liberation

Identity politics vs class politics - 5: What is identity politics?

Increasingly the debates around New Zealand politics – especially relating to the left – feature concepts such as ‘identity politics’ and ‘social liberalism’. These terms are especially useful for understanding the history of Labour Party over the last thirty years, as well as for understanding the internal fights going on in the contemporary left. But just what is social liberalism and identity politics? This blog post argues that identity politics arose out of the rightwing of the new social movements that developed on the New Zealand left from the late 1960s. As liberation struggles developed around important issues relating to gender, sexuality and ethnicity, leftwing and class-based approaches to understanding and fighting for social equality were sidelined in favour of this more conservative approach. [Read more below]

Identity politics vs class politics - 1: Introduction

Phil Goff has recently challenged issues that are at the core of socially liberal politics in New Zealand. The Labour Party leader has been asserting a more class-oriented and leftwing version of politics, effectively seeking to shift Labour away from a core part of its project of the last three decade: liberal identity politics. The meaningfulness and authenticity of this shift can be questioned, but the intrinsic tilt to the left cannot. While the conventional media and blogosphere interpretation of Labour’s new direction is to label it as either ‘social conservative’ or ‘rightwing’, Goff’s repositioning is in fact nothing of the sort. It is actually a newfound expression of relatively leftwing positions on important issues. What’s more, the controversy over the speech has sparked an important and long overdue debate within the New Zealand left about what it means to be leftwing in 2009, and what the way forward is for those interested in fighting for a more equal and just society. It has made the left confront questions of how concepts such as ‘social liberalism’, ‘political correctness’, ‘post-materialism’, and ‘identity politics’ fit into the leftwing project, if indeed they do at all. Yet, much of this significant debate occurs in an incredibly murky and confused manner, mainly due to an inability to conceptualise the different elements at play. So, in an attempt to contribute to this discussion, this blog post introduces a whole series of posts discussing these issues. The series attempts to reframe the debate and the terms of the debate in a way that is hopefully useful. It argues that to understand what’s going on in the Labour Party, what Goff has recently pushed for, and indeed what’s happened to the Green Party, is not a case of social liberalism versus social conservatism; nor is it left versus right; but instead it’s liberalism versus leftism – or simply: identity politics versus class politics. [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 26: Conclusions (and bibliography)

The formation of the NLP appeared to represent the beginning of a radical or left-orientated realignment in the New Zealand political landscape. Rather than being merely a product of Jim Anderton’s personal dissatisfaction with the course of the Fourth Labour Government — as the media tended to portray the NLP — the establishment of this new party represented the rejection of neoliberal economic policies by a section of traditional Labour voters, and elements of both the far-left and new social movements. [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 25: The cross-class basis of the Alliance and its consequences

The rightward shift of the NewLabour Party (NLP) that — as I have described it in the previous blog posts, mirrored a similar evolution of the Labour Party  — is closely linked to a shift in class orientation, which is a process that again mirrored Labour’s own. In the case of the NLP, the watershed point was the formation of the Alliance, a multi-class electoral coalition. Thus, policy evolution, to an important degree, reflects class orientation. [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 24: Resistance to party change

Just as in the 1980s, when some members of the New Zealand Labour Party resisted what they saw as the corruption Labour’s traditional ideals and the rightward transformation of the party under the parliamentary leadership of the Fourth Labour government, substantial numbers of NewLabour Party (NLP) members attempted to resist the NLP’s shift towards the right in the ideological spectrum. To do this they had to fight against the attempts to suppress dissent, and had to choose between tactics of 'voice' or 'exit'. [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 23: The Alliance oligarchy

In the short history of the NewLabour Party (NLP) and Alliance, the conservative and rightward political developments were paralleled by comparative organisational tendencies towards oligarchy. During their short existence, both parties undoubtedly displayed a concentration and consolidation of power within the leadership, as the Anderton group came to dominate both. As one senior member of the NLP said about working inside the Alliance: ‘Its just like in the old Labour Party again. People get power and they want more of it’ (Interview). According to Robert Michels, the writer of Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy, an influential book about the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the rightward drift of parties usually goes hand-in-hand with organisational tendencies towards an increasingly narrow distribution of internal political power. [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 22: The Alliance’s orientation to the economic system

