Towards a Socialist Austral-asia.
The logic of Austral-asian semi-colonial development is that of global capitalism. There is no escape into 'exceptionalism' which allows Austral-asia to break from capitalist laws of the global economy. Despite its favoured origins, the progress from settler colony to dominion capitalism exhausted Austral-asia's lumpen imperialist role and under the neo-liberal revolution has consigned it to a semi-colonial future. Here I make the case for the completion of the unfinished revolution which began as Austral-asian settler colonisation, and which now runs up against the limits imposed on the Austral-asian social formation by global capitalism. In the new millennium that revolution must be completed by an awakening consciousness of how the past shapes the present and conditions the future as a programme of action for Austral-asian Socialist Republics in an Asia-Pacific Federation of Socialist Republics.
We start from the Earth
80 million years ago, what was to become New Zealand split away from Gondawana land, a fissure opened up in the earths crust between them and the two countries drifted apart. About 20 millions years ago, the Pacific plate began to edge New Zealand back towards what has now become Queensland. The movement of the Pacific plate diving down beneath New Zealand pushed it up, twisted it, split it along the Alpine fault line, and created massive volcanic activity.
What lessons can we learn from these geological processes? What social analogies are there to the techtonics of overheating, shoving, twisting and splitting? Australia and New Zealand were colonised together – New Zealand was still part of New South Wales until 1840. And part of the Austral-asian colonies until Dick Seddon's lumpen imperialist pretentions made him reject Federation around 1900. 1
Despite a century of staunch rivalry for the crumbs of colonialism in the South Pacific, New Zealand and Australia are moving back together. By 1990 a speeded-up CER common market had come into existence. Who knows around the year 2000 we may be talking of Federation again? But a Federation of what?
I have argued in this book that Austral-asia is a capitalist social formation that began as an imperial continental drift of settler colonies that metamorphosed into dominions. Global overheating, pushing and shoving created the privileged but declining semi-colonial states of Australia and New Zealand today. The energy of global ecotechtonics is pressuring these states into increased dependence upon imperialism, twisting and splitting social fissures, opening up the blocked bourgeois revolution as a socialist eruption out of which can come a new formation of federated socialist republics.
The Science of Deep Structures
These earth-moving analogies are not just superficial but reflect the same scientific materialist method. Marxism has much more in common with geology than sociology. Unlike sociology, geology deals with deep structures, not always directly observable, where the past and the future is read off from the present. The theory of plate movements is part of the theory of continental drift and the postulated currents at the earth’s molten centre. But this theory is a powerful explanation of volcanic activity on the surface. We need no longer look the bowel movements of gods for an explanation of the geology of the past, but to plate movements.
As with geology, Marxism deals with deep structures, not always directly observable, and reads off the past and future from the present. The theory of deep structures of social relations is a powerful explanation of class activity on the surface. We too need not look to a-historical abstractions about gods or human nature to explain class struggle. The laws that connect the deep structures with the surface activity operate both under our feet and behind our backs. Like geological laws, once we understand social laws we can intervene and change their effects for our benefit. 2
Marxist Laws of Motion
By laws of motion I mean
The end of the post-war boom and the onset of globalisation brought about not a crisis of Marxism, as is often claimed, but a crisis of bourgeois thought. The predictive power of Marxism has been vindicated by events since the end of the post-war boom and the onset of the world crisis of overproduction in the 1970s. Marxist laws of motion which explain how contradictions reassert themselves on the surface, became evident again. The long-run development of Austral-asian society, its booms and busts, can now be read-off from the perspective of the present crisis. The major defining moments of Austral-asian history stand out as the shift from settler colony to dominion to semi-colony. The booms were exceptions rather than the rule and in the long run it proved to be only Keynes who was dead.
