They sincerely want us to be better qualified, better paid, and more productive as a nation. And, to
achieve those goals, they have been willing to strap us into what the New York Times columnist,
Thomas Friedman, calls the "golden straightjacket" of free markets and free trade.
They desperately want us to accept what that guru of the Third Way - Anthony Giddens – insists is "the
fact" of globalisation. But what they cannot seem to understand is that the economic and social order
created by free markets and free trade is absolutely incompatible with the existence of free citizens.
As Freidman is so fond of saying: "The purpose of the new capitalism is to shoot the wounded."
The "new" capitalism is also, I might add, incompatible with a living planet - which means that the
choice we have to make is not simply between – as Rosa Luxembourg wrote – "socialism and
barbarism" (that choice, I fear, has already been made) but between a living planet and a dead one.
So, you see, the stakes we are playing for have gotten very high.
Too high for the Greens, alone, to win.
The challenge facing all progressive New Zealanders is to how to translate their analysis of what is
wrong with the world, into political action capable of putting it right.
There are those who argue that the world can be saved only by building an alternative culture in the
nooks and crannies 21st Century capitalism has yet to colonise. That the pursuit of power is a project
doomed to failure, because power has no location – it is always in the next room, or on the next floor
up.
I do not agree. In fact, I violently disagree.
Let me tell you why.
Twenty-two years ago, in 1981, I was part of the Dunedin organising group against the Springbok
Tour. A week or so before the Springboks arrived in Otago, we decided to organise a training run up to
Carisbrook. About 500 of us gathered on the motorway, linked arms, and began marching towards the
ground. After a few steps we started chanting: "Amandla! Amandla! Amandla Ngewhetu! Power to the
people."
I’ll never forget the way the chanting, and the marching, and the linked arms transformed that group of
ordinary New Zealanders. It was as if an electric charge was flowing through them and around them.
Their eyes shone and their faces glowed. For the first time in my life I understood the awesome and
unstoppable power of solidarity; of people united in a common cause.
Change can only come through mass political action.
Just as the only source of profit is human labour, the only source of political power is human
organisation. The capitalists are organised to a degree that beggars belief, but working people, young
people, progressive people seem to have lost their way.
How the Dick Cheneys and Donald Rumsfelts of this world must laugh at the progressive movement’s
cumbersome consensus-based decision-making, and its "affinity groups". How puny they must appear
alongside their aircraft carriers and Abrams tanks.
But how much more dangerous progressivism would seem if it was organised into a single, disciplined,
achieve those goals, they have been willing to strap us into what the New York Times columnist,
Thomas Friedman, calls the "golden straightjacket" of free markets and free trade.
They desperately want us to accept what that guru of the Third Way - Anthony Giddens – insists is "the
fact" of globalisation. But what they cannot seem to understand is that the economic and social order
created by free markets and free trade is absolutely incompatible with the existence of free citizens.
As Freidman is so fond of saying: "The purpose of the new capitalism is to shoot the wounded."
The "new" capitalism is also, I might add, incompatible with a living planet - which means that the
choice we have to make is not simply between – as Rosa Luxembourg wrote – "socialism and
barbarism" (that choice, I fear, has already been made) but between a living planet and a dead one.
So, you see, the stakes we are playing for have gotten very high.
Too high for the Greens, alone, to win.
The challenge facing all progressive New Zealanders is to how to translate their analysis of what is
wrong with the world, into political action capable of putting it right.
There are those who argue that the world can be saved only by building an alternative culture in the
nooks and crannies 21st Century capitalism has yet to colonise. That the pursuit of power is a project
doomed to failure, because power has no location – it is always in the next room, or on the next floor
up.
I do not agree. In fact, I violently disagree.
Let me tell you why.
Twenty-two years ago, in 1981, I was part of the Dunedin organising group against the Springbok
Tour. A week or so before the Springboks arrived in Otago, we decided to organise a training run up to
Carisbrook. About 500 of us gathered on the motorway, linked arms, and began marching towards the
ground. After a few steps we started chanting: "Amandla! Amandla! Amandla Ngewhetu! Power to the
people."
I’ll never forget the way the chanting, and the marching, and the linked arms transformed that group of
ordinary New Zealanders. It was as if an electric charge was flowing through them and around them.
Their eyes shone and their faces glowed. For the first time in my life I understood the awesome and
unstoppable power of solidarity; of people united in a common cause.
Change can only come through mass political action.
Just as the only source of profit is human labour, the only source of political power is human
organisation. The capitalists are organised to a degree that beggars belief, but working people, young
people, progressive people seem to have lost their way.
How the Dick Cheneys and Donald Rumsfelts of this world must laugh at the progressive movement’s
cumbersome consensus-based decision-making, and its "affinity groups". How puny they must appear
alongside their aircraft carriers and Abrams tanks.
But how much more dangerous progressivism would seem if it was organised into a single, disciplined,
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