The Party that stole the name of 'Labour'

 

PM Ardern and the human face of Labour that masks naked capitalism

The New Zealand Labour Party must be elected to govern alone to be judged for its failure to deliver on its promises to workers and the poor for decades. It got away with breaking those promises by making concessions to NZ First party to keep the coalition Government in power. As for the Greens keeping Labour ‘honest’, a pious hope when its co-leader James Shaw recently gave $11 million to an elite private school!

When social democratic parties tie themselves to petty bourgeois or bourgeois partners, they become part of a political popular front dominated by the interests of international monopoly finance capital. Promises made to workers are then sacrificed. As a result, they become in effect open bourgeois liberal parties without any pretense of representing workers.

Labour has long been moving towards an open liberal party since 1984 when it was hijacked by the Roger Douglas right-wing who later split to found the ACT (Association of Citizens and Taxpayers) party, later rejuvenated under MMP on the extreme right of parliamentary parties. Labour won the 1987 election with the support of swinging voters in affluent National Party seats. Disgusted by Labour’s right turn, in 1989 its left-wing split from the party behind Jim Anderton to form the New Labour Party leaving the centrists around PM David Lange in charge of the liberal rump of the party.

The Split in Labour was a Disaster

The split in Labour was a disaster. The Left had roughly a third of the votes in the national conference and a majority on the National Council behind Jim Anderton. But instead of using that support to launch a campaign to kick out the Douglas right faction, Anderton left prematurely to form the New Labour Party.

The NLP got 5% of the vote in 1990, proving that the split was not only ill-judged but a top-down left bureaucratic adventure. Labour suffered a major defeat retaining only 29 seats allowing National to form an extreme right-wing government to impose the ECA, drastically cut benefits and force a 26 week stand down for the unemployed.

In 1993 two thirds of the electorate voted against Rogernomics. Labour won almost the same number of seats as National but it did not get a majority because the NLP (which had now formed the Alliance with the Greens and Democrats) split the vote in a number of seats.

The result was a hung parliament. Anderton refused to support a Labour plan to form a government on a 5-point program which included repeal of National’s labour ‘reforms’ and plans to privatise health and the ACC. This allowed National to stay in power until 1999.

The split in Labour then ensured that the Rogernomics counter-revolution sped forward on steroids under the National Party. What began as a bureaucratic split by the labour left now became a sell-out of NZ workers for the whole lost decade of the 1990s. Moreover, it marked the consolidation of the Blairite centre in the Labour Party and the failure of the Clark and Ardern governments to repudiate neo-liberal policies.

Under MMP Labour has ruled only with the support of the petty bourgeois Alliance, Greens, and NZ First. The 9 years of the Fifth Labour Government (1999-2008) was a popular front Gov’t that provided a Blairite fig-leaf over the naked neo-liberal policies of the Fourth.  It trapped workers in parliament while the world headed for the financial crisis of 2007/2008.

True to form, Labour had done no more than prepared the ground for National’s 9-year term in office from 2008 to 2017, dragging the country into period of austerity and subservience to both Chinese and the US imperialism.

Labour sneaked back into office in 2017 only by forming a popular front coalition with the bourgeois populist NZ First party, and a confidence and supply agreement with the petty-bourgeois Greens. Labour under its Blairite Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, wanted to prove that it could govern for the centre, reconciling capitalism and socialism, and failed to enact any major reform in the interest of workers.

Labour has always been a Capitalist Party

The reason should be obvious. That Labour is and always was a capitalist party that put profits before people. Its only rationale to exist was to present itself as the ‘nice’ face of capitalism to corral workers off the streets into parliament. But Rogernomics exploded the myth of ‘niceness’.

Today the ‘missing million’ is the working class that Labour has abandoned for the middle-class, or more accurately the “class-less middle of NZ”.  When crises strike, Labour rallies the nation against class which provides a mask for the ruling class. It suppresses the class contradiction in the warm bath of nationalism.

Then the Covert crisis struck, Labour showed its true colours. It formed a cabal of big businessmen including Sam Morgan the face of neoliberal marketplace, to get permission for the ‘hard and fast’ lockdown. But the cabal wanted to continue to pull the strings. The ‘plan’ was to eliminate the virus then find a rapid high-tech solution to track everyone to keep it out, and so open the economy up for ‘business as usual’.

This worked until the bureaucratic border breakdowns that allowed the virus to sneak back in. The cabal, now with support from National, put the hard word on Labour to abandon the strategy of elimination as too costly for business. Labour balked at this plan, but compromised to try to keep the virus at bay, and lost little popular ‘trust’. Then with Judith Collins running the naked face of capital strategy, Sam Morgan spat the dummy when his Covid Card failed to get rapid adoption. It was game on with weeks to go.

With the election looming, the contradiction between the expectations of Labour’s voter base and its failure to meet those expectations, has been over-ridden temporarily by the impact of the pandemic.

The idea that NZ as united in one “team of 5 million” is fraying at the edges and looking shaky. Business sentiment, especially SME businesses, despite bailouts and wage subsidies, has dropped between the first lockdown in March and second lockdown in August.

The desperation of the rightwing National and extreme right ACT, now backed by the rebellion of the Morgan business cabal, and the corporate media, threatens to destroy the trust in Labour’s leadership in the fight against the pandemic.

For an Workers Socialist Party

The 2020 election may yet see Labour returned with a majority to govern on its own. But even so in the Covid world it would rapidly cave in to the kiwi comprador cabal and international finance to give priority to the economy. But it would be exposed to the working masses as a bankrupt social democratic party serving only to make workers’ pay for the bosses’ crisis ridden system.

To make this happen class conscious workers must give critical support to the re-election of the Labour Party with the objective of splitting workers away to form an independent workers party, that can represent the 80% who work to replace the rotten capitalist system with a socialist system that serves their needs.