Labour Parties

["Jurriaan Bendien" <J.Bendien@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Phil wrote: "[The NZLP] is certainly a bourgeois-liberal party these days.
Even genuine social democrats in NZ - eg the Alliance - probably regard it
in this way".

I would actually dispute that the Alliance consists of "genuine social
democrats", although there may be some genuine social democrats within it.

The party lacks any distinctive social democratic ideology, doesn't even
refer to the most watered-down kind of socialism, don't engage in systematic
advocacy of (what remains of) the labour movement, and the policies they
pursued in government aren't distinctively social democratic either.

That is not surprising because, as I explained previously, the radical
restructuring of the New Zealand government apparatus and economic life
makes it exceedingly difficult to pursue any kind of social democratic
reformism these days.

If, as happened in NZ,  you privatise the bulk of state enterprises, sell
off government assets,  fix the maximum inflation rate by law at a very low
level, operate a floating exchange rate, permit more or less free capital
movements in and out of the country, remove most foreign trade restrictions,
sharply reduce or eliminate graduated taxes, reduce government subsidies to
business and individuals to a very low level or eliminate them, sharply
reduce or eliminate basic trade union rights, cut or eliminate social
security benefits etc. then you remove the very basis of the social
democratic project.

You don't have any real grip anymore on the economic development of the
country as a government, and you aren't in any position to redistribute
incomes on any significant scale.

All you can really do at that stage is administer what remains of the state
apparatus, do a bit of monitoring, tinker a bit with property rights and
taxes, reflect on democratic rights, make arguments about the adequacy of
the public health system, the public education system or the police, argue
for an adequate social safety net  - so that the poor don't resort too much
to misdemeanour and crime, and so forth. But you don't need to be a social
democrat for that, in practice, in fact you end up compromising yourself
when you try.

The only things that could change that situation are a big socio-economic
crisis and/or a genuinely popular revolt. The whole thrust of official
politics is however to prevent both from happening, insofar as they are able
to do that, and occupy the middle ground in a populist manner, without any
coherent ideology.

That means radicalism more or less needs to be reinvented, and that is what
Phil is doing, that is about all you can do - the only dispute you can
really have is about political tactics.

Sectarianism means above all introducing political differences and divisions
unnecessarily, where there really aren't any. But if the whole political
landscape has been altered, and the old political distinctions effaced, you
are going to have to make some new political distinctions, make a stand, and
draw the line somewhere. That is not sectarian, that is just standing up for
what you believe in.

Jurriaan





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