Corbyn: A Partisan Revolution?

Best of luck to the 'non-partisan' Matt McCarten in revving-up the 'missing million' in NZ, he will need it. If there was any message in Corbyn's revival of the British Labour party it is his 'partisan' democratic socialist stand. Much has been made of the 'lessons' for NZ. Veteran class fighters Mike Treen and John Minto see the need to get rid of the Blairites. Most others seem to think it wasn't Corbyn's program that worked wonders but his appeal to non-voting youth. Bomber Bradbury even ranks all the political parties on their ‘youth appeal’ as if missing youth are a mere segment in the political marketplace. That is what happens when you replace class with generation as your main political motivator. Social class disappears and ‘youth appeal’ becomes the cue for the Blairites to once again accuse Corbyn of splitting the Labour Party.

It’s all about class

Speaking for the NZ Labour Party Blairites in the NZ Herald, Josie Pagani complains that Corbyn could have won a majority had he united with the hostile Blairites behind a more moderate program. These same Blairites who rejected Corbyn and his program as 'their' leader! And for Pagani, obviously NZ Labour's current centrist tack to reclaim the ‘middle ground’ from National is the way to go. And the 'non-partisan' Labour caucus endorses it. Here we can see how the fixation on youth appeal at the expense of socialist program leads to cross-class identity politics displacing working class politics.

The reason that thousands of young people flocked to Corbyn's 'parliamentary socialist' program was because they were inspired by it. As were many die-hard older Labour supporters despite decades of Blairism, and before that, decades of Labourite attacks on the working class. Why? British Labour, like NZ Labour is a class divided party. They were both created by the conservative trades union bureaucracy in the early 1900s to divert the class struggle from the workplaces into parliament when the unions found that their ability to fight for wages and conditions came up against the bosses' cops and Cossacks and when they really pushed hard, the military. Because...they were breaking the law.

When communists said there is one law for the boss and one for workers (Labour's leg-iron), the union leaders said, no, we are all subject to the one 'non-partisan' law for all so we have to obey the Labour Law and take the fight to parliament to reform the glorious law. So Labour Parties have in their DNA a class contradiction between workers who want Labour to advance their interests, and their leadership that has signed up to the bosses' law. This was true at the beginning of the 20th century and it remains true well into the 21st century.

That means there can be no 'unity' within Labour parties unless one or other class wins. Either the workers take their demands to parliament and get them all voted in because they have turned Labour into a mass workers party capable of leading a general strike. Or, the bureaucratic Labourite leadership suppresses workers’ demands and imposes the bosses' program of more austerity. Historically, the Labour 'left' has been confined to relatively small groups who have battled away against the bosses' program to make profits at the expense of workers living standards. Labour parties have been able to suppress the class struggle inside the party and divide and rule the class struggle outside. So long as the left inside Labour plays by these rules then there will always be the 'hope' of winning reforms in parliament and delivering the holy grail of parliamentary socialism.

Reformism Rules

This is the meaning of Corbyn's victory. It's all about class partisanship. Corbyn found his “missing million” by standing on a mild anti-austerity program. If he had stood on a full-on parliamentary socialist program, might he have won a majority? After decades of Blairism (both socialism and conservatism have failed, we need a new middle) Corbyn, who after a career as a backbench rebel was fortuitously (against resistance of the party establishment) propelled into the leadership. Then it exploded into a major revival of the disenfranchised left who could see the program working for them all, young (education, housing) and old (NHS, pensions etc) and all those in between (make rail run on time!). The disproportionate rise of disenfranchised youth was not a function of age but of a youth wasted by the decades of Blairite and Tory austerity. But the youth were not totally wasted and rose up in response to the hope of socialist reforms.

Against Josie Pagani, and all the 'non-partisans' in the NZ Labour Party, it was not the failure of unity in UK Labour that lost the election but the partisan class stand of Corbyn that won the seats of hundreds of Blairite MPs! Yes, had Corbyn not been already moderating his program (ignoring Brexit, voting for Trident, etc) to pacify his enemies in the party, and stood on a full blooded socialist program, Labour could have won and put the Blairites on notice. "Get behind our program or get out!" This would be the first step towards throwing them out and replacing them with MPs that represent the interests of the massive activist membership of around 800,000 - and rising.