As I have tried to show in this book, it is not Marxists then who, under the present conditions, appeal to dogma rather than science, but various bourgeois apologists and protagonists of greed, zero-sum-ism, accidents, fatalism, experiments, messianicity etc .all of which are impressions on the theme of neo-classical dogma.10 The basic dogma is that of market equilibrium disturbed by wrong policies of right or left. The neo-liberals condemn state intervention, collective labour and social democracy, while the social liberals condemn new right profiteering, deregulation of the labour market and attacks on social spending.11 But these debates for and against Economic Rationalism in Australia or Rogernomics in NZ miss the point.12 The neo-liberal reforms were not optional models imposed by extreme ideologues, but ideological rationalisations of the necessary unleashing of the over-regulated LOV to restore the rate of profit. The failure to understand this leads opponents of neo-liberalism to misjudge the 'revolution' a failure against national statistics of growth and income distribution.13
So after another dark age in which surface calm make assumptions of equilibrium ruling ideas, which pronounced Marxism dead yet again, it comes back into its own again in a period of disequilibrium, when the deep structures are manifestly implicated in the disturbed events at the surface in the form of another long-run, generalised capitalist crisis. The long-term prognosis of Marx of the Communist Manifesto re-asserts itself. Crises are not natural phenomena of biology, race, tradition, nor are they accidental 'chaotic' events, but crises of overproduction of commodities ie. capital.14
The onset of the current world crisis of Dominion capitalism in Australia and New Zealand in the late 60's and early 70's brought with it a revival of Marxism as a science in opposition to both openly bourgeois propaganda and that disguised as neo- or Stalinist Marxism.15 From the early 1970's attempts were made to rediscover classic Marxism and apply this analysis to this social formations. This meant explaining how various forms of Marxism had become distorted as either vulgar or humanist Marxism.16 It also meant returning to Marx's scientific method and developing it to explain the development of capitalism in the white settler colonies.17
The fruit of this renewed interest in Marxism in the 1970's was a number of attempts linking the abstract analysis of modes of production and the operation of the law of value to the crisis-ridden tendencies of capitalist development internationally. Within this framework, an account was begun of Austral-asia's evolution as a semicolonial formation in the world capitalist system. Applying this method generated knowledge of Austral-asian semi-colonial development: I will list and briefly note the most important conclusions.18
From Conquest to Crisis....
The formation of the state.
What is it that made Austral-asia semi-colonial rather than imperialist? This question can only be answered in terms of the state’s economic role, not its appearance as a relatively autonomous dominion or ‘independent’ state. Thus it comes down to who produces the surplus value accumulated in Austral-asia. If the bulk of the surplus value produced inside Austral-asia, is exported then this social formation cannot be imperialist. However if Austral-asia exports capital that returns surplus value, it has imperialist aspects. I would argue that Austral-asia has for all of its history been a much greater source of imperialist profits rather than a recipient, and on balance can be characterised as a relatively rich semi-colony. One way of theorising Austral-asia is to recognise that it has both lumpen imperialist aspects and advanced semi-colonial features. The question is, which features are more important in shaping the development of the whole social formation?
I defined lumpen imperialist as a sort of 'jackal' imperialism, that is serving as junior partner to British or US imperialist expansion but deriving only a small share of the super profits. Between the 1880's and first World War Australia and NZ played the role of British agent in the South Pacific, but this did not significantly alter the fundamental dependent status of these colonies in relation to Britain. Similarly, the liberal labour settlement was one not on the basis of sharing the super profits from the Pacific colonies, but the protection of the settler economies from the imperial economy. It seems to me then, that the Austral-asian social formation has been defined decisively by its dependent relationship to imperialism, and not by its lumpen imperialist pretensions.
So, it is the logic of capitalist production and reproduction on an international scale that allows us to derive the nature of the state in Australia and NZ. The British imperialist state acted to establish capitalist social relations, and has remained a dominant influence over the local states, despite claims to national sovereignty, to the present day. The degree of dependence of the local states on imperialism is given by the degree of dependence of capital accumulation in the new states in international circuits of capital and global division of labour. The forms of the capitalist state therefore conform to the requirement placed on them by imperialism to administer the dependent economies.
This conception of stages of state formation, from colony to dominion to semi-colony, rejects the non-Marxist misconception of an instrumental state that can act as hand-maiden of 'national socialism' as a reactionary utopia. However, because of the central role of the state in constituting and reproducing settler colonialism, Antipodean petty bourgeois nationalists imagine that the state is autonomous from social relations and so can ‘experiment’ in reforming and protecting the market. The material basis of this ideology of the instrumental state is that of the necessity for a liberal labour class compromise to present a united front to imperialism. There is wide agreement among bourgeois economists, neo-Ricardian radicals and neo-Marxists, that the basis for such ‘nationalism’ was the class compromise made possible under certain uniquely determined material conditions where both countries could prosper as dependent but privileged colonies and then dominions of first Britain and then the US.