Social democratic parties have traditionally occupied an ambiguous position in relation to the economic system. While maintaining various degrees of opposition to the consequences of capitalism, they agree to work within the framework of capitalism and bourgeois democratic institutions. Such ‘State socialists imply that although class conflict, economic crisis, exploitation and poverty are consequences of capitalism, they can be eliminated (through state action) while capital remains’ (Allen et al., 1978: p.24). Operating within this framework, such parties continually adjust to the constraints of that environment. [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 21: A shift to the right in economic policy

After the formation of the Alliance, the NewLabour Party’s (NLP) speed in policy moderation increased substantially. This was largely a result of two processes: first, the pressure applied by the other Alliance partners for the NLP to drop its own more radical policies, and second, the NLP’s desire to keep the coalition together, which inevitably meant compromising on its own policies. Furthermore, involvement in the Alliance now gave the Anderton group in the NLP more power and influence through uniting with their more conservative allies in the other Alliance parties against the NLP leftwing. [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 20: The success of the Alliance

During the early formation period of the Alliance, public opinion polls gave the as-yet-unformed coalition percentage ratings in the mid-30s. These results were largely illusionary, as some sections of the public which were probably outside of the Alliance’s potential support-base simply flirted with the novelty of the new coalition. Yet it still indicated that the Alliance was likely to be a substantial political force in at least the short-term future. [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 19: Principle and pragmatism

The NewLabour Parry (NLP) was born out of a rejection of political expediency. The people who formed the party perceived the old Labour Party to have given up its social democratic principles and traditions and implemented policies for which it had no mandate. Therefore the early NLP party organisation placed a strong emphasis on the fact that it would not be tempted by the methods of expediency and that it would strongly guard its original principles. But Anderton and the NLP constituted a peculiar contradiction – they claimed to be principled; they rejected expediency, yet they also claimed to be pragmatic and attempted to reject an image of idealism and of being ideologues. [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 18: Political differences within the Alliance

The establishment of the Alliance, was a major turning point for many of those who remained in the radical left faction of the NLP. While some of the radical left capitulated to the swell of enthusiasm for an Alliance, others were concerned with the opportunism which they perceived in the NLP’s involvement in the Alliance. After all, membership of the Alliance depended less on what a party stood for, than what it stood against. Hence all five Alliance parties stood for distinctly different politics when they joined, but claimed a commonality in what they opposed — neoliberal economic policy. [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 17: Formation of the Alliance

The formation of the Alliance in 1991 was a watershed in the NewLabour Party’s (NLP) development, especially in that all four of the party’s Alliance partners were considerably to the right of the NLP on most economic issues, and largely unsympathetic to the NLP’s strong ideological emphasis on working class interests. Thus the NLP’s semi-merger with the Greens, Democrats, Liberals and Mana Motuhake contributed to the NLP leadership’s rightward movement. Politically, this project led to a watering-down of the policy and principles that the NLP has worked for. Organisationally it led to the NLP, especially its branches, being subsumed into the larger Alliance structure. [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 16: Post-election internal reactions

Following the NewLabour Party’s (NLP) 1990 general election campaign, some type of post-election evaluation period was made inevitable by the rushed nature of the pre-election preparations and the less than hoped for election result. The party finally had real time to take stock and for some to take a broader view of the direction of the party as an organisation and a political force. The post-election period was therefore a time for members to consider some fundamentals of the party: structure, organisation, political and activist orientation, and the decision-making process. [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 15: The 1990 general election

The general election of 1990 was the first real test for the NewLabour Party (NLP). The existence of elections every three years serves to intensify the selection and refining of a party’s particular policies and political positions. The election acts to test these policies as well as the party’s organisation structure including its ability to mobilise activists for the event. Elections also reassert the importance of the party’s leadership, as they shift the emphasis to the idea of particular members of the party potentially becoming representatives in the national legislature. Furthermore, because elections test the success of the organisation, they automatically lead to some sort of internal party evaluation of the many decisions that were made prior to the election. This means that elections are often substantial turning points in the nature of political parties. This was certainly the case with the NLP. [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 14: Interclass support and social democracy

Parliamentary participation tends to require parties of the working class to seek electoral support outside a narrow definition of what might be seen as the working class. And, as can be seen in the evolution of the NewLabour Party (NLP), the compromises needed to gain this wide support had the effect of weakening the party’s original ideology. As the NLP moved beyond an attempt to appeal primarily to working people, its stated ideology and policies have shifted correspondingly. [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 13: The NLP’s orientation to Parliament

