From In and Down to Outward-In: The Big Picture matters

Three-year-cycle thinking conditions much of New Zealand’s political life. Our eyes are generally down on the short-term – how to win next time. Poll-driven thinking exacerbates this focus. Arguably, for Labour, it reinforces MMP’s tendency towards the constrained and defensive. To espouse a radical idea is to anticipate admonition – don’t panic the voter. It leads to a particular view of a disciplined party – one that rarely, if ever, should buck the traces.

In this self-constrained world, the focus is on the short-term and achievable. Looking up and out into the wider world in which NZ exists is either neglected or confined to specific (and wonkish) portfolios such as Foreign Affairs or Trade. Part of the problem is that understanding the wider picture is demanding, often partial and imprecise, and less concrete than, say, changes in the tax structure or voting behaviour statistics. Nevertheless, that “outward-in” focus is as important as the “in and down”.

Marx captured the outward-in focus in the oft-quoted passage from the Eighteenth Brumaire:

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

One implication is that we must deal with what history serves us. There is a second – the idea that that transmission is also spatial, that is, for example, we in New Zealand are trying to make our own history, but what’s happening elsewhere in the world may intrude.

It is that second aspect of history’s many gifts that merits greater attention, especially now. Here’s why. At this point, true believers in the market might have a cup of weak, milky tea and a nap in the shade.

Most of the Left believes in the existence of Capitalism, that is, an almost universal system of production and exchange in which most of us work for Capital in one way or another, are paid less than the value of our labour, allowing a small group of people to do very much better by hoovering up the surplus thus created. (And, yes, this precis is laden with arcane discussions).

Since the 16th Century, the political organisation that has provided the physical boundaries for this inequality, and also for opposition to it, has been the nation-state, the governance of which has evolved over time, partially and messily, towards liberal democracy. Liberal democracy has provided a safety valve – the vote – to head off political challenges to a thoroughly unequal system. It has failed on the other important front – economic democracy – because that strikes at the very heart of the creation of wealth and its unequal distribution.

But Capitalism is dynamic. It must develop to survive, seeking ever larger markets, sources of raw materials and labour. In the modern era, the pillaging of Latin American from the 15th Century was followed by similar behaviour in Africa, Asia and elsewhere. Initially that expansion was under the auspices of nation-states, leading the squabbles over which metropolitan countries got what (have a look at the 1885 Treaty of Berlin, for example). At the same time, working people in the metropolitan countries endured appalling privation. Capital is ever generous in its distribution of disadvantage.

Expansion also began to privilege footloose financial capital over productive capital, and threw up in colonial and post-colonial states client groups (sometimes called national bourgeoisies), which sought, first, to manage the relationship with Capital and its power-bases in the colonial powers and, second, to seize a modicum of independence for local capital, so it could share in the spoils of appropriated wealth. This was neither easy nor always successful.

Note that, despite a commitment to internationalism on the Left, and despite often heroic attempts to build international class-based action, such efforts have been spasmodic and limited. Yes, there have been extraordinary international campaigns of solidarity. Yes, entities such as the EU have permitted greater transnational organisation. Yet the basic playing field for the Left remains the nation-state and its institutions. Bluntly, most contemporary Lefts are stretched in trying to sustain domestic political and worker rights in their states.

This may change, but here’s the rub. For fifty years or so, the Left and its values have been under powerful intellectual and policy attack from the Right. Neo-liberalism, combined with the impact of extraordinary technical change, has empowered domestic capital and its political representatives, and, strikingly, a new uber-class of global magnates frankly contemptuous of liberal democracy and its values. The Left’s standard response to this challenge has been tentative.

One consequence of this new world is the erosion of the international rules-based system, embodied in post-Second World War institutions – the IMF, the World Bank, the UN etc.. That system provided an at-best modest degree of voice and protection for small players such as New Zealand. Such protection, however limited, cannot be taken for granted in the future. The world is currently sliding into an extended period of confusion, in which institutions and behaviours upon which we have relied for the past 70 years are decaying.

Returning to Marx, making a history in NZ in the next one or two generations is going to be tough. The external conditions are threatening. The precautionary principle applies. So what is to be done?

For a small country such as NZ, the following makes sense for a start:

a) Continue to support as far as possible the rules-based model. Purists may baulk at this, but, looking at the chaos facing the world over the next generation, the rules-based model has its virtues. That said, arguments that we can never recover that model cannot be ignored. In that case, we face a generation or more of challenges;
b) Identify allies with which cooperation in economic and defence issues is possible and sustainable. For New Zealand, this must mean Australia and our island neighbours in particular;
c) Explore actively import-substitution options, emphasising domestic innovation, investment and production. One necessary step is, for example, to promote further a decline in domestic investment in housing;
d) Reduce dependency on overseas financial controls, particularly in the retail banking sector;
e) Develop further energy sufficiency by, for example, supporting the Lake Onslow initiative;
f) Take seriously the lessons of the Keynesian Accommodations since the 1930s, particularly a significant flattening of wealth divisions by taxation, and the role of an active state;
g) Strengthen consciously democratic involvement and institutions as a bulwark against populist authoritarianism. How we address the issue of social media cannot be avoided;
h) Build strengths in economic democracy in the productive economy, from collective bargaining and co-operatives to capital-sharing;
i) Consider with care our approach to population movements in a troubled world.