John Minto recently spoke at the Workers Education Association (WEA) in Christchurch. Guest blogger Phillip Ferguson reports on the meeting, where Minto argued that the liberal left had let down the working class, and that life for workers and other oppressed groups had got worse under Labour and National governments. [Read more below]
John Minto was in Christchurch to give the annual Lincoln Efford Memorial Lecture. Lincoln Efford was a leading figure in the WEA for many years and there was a presentation about him before John's talk. I was expecting it to be dreary dull, but found it quite interesting. Instead of Efford being some old Christian do-gooder he turned out to be much more interesting than that. He had been a member of the Labour Party as a young man but left it, disillusioned part way through the 1920s. He was a conscientious objector in WW2 and stood as a candidate in elections twice during the war. According to the person presenting, Efford attacked the war as an inter-imperialist conflict. Efford was also a prominent campaigner against Labour's introduction of peacetime conscription in 1949 and the WEAer doing the talk referred to Labour whipping up a Cold War hysteria to push peacetime conscription.
John Minto is a no-frills speaker, so unlike the previous talk, there were no slides, powerpoint etc - just John. He did, however, invite the audience to boo and hiss whenever he mentioned anti-worker stuff that Labour and National had done.
Although the talk was called "Class, race and sex and of these the greatest is class" Minto only talked very briefly about the rise of identity politics in the 1980s. He mentioned that the left had not taken up gender and race issues enough originally and that was part of the reason that patriarchy theory and sovereignty stuff had taken off, which was a fair point. He then looked at how the left in NZ in the 70s and 80s was largely a liberal left and so ended up spending a lot of time fighting within campaign groups about patriarchy theory and sovereignty and racism and so on in the 80s while Labour got on with restructuring the economy and shifting wealth upwards.
Minto explained what Labour had done by saying they were 'a middle class party' (he was talking about social composition) and the middle class were happy with the liberal social reforms of the 4th Labour government and went along with the trade-off: the new right economic reforms. (I think it is better to see this as the reason why there was so little opposition to the reforms rather than why Labour carried out the reforms. The main reason they carried them out was not the party's social composition - although by 1984 it certainly was a middle class party in terms of its active membership - but the fact that Labour was committed to managing capitalism and capital/ism required the reforms. Their social composition made it easier than if they had've had a lot more active workers, but it wasn't the *cause* of why they carried out the reforms.)
Minto presented some interesting stats about how life hadn't been improved under Labour but for many workers had actually got worse. But mainly he relied on talking about his own observations, which was quite effective. He talked about how the longer hours people had an effect beyond their own low pay; it also affected the fabric of community life - eg in Otara there weren't the people to coach sport and organise weekend fixtures etc, because the people who used to do this were now working over a 7-day period. He also gave some stories from his own negotiating experiences about the class hatred the employers and negotiators he deals with have for workers, especially the low-paid.
He also looked at how the position of most Maori had gotten worse and they'd got nothing from the Treaty settlements and the whole process around the Treaty. In fact, he was pretty hard-hitting on that. I think one of the things was that this is an area which got to him personally because when he was dean of graduates (not sure exact title) at the high school he taught at, one of his jobs was to try to organise scholarships for kids to go to university. He said he got a booklet several centimetres thick which listed all the iwi trusts and so on and he went through it to try to get some scholarships. He soon found than there was no interest at all in providing scholarships for Maori kids at his school because they weren't iwi-affiliated.
One thing was a bit odd, though: after making a really good case against the whole Treaty industry he still felt it necessary to say that he thought it was good that there was a Treaty industry. It didn't really make sense, because everything he'd just said about it was negative.
He also looked at the political parties and said there wasn't a tissue of difference between Labour and National and they just danced around in the centre: sometimes Labour was a tiny bit to the left of National on something, sometimes National was a tiny bit to the left of Labour (eg John said he agreed with Key's comments about Kiwi-saver being a tax-cut for the well-off). He criticised the Maori Party for supporting people like Donna Awatere and Taito Philip Field on the basis of race and said it was impossible to name one single thing Field had done for the people of Mangere, the poorest electorate in the country. He also pointed out that there are seven MPs in parliament today sponsored originally by the Service and Food Worker Union and none of them had done a thing for workers.
He was a bit more generous with the Greens. Said they always pushed Labour on legislation related to workers' rights but were too concerned with being a niche environmental party and needed to emphasise class more.
In fact, it was around the issue of the way forward and what kind of society we should aim for that his talk was a lot weaker. For instance, he said that the ‘Buy Kiwi-Made’ campaign was good - although he had just been talking about some shocking NZ employers, and when during question time, he was challenged on whether NZ capitalists were in fact better than foreign ones, he said ‘sure a capitalist in Remuera was just as bad as a foreign one’.
Minto believes that NZ should export less and import less and aim to be much more self-sufficient. He seemed to think this was what a liberated society in NZ would do. I found this part of the talk quite bizarre. He'd already outlined how NZ before 1984 was not such a great place and we shouldn't be nostalgic about it, yet producing a lot more kinds of stuff in NZ was exactly the old economic model. It was also strange because he talked about internationalism yet hadn't seemed to yet have made the leap from there to realising that in a socialist world it would be fine for any one part of the world to just produce one thing, even just a crop, because it would not be a negative – somewhere in Africa could just produce corn and it would have no negative consequences because, unlike under capitalism, they wouldn't be at the mercy of low agricultural prices controlled by agribusiness. They might mainly produce corn but still have a thoroughly modernised society with high living standards because their position in the world would not be determined by the law of value. I kind of flinched at the prospect of living in a self-sufficient (or largely self-sufficient) NZ. In the context of a capitalist world, it would mean we'd have less goods and pay higher prices. In a socialist world it just wouldn't make sense.
Overall, however, it was a pretty good speech – and some of it was like he was pushing a Workers Party line. The weaker parts, which were a couple of smaller sections of the talk, simply reflected bad ideas that still have a resonance on the wider left in NZ.
Unfortunately few from the wider left were at the talk. Minto commented that it was good to see Marxists outside the meeting distributing literature, and how important Marx was for understanding the modern world. But apart from these Workers Party activists, the only other organised group there was the Alliance. Given John Minto's HART past I thought that a number of former HART activists would be there. Although there were probably 90-100 people in attendance, most of these people would have been in their 60s and 70s, with a few 'young things' in their 50s. At my age it is also rather weird to walk into a meeting and actually *lower* the average age in the room considerably! No doubt there is still a big struggle to convince younger activists - and the alienated in general - that the class struggle is vital.
