Written By:
advantage - Date published:
8:38 am, January 14th, 2025 - 37 comments
Categories: Deep stuff, Left, Politics -
Tags:
In the past two decades, election results in western Europe, Australasia, and North America have been framed as a crisis of the left. It’s more a case of misidentified success that’s holding the left back, than a primrose path to a tragedian graveyard.
The performance of social democratic parties has, on average, been marked by a tremendous decline across many democracies, from a vote share of nearly 40% to below 20%. Europe’s left decline has been fast, but it’s common elsewhere.
Those with redistributionist tendencies who did get in to run a country are either pretty mild like Trudeau or Albanese or Starmer, or needed major coalition partners to squeak in like Ardern or any recent government in Spain or Germany.
But fixating on the fate of social democratic parties alone is misleading: it overlooks the broader fate of progressive politics that prioritises the core principles of egalitarianism, inclusion and sustainability. While mainstream parties on the left are declining, progressive politics is transforming, renewing and in some instances even thriving.
Many of the diagnoses of the left’s challenges rely on assumptions that are at odds with reality.
One of these flawed claims is the supposed decline of working-class support for the left, which obscures the massive voter gains that progressive parties have made beyond their traditional constituencies. The working class is mostly female, and it ain’t white. It is simply an outdated notion about the composition of progressive party electorates. It may appear that the working class resides in the UFC audience, until you register that industrial workers requiring blokey muscle and blood are in a collapse-fast decline in advanced democracies. That has been particularly the case in New Zealand in the last 3 years.
The decline of the industrial workforce does not signal the demise of progressive politics. Working class people tend to be younger, female and often have a migration background.
Second, voters from the educated middle classes, often employed in services or the public sector, have become the largest and most loyal electorate of progressive parties, whether social democratic, socialist, green or left-libertarian. In New Zealand the great majority of those who are in the public service are women, and the great majority of the remaining union members are women.
That gives a correlative hint to why the Greens pretty took out the vote across most of the Wellington region last time.
Progressive parties today engage with a diverse range of voters, from people in precarious or insecure work, women and migrants, to old people secured by state superannuation, to the expanding middle classes. Any analysis that keeps insisting on the declining blue-collar working class as the sole viable electoral constituency of the left underestimates the electoral base of progressive parties overall.
And our left parties will actually thrive if they reflect that the newer segments of the left electorate strongly favour progressive redistributive economic and social policies – beyond their support for social inclusion and sustainability.
Beyond confusing where the left constituency now lies, the power of the lefts’ policies now has astonishing if poorly recognised momentum and power.
Register the scale of the policy programme success the left have had, as well as its consequences. The left-led climate policies from the Paris and Kyoto accords forward have led to some of the most fundamental policy-driven shifts since the Marshall Plan. The auto industry including parts and servicing accounts for about 40% of Japan’s economy and 30% of Germany’s economy, and they are in rapid and likely terminal decline (albeit with the long tail of servicing and polishing all those shiny old combustion machines).
Check out where public transport use is in Auckland compared to the late 1990s when National tried very hard to kill it all dead. Now no one dare touch those Gold Card subsidies.
That is the permanent economic and environmental avalanche of renewal for the modern world, and for the most part the right still fights it.
It is the left that has altered capitalism in myriad, massive and permanent ways in the last three decades, and it would help if we shouted our successful policy revolutions that are still underway.
Green voters do not differ from social-democratic voters much. Both groups are consistently leftwing in their economic considerations. These voters’ commitment to egalitarian redistributive policy is also manifest in their clear opposition to welfare chauvinism. More than two-thirds of social democratic, green or radical left voters reject restrictions on migrants’ access to social assistance.
Now let’s get to immigration. It’s not left-Kryptonite.The support for immigration in New Zealand for example is still resolutely high with employers regularly crying out for more restrictions to be lifted. The socialists of old from the 1940s are now lifted onto their care home beds with gratitude, by Filipinos and Thai and Samoan working class women.
Nor need they go to ground when there are electoral losses. Instead of finding them at a party meeting, in the absence of a charismatic party leader you may instead find them leading community gardens, organising Pasifika or other cultural events, stopping Peter Thiel from investing here, joining in with school fundraisers, or putting the volunteer hours into pest-free neighbourhoods.
The left may not be winning electorally, but their policies most certainly are, the working class are most certainly strong and identifiable, and we can draw sustained strength from the powerful success of them both.
