CAN CENTRISM REALLY BE A MOVEMENT?

The Labour Party wants you to 'join Jacinda and our movement'. But can you really have a movement based on a centrism that rejects real change?

IN 2017 Jacinda Ardern and the Labour Party declared that they just wanted to do 'this'. 'Let's Do This' was as meaningless as most election campaign slogans, but Ardern attached the slogan to what she said were her two main two policy priorities - tackling poverty and climate change. In the subsequent three years she has failed to fulfil both of them. As the level of inequality has widened so the level of poverty has increased. And if tackling climate change really was the 'nuclear free moment of her generation'  targeting supposed carbon neutrality by 2050 could hardly be described as taking the issue seriously, since the scientific community has repeatedly warned we have nothing like thirty years to sort out our act.

Three years later and with  another election campaign looming, Labour's new election slogan is 'Let's Keep Moving'. Which raises many questions. Who is moving? Where are we moving to? In what direction are we moving? Indeed, are we moving at all?

Certainly the Labour Party thinks we are. On its websIte we are invited to 'Join Jacinda and our movement'. Mmm...I smell something unpleasant.

I can fully understand that an American left wing politician like Bernie Sanders can lead a grassroots progressive movement which is now wheeling in behind Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I know that an organisation like the Democratic Socialists of America is leading a revival of the socialist movement in the United States. And in Britain it was a large grassroots-based movement that propelled Jeremy Corbyn into the leadership of the Labour Party.

What marks such movements is a desire for real political and economic change and a determination to bring it about, even with the forces of reaction ranged against such movements.

The movement that Jeremy Corbyn led rallied around a  manifesto that sought to overturn a failed capitalist economy and build a society and economy for 'the many, and not the few'.

In the United States Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the movement she represents remains committed to a Green New Deal (GND)for the United States. The GND proposes carbon neutrality by 2030 combined with far reaching and transformative changes to the American economy. It is a movement based on a politics for economic and social justice in a decaying capitalist society. AOC puts it this way:

' We have seen greed and a desire for profit at any human cost and any environmental cost, kill our planet, endanger our children, and create miserable conditions. '

Her alternative? 'When we talk about the word socialism, I think what it really means is just democratic participation in our economic dignity, and our economic, social, and racial dignity. … It is about direct representation and people actually having power and stake over their economic and social wellness, at the end of the day. To me, what socialism means is to guarantee a basic level of dignity.'

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez : Campaigning for a GND and real change.

You will search long and hard and without success, to find anything that Jacinda Arden has said that articulates a vision in any way comparable to the one expressed by AOC. The term 'socialism' is not in her vocabulary. Indeed in 2017 when Ardern expressed a view that 'capitalism had failed' what she really meant was that the policies providing the framework for capitalism had failed, not capitalism itself.

Can you really lead a movement based on the centrist, 'business as usual' policies that Jacinda Ardern and Labour subscribe to? Can you really claim to be leading a movement that, in reality, will result in nothing more than the same established order proclaiming policy from 'on high'? Can you really claim to be leading a movement when any democratic participation is confined to voting every three years?

In the end the truth remains that Jacinda Ardern and Labour remain committed to the status quo and the rejection of the kind of tranformative changes that would threaten the interests of the established order. In the end, the kind of movement that Ardern and Labour envisage is one that merely trots docilely along to the polling booths and provides them with the necessary votes. Electoral fodder.

During her election campaign Ardern will present herself as leading a movement and we've had a preview of it in all her empty talk about 'the team of five million'. In 2017 she portrayed herself as a politician of change which might of caught the mood of the country but was completely bogus  - and I said so at the time. In 2020 she is being pushed forward as leading a so-called movement that exists nowhere except in the minds of her backroom staff strategising her election campaign. It's a bogus movement. 

A real movement will only emerge when the widespread discontent with climate policy, housing, inequality, poverty and low wages translates into a political party that doesn't pander to the status quo. And that party isn't represented among the parliamentary parties that will soon be trying to convince you to vote for them.