Twopenneth on MMP and Class

Let me begin by suggesting that the Single Transferable Vote (STV) option in the 1992 referendum was preferable. In the 1993 referendum, First Past the Post (FPP) was preferable. Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) won 54% to 46%, a clear win but not a weighty endorsement.

MMP is an unfortunate system for many reasons but particularly because it seeks to obscure class conflict. In this it is no friend of working people.

We can all agree that the fight for political democracy – that is, adult suffrage – was, and is, a hard road. Winning the vote is a continuing struggle, particularly in a world evermore patrolled by a new global feudal-style aristocracy.

The confidence that we have in liberal democracy in New Zealand is harder to find in large parts of the globe. Liberal democracy is not protected by a ratchet system, whereby gains in democratic voice become a new stable platform for further gains. Polities can fall back into despotism despite previous democratic gains. Current trends in Brazil are interesting.

This means that the protection of democratic voice is important. However, that is only part of the story. In the Nineteenth Century, the debate about political democracy – with suffrage its heart – was complemented by the “other” democratic matter – industrial democracy. This addressed worker voice in the ownership and control of production.

In general, if concessions were made (and won) in terms of political power, they were less frequent and harder fought in the realm of ownership and control of capital and profits. Collective bargaining was generally the closest working people came to ownership and control, and any student of Industrial Relations, or, for that matter NZ’s Employment Contracts Act, will understand how fierce is the opposition to worker voice and control.

The baffling aspect of the struggle for industrial democracy has been the Left’s progressive disengagement with the idea. The ideology of private property so effectively promulgated since the Eighteenth Century is powerful. Today, Industrial Relations, ownership and control, creation and distribution of wealth are all approached by the Left as one would an choleric Inland Taipan.

With this timidity comes a distancing of the Labour tradition from working people as its core constituency, a downgrading in the voice of unions and the growth of a latter-day pluralism, given oxygen by Post-Modernism, in which Labour’s newly found broad church marginalises its traditional base. The role of marketing strategy in party and electoral activities promotes that marginalisation.

And there are reams of scholarship, in Economics, History and Sociology especially, to anchor this inchoate pluralism. Much of contemporary economic orthodoxy exists on the basis of Capital’s attack on the centuries-old Labour Value model, mounted from the early Nineteenth Century, and consolidated in the 1870s marginalist framework.

The often-unspoken target of this scholarship has been class analysis. Labour value analysis prioritises the quality and quantity of labour embodied in production, in the process explaining how capitalist exploitation occurs, and establishing the basis for class conflict and exploitation under Capitalism.

Contemporary economic orthodoxy remains rooted in a Nineteenth Century move to obscure that exploitation by emphasising the individual and their choices. There is no structured exploitation under Capitalism, merely the outcome of myriad individual choices expressed in prices. There is no space for effective economic democracy, for ownership and control is an important expression of individual freedom, in this case to own, control and dispose of assets.

So well established has become this mode of analysis and organisation, radical alternatives have found it hard to prosper. Even in the Labour tradition, its historical commitment to abolishing economic exploitation has been diluted.

So we come to MMP. MMP is political system designed to obscure class differences (that is, differences based on exploitation in Capitalism) and, instead promote the narrow view of political life as a choice between myriad parties grounded in the status quo. MMP is clever, for its essential pluralism, its essential centrism, promote “safe” contending views, yet obscure the contradictions within Capitalism with a fig-leaf of contending pluralist interests. Its essential pluralism obscures and rejects class analysis.

For the Left, to play in the MMP pool carries many dangers. It is a system for and of a narrow view of political democracy. It plays to a 1960s pluralism of contending elites. It traps the Left in debates and institutions in which class perspectives are framed as illegitimate, conflictual, archaic. It doesn’t address the lacuna in industrial democracy. Above all, it traps the Left in a political order in which its historical and historic role – that is, to transform Capitalism in the interest of working people – is at best irrelevant, at worst a danger to that circumscribed democracy.

One curious aspect of New Zealand finally arriving at something like a true MMP outcome, thirty or so years after its implementation, is the changed circumstances since the early 1990s. MMP in New Zealand appears to be coming of age in an era of polarisation and conflict globally and, perhaps, locally. The conditions for the maturation of MMP in New Zealand are not promising. This contrasts strongly with, for example, Denmark in which a comparable system has been in place since 1920 and has developed deep roots in the obfuscation of class conflict.