How typical of New Zealand that the most high-profile protest of the year to-date should take place at the instigation of a right wing business lobby group (the Road Transport Forum, which represents the major trucking companies) and despite all the breathless media hype about the possibility of the country’s major urban centres being brought to a complete standtill, pass off almost entirely without incident.
While in Spain similar protests last month over the rising cost of fuel led to pitched battles with riot police and at least 1 death, here in good ol’ godzone the protesting truckies were warmly applauded by the authorities for their “responsible” conduct and the day ended with the government promising a “working party” to look into the protesters’ concerns.
Is this all down to the fact that as liberal commentators are forever telling us, New Zealand simply doesn’t “do” class struggle? Supporters of this line of reasoning need only look to the other major protest to make the news in the past 48 hours, a march in Auckland by some 10 000 people against violent crime to find evidence for this contention.
However, contrary to the opinion of some other NZ left wing bloggers, I don’t think we can dismiss these kinds of protests as simply exercises in political theatre or empty rhetoric.
That’s why I was pleased to see members of the Workers Party making a constructive intervention at the truck drivers’ rally in Auckland yesterday. The leaflet they distributed, which you can read on the Workers Party blog here, makes the distinction between the interests of the big trucking companies who are able to pass on costs such as increased road user charges, and the majority of truck drivers who despite being self-employed are essentially owner-operators who have no choice to absorb all the costs themselves (just like ordinary household consumers can’t pass on the cost of GST).
The increasing atomisation and demoralisation of the working class which is the result of the neo-liberal ecnomic policies of successive governments – both Labour and National – over the past two and a half decades means unfortunately that workers do not look to forms of social solidarity (such as trade unions) to overcome problems such as rising prices or violent crime (the latter itself due pricisely to the *absence* of social solidarity) but instead to individualist solutions such as tax cuts or vigilante justice.
This is a major reason why a majority of blue-collar workers will in all likelihood vote for parties and politicians identified with the Right or Centre Right at the upcoming election. Not, as the journalist Nicky Hager and documentary maker Alistair Barry foolishly claim in their work The Hollow Men, because they have simply been “duped” by cunning National Party spin doctors.
In reality it is the abject failure of the liberal (ex-social democratic) left in the form of the Labour Party and CTU leadership that has led to the present situation. As the Workers Party leaflet points out
Historically, drivers have been a backbone of the union movement. This was eroded in the 1980s and 1990s because the wider union movement was unable to withstand attacks from both Labour and National governments. If unions are built on workers’ self-activity and workers control – rather than on relationships with the government – a union movement can be built that can withstand the attacks from the ruling class.
This is surely the real challenge for the left in the coming period – rebuilding workers’ own sense of collective power and agency – not re-electing a tired old pro-capitalist Labour government!
Tags: Alistair Barry, Crime in New Zealand, Nicky Hager, Truck Drivers' Protest
July 5, 2008 at 7:43 pm
As an outsider I agree the intervention was good.
Coming from the US, where we don’t have anything resemblong a labor party, I would caucus inside.
July 5, 2008 at 9:09 pm
Apart from the Density Church marches, most of these right-wing protests just don’t seem to involve a great deal of people – usually, after a lot of hype and bluster and mock indignation they turn out to be a couple of dozen people at best, even if you count Farrar and Slater as “people”.
I can’t help thinking that’s why they used trucks this time.
July 6, 2008 at 4:50 pm
I think it’s a bit dangerous Felix to write off these protests as inherently “right wing” simply because the National Party supports them.
In the case of the protests over the EFA it’s true that most of the people making a noise over the issue were right-wingers and the campaign was perceived as having little traction outside the beltway, however as I’ve written previously on this blog I think the EFA is a dangerous piece of legislation and the failure of almost all left wing groups to oppose it is something of a sad indictment.
With the more recent protests over road user charges and violent crime, the situation is even more worrying because while the leadership is coming from the same sorts of right wing elements (National party, Sensible Sentencing Trust et al), these right-wingers have actually succeeded in mobilising a significant layer of working class people who are justifiably angry about things like rising prices and violence in their community (which affect them far more than they do the inhabitants of Remuera or Roseneath).
So in a very real sense it is the utter ineffectiveness of the pro-Labour reformist left that is the real problem here, not the bogeymen like Garth McVicar or Bob McCoskrie who the liberal latte set spend so much time obsessing over.