The Labour Party is currently embroiled in a debate about its ideological direction. It's an on going struggle about what the party should prioritise and what it should ‘stand for’. The recent increase in tensions over the party’s ideology has been precipitated by the announced departure of Labour MP Shane Jones. [Read more below]
There has been a tendency to see the division being between the left and right factions of the party. Such a view has merit, but there’s probably more sense in seeing the divide between those in the party focused on social liberal concerns, and those focused on economic and more traditional Labour issues. In political science terms, this divide is generally termed a materialist vs postmaterialist debate.
Materialists are more concerned with economic issues, while postmaterialists are mainly concerned with focusing their attention and political policy on social issues. While materialists want to focus on the things that materially impact on voters, such as jobs, housing, the economy in general, the state’s provision of services including social welfare, the postmaterialists are interested in social issues often related to ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disabilities, human rights, and foreign policy.
Traditionally, there’s been a class aspect to the materialist/postmaterialist cleavage, with working class voters and politicians being more focused and concerned with materialist economic issues, and middle class voters and politicians being more focused on postmaterialist human rights or ‘identity politics’
Therefore, traditionally, the political left and the union movement has been materialist, and the more politically centrist has been drawn to identity politics and postmaterialism.
On the left, the division first started to arise in the 1960s and 1970s, when the new social movements arose. These more middle class-oriented movements around gender, ethnicity, peace, and environmentalism were a major change to the traditional left. With concerns about ‘political correctness’ and the ‘personal is political’, these postmaterialists managed to re-orientate much of the political left.
In New Zealand the postmaterialists of the new social movements flooded into the Labour Party in the late 1970s and early 1980s. As Bruce Jesson (and others) have argued, it was these more middle class activists that were key to the development and acceptance of neoliberal economic policy introduced by the Fourth Labour Government. Helen Clark and other postmaterialists played an important role in this and other ideological developments in Labour in the 1980s and 1990s.
Essentially throughout this period, the postmaterialists have been dominant in the Labour Party. Their influence has been in prioritising and achieving some important social changes, such as prostitution law reform, civil unions, the so-called anti-smacking law, the development of political biculturalism, gay marriage, anti-smoking reforms, etc.
Therefore in the Labour Party the postmaterialists – also known as ‘social liberals’ have been part of the party that have wanted Labour to focus most on issues particularly relating to the agenda of ethnicity and gender.
Materialists in the Labour Party – regardless of whether they are on the left or right – are more concerned to prioritise economic issues. They have wanted the party to emphasise issues such as jobs, cost of living, housing, social services, economic inequality, and so forth.
Through the period of the Clark Labour Government the social liberal faction was clearly dominant, especially because the prosperous economic times meant that materialist concerns were of less pressing concern, allowing space to fight more on social issues and against non-economic oppressions.
Then the Global Financial Crisis hit, and this changed everything. Throughout the world and in New Zealand, suddenly materialists concerns were elevated after 2008, and they came to dominate political debate, after a long absence. Across all of New Zealand politics there was now a greater concern with economic issues, especially about jobs, housing, economic inequality and the public provision of social services.
The left in New Zealand – and elsewhere – has been more concerned with materialism in the years following the GFC. There has even been a resurgence of interest in class politics, unionism, Marxism, and theories of socialism. The Occupy movement, together with the increased focus on economic inequality epitomised the revival of traditional materialist leftism.
It might have appeared that the social liberalism and postmaterialism of the 1970s through to the 2000s was now dead. Of course this wasn’t the case, and in just the last year – perhaps with the revival of some economic prosperity – there is now also a return of interest in all forms of identity politics, from Maori nationalism through to feminism.
So which ideological tradition and emphasis is dominant? Materialism or postmaterialism? It’s not clear. Neither in the Labour Party or the wider political left, does it appear that one or the other ideological focus is more important that the other.
And this of course raises the question about whether they are in fact mutually exclusive anyway. Certainly there’s a good argument to be made that a strong leftwing movement or party will pay reasonable attention to both economic and social concerns. The problem, of course, is that there’s a tendency amongst some to pay lip service to this idea, while actually reverting to the extreme prioritising of one over the other.
