David Cormack
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Left! Right out.
🕑 Added 2021-12-31 02:04:14 +0000 UTCWhew. What a year eh.
There are plenty of political columns citing people's politicians of the year.
Hot tip: it ain't David Seymour. He disqualifies himself for a whole host of reasons, not least because he actively tried to hamper targeted Māori vaccination when he tweeted out the code for Māori to use. Also the main reason columnists think it's him is because for a lot of the year ACT was polling in the mid-late teens. Except now they're not. Seymour sucks for so many reasons.
I'm not going to do that. Instead I wanted to take a look at the state of the left at a global level.
Following the insane neoliberal reforms much of the Global North went through in the late 70s, and early 80s, right up until Covid, the left had kind of become irrelevant. Successful left parties around the world got in on the strength of being mealy mouthed centrists. Tinkering around the edges without doing anything radical.
In New Zealand we had right of centre governments for 24 out of 33 years from 1984-2017. Helen Clark's Government was very very slightly left of centre, but mainly centrist liberalism. An absolute plague on progress.
Jacinda Ardern's Governments have been more left, but still with a lot of work to do.
But globally we have to admit we've struggled with coherency. We didn't know what we were fighting for. Working class folk were getting left behind by "left" parties, in favour of educated intellectual pseudo-socialists. Right wing parties were able to tap into the growing resentment experienced by the less well-off by blaming immigrants, indigenous peoples, Jews, trans people, whatever. Instead of holding a system responsible that is specifically designed to keep making some people poor and others richer. Unless you have capital, and lots of it, you get fucked.
Covid has come along and magnified so many problems that suddenly the left is in the ascendancy, at a population level anyway, political parties still have a way to go. In the United States, people are finally realising that they don't have to be treated like shit by their employers. The US is experiencing the "great resignation". It's being reported as a labour shortage, but it's not. It's a shitty employer glut. If you browse reddit, you should take a look at the subreddit antiwork, it's a great insight into what's going on (this subreddit helped screw over Kellogs when it tried to hire a bunch of scabs to get around a striking workforce).
"Essential workers" have realised that what comes with being essential is a degree of leverage. When the only thing you have to sell is your labour, you should extract as much from the buyer as you can. It's what the market would want.
The crazy levels of money printing that went on around the world opened people's eyes, that with a collective will we can actually solve problems we'd been told were in the too hard basket. That we can just pay for things. Stimulus could be here to stay.
This view will become entrenched if inflation doesn't take off and stay high. The capitalist classes would prefer inflation did go sky high, it will reinforce neoliberal ideals, punish everyone who doesn't own capital, and line their pockets even further.
Covid has also shown the left a path out of being trapped in identity ideological warfare. As more and more cis het white folk realise that they aren't capital owners and so have been screwed for decades, they also see that non-white, non-cis, queer folk are getting fucked too. We're all getting fucked. And we aren't getting fucked by immigrants, or queer folk, or indigenous folk, we're getting fucked by people who look just like us, they just have more stuff.
This is not to minimise the experiences of people who look differently to me, who sleep with different types of people to me, who are differently-abled to me, those people still require a huge amount of support. Intersectionality is still a very real thing. But class consciousness seems to be a path we're headed down. And so long as that is an inclusive class consciousness, I welcome it.
Despite this, it's unlikely we'll see a surge of left-wing governments sweep the world, Chile aside. That's because "left" wing political parties are still very corporatist. Here in NZ, the most dramatic law reform is likely to be the fair pay agreements that Michael Wood is shepherding through. Big fan of those. But this Government has been pretty shit on homelessness, funding our health system, social welfare, drug law reform, and a bunch of other lefty things too.
Over in Australia, Labor is still pretty bad on climate change. Anthony Albanese is not inspiring, and they still have a fucked political system. The Democrats in the US are bad man. Real bad. They'll likely get wiped out in the mid-terms next year and then we'll have two years of shitty gridlock, as a Democrat President contends with Republicans running both houses of Congress.
The Tories may have finally fucked the dog in the UK, and despite the fact that Sir Keir Starmer is a hideous corporatist himself, there is still enough of Corbyn's Labour left that we might see some proper change come, though there isn't supposed to be an election until 2024.
So overall the left is perhaps in as good a shape as it's been in my lifetime. There are opportunities there, from grass-roots to federal government. We just have to find the right people, the right parties, and we can take them.
So happy new year friends. I hope that you've managed to scramble something positive out of 2021. And I hope that 2022 sees this fucking pandemic get better, holy shit I crave a social interaction that doesn't inevitably end up in talking about Covid.