Where to from Here

The Blairites will pull their collective head in, but continue to undermine and water down any Corbynite policies. They will claim his victory and their seats but conspire to dump him from the leadership. But first they have to remove the election of leader by the membership which was the only thing that kept Corbyn as leader. It remains to be seen how Corbyn will move from here. Will he become that Labour rebel who now fights to remove the bourgeois leadership and turns Labour into a mass democratic workers party? Or will he act as the Pied Piper who takes a new generation of young idealists into parliament only to destroy their hopes as he pulls back from a genuine working-class program?

Even if we assume the former, Corbyn cannot deliver what workers need without putting workers into power. Capitalism cannot deliver reforms when its terminal crisis demands the destruction of workers as a class. There is no way out on the parliamentary road. Corbyn can play a role in breaking the working class from bourgeois parliamentarism only if he empowers the Labour membership and turns Labour into a mass workers party. If he tries to form a minority government with the Scottish National Party and the Social Democrats he would be already selling his supporters out to a multi-class, non-partisan popular front with bourgeois nationalist parties to suppress the partisan membership.

However, if Corbyn now realises that he could have won had he stood for a red-blooded socialism, and if he mobilises his 100,000s of left wing supporters to take control of the Party, he can fight to bring down the Tories over their hard Brexit, rabid austerity and police state plans, and go to another election on a platform for a Socialist Britain in a Socialist Europe.

But to make this a reality, and withstand a Tory coup, Labour would have to be an openly partisan working-class party that has the strength to mobilise the masses outside parliament, reviving the unions as democratic fighting unions, and creating workers councils or soviets everywhere as the basis for a socialist revolution and a Workers' Government!

Aotearoa: State housing for all, now! Occupy!

 
Capitalists have no need to provide houses to workers whose labour power is not required or who can be replaced by workers who will live in little boxes. We have a choice. Either we accept that we are to blame for choosing to feed the family rather than starve to pay for a house, or we kick out those who are responsible, the capitalist class. Only a socialist society can provide adequate housing for all. Squat! Occupy! Expropriate! 

 After the publicity that even the mainstream media have given it, the only people who still deny there is a housing crisis in Aotearoa are those who own multiple rental properties. Thousands of NZers are living in unhealthy overcrowded and overpriced rental accommodation or in caravans and garages- if not under bridges or in shop doorways. It has recently been confirmed that a majority of those in inadequate accommodation are families: their children are thus exposed to the risks of such deadly illnesses as rheumatic fever. A crisis that was predictable under capitalism became inevitable given the neo-liberal government's commitment to reliance on the "invisible hand" of market forces. That same commitment is bound to render ineffective any measures it may reluctantly permit itself to relieve the crisis.

Most prominent amongst the deniers is the PM John Key, who would never have risen in the world without the assistance of a state house. His contact with reality is inversely correlated with the number of mansions he now owns. Although he eventually found it expedient to acknowledge that the level of homelessness was unacceptable (!), the ministers he appointed to the two housing portfolios remain securely in office and have not deviated from their mission to sell off state housing to profiteering developers and ethnically cleanse the neighbourhoods in which they are located. Tauranga is the latest to face the onslaught. The denial of a housing crisis is analogous to the denial that overstocking of agricultural land is responsible for the contamination of town water supplies. The government's flagship policy of deregulation is responsible for both.

Key's government has meanwhile blamed the environmentally protective town planning regulations (inherited from Labour) for a crisis it denies exists. Its nonexistence has not stopped the government from taking maximum political advantage by bullying Auckland Council into accepting a Unitary Plan described by one councillor as a 'deregulatory hurricane.' Its first pathetic attempt to cope with the non-crisis was to legislate for 'Special Housing Areas', giving them exemptions from environmental protection regulations. Besides opening up land for building high-value housing for the wealthy, these have been seized on by developers to get their hands on environmentally sensitive protected areas such as Ihumatao. And since the Unitary Plan was adopted developers have been relieved of any obligation to supply a miserable quota of affordable housing. When developers demonstrate a preference for constructing high-valued dwellings over affordable ones they are just doing as capitalists always do- maximising their profits.

Whether the SHAs and the Unitary Plan should be regarded as an ignominious policy failure or an outstanding success depends on who benefits. The denial of a crisis is a tacit admission that these policies are successful in achieving their objective of giving developers the freedom they demand.

The phenomenon of land banking, where investors ignore the use value of houses as dwellings and treat them as assets - valuable purely for their ability to appreciate in exchange value - demonstrates how clearly that crisis is a characteristic feature of the capitalist system, where failure to invest in unprofitable production leads to speculation in such assets (see Review of The Long Depression in this issue).

