New Zealand’s Class Struggle - Lutte de classe en Nouvelle Zélande

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• 1. New Zealand’s Class Struggle - Lutte de classe en Nouvelle Zélande, 5 November 2018, 06:11

  There are no major differences of economic policy between National and Labour in NZ. They are both utterly committed to being ‘good managers’ of the capitalist system. And capitalism is in such a decrepit state these days that there simply isn’t room for ‘generosity’ of the kind that existed during the postwar boom. Back then the capitalists were simply getting so much surplus-value out of workers’ labour-power, due to massive increases in productivity and output, that they could buy class peace by guaranteeing wage rises and providing a chunk of educational and health care for free. Meanwhile increases in productivity meant a fall in the socially necessary labour-time to produce goods (and services), thus a fall in the value embodied in individual commodities and a fall in the prices of these commodities. Workers’ wages could buy more stuff, a crucial element of rising real wages.

  Those days are long gone and there is no sign of them returning.

  But, instead of long-term stagnation leading to workers becoming restless and fighting to defend what had been the norm several decades ago, let alone fighting for more, they have fallen into a kind of long-term stupor. The TINA argument – There Is No Alternative – has been accepted and internalised by most of the working class in New Zealand. And the left has not offered an alternative.

  The bulk of the left in NZ is anti-National Party rather than anti-capitalist. It is anti-foreign capitalism rather than anti-capitalist. And it supports state capitalism rather than exposing how workers are still exploited when employed by a profit-making enterprise that is owned by the state. Indeed, a couple of years ago, during the state assets referendum, most of the left defended the SOEs (the profit-making capitalist enterprises created by new right economic reformer Roger Douglas!) rather than opposing capitalism per se.

  What we clearly need is a new left – a genuinely anti-capitalist left – and a new working class political movement, one that is of, for and by workers and that doesn’t subordinate our interests to those of capitalist parties like Labour but fights for the independent interests of the working class.