Could these progressive people referred to in Ad's post be called left wing, or are could they be more accurately called liberal?
To be left wing, I thought there needed to be a structural analysis of socio-economic class. In either a Marxist analysis, or the more Weberian (occupational-status) type of the likes of the old UK Registrar General's analysis, women didn't fit easily into it. This is because the structure was basically developed around assumptions of male dread winners.
The proletarian working or manual classes tended to be male-dominated ones. Women working in service occupations, from cleaners to sales people or 'secretaries', they never had the same status or payment of any equivalent male occupations in terms of skills and training level.
New Zealand also never had a very big industrial working class, which generally is what is regarded as working class. And in the old left internationally, that was the focus of union activity.
To me, having lived for a time in the UK, it has long seemed to me that NZ has always been more of a liberal than left wing country. And both countries are still pretty patriarchal, in that the male sex class tends to be dominant politically and economically, no matter how many women are in higher socio-economic and political positions in than in the past.
In the begining, there were those who worked for those who have the capital invested (and or owned the land). Mechanisation reduced labour required on the farm and then the number of skilled artisans.
1.The 40 hour week began here via Samuel Parnell (though google will lie that it was invented by Henry Ford). First for carpenters.
2.We did have a working class culture for a time. But it was more in the assembly of cars/TV's, wharfies and freezing works. Then came the open market policies of Douglas (and since further diminished by the move to dairying and then the more recent decline in forestry processing).
3.The ECA was of a design to destroy unions, unions were manifest proof of the existence of an organised working class.
4.The decline in size of a working class in manufacturing (assembly) or in manual labour has become associated with a move from well paid jobs (on which one could support a family) to lower paid work.
All while people are supposed to see themselves as middle class (yet it required two incomes and fewer children to be able to own a home) or otherwise classless poor (often working multiple jobs/shift work) who rented for life and then faced a desperate old age.
5.If one put it that those who work for life in jobs that would not pay a mortgage are working class, then we are moving towards a time we have the most of this class than we have had in the past. That this includes couples is the tragedy.
"We did have a working class culture for a time." Yes. But even that was very small in comparison with more highly industrialised countries.
Thanks for this. I have been thinking a lot about this as you can imagine. For me, the working class are those who depend on wages paid by a boss to earn a living – whether it be in service sector jobs, what's left of manufacturing or public service jobs. I think that’s what we need to capture somehow in our discussions.
The problem is that currently the Labour Party focus on "working people" tends to cater more to the middle classes. Low income people, especially low-paid women in precarious work, tend to be given secondary consideration. They are often in part time, or casual work. they tend to be non-unionised, as in low paid hospitality workers.
Beneficiaries tend to be given a low consideration – better than National and ACT, but still they, especially single mothers, tend to be left a lot to struggle on.
The Greens have better policies for low income people, but still they tend to favour middle class young people.
The middle classes are, so far, doing reasonably well, though not always as well as they should be.
Those in "middle class" jobs (teachers, nurses) are doing comparably well – but would do better over the Tasman. Where they get paid middle class incomes and have better working conditions.
Agreed. Having lived in Aussie (and worked in education there) it seemed to me there was a stronger, or bigger working class movement than in NZ. And stronger unions.
Most of what we are talking about is in yr last sentence.
Union as in the formal organized sense eg E Tu, NZNO, the union of a sports/community/church group and union in the form of a marriage/long term commitment.
All of those unions have weakened with the rise of the self and neo-liberalism.
We've forgotten what we can achieve when we co-operate, forgive relatively small grievances and work towards a common goal.
union in the form of a marriage/long term commitment.
Yeah cause women really loved having to stay in those abusive, controlling violent relationships. Maybe we should bring back the right to rape your wife to make the expectations clear – after all it isn't that long ago it went away.
The demise of the above has nothing to do with this. It is simply a male rose tinted view of the past.
And sports / community activity declined with the advent of weekend working (and an aging population). You seem to think the symptom was the cause.
What a way to miss a point.
Dunno where that misandry diatribe cane from.
I've seen long term marriages and relationships end because one of the couple 'weren't happy'.
No violence, no rape.
The cruel irony is that the jilted one in three examples has gone on to find happiness and a new relationship while the instigator is still 'unhappy' and single.
Yep, weekend working is another of the undesirable traits if neo-liberalism.
A very unscientific suggestion, but I think what the right wing call apathy is mix of hopelessness and fear.