Some argue that this compromise was made under pressure from the working class to share in the wealth generated in the new colonies.20 But, as Rosewarne and others have argued correctly in the case of Australia, the lib/lab compromise was not driven mainly from below, but from the need of the emergent national bourgeoisie to drive a bargain with imperialist finance capital to split the profits. In return for a guaranteed supply of rentier profits from these lands, a national lumpen bourgeoisie was allowed to insulate the economy and to retain a share of the surplus. Thus the local state forms and their class settlements had their material base in imperialist 'dominion' over Austral-asia. The imperialist rentiers sublet the dominions and allowed their local agents a cut in the 'rent'.
But did ‘the workers’ share in the rent? Was there a material base for ‘state socialism’ then, and if so can it be revived today?
How is the rent spent?
In the NZ case, the neo-classical economist Conrad Blyth employed a distributional model when he claimed that the state served to manage an economy in which economic rent was redistributed from the land to "urban and rural business and working families".21 The neo-Ricardian Rob Steven used an exchange model to claim that that high differential rent from stolen Maori land was redistributed back to New Zealand manufacturers and to many pakeha workers and sustained a white, racist, chauvinism at the expense of the Maori. Though a seductive theory which shifts the burden of proof from biology (white racism) or national character (British greed) and away from reverse racism, Steven rejected basic Marxist precepts and ended up supporting those who blame Austral-asian workers for both dispossessing the indigenous peoples and as accomplices in the exploitation of the British working class. 22
In the Marxist mode, I have argued that most of the differential rent was siphoned off first by the imperialist rentiers and then the local landowners. It did not become available for redistribution to Pakeha workers even if that were possible. NZ capitalists were not imperialist and could not pass on a share of their super profits to an aristocracy of labour. Under the lib/lab compromise workers got jobs but no guarantee of a share in the rent. The segmentation of the labour market into a largely Pakeha aristocracy of labour, and a Maori reserve army, reinforced the privileges of some Pakeha workers against Maori and in a class alliance with local manufacturers. But this was as a result of conservative ideology and racist divisions introduced into the working class in much the same way as patriarchal attitudes and values are used to reinforce gender divisions in working class families.23
This relationship persisted from the post Second WW settlement until today. It was made possible by the capacity of the national economy to grow under protectionist controls. Full employment and the welfare state created the impression labour benefited at the expense of capital. However, just as with the lib/lab settlement, this was not driven from below by demands of workers. Rather it was a requirement of the full employment generated by a protected economy with relatively backward technology, and a set of Keynesian demand side policies designed to maintain consumption.24 But once the limit to the national market had been reached generating a growing crisis of falling profits, the material basis for the post-war consensus was blown apart.
Today the material basis for petty bourgeois aspirations to a 'state national socialism' no longer exists. The 'class partner' of the past, the lumpen national bourgeoisie, is fragmenting into those going broke and joining the reserve army of workers and self-employed, and those going offshore as international firms in the transnational division-of-labour. The labour movement is rendered almost impotent, unable to resist the pressures to restructure the labour market. This leaves lumpen bourgeois nationalism as an ideological hangover cut off from its material base. So nationalism becomes free floating able to indulge in a fantasy life in sports, the Olympics, the Americas Cup or the Millennium. Against this extreme racist and chauvinist face in the only progressive form of nationalism is that of the nationalism of the oppressed united with the working class in the struggle to transcend the bourgeois state in a workers’ state.
From self-governing colonies to Dominions of debt...
I have argued that there was never a complete bourgeois national revolution in Australia or New Zealand. The imperialist troops defeated Aboriginal and Maori resistance, not the settlers. The granting of self-government over the new territories and new lands was derived from rights of property owners to claim citizenship rights. As the law of value creates the market, it also creates citizens. The fetishisation of productive relations as exchange relations also implies the formal rights of bourgeois citizens.25
The 'self-governing' colonial states did not have much self to govern. Their economies remained tied to the motherland. The local states were granted territorial sovereignty so long as they acted as agent for British finance capital, guaranteeing the repayment of the national debt out of surplus value, a defining semi-colonial role Austral-asia still plays to this day.
