SLEEPING DOGS : HOW A LIBERAL DEMOCRACY CAN DESCEND INTO FASCISM

Sleeping Dogs was marketed as an action movie but it is really a warning on how a liberal democracy's descent into fascism can occur with the blessing of the political establishment.

THE MOVIE Sleeping Dogs was sold as an action thriller but it is really a warning about how a liberal democracy can be turned into a police state, with the political establishment's full approval.

Its provocative premise is of a near future New Zealand under the iron heel of a totalitarian/fascist government. The regime has put the entire country under martial law as it struggles to suppress rising political and social unrest and an organised resistance movement. Capitalism is in crisis.

The film was released in 1977, at the fag end of the social democratic consensus that dominated New Zealand politics in the post war era. That consensus was soon to come to an end with the election of the fourth Labour Government in 1984.

Without a popular mandate, it proceeded to dismantle the Keynesian-based economy in favour of monetarist inspired policies based on unregulated markets, privatisation, the rollback of the state and so-called 'individual freedom'. These days, its supporters like to call it 'aspirational politics'.

If fascism arrives to rescue the interests of capital, if it does represent the last ditch defence of a moribund capitalism, it has not been needed in New Zealand. The future that Sleeping Dogs tentatively sketched out in 1977 has not arrived. Yet.

The irony is that while neoliberalism was first imposed by military and fascistic dictatorships in developing countries like Chile and Argentina it was imposed via liberal democracies in developed countries like the United States, Britain and New Zealand.

In Chile the imposition of neoliberalism saw the socialist government of Salvador Allende overthrown by a US-backed military coup. In stark contrast, New Zealand's neoliberal coup was done via the ballot box. While Labour might of been freely elected in 1984 it proved to be an undemocratic government.

Since then, resistance to the neoliberal order has been sporadic and piecemeal. And since the election of a Labour Government in 2017 that resistance has disappeared altogether. For a long time, the rhetoric and activities of the New Zealand left depended on the idea that the interests of the left and the interests of the working class were at one. That illusion has been increasingly difficult to maintain because of the left's continued loyalty to an obviously right wing Labour Party. 

Last year saw working class interests and the Labour-aligned left come into direct conflict. The occupation of Parliament grounds last February was a visible expression of working class militancy but the left, everyone from Labour and Green politicians to trade union officials to 'progressive' commentators, attempted to smear it as neo-fascist in its politics.  As commentator John Moore observed at the time:

'Liberals and leftists have found a new cause in decrying a rabble of poor, brown and angry protesters. They have embraced the police and even the army as the necessary agency to push back this mob. Where is the left that once saw the millionaires, billionaires, the police and the oppressive state agencies as the real enemy?'

And as I wrote recently:

'What was an uneven and often confused expression of working class anger and frustration was smeared as a nascent alt right movement rather than what it really was, a symptom of a political system in decay.'  

Capital has not only captured the economy and pursued its own interests, it has also seized control of our political system. Our 'representative democracy' is neither representative or democratic. It has been slain with false premises and hollow platitudes from a bunch of parliamentary parties who exist only to maintain the status quo. 

Given the unrelenting hostility that the political establishment exhibited to the Wellington protesters, the future speculated on by Sleeping Dogs nearly fifty years ago cannot be confidently dismissed. Its message remains acutely pertinent today. This is especially so because as the country sinks further into recession and the parliamentary parties are exposed as having no real answers, more people may begin to forcibly insist that the political and economic elite be made to foot the bill for the country's economic problems. That demand will not be welcomed by the political establishment.