Labour’s Loss is a Workers’, Women’s & Māori Win

We wrote in Aotearoa: For a Workers’ Government before the recent election about why Labour was trapped by its own history in a settler colony ruled by imperialist powers.  First, Britain until WW2, then the US, and now in the 21^st Century, China. As a result, the recent election outcome was determined by the interests of the international finance capital of these great powers well beyond NZ shores.

This explains why Peters’ late run to become the kingmaker which put the NACTZ Coalition (National, ACT,  NZF) into Government was the opportunity created by global forces that led to his self-promotion at the mass anti-Labour protest in Parliamentary Grounds in February 2022. That protest was the culmination of two years of Covid lockdowns, compounded by the Christchurch Mosque killings in March 2019, originating in global climate change disruptions in the biosphere and the rise of white-supremacy alt-right currents. 

It was the fallout of these external crises impacting on NZ that created a disaffected populist movement which blamed Labour for the disruption of their lives. Add the impact of the world economic terminal crisis of capital, including the collapse of supply chains and commodity markets, which disrupted Labour’s centrist bureaucratic/managerial fetish leaving it rudderless and sinking.

Labour’s feeble attempts to regulate land, labour, water and mining rights to manage the economy only enraged the patriarchal petty bourgeois who turned on the Prime Minister forcing her to resign. The resentment of this downwardly mobile middle class was enough to swing voters towards the right NACTZ coalition to rescue NZ capitalism from the doldrums and restore normalcy.

Add Māori Co-Governance, Three Waters and the Māori Health Authority and the racism of the right-wing mob surfaced attacking Labour for plotting a Māori/communist takeover of the ‘one person one vote’ neo-colonial heritage.  Labour’s defeat opened the door to the white settler coalition to revive its rip, shit and bust approach to economics.

Simon Wilson asks ‘Why didn’t Labour do more in power? The answer is that every NZ government is has to obey the dictates of its imperialist masters to cut taxes on profits, deregulate the market to free up investment, and pump out value based on cheap labour. Any Labour reforms to workers living standards and global warming were too little, too late, and won’t survive the NACTZ Coalition’s first 100 days in office.

This proves the point we made in Aotearoa: For a Workers’ Government. No workers’ government can transform the NZ economy without taking power and planning the economy to meet the needs of the working majority. Not until that reality sinks in will workers see the need to mobilise independently of bourgeois and/or petty bourgeois parties – Labour, Greens, and Māori Party – to build a workers’ party and workers’ government.

So how do we get there from here? The first step is to organise militant opposition on the streets and workplaces to the incoming anti-worker, anti-women and anti-Māori agenda of the NACTZ. Where that militant opposition can form united fronts with these parties in common actions we need to maintain our political independence and resist being coopted by parliamentary illusions.

Meanwhile, the NACTZ coalition of racist, white supremacist landlords, capitalist farmers, bankers, SME owners and random feral wankers, has been selected to finish the job for our imperialist masters and their NZ class collaborators – to deregulate and privatise the economy, drive down wages and restore profits by pumping out monopoly rent from land and natural resources.

We say NACTZ has been ‘selected’ because like all parties of the bourgeoisie it can manipulate the vote and effectively disenfranchise working people. The bourgeoisie own the mass media and spend millions promoting the lie that without wealthy capitalists and landowners the economy would collapse harming the interests and well-being of workers, women and Māori.

But no matter how hard NACTZ tries, the terminal crisis of end stage capitalism exposes its ruling class agenda. Peters’ rode the racist backlash against Māori Co-Governance and Three Waters, roping the racism of the feral conspiracy mob who live in fear of ‘cultural Marxists’ replacing colonial democracy with a ‘communitarian’, that is to say, Māori, state.  This conspiracy theory needs to be unpacked and debunked.

The person providing the bourgeois ‘science’ backing up this conspiracy theory is Elizabeth Rata of the University of Auckland. Writing for the Platform, she claims that the Renaissance gave humanity the sovereign individual committed to Western science and freedom, now increasingly under threat from the demands of a ‘communitarian’ state promoting social equality. Even on its own terms this argument is flawed.

Rata conveniently forgets that Enlightenment ideas were first put into practice by the French Revolution which liberated the bourgeoisie from the Ancient Regime. Yet Liberty was inseparable from Equality and Fraternity. Liberty meant the right of the sovereign individual to be a citizen. Freedom would allow all individuals equal rights. Fraternity meant that Liberty and Equality would serve the greater good of the community.

But these ‘individuals’ were not ‘sovereign’ unless they owned private property. And of course, bourgeois rights were not extended to the working classes, women, or the colonised peoples, who had to fight to win them. And even when they succeeded, these rights were never freely granted, as a was evident when in 1802 Napoleon revoked the freedom of the Haitian slaves following pleas from the merchants of Bordeaux.  

Therefore, to detach the notion of bourgeois freedom from its factual historical context and apply it to NZ today as a universal right is not science but blatant ideology. Freedom today is just as entailed in the equality and fraternity of a class divided ‘community’, and still at the behest of the bourgeoisie! Just as they were denied to slaves by Napoleon, the NACTZ ruling class ideology passes off bogus ‘human rights’ to propertyless workers, women and Māori, whose Liberty, Equality and Fraternity is to be exploited and oppressed by the bourgeoisie as wage slaves.

Moreover, the Māori ‘communitarianism’ that is painted as threatening bourgeois rights in Aotearoa today originates in the ‘communal’ values that preceded the French Revolution by about 40 millennia. Indigenous tribal collectives were the first egalitarian democratic societies to exist until smashed by the rise of class society that gave us slave, serf and wage labour exploitation ever since, yet always resisted by the struggles of the oppressed, and revived briefly by the Paris Commune and the Russian Revolution. 

So, the strategic lessons we learn from bourgeois electoral circuses since the French Revolution, are that they mask the ruling class dictatorship, imposed not only on the working class, but on women and indigenous peoples oppressed by conquest and colonisation for millennia.

Therefore we need a socialist revolution to decolonise Aotearoa and to revive the global ‘collective’ experience from the dawn of history, so as to finally realise the liberty, equality and fraternity promised by the Renaissance, fought for by the French Revolution, and kept alive by all social revolutions since, including Palestine’s long war of liberation.

This is why we argue that Labour’s parliamentary defeat is a strategic victory for workers, women and Māori.  Parliament is exposed as a circus of reactionaries swapping acts with pathetic liberals every three, six or nine years. A theatre of fools diverting us from the real struggle as mere spectators in capitalism’s rush to destroy the Earth. There can be no escape route down the ‘alt centrist road’ that attempts to conjure away the class struggle.

NZ under NACTZ rejoins the morally and politically bankrupt Western world, along with its rising rivals in the East, where competition for cheap labour and scarce energy and minerals drives us down the path to never-ending war and ultimately human extinction

Our response to the political parties that prop up dying capitalism must be to rally all those who see the need for a revolutionary Left that does not compromise with the racist ruling classes war for profits over the bodies of workers. We need an independent labour movement that jettisons the wreckage of 100 years of social democratic betrayals, and before that, 40,000 years of class oppression.

To give that struggle its direction we must build an international socialist party so that NZ can become the socialist republic of Aotearoa. The foreign policy of our socialist republic must be to fight for the right to Liberty, Equality and Fraternity of all nations from Palestine, to Ukraine, to Myanmar, to Taiwan, and of all oppressed peoples, realised as a global federation of socialist republics.