Written By: - Date published: 4:08 pm, December 12th, 2008 - 117 comments
Categories: activism, john key, workers' rights -
Tags: 90 day bill, fire at will, workers party
Taken a matter of minutes ago, the Workers Party protest outside John Key’s multimillion dollar Parnell mansion. Just to remind you that we’ve just seen a man worth tens of millions of dollars take work rights off a whole bunch of people who earn minimum wage.
In case you’re wondering what they’re holding up, it’s this poster.
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QTR
Not at all. Hand up not hand out. Good National and capitalist policies.
Bill: Population control.
Infused
The misanthrope in me is all in favour of eat thy neighbour.
But looking at the problem sensibly, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that our production and distribution system is the root of it all and that it is shot.
Capitalism dictates that production is slave to profit. This means that socially beneficial production will not happen automatically. Worse, environmentally and socially disastrous production is often encouraged because of adherence to the profit motive.
On the distribution side, it is patently obvious that the market does not work. Starvation and malnutrition offer a good example. There is more than enough food produced to feed the global population yet 1 in 6 of us suffers permanent and severe malnutrition alongside 100 000 deaths from hunger every day.
The solution? Well, capitalism has encouraged GE as a ‘cure’ to all this. Studies show crop yields to be lower than yields from conventional seeds. But it’s profitable.
Of course, the 82 billion dollars annually over five years that the UN asked for could have dealt to the hunger as well as the other targeted areas of concern.
But since governments claimed that no money was available for this it didn’t happen. Then, €1 700 billion appears out of the hat when the banks suffer a bout of peckishness!
A pathology that set profit before people might anger me, but the reality of the total disregard for people and life is something else altogether. The watchward for capitalism is larger profit before lesser profit and regardless of all else, always profit.
Thankfully, it appears that people are wakening up to this fact again and class war is being engaged after a lenghy lull during which it was viewed as a quaint anachronistic term applying solely and decidedly to yesteryears realities. Early day, for sure. But the signs are there that a resurgence of left traditions is under way. No doubt you are infused with optimism when viewing the prospects for the next decade.
Honestly, if the protesters spent more time doing what they believe everyone else should, by borrowing a capitalist running-dog slave-owning business owner approach, and leading by example, they could probably fix whatever problem they are protesting about. instead of barking at somebody and expecting them to listen, why not just do something to fix it? and if they are doing something do more.
protesting in a group is not doing something either, it’s a thuggish way of getting your point across in this setting. did protesting about the springbok tour really finish apartheid? does protesting aginst whaling stop the japanese killing beautiful creatures of the sea? will protesting about class divide really get all those evil rich people to share out there hard earned dosh with those supposedly less fortunate?
George.
I basically agree with what you are saying. Protest with no alternative vision/practice is, at the very least, a waste of time and energy.
But there are alternative visions out there. And some are being put into practice. And a lot more would be done if the environment within which these alternatives must survive wasn’t so inimical to them.
Give it time.
An especially fatuous thread.
Regarding the protesters – who really cares. They weren’t doing any harm and they were likely there for only a couple of minutes for a photo op, if it was anything more than a gimmick the protection squad would have moved them along. I personally think they are a pack of numpties but am very happy that we live in a country that freely allows numpties to behave in this way.
That the thread has then moved on to a debate about the “class” divide is bizarre with certain posters trying to try and create a class divide and war among the classes where there is no need for either and the usual “I love capitalism ……no it’s evil I love socialism no it’s evil ……I love marxism” as usual ignoring the reality that there’s no nations that are pure examples of these systems anywhere and that no ideology is the answer to all of lifes/societies problems.
Anyway weather’s too nice to hang around here.
Bill,
The best thing about tolerance and diversity and to a lesser extent democracy is the ability to understand that other people do not share the same opinions and vision that I, for instance, may possess. It doesn’t bother me and i have every faith that people holding such views are earnest about them. which is a good thing.
could it be possible though that the environment is adverse and opposed to these views because of the strident militancy and the chest-beating rhetoric that accompanies the presentation?
maybe if more time was spent working towards changing the environment, without using polarising tactics, more could be achieved in the long run. surely methods involving hostility must only serve to harden the resolve of the very people whose opinions are trying to be influenced?
I’ve never posted here, but this it really creepy.
Leave his wife and kids alone, go protest at his office if you have to, but leave his family out of it.
What a sorry arse bunch of Union losers, I wonder if the Police officers from the Special Investigation Group (SIG) have carried out surveillance of this motley bunch. At least you can blame Phil Goff if you run into trouble with the Law.
That last remark from Doug re ‘Union losers’ kind of stuck in my mind.. so when Paul Krugman wrote a piece today about the anti-union action in the US Senate re carworkers’ jobs etc.. I got to figure well who, why.. Paul obliged:—
My point: we need to know who if anyone is behind the antis in this country. It is an important as knowing per the GW Bush dictum of knowing and knocking out those interests/parties and individuals who support terrorists.
What’s good for the goose applies also to the gander.. yes..
Northpaw:
Because the nature of the capitalist crisis is that it can’t be resolved in their interests until they devalue masses of fictitious capital as well as the value of labour-power. At that point the amount of money capital left can be productively invested to exploit a devalued labour power and make an adequate profit.
So attacking unions is the only way they can win, because union solidarity limits their attempts to cut wages and recover profits. The fire at will Act is their first broadside, and put that alongside keeping unions out of workplaces, cutting bosses Kiwisaver costs, tax cuts to the rich, forcing mums and dads into casual jobs and lower wages to pay for their kids truancy fines etc all of this is designed to weaken and ultimately destroy the unions and so cut the value of the wage.
Key has the money backing of big business, and the votes of small business, but he knows that like Roger Douglas in the 1980s, he has to do it fast before he completely blows his cover and the opposition wakes up. Hone Harawira appears to be waking up, but he is still in bed with the Maori bureaucracy and the NACTIONALS. Its only a matter of time before the MP splits along working class and petty bourgeois class lines.
The righties got very upset about the protest outside Key’s house because it sends them exactly the message they don’t want to hear: “We Will Not Pay for Your Crisis?”
Rave,
a couple of things if you don’t mind.. plain explain your – in the above cases – sense of capitalism.. AND.. to what Crisis (please be exact) does your final sentence refer..?