We must be into the third or fourth generation of those who work playing musical chairs for an ever diminishing share of the pie. There's been no help over those times as what purported to be a voice for the left was a watered down neoliberalism. Hence, why vote?
And, in a world/country where unions get the bash every time a right wing government gets in, what job holder wants to find themselves with a reputation as a union member = socialist = communist, when the person who owns your job gets the power to replace you and you find yourself with few rights to challenge the decision.
Since 1984, even when the left has been in power, unions were never given back what they lost. Probably that's a good thing, imho the pendulum had swung too far. But two wrongs don't make a right.
Ten points to you for demonstrating what politicians do, and how, despite recent efforts to discontinue the practice.
Immigration isn't left-Kryptonite here because, unlike European countries, we haven't imported masses of people from cultures that hate the West. However, it's an issue the left should pay more attention to, ie there's a reason why employers are "regularly crying out for more restrictions to be lifted" and that reason isn't that they have the best interests of NZ's working class at heart. The old socialists who are being lifted into their care beds by Filipina, Thai or Samoan women should ask themselves why there aren't NZers willing to do those jobs.
Because we have 40 odd years of putting the slave back into wage slave.
Like most OECD countries we have an aging population we haven't done enough planning for and countries around the world are competing for our skilled young people.
This is exacerbated by the above to make us non-competitive and also exacerbated by a large chunk of the young population being Maori and a large chunk of employers being old racists.
Yes, with the advent of the ECA – the wages for Care workers dropped to the Minimum Wage very quickly.
The privitisation of care services also had a lot to do with it as well. Staff for instance at geriatric wards got paid well. We oft paid the same for the wages i.e. no cost savings to the government, to the private sector but the profit had to come from somewhere. No coincidence many of those agencies now have very wealthy owners – aged care, geriatric care, childcare – thar's gold in them hills……..
The positives – 4 weeks annual leave and 2 weeks sick leave. And payment to carers.
The negatives. No Fair Pay Agreement/industry awards. No regulation of work hour requirements (requiring people to be willing to work shifts to get jobs – is not good for community. There are those able to do second jobs at weekends/in the evenings). Limited oversight of the working conditions of migrants – as per exploitation by employers.
Advantage? Can we call the current government gerrymandering with the public service job cuts then?
You're probably wondering why the Minister of Local Government put a Crown Observer into Wellington Council with no reason – other than NZs only Green Party mayor?
Or why same Minister delights in slagging Wellington Water despite WW fronting the biggest renewals programme ever?
Sheer coincidence of course.
You know, Wellington council budget reports and recordings of council meetings are publicly accessible online, yeah? While the Wellington financial sh*tshow was massively exacerbated by National throwing out Three Waters, pretending Wellington doesn't have major problems at this point is just willful.
The gutter gossip in Wgtn is that the greenie council was balanced, unknown to them for a while, by a neo-lib city administration. The same gossip alleges it was the admin that put up the figures for the sale of the airport share to council, and that it wasn't until a councillor questioned the financial case the city bureaucrats put to them that the real discussion began.
And the same was, allegedly, the case with demolishing The City to The Sea pedestrian bridge, although this time, it was Wellingtonians with engineering and finance backgrounds that questioned the admin case for demolition.
All this is just hearsay, of course, but I'd love to have an expansion/refutation by anyone in the know.
The bridge was fine, all they needed to do was manage numbers on it during events. Money saved. They could have worked with friends of the bridge to reduce event costs.
The 4 councillors, not Green nor Labour, voted to support the share sale pre the 2023 GE and changed their minds in 2024.
2 of those had been on the Platform to spread lies about the Mayor.
Share sale money into a wealth fund would help them get around the insurance risk problem (sale of airport shares is not easy after an earthquake).
WCC to put it mildly is a cot case, Green Mayor or not. The 'sad/tragic Wellingtonians like me who listen/watch to the WCC meetings on Youtube, respond to invitations to submit comments on developments, that are always ignored, have seen this trend over the last 5 or so years.
The trend not to do city maintenance on potholes, roads etc came to the fore in 2024. Wellington City physically looks scuffed and beaten, in large part due to the lack of leadership and the wish for the legacy, for herself, of so-called transformational projects focussed on by the Mayor.
I've never believed the need for political parties in local government and those councillors who have tried to block various 'mad' things have reached across political boundaries to do so. We saw this in the vote against the sale of the shares in Wellington Airport. We have seen citizen action in the call for a judicial review relating to the proposed demolition of the City to Sea bridge.