Provided it paid the national debt, the weak national lumpen bourgeoisie was allowed to legislate to protect domestic manufacturing, part-nationalise the land, and to part-develop the forces of production in industry. Austral-asia was indulged by British finance capital and allowed 'dominion' status, posturing as a comic-opera junior partner of imperialism, and strutting about the South Pacific and PNG with grandiose pretensions.
So this was a half-hearted, adolescent rebellion of the rich kids, developing a local productive circuit in defiance of more advanced industry, but under the patronising guidance of big daddy British bankers. "In each capitalist state lacking a 'strong' state the bourgeoisie beg the protection of an imperialist power".26 So the adolescent dominions remained attached to the parental inheritance.
"In our time of course a pure national bourgeoisie...is by the very nature of capitalism linked to world imperialism. Capitalism is an international movement; the revolutionary workers to defeat capitalism, must develop an internationalism stronger than that of world capital. The limitations of capitalist internationalism define the objectives of communist internationalism: world capital, as the sum of international corporations recognising no allegiance or loyalty to national governments, nevertheless cannot escape their political dependence on the nation state, or evade completely productive forces within national boundaries. Capitalism always struggles to free itself from the nation state; it never succeeds. Conversely, the first step of communism is precisely its emancipation from the nation state: its declaration of world revolution, the impossibility of "socialism in one country".27
...to Semi-Colonies.
As Bill Sutch was to discover late in his life, the adolescent rebellion against the imperialist fatherland did not lead to a mature nation state.28 From Fitzpatrick to Wheelright, nationalist socialists have documented the dominion over Australia by international capitalism.29 Finance capital kept its first claim on surplus produced, and "foreign" branch plants set up alongside local firms in producing for the domestic market. So without ever becoming fully-fledged nations, the Austral-asian dominions had reached the limits of dependent development, and by the mid- 1970's were forced to act directly in the interests of international finance capital to restructure production to restore profitability. And so Austral-asia entered the stage of semi-colonial capitalism.
If there never was a completed national revolution how do we explain the phenomenon of bourgeois nationalism? Perhaps it is best described as petty-bourgeois or more accurately lumpen-bourgeois nationalism. The class which styles itself as the progressive force, using the local state to reform capitalism, to reconcile classes and insulate the economy from imperialism, is the national bourgeoisie. However, its brand of nationalism is reactionary because it can never break free of its class dependence on its finance capitalist masters.
In Australia, the national revolution went a bit further than NZ. Subservience to UK rule was bucked in WW2, but not sufficiently to remove the external controls of foreign finance capital that allowed Kerr and the CIA to dump Whitlam, or to step outside the power play of the Washington Consensus. Australia, like NZ allows the US military to use its territory to conduct military spy operations. The sham republic referendum rejected by Australians shows that it was a political diversion to mobilise the cultural lag of pro-dominion settlement sentiment against any real republican opposition to Australia's slide into semi-colonial domination by imperialism.
Nationalism is dead! Long Live Internationalism!
The historically important opposition to the lumpen bourgeois nationalism in Austral-asia has always been that of indigenous peoples’ nationalism, expressed as a struggle against both imperialism and white racist chauvinism. In both Australia and NZ the test of working class internationalism has always been its defence of Maori and Aboriginal rights. Indigenous rights struggles are progressive because they express the struggles of oppressed peoples. Maori and Aboriginal nationalists always saw that the `enemy' was not just imperialism but its local capitalist agents as well.
"Maori people were forced to recognise in battle the integration of the NZ bourgeoisie with British imperialism, as the representatives of world capital in NZ." 30 The struggle today is a dialectical one, support for Maori nationalism in opposition to national chauvinism and imperialism. The `anti-racism' struggle becomes an anti-imperialist struggle.
This positive, progressive nationalism transcends the reactionary nationalism as internationalism. Aboriginal and Maori nationalism which is a struggle for national rights and land rights against imperialism has to first overcome national chauvinism –the lumpen bourgeois attempts to defend their privileges in the face of economic dependency and destruction. By supporting Aboriginal and Maori struggles, white workers show that they are fighting imperialism, rather than gaining privileges from it.
"In situations where there is a long record of imperialism, chauvinism, discrimination and prejudice, a working class movement can only prove to those oppressed because of their race, colour and nationality, that