Whatever it’s immediate causes, the crisis’ origins can be traced to falling profitability and the consequent need for capitalists to seek sources of profit other than industrial production, and compete with one another in unproductive markets such as real estate market (not to mention state assets such as education and health systems.) This boosts the prices of land and houses even as wages are kept low by competition for work within a labour force rendered surplus to productive requirements by disinvestment in production. So it is no surprise that since the 2008 recession the ratio of house prices to median income has risen from about 3:1 to 9:1.

Although homeless families and state tenants facing eviction are the first to bear the brunt of the crisis, there is a growing realization among younger citizens that (with the exception of those standing to inherit property from wealthy parents) their entire generation will be denied the opportunity of ever owing their own homes. Many, though, have yet to realize that with the sell-off of state houses there will be nothing left to moderate private-sector rents and prevent them spiralling up beyond even what the more highly paid workers can afford. Already the housing crisis is threatening to become a crisis of teacher recruitment as teachers are moving away from Auckland's prohibitively high rents. While Generation Zero, for example, is calling for more houses to be built, there is no demand that the majority of these be state houses, nor is there any call to defend existing state houses and their tenants.

Douglas Rushkoff in Life Inc: How the World Became a Corporation recounts the history of American cities and how they have been shaped and grotesquely distorted by capitalist interests. Suburbia was invented by an unholy alliance of real estate, road and rail building and banking capitalists who whose profiteering was facilitated by the creation and nurturing of racial prejudice with is attendant segregation. Their interests converged with those of industrial and mercantile capitalists who in an age of labour shortages wished to create a stable pool of docile labour. Thus was the ideology of home ownership glamorized and promoted as a way of chaining workers to their employers. It is hardly coincidental that the current worldwide shortage of affordable housing follows on the 2008 financial crisis and the consequent surplus of employed labour.

In Aotearoa the state housing programme of the first Labour governments mitigated the malign effects of the pre-1940s housing shortages, but this was shackled by refusal of the Bank of England (whose governor was ideologically opposed to what he condemned as 'communism') to advance adequate finance. And although subsequent National governments found it politically expedient to continue to continue the state housing programme initiated by Labour, they have mounted a relentless ideological campaign to undermine its popularity by stigmatising state tenants as being unfairly privileged vis a vis private sector tenants in the working class. This enabled them to place all sorts of restrictions on access to and tenure of state housing and has culminated in the current government's mass sell-offs and phasing out of income-related rents.

The latest ruse in the campaign of defamation has been to use the presence of P-residues in state houses as an excuse for eviction. Scientists have now pointed out that such residues are seldom present in dangerous concentrations. Evictions are far more likely to have adverse consequences for the tenants' health.

Not only has the lure of home ownership become a mirage, it has become a distraction from the only realistic prospect of housing the world's working class, which is through freely available state houses with secure life long tenure and income-related rents. Solidarity is the most effective weapon the working class has in its struggle with the capitalists: Most of the gains the working class have ever made have been achieved through strike action, and solidarity has been the essential ingredient of success. "The workers united will never be defeated".' "United we stand, divided we fall" are the watchwords. If the current generation of the working class has forgotten this it is a lesson that must be re-learned. The capitalist class knows this, and in its effort to remain supreme constantly seeks not merely to divide and isolate the workers but to set them up to fight amongst themselves. The stigmatization of state tenants is a case in point.

What solidarity means in the struggle for affordable housing is for employed, unemployed and beneficiaries, state and private sector tenants to support one another's struggles. Neither can win without the assistance of the other. If the government can be defeated in its plans to sell off state houses, private sector tenants will benefit by having lower rents.

The way to use the solidarity weapon is by mounting mass pickets to prevent the eviction of existing state tenants and the sell-off of state houses. Unions must organise support with pickets, transport, and industrial action. Court action can be useful to mobilise support, but courts exist primarily to defend the same property interests that have created the crisis and to enforce anti-worker laws. 

 · For Affordable State Housing available on demand to the employed, unemployed and beneficiaries with lifelong secure tenure and income related rent!

· Rent control of privately owned houses!

· Sufficient number of State Houses to supply need!

· No sale of State Houses to developers, Social Housing or Iwi Housing!

· Repossess State Houses sold to developers without compensation!

· Capital gains tax on privately owned dwellings.

· Resist evictions! Squat vacant housing! Occupy! Expropriate!