Initially the NewLabour Party (NLP) membership voted against a purely parliamentary focus for the party. The 1989 Constitution stated that the objectives of the NLP ‘may include education, activity and organisation at all levels of New Zealand Society, not restricted to political electioneering’ (NLP, 1989: p.2). The NLP thus decided on a strategy that sought to put emphasis both on winning seats in Parliament and mobilising community fight-backs against the attacks on working people. As National Councillor Laila Harre contended, ‘It would be opportunist to expect people to elect you to Parliament if you’re not doing work in the community’ (quoted in CPNZ, 1991a: p.17). [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 12: Development of party policy

The pre-election exigencies that acted to centralise the NewLabour Party's (NLP) organisational structure served also to make the party’s policymaking process a less than democratic and thorough affair. As a result, the early policymaking process acted as a crude filter on the diversity of perspectives within the organisation. Economic policy, in particular, was rather conservative as a result, with an essentially middle-of-the-road Keynesian approach adopted [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 11: Structure and organisation

On being formed in 1989, the NewLabour Party (NLP) adopted an organisational structure very similar to that of the old Labour Party. It had policy commissions, party branches, electorate councils, district councils, a National Council, a National Executive, and the usual positions within this (such as leader, president, vice president, general secretary). In a sense, organisational forms and routines perfected in the old Labour Party to ensure centralised control were used as armatures to give shape and organisational form to the NLP. The influence of this established labour organisation, which had evolved over three-quarters of a century, meant that the NLP was born with a more top-down party organisational structure than might otherwise have been the case. [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 10: Party ideology

In the history of the NewLabour Pary (NLP) – which this series of blog posts is covering - the question of whether the NLP would simply constitute just ‘another Labour Party’ was clearly intertwined with the struggle inside the party over its adoption of a particular ideology. The NLP was being pulled in two directions. On one side were those who wanted to re-create the NLP in the image of the old Labour Party, with its parliamentary bias, and generally Keynesianist economic approach. On the other were those in the radical left and social liberals who wanted a party concerned with bringing about more fundamental social change, or even some form of ‘socialism’. [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 9: The influence of the social liberals

As well as the revolutionary-reformist divide within the NewLabour Party (NLP) discussed in previous blog posts in this series on the history of the NLP, there were other axis-lines of significant political conflict in the early organisation. Many social liberals were strongly represented at the founding conference, and were involved in several important early debates over party policy (especially about environmental and gender issues). Most significant was the involvement of activists from the women’s movement. According to Alison McCulloch, an observer at the first conference, ‘Feminists at the conference were one of the most united groups’ (McCulloch, 1989: p.13). [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 8: Elimination of the radical left

The incompatibility of the three factions detailed in the previous blog posts proved too great to allow their coexistence, and the first eighteen months of the NewLabour Party (NLP) saw the far-left groups expelled, marginalised, or dissolved fully into the organisation. The Communist Left organisation was the first to be purged, after they made clear their intention to attempt to split the party. There was some debate and dissension from party members over the expulsion (Boyle, 1989), but no one outside the Communist Left appeared to be willing to support their somewhat inept tactical manoeuvres inside the NLP. However, the expulsion of the Permanent Revolution Group (PRG) in April 1990 for unspecified acts of disruption and for unspecified incompatibility with the NLP constitutional principles and objectives was not so clear-cut and uncontentious. The PRG’s expulsion provides an interesting example of the political process of the NLP National Executive and also of the tensions inside of the organisation. [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 7: Loose and fluid alliances

The existence of these three broad groups of the ‘labourites’, the ‘social liberals’, and the ‘radical left’ inside the organisation (detailed in the previous blog post), did not mean that all party members were either in one or another, but that they constituted broad divisions within the organisation. So these groups were by no means mutually exclusive — there were some overlaps in terms of membership of these groups. For example, there were, of course, many ex-radical left members moving in a rightward direction. Keith Locke (pictured on the right), for instance would probably be better described as a member of the social liberals despite his former membership of the Socialist Action League (SAL). [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 2: Theoretical background

The NewLabour Party (NLP) was a classic social democratic labour party aimed at the pursuit of working class orientated social change through the institution of parliamentary democracy. Although it was a reaction to another parliamentary party of the left moving significantly to the right, the NLP too provides evidence of the inability of social democratic parties to maintain their initial radicalism due to their subsequent need to moderate their policy and political strategy. The party therefore provides an interesting opportunity to examine party transformation in general. This second blog post in the series on the NLP’s short history in New Zealand politics – which contains research carried out on this political project back in 1995 - therefore attempts to discuss theory in relation to social democracy’s transformation and set up some sort of framework for understanding the NLP’s short history. [Read more below]