Youth crime is already hotting up as one of the main issues for this year’s New Zealand general election. Both Labour’s Helen Clark and National’s John Key in their respective “state of the nation” speeches this week sought to tap into public angst at a spate of high-profile killings involving youth offenders over the past few months.
While I think the current public anxiety over this issue is to a certain extent a product of the annual summer holiday slow news period and middle class moral panics, there is no doubt that in many working class communities such as South Auckland and Porirua youth gang culture is a major problem which socialists cannot simply ignore.
Indeed violent crime always predominantly impacts on the working class – not the residents of the laefy suburbs of Remuera or Fendalton (although they are the ones who make the most noise about it). However the solutions proposed by the National and Labour Parties – boot camps, rasing the minimum school leaving age, tougher sentences – are merely the knee jerk defensive reactions of a frightened middle class and do nothing to help the communities most affected.
As Bryce Edwards points out on his blog, basically Labour and National have no real political differences on law and order, and are instead reduced to a farcical situation in which each accuses the other of having “stolen” their policies.
And when they aren’t doing that, Labour and National Party bloggers spend inordinate amounts of time arguing childishly over how much or how little crime rates increased on their watch.
As identikit middle class liberal parties I would argue that Labour and National are fundamentally incapable of addressing the underlying causes of most crime, which I would argue is rooted in the collapse of social solidarity and class consciousness in the West over the past three decades.
This collapse is in turn due to the demise of the organised working class movement which in the past not only organised workers politically and industrially but also provided a strong social and cultural nexus.
An example of this is the way in which the unions such as the Seafarers, Railway Workers’ and Meatworkers’ would run book clubs, sporting teams and musical performance groups for their members and families. Large job sites like the Hillside Railway workshops in Dunedin were a hub for a huge range of these kinds of activities.
Workers had a strong sense of being part of a common community and not just atomised individuals (contra Miles Fairburn’s thesis). In the Depression years, when poverty in New Zealand was at its highest level ever, crime rates were astoundingly low because people would not generally steal from or assault “their own” (just as they wouldn’t steal a job by crossing a picket line).
This is even more true of countries which actually underwent socialist revolutions, such as Russia (at least until the advent of Stalin) and Cuba.
With the total transformation of social democracy in New Zealand into social liberalism and the ascendancy of the individualist free-market ethos, it is no wonder that lumpen criminal behaviour is again on the increase.
The tragedy is that the socialist left in New Zealand is so weak at the moment that the only collective institutions you are likely to find in the most impoverished communities are the Mongrel Mob and Destiny Church.
This has to change.
