No heart (Happy 90th to Labour)

Idiot/Savant's post about Labour's 90th birthday has prompted me to deliver on my promise in my Back in Black comeback post, to continue to discuss the future of the NZ left.

Often it seems my posts on this topic end up really just being an excuse to vent my eternal disappointment with Labour (as I've commented over on I/S's post).

Today I'm particularly grumpy. Partly because I'm fed up with migraines and food poisoning (I thought fancy restaurants weren't supposed to be the cause of 2am vomiting fits). But mostly because I've been thinking a lot about how Labour acts to shore up the current capitalist system, rather than mounting any kind of serious challenge to it.

What really gets my goat is the number of decent activists who are hip deep in Labour, seeing it as the best way to advance their progressive politics. They will often be people switched on to the value of political activism by their own experiences in unions, the peace movement, Education Action Groups at university (oh dear, showing my age), or student politics. They have good intentions, and I don't doubt those for a second.

But is Labour the best way to achieve such desired outcomes as fully publically funded, publically controlled health and education systems? Can such aims be implemented or sustained in our current political system anyway? And if not, how is Labour changing the way NZ politics and society operate to enable their alleged principles to be deliverable?

Many years ago I was a law student. I had aspirations to practice, until one day I was sitting in one of the few Jurisprudence lectures we had about alternative analysises of the Western justice system, and it all fell to bits - my careful plan to complete law school, practice public law, and generally do good in the world by virtue of being that holy thing, A Lawyer. David Williams was the lecturer and he said (I paraphrase of course):

There is a view that left-wing lawyers who seek to make improvements to our legal system are merely entrenching further a system that is fundamentally unfair. The improvements they seek only make it less likely that real, radical change will ever occur, because they make the system slightly less unpalatable and make it seem as if addressing the root inequities can happen within the current system, when in fact it never can.

In essence he was saying you can make your incremental changes, feel as if you are doing good, but in reality you have not made a dent in the underlying injustice of our legal system. If anything you are helping to prop it up. You are doing the equivalent of buying the workers' happiness with a 2% wage increase when what they really want is democratic control of their own workplace.

I often feel that Labour activists are doing the same thing, but writ larger than just the law itself.

And sometimes when individual Labour activists realise this - when they get burnt out by the frustration of putting up endless remits seeking party policy that reflects what it says on their membership card, only to have Cabinet Ministers speak forcefully against them - they get fed-up with politics in general, bitter and twisted. Their energy and enthusiasm is all used up by a party machinery that is quite happy with capitalism, thanks very much.

Part of the problem is the current lack of viable alternatives for those activists attracted to Labour. Unless they are environmentally minded they are unlikely to see the Greens as an option, and other parties like the Alliance, the Progressives and Democrats for Social Credit seem too old-fashioned, and/or too much hard work. To attempt to operate in left wing groups outside of the parliamentary path is not an option for many - for myself I seek a single organisation that I can be involved in and pursue a number of issues dear to my heart, from both inside and outside the Beehive-centric system.

I have many friends in Labour, and I don't wish to treat them badly. But I do believe their own party uses them, quite disingenuously. If they want to change the direction of Labour, if they want true renewal, then they need to get organised, within their party, or they need to find an alternative outside it to support, so that Labour will seek the left ground as they did when the Alliance was a real threat in the early 1990s. And then they need to cement their power to keep it left, just as those who are quite comfy with the status quo have been doing within Labour these last few years.

Because, as I/S points out, Labour is going to be the core component of any progressive government of the forseeable future. The longer it occupies the centre and centre-right, the worse it will go for us all when National and its kin are in charge.