International Socialists

When Labour, Alliance and the Greens won a majority of seats in the 1999 election, we were all happy to see National and ACT out of power. National dominated governments had ruled in the interests of the rich throughout the 1990s. And National and Act were promising to take the New Right policy agenda much further...

 

The majority of New Zealanders experienced falling real incomes, brought about by the Employment Contracts Act which made it much harder for our unions to organise and fight for better wages and conditions, the 1991 benefit cuts, and rising tertiary education fees. At the same time National continued with the fourth Labour Government's policy of cutting taxes for the rich.

 

In view of all this it is hardly surprising that inequality increased at a faster rate and to a greater extent in New Zealand during the 1990s than any other advanced capitalist society. The overall effect of the New Right policy agenda was to make the bottom 80% much worse off, and the top 20% much better off.

 

No matter how often that National, ACT, the Employers' Federation and the Business Roundtable told us that these policies were good for us, our own experiences suggested otherwise. So in the 1999 general election a clear majority "sacked the Nats." The mood was that it was "time for a change" in the direction of more "caring" policies. The hope was that Labour, the Alliance and the Greens would bring a change.

 

 

The promises

Labour was careful not to promise much at all in the run up to the election. And the Alliance didn't promise much more. Essentially what they did promise was the following:

Since being in power the Government has taken some steps towards implementing these policies. But already it is clear that the tax increases are hollow in that high income earners are exempt from paying the higher rate if they contribute to superannuation schemes. The approach to managing the economy differs little from the previous government. And the key features of National's education policies remain in place.

 

In fact, overall all we have is a slight modification of the New Right policy agenda, implemented between 1984 and 1999, disguised with (admittedly refreshing) leftish sounding rhetoric from Helen Clark and Jim Anderton.

 

We in the International Socialists argued that people should "vote Alliance without illusions" in the run-up to the election. We did so because we wanted to see National and ACT out, but at the same time we said vote them out without having illusions that Labour and the Alliance would rebuild the welfare state (to make it resemble the welfare state of the 1935-1984 period) let alone bring about real change.

 

We wish that Labour and the Alliance really would scrap the New Right policies of "Rogernomics" and National. But they will not. They are reformist parties - profoundly committed to managing the existing capitalist system rather than changing it.

 

 

Real change through parliament?

The historical reality is that fundamental, as opposed to minor, change has not come through parliament. No reformist government in any country in the last 150 years has successfully overcome the fundamental problems which are generated by capitalism: class inequality, unemployment, alienation within the workplace, women's oppression, racism and the destruction of the natural environment.

 

In fact, reformist governments have repeatedly adopted policies which have had precisely the opposite effect (eg the 1984-1990 Labour Government in New Zealand, the Hawke-Keating Government in Australia, the Labour Government in Britain from 1975-1979).

 

Capitalism is inherently and unalterably an anti-democratic system of economic organisation. The real power in capitalist society does not, for the most part, reside in parliament; it resides behind closed doors in the boardrooms of large corporations. Within the state apparatus itself power is heavily concentrated in cabinet and its key advisory bodies - Treasury and the Reserve Bank.

 

This means that the key decisions about the allocation of resources, decisions which affect us all as they determine whether or not we will have to pay for education, housing and health etc., are not made in a democratic manner. If the directors of Telecom decide to sack 10,000 workers, destroying these people's lives in the process, we do not have the right to vote the directors responsible for that decision out of office.

 

Further, the workplaces in which most people spend most of their lives are not organised democratically. No one "elects" their bosses.

 

Capitalists can exercise more influence on the formation of state policy than trade unions or progressive social movements. Capitalists can:

 

 

These domestic constraints have been compounded by the growing internationalisation of the economic system.

 

Reformist parties like Labour and the Alliance are committed to managing rather than transforming capitalism. The problem with this is that all the major problems we face have deep roots in capitalism and can only be eliminated when we get rid of it. Class exploitation and inequality, women's oppression, racism, war, the destruction of the natural environment - none of these can be eliminated while the entire economic system is governed by profit maximisation and market competition, rather than meeting  human needs.

 

 

The only alternative?

Reformists in the Alliance generally respond to these arguments as follows: OK, they say, we acknowledge that the Labour/Alliance Government will not eliminate poverty, unemployment, women's oppression or racism, but it will introduce policies in the "here and now" that will ease these problems and forms of oppression. Surely it is better to do something "here and now" than it is to wait around for a revolution that may never come. After all, as the social democratic economist Keynes said, in the long term we're all dead.

 

It is on this point that the reformist argument superficially appears at its strongest, but is in reality very weak. Reformists always respond to criticisms from revolutionary socialists by claiming that we are only for revolutionary change in the long term, and consequently that we are unable to contribute to current struggles to change society.

 

 

Revolutionaries are the best fighters for reform

The truth is that "revolutionaries are the best fighters for reform." We try and build every struggle in the short term. We do not sit around passively awaiting "the revolution."

 

This point has been established beyond doubt already: both the Alliance and Labour Party were effectively absent from the major struggles that occurred during the 1990s such as the struggles against the ECA and benefit cuts in 1991, Maori and student occupations, and protests against the Gulf War and US intervention in Kosovo.

 

The Labour Party and the Alliance may not have been involved in these struggles but we were. Given our small size and limited resources we did everything we could to help build these struggles.

 

Actions speak louder than words. Labour and the Alliance did little to build the fightback against the National and Coalition Governments, and now that they are in government they are only making minor modifications to the New Right policy framework, rather than changing it fundamentally.

 

Give them a chance?

Many workers and students who voted for these parties think that we should give them time to change things. But there is a huge danger with this "give them a chance" approach. The New Right policies of the past 16 years have massively redistributed income away from the working class majority towards the small greedy capitalist minority at the top of the heap, a minority with the bulk of the wealth and power in society. We need to fight for a real reversal of these policies and against accepting merely cosmetic changes.

 

The problem is that if we do not fight - through our unions, through mass student protests and occupations, with more flax roots protest from Maori and Pacific Island peoples - then what the Labour and Alliance Government may do in reality is end up ensuring that the New Right policy agenda becomes cemented in place.

 

We in the International Socialists are very small, but we will be doing everything in our power to argue for real change rather than tinkering. But ultimately real change, change to create a genuinely democratic, "caring" and equal society, will not come through parliament. It will only come from workers and their allies rising up and overthrowing the capitalist system that is the underlying cause of all the major problems that we face.