Labour Parties - the New Zealand case

[Jurriaan Bendien <J.Bendien@xxxxxxxxxx>]

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Phil wrote:

A Mandelite friend of mine, who sometimes writes for 'revolution' and who
was here ion the 1980s when I was overseas, tends to argue that the
fourth Labour government saw the destruction of the NZ LP's social
democratic nature and its transformation into a totally bosses' party.
(Btw, in 1990, after that government, Labour only got 25 percent of the
vote here, and lost some of the most oppressed working class eats to National!)
I think his argument is credible, but mine would place it earlier.

That "Mandelite" was me. I in fact originated the research on the Labour
Party, but Bruce Curtis and Shane Martin among others developed it further and
published on it. In fact I wasn't a Mandelite at all, although I was in
contact with Mandel, studied his works, and debated with him. He was an
intelligent Marxist. When I explained my view about the Labour Party to
Mandel, he was skeptical about it, but above all concerned that we should not
condemn our group to sectarian isolation. His experience was of the British
Labour Party, and the argument there, was that you had to be where politically
active workers were present.  Mandel could not conceive of a Labour Party
completely selling out its traditional constituency and implementing an
extreme neo-liberal policy of the Chilean type, without any military
intervention. But that was easy to understand, because his knowledge of NZ
economic life and culture was practically nil, and he told me so
explicitly. His knowledge of how the rich operate political systems in the
modern world was also largely out of date.

A Labour Party is a reformist party in almost all cases, it seeks to operate
within the framework of capitalist society and the capitalist state to reduce
social inequality and mitigate the evils of capitalist economic life, through
state regulation and income distribution. That is the core social democratic
programme, that is what social democratic reformism is about, and that is why
many workingclass people will vote for it. It doesn't matter whether it is in
power or not, for the purpose of political definition, although typically out
of power it will spout more egalitarian rhetoric and in power it will do
capital's bidding more often.

If I have argued, as I have, that the NZ Labour Party's social democratic
nature came to an abrupt end in 1984, this is because it abruptly stopped to
pursue social democratic reformism as previously defined, within a more or
less Keynesian framework, and opted for neo-liberal "more market policies"
aided by the Treasury, the Reserve Bank, the IMF and other strongholds of the
business elite, inspired by Hayek and Milton Friedman. Before that time, it
was still arguing for redistributive policies, egalitarianism and state
intervention within the Keynesian framework, and to that extent remained
social democratic, although more and more tenuously. Prime Minister Norman
Kirk in the 1970s was still a social democrat, and clearly perceived as a man
of the workers. But from 1985 the entire legal framework that formed the basis
of social democratic reformism was ripped out, and all its key institutions
destroyed or sold off. Keynesian-type state intervention became impossible,
because neither the resources nor the legal framework for it existed anymore.

However, the question of the social democratic character of the party, and its
character as a workers party must not be immediately conflated. There is no
necessary immediate correspondence between the social composition of a party,
its organisational structure, ideology and culture, its leadership, party
finance, perceptions by the electorate, and its objective programme that it
pursues, although all these factors influence each other. We are talking about
an historically evolving entity, and the evolution may be uneven.  A
middleclass party can sometimes advocate pro-workingclass policies, a
workingclass party can adopt bourgeois policies, and so on. We need to study
these things concretely and historically to find out what is going on.

The first Labour Government in New Zealand in the 1930s was most definitely
social democratic, and it was more "left" than most other "Western" social
democratic parties, introducing a large number of social reforms which
benefited workingclass people, in the areas of health, housing, education,
labour legislation, and social security. It instituted whole legal frameworks
which persisted for a generation at least. It was not socialism, but it was
social reformism, and it was left. If for instance you reduces the working
week to 40 hours, and ruled that the wage must be sufficient to maintain the
worker and his family, this was a progressive social reform. It isn't
specifically anti-capitalist nor specifically socialist, but it is progressive
social reform.

However, particularly in the 1950s it became readily apparent to a lot of
workers, if they had not realised it before, that there was a decreasing
political gap between the Labour Party and the National Party, increasingly
they were more like tweedledum and tweedledee, the one centre-left and other
centre-right, but both committed to developing the Keynesian-type welfare
state, with variations. The difference between them was more and more just
"cultural", the policy differences were less and less great. The Labour Party
had more ties with the trade unions, the National party had more ties with the
business community.

An effect of the long boom was to reduce mass interest in governmental
political activity, and wage demands could be often successfully pursued
through the unions, because of low unemployment, while the political parties
in fact tried to moderate wages. The statistics thus show a steady erosion of
the absolute number of members of the Labour Party (as well as the National
Party), and the gradual substitution of white collar professionals for workers
at all levels. Workers still belonged to the Labour Party through union
affiliation, but this did not mean anything anymore except on paper, it just
allowed union officials to participate in policy making. The branch membership
gradually dwindled.

