtesy of YouTube

 

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.