Hobgoblin #8 November 2014 www.hobgoblin.org.nz

Post Election: so what now?

by David Neilson

Post election the on-going crisis of global neoliberalism appears at least in New Zealand to be perversely encouraging neoliberal common sense. At some level of consciousness, people think that in a world of intensifying inter-national competition (due to the neoliberal project’s on-going crisis) we need to be even more focused on how New Zealand can win capital’s confidence. Prevailing common sense dictates that competitiveness depends on having a workforce that is moulded, segmented and subordinated for capital’s global needs. This is not a simple ‘false consciousness’ but, rather, expresses a rational sense within an irrational world. In this view, radical social democratic goals of universal security, solidarity, equality, (and in the eco-socialist variation, ecological sustainability!!) can be cast as indulgent naivety: as ‘Left lunacy’. Social democratic thinking, even in its very cautious Labour Party format, appears at this point in time to be out of step with dominant market values of competition; of winners and losers; of friends and enemies; of the global market reality. Overcoming neoliberalism and the global market ‘civilisation’ it has spawned, requires a global sea-change. However, such economic transformation beyond the neoliberal model requires a movement that grounds itself in the everyday struggles of everyday people. Of course we need a global ‘counter-hegemonic’ project; one that envisions a new ‘global fix’ that prioritises international cooperation and displaces global capitalist imperatives. But we also need a groundswell development of political consciousness and local social movements that can envision and fight for socially progressive national templates. Ultimately, these need to connect as a global solidarity for the enactment of a new global fix that can facilitate such progressive local templates. In New Zealand, the mainstream of the social democratic movement has undermined the local development of such a consciousness. From 1984 onwards the mainstream of the political wing of the labour movement has devoted its energies to legitimating the neoliberal reforms that it has championed, but which go against its social democratic roots. Since Helen Clark’s ‘Third Way’ government (1998-2005?), the party has tentatively and cautiously sought to rekindle the social democratic reformist path. However, by this time the social democratic values underpinning the progressive aspect of such reforms had only a tentative hold on common sense. Third Way advocates did not spend enough time engaging in the discursive struggle with everyday people and their everyday experiences and in contest with neoliberal logic –the war of position as Gramsci would say- to rekindle the social democratic imagination. They seemed like Leninists (distant from and even dismissive of the popular consciousness) but without a socialist project! More problematically, Third Way reforms and discourse remained couched in the neoliberal mentality. While certainly an attempt to soften the hard line version of the neoliberal project; the Third Way does not however decisively challenge it. More depressingly, this ideological mix can be cast as the ‘neoliberalisation of social democracy’. As such, the Third Way becomes at best neoliberalism’s ‘functional supplement’ defined by selective state-led interventions to counteract neoliberal capitalism’s worst effects. Now, ‘centre-Left’ (Labour) and ‘centre-Right’ (National) versions of this mix of the dominant neoliberal project supplemented by secondary social democratic sweeteners displace the hard-line neoliberal market mentality but nonetheless consolidate the neoliberal project. In the Third Way mentality, there is no questioning of the global market terrain, and in the British version it is even championed. Moreover, the global market terrain is treated like a natural and thus immutable environment. In this mind-set, everything becomes necessarily subordinated to the priorities of NZ Inc. This is a narrow-minded but rational national pragmatism, within an irrational world. Only their purpose is mad, as the late Bruce Jesson put it. More disturbing, is that the Third Way model does not question the neoliberal model of ‘exclusive solidarity’. For example, ‘Working for Families’ was euphemistically called ‘employment friendly’, but more accurately, it was ‘unemployment unfriendly’. Central to the neoliberal mentality is the view that the unemployed and beneficiaries, what Guy Standing might call the ‘idle precariat’, are demonised and scapegoated. ‘We need not worry about them, they are the problem!’ is the underlying sentiment. In this perspective, even the most basic principles of welfare solidarity appear to be out of step with neoliberal common sense. The task for the Left in New Zealand, then, is about stepping outside of the neoliberal myopia, and envisioning the new global project and progressive local template within that for New Zealand. More basically, it is about rekindling on the terrain of everyday life the fire of a progressive social democratic imagination. We need Think Tanks, and we need popular education. In one sense, this requires going back to basics. That is, we need to foster ‘organic intellectuals’, who know how to organise, who know how to listen, who know how to promote the ‘good sense’ (Gramsci) in the popular consciousness. More broadly, in another sense, we need to begin again the task of ‘education, education, education’ to quote the disgraced 1

Tony Blair. But this is not education so we can grow a high skilled working class component of NZ Inc. that can compete in a neoliberal world of global market competition. Rather, the biggest task is to begin promoting again the values of solidarity, equality, and security, but this time connected with a vision of ‘another world’ which can fuse such values with a practical, realisable, and mutually reinforcing global-local framework.

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