In fact, from the 1960s onwards, it is difficult to still call the Labour
party a workers party in terms of social composition, but the workers still
saw the party as such, by tradition, that is the point. Meantime a lot of
changes were taking place in terms of membership, financing, organisational
structure and culture, financing and leadership. Whereas in the 1930s the
leadership was bourgeoisified, and the party attracted the farmers vote, now
bourgeoisification affected all levels.

In the 1970s, the Third Labour Government tried to overcome recession by
Keynesian-style demand management and deficit-financing but this completely
failed, and the party lost more members. Under Jim Andertons' energetic
presidency membership levels increased, but the members included less workers
and more middleclass people. The big political mass event of 1981, the
Springbok rugby tour of NZ, set in motion a revolt against the autocratic
state which was to a large extent a middle-class revolt, although workers
grievances about unemployment and racism also played a role.  Muldoon's
National Government tried to pursue Keynesian policies as well as attract
foreign investment, but inflation and unemployment continued to rise.

Anyway the Labour Party coming to power in 1984, when people wanted to get rid
of Muldoon, was therefore a shell of its former self, totally bureaucratised
and led by opportunists whose only real lever was that they were experienced
professional politicians. The political situation created a unique opportunity
for a neo-liberal take-over, and that was accomplished because the party
membership had no effective legal power to stop the cabinet from doing what it
did.

The Left assumed that the neoliberal cabinet would respond to popular
pressure, demonstrations and so on, but this was totally false. The cabinet
could not care less about demonstrations.  The only way to stop them was
through a general strike, but the union officialdom refused to organise and
lead it, although there was some weak activity organised to let workers blow
off steam. Jim Anderton did split off with his New Labour Party, but by that
time the damage was already done. That was the death of social democracy in
New Zealand, but the death of a mass workers party had occurred already
earlier, in the 1950s or 1960s. Anderton could not pursue social democratic
policies anymore, because the legal framework had been changed irrevocably and
state enterprises sold off. So there was simply very little left to
redistribute, and few government levers to get any grip on the economy
anymore.

That's roughly the historical picture. The social democrats were always
reformist, there is no dispute about that. But originally they had a mass
workingclass following and pursued progressive social reforms. They pursued
those reforms less and less, and lost their workingclass following in a
process of time. In evaluating the status of social democratic parties as
"workers parties" we must first of all look at membership and who votes for
them, but also organisational structure and culture, financing, leadership and
objective programme- the specific way in which these combine, and how they
evolved over time, in a given country.

A basic dispute with Phil that I have, is that I argue that socialists should
try to pursue social reforms as the necessary basis for a more radical
politics, whereas Phil argues that pursuing any social reform, anything short
of revolution, is pro-capitalist. Therefore Phil doesn't distinguish between
different species of reforms and reformism, it is all pro-capitalist, reified
and wrong. This obviously leads to a different view of what sort of political
activity is desirable and possible for socialists.

For Phil, it is therefore natural to argue that from the time that the NZ
Labour party assumed governmental power in the 1930s, without breaking with
capitalism, it ceased to be a workers party, regardless of how many workers
were in it, and simply because of its leadership's acceptance of working
within capitalism, its objectively reformist programme. But for me things are
not that clearcut. A party with a mass workingclass membership, major union
affiliation and a bourgeois leadership is still a workers party, be it a
bourgeoisified workers party. Just how exactly a party like that will act from
the point of view of workingclass interests, cannot be determined a priori,
you have to see what it does.  But if the mass workingclass membership also
disappears, there is no sense in calling it even a bourgeoisified workers
party anymore.

My original dispute with the Barnesite Socialist Action League in New Zealand,
published in their newspaper (later they were called the Communist League)
centered precisely on this issue. They wanted to argue in 1985 that a party
with hardly any workers left in it, and pursuing extreme anti-worker policies,
was nevertheless a mass workers party, a bourgeois workers party, and that
socialists should vote for it. This was just a pure dogma, not based on any
serious knowledge or study of New Zealand politics. They made it worse by
arguing that the New Labour Party of Jim Anderton, a split-off, was just a
"petty-bourgeois epiphenomenon" to which the original Labour Party was
preferable. This signalled that they could not actually place parties
correctly in the political spectrum anymore, and that they were a politically
spent force. We could not work with them in some kind of united socialist
opposition for that reason, and formed a different group.

The situation in New Zealand today is that the working class does not have any
political voice of its own anymore, apart from a few insignificant groups. The
workers been politically disenfranchised, although they can still formally
vote for all sorts of political odds and ends.  The question is really how you
can conduct socialist activity there, so that it makes a difference to
people's lives, makes a political difference, and generates wider popular
support. It could take ten years before there is an effective new solution to
that problem.

Jurriaan






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