In exchange ratepayers have been pounded with rates increases of up to 18.5% while still we have a plethora of 'nice to haves' getting a place in the LTP.
Various people have put forward the view that the power of the Council officers is too great. Without much more evidence I'd believe this when I see it and I'm picking I won't see it. It sounds too much like the national politicos who crassly blame the Government departments for the politicos own lack of progress. Always good to pick on those who cannot defend themselves. If by some chance it is true then it actually signals that we need to have councillors who are more experienced in their communities, in money management and with commonsense.
I voted for Tory Whanau. I won't be making this mistake again. She is just not capable and rumour is that she is seat warming until her magnificence is recognised by The Greens nationally and she will be propelled into Parliament.
Many Wellingtonians of all stripes support the Observer, and the so-called increases to contributions to Wellington Water build on a very low base. There has been a mood that 18.5% rates increases would not be so bad if it all went on water. But no.
'Big people' acknowledge when they have made a mistake, they don't defend to the death because of left-wing credentials. We need some big people to acknowledge that the Tory Whanau mayoralty has not been a success, lick our wounds for a little bit and then move on. The current mayoralty has been wasteful both of $$$ but also in the reputation of the Council as a whole, council officers and with the funds of ratepayers. Many ratepayers are finding this Council difficult to deal with, a combination of council itself and odd things happening with the staff.
Mid to late last year many felt 'oh we don't need an Observer'…for many others it has morphed into 'why the timidity Minister, we needed a Commissioner and you gave us an Observer'
The Observer is due to report in February, the appointment ends in June.
So I agree with Populuxe '…….pretending Wellington doesn't have major problems at this point is just willful.'
I forgot to mention that there are others concerned. Read The Scoop https://wellington.scoop.co.nz/
for articles by Wellington-focussed thinkers like Lindsay Shelton, Helene Ritchie and Sir Hugh Rennie.
Tory Whanau also writes an uninspiring word salad.
So fun for everyone reading The Scoop.
That's awfully utopian. Britain and Germany de-industrialising because of energy costs is not being compensated for by the development of new industries. Hence their stagnant economies.
In Britain it's less about shiny old combustion machines than chemicals:
Meaning India and China. IIRC China has pumped out more CO2 in the last forty years than Europe has since the start of the Industrial revolution, which is extraordinary. It's not slowing down and India is coming up fast.
Radcliffe is a petrochemicals engineer, who must have made his money from the UK's oilfields, so he would say that, wouldn't he.
The UK lost any edge in manufacturing in the Thatcher era, when she single-handedly dismantled the UK's industrial base in favour of an economy based on nebulous financial services that bartered primarily on UK tax havens and on the UK being the English-speaking (two-way) door to Europe's financial and economic markets.
Thatcher's anti-coal fields policy killed the UK's cheap (and admittedly nasty) energy advantage, for a start. Apparently, whole manufacturing bases, equipment, etc, were snapped up by countries like Germany in the Thatcher era to re-establish elsewhere.
Brexit was an enormous own-goal economy-wise. As evidenced by how quickly large chunks of the finance sector migrated to Ireland post-Brexit, and how any light industry that could grew a base in Northern Ireland, to take advantage of the porous border. Those that couldn't have been sunk under a mountain of red-tape involved in taxation and physical entry into Europe.
Much of that is because the same Tory government that brought in Brexit gave almost no resource and thought into managing those issues, because it all involved investment from the state. Apparently France built the facilities and employed the extra staff to run imports from the UK, but the UK did almost nothing except build huge carparks. They certainly did not set up the bureaucracy to help UK businesses with the nightmare of forms generated.
The Tory government seemed to be blind to what a thin wedge their position as '6th richest country in the world' was based on.
So to blame left-wing governments and green policies for destabilisation and de-industrialisation of the UK is just rubbish. The Netherlands used its oil income to target top-tier science research, while Norway, with its sovereign investment fund, is now one of the richest countries in the world, with the oil money belonging to the State. Whereas the UK has moaning billionaires like Radcliffe to show for their North Sea oil, now run out.
Perhaps it would cool your annoyance if I told you that I regard the Tories as equally useless on all these matters. Most of the crap that Labour is dealing with is based on laws passed by the Tories – like the Stasi hate speech stuff and Net Zero.
But the thing is that Labour don't disagree with most of those Tory laws and policies and are pushing them further, which is a major reason why they've plummeted to such polling lows in record time.
Net Zero especially is going to dump ever higher power prices on people and companies for decades into the future, simply because renewables are intermittent and unreliable – and it costs a lot to compensate for that, whether it's buying nuclear from France or hydro from Norway, giant batteries (not any time soon), and gas-fired power plants that basically form a parallel power system, and one that can't run 24/7 to pay itself off.
Ratcliffe having made his money off chemicals, including petro-chemicals is irrelevant to the point he’s making, and he’s not “moaning” (I’m sure he’ll be fine). He’s simply making it clear as to what will happen with British industry from here on if energy prices continue to increase relentlessly – which they will.
It will be a de-industrialisation that will make the pain of the Scargill-Thatcher coal mining era pain seem like merely a mild headache.
As to that past, well Thatcher did you a favour in forcing the coal industry to deal with reality, and the country did pretty well up until the last decade, as testified by her 12 years in power, plus five years for Major and then ten years by her mini-me that the Left hated almost as much because he changed little of her legacy, Tony Blair. Twenty seven years of power is hard to argue with if the policies are such failures.
Also, Norway is doing well because people are still buying their North Sea oil and plenty of individuals got rich off that in the nation. Sovereign funds work with tiny populations in ways they don't with big populations. That's why you also don't hear of them with very un-Thatcherish nations like China, Japan, Brazil, Argentina, etc. If Britain had their small population they'd be just as rich from their North Sea fields, even as they now run down.
Oil company's, like RWNJ's in general, are fans of "if you repeat bullshit often enough, even those who should know better, repeat it".
Meanwhile, in reality. Wind power prices now lower than the cost of natural gas – Ars Technica
New Zealand will be far better off economically in future with locally sourced renewables, than the haemorrhage of foreign exchange to oil companies. Which costs much more than agricultures net foreign exchange earnings.
Muldoon wasn't wrong about replacing imported energy.
Yes, I’m familiar with that Ars Technica article and others like it from that period in the late 2010’s. If it were true then power prices would have dropped where wind has increased its share of the load.
But in every place where wind power has been expanded – California, Germany, South Australia, Britain and so forth – power prices are vastly higher than they were, and the reason is precisely because of the things I listed that the Ars Technica article does not, with this BS focus instead, which is so very 2010's.
Yes, wind turbines have got cheaper – but that does not change the external costs involved in supporting their unreliability, and in the last decade that has begun to bite every nation that's been pushing them.
Or how about this: a recent offering for offshore wind turbines in Britain got not a single bid because the regulatory bodies pitched a power price the wind farm owners could not make money from. The regulators understandably freaked out at the required prices, knowing the public would revolt. Negotiations are ongoing. Similar shenanigans in New York.
Wind farm owners can be greedy too; they're not doing this to be Green.
The problem is not more sustainable energy sources, it is the privatisation model of power which rewards deliberate shortages of generation and lack of investment.
Very well put indeed tWig…and 100 per cent true.
I agree that Labour under Blair continued the blindness to the UK's dependence on finance and lack of a balnced economy. However, the case for the UK pissing away its oil revenues is pretty strong and very little to do with population size.
The right have got the psychology of it all completely nailed.
Give the voter something to be afraid of (immigrants, law and order, cost of living…)
Blame the other guy for all the problems- everything even slightly negative, blame them.
Sell the voter an easy fix. Just, 'I will fix it' will do.
No scientific facts, no arguments, no ethics, no values, nothing complex. Smooth talk. Lie if you have to, in fact it really doesn't matter a fig if you lie.
Job done.
That is how the COC did it. The cost of living is terrible. It’s Labour’s fault. We will fix it.
The problem is. 'The "Left" went Right.
Adopting and following right wing memes.
This is still very apparent when the "Left" cave in about things that should be axiomatic"Left" such as CGT, inheritance taxes on large fortunes, State funded welfare and health and housing and opposing the rights creeping privatisation.
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Screenshot-2025-01-14-at-3.58.37%E2%80%AFAM-1-696×660.png
[Image resized]
“The working class is mostly female, and it ain’t white. It is simply an outdated notion about the composition of progressive party electorates. It may appear that the working class resides in the UFC audience, until you register that industrial workers requiring blokey muscle and blood are in a collapse-fast decline in advanced democracies. That has been particularly the case in New Zealand in the last 3 years.”
The electorate that gives Labour the most party votes (in raw quantity) each election is South Dunedin – now Taieri. Which happens to be both Working Class and heavily Pakeha.