AGENTS OR VICTIMS?

In some previous posts I commented that columnist Chris Trotter had dismissed the working class as a force for political and social change. Chris says this is not his position and he has forwarded me an article which is a clarification of his present viewpoint.
This article appeared in this weeks Independent Financial Review and it is published here in a spirit of open and critical debate.
Readers may also like to read Bryce Edwards commentary on the article which is posted on his Liberation blog.


Former union boss, Rex Jones, once quipped: "The Engineers’ Union represents workers – not victims." It’s a distinction Phil Goff and Labour need to learn – and fast – if they’re ever to recapture the Treasury benches.

A week or so ago, John Campbell asked Paula Bennett, our new Minister of Social Development, the blindingly-obvious but all-important question. Why didn’t she, as a young, working-class, part-Maori woman, raising a daughter on her own and struggling to make ends meet, turn to the Labour Party for political salvation?

"Why didn’t you join?"

Bennett’s response was devastating.

"Because I was damned if I was going to be a victim."

If Phil Goff is to lead the Labour Party back into government in three years time, he and his party are going to have to come up with a response to Bennett that’s as convincing as hers was crushing.

Because in one simple sentence Bennett has encapsulated everything that is wrong with Labour’s (and, to a greater or lesser extent, the entire Left’s) current relationship with the New Zealand working-class.

The contemporary Left conceptualises the political dynamic between those at the bottom and those at the top of our society as being, essentially, therapeutic.

Poverty, unemployment, domestic violence, dysfunctional child-rearing – powerlessness in general – are not understood as relationships which must be changed, but as pathologies which must be treated: diseases which must be cured.

This conceptualisation of the social-democratic project is, of course, a profound revision of the original socialist cause.

Consider the political, social, economic and cultural implications of the last verse of the old trade union anthem, Solidarity Forever:

In our hands we hold a power greater than their hoarded gold,
Greater than the strength of armies multiplied a thousandfold
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old
When the union makes us strong.

Packed into those four lines are a cluster of ideas and assumptions from which the modern social-democrat would, quite frankly, run a mile.

For a start, there isn’t even a whiff of powerlessness, not a trace of victimhood.

Written by the union agitator, Ralph Chaplin, back in 1915, when the Industrial Workers of the World – the IWW or "Wobblies" – were still a force to be reckoned with in American labour relations, the song is an undisguised celebration of the raw power of working-class collectivism.

"Heroic" individualism, the ideal which in subsequent decades would come to define America’s perception of itself, is dismissed by Chaplin in a single line:

Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one?

The song is also a statement about the competence of the unionised working-class, in which Chaplin defiantly attributes the manifold achievements of modern industrial civilisation not to the capitalists who initiated them, but to the workers, whose labour-power erected and sustains them:

It is we who plowed the prairies; built the cities where they trade;
Dug the mines and built the workshops; endless miles of railroad laid.
Now we stand outcast and starving, 'midst the wonders we have made

And it is this sense of exclusion which fuels the rising temper of Chaplin’s verse:

All the world that's owned by idle drones is ours and ours alone.
We have laid the wide foundations; built it skyward stone by stone.
It is ours, not to slave in, but to master and to own

What Solidarity Forever describes is a relationship that has failed, a relationship that must change:

They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn,
But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn.
We can break their haughty power; gain our freedom when we learn
That the Union makes us strong.

It is no coincidence that the repeated use of the phrase "we can" in this, the most popular and best remembered of all union songs, found a contemporary echo in the slogan of a Democratic Party candidate who, for the first time in more than forty years, drew openly from the rich historical legacy of the American labour movement.

"Yes we can" became Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign slogan, but it was Ralph Chaplin’s first.

The consciousness of collective power, the assertion of collective competence, and a very clear sense of historical agency: these were the factors which drove the early socialist movement forward, and made its participants so certain that they could alter the exploitative economic, social and political relationships in they were enmeshed.

If there were problems to be solved, diseases to be cured, it was working people who would do the curing and the solving. They were history’s subjects – not its objects.

Contrast this with today’s therapeutic social-democracy. Far from being the prime agents of historical change, working-people find themselves reduced to suitable cases for treatment. They’re either patients – to be healed; victims – to be comforted; or delinquents – to be rehabilitated.

It was precisely this mindset that Paula Bennett wanted no part of: the mindset that disempowers working people by subtly but unmistakably infantilising them. The political dynamic which, having transformed working people into children, then proceeds to offer a vast array of middle-class professionals – teachers, union officials, social workers, probation officers, criminologists, sociologists, anthropologists and psychologists – as their surrogate parents.

The sort of people who send shivers up and down the working-class’s spine every time they deliver that immortal line: "Hello, we’re from the Government/Ministry/Council/CYF’s – and we’re here to help."

If there were problems to be solved, diseases to be cured, it was working people who would do the curing and the solving. They were history’s subjects – not its objects.

Contrast this with today’s therapeutic social-democracy. Far from being the prime agents of historical change, working-people find themselves reduced to suitable cases for treatment. They’re either patients – to be healed; victims – to be comforted; or delinquents – to be rehabilitated.

Denied the opportunity to exercise collective power, is it any wonder that all those "aspirational" members of the working-class: people seeking "inclusion" in the broader social narrative; citizens who, a century ago, would have built the workers’ unions, the workers’ party, and finally the workers’ government; today turn for inspiration to the boy raised in a state house who went on to become New Zealand’s millionaire prime minister; or to the feisty solo-mum who went from being the recipient of a social-welfare benefit, to the Cabinet Minister responsible for handing them out.

This is the great transformation which John Key has now been given the opportunity to complete. To finally wipe from the minds of the New Zealand working-class all memory of the collective power that once allowed it to transform a nation. And, to create in its place an Americanised culture in which the revolutionary political slogan: "Yes, we can", can be quietly retired in favour of the transformative personal slogan: "Yes, I can".

If Phil Goff cannot put the "our" back into Labour. If he cannot dispel the notion that workers have become little more than lab rats in a vast social-democratic experiment. Then, to paraphrase Bruce Springsteen’s heart-breaking ballad, ‘My Hometown’:

"These votes are going, boys – and they ain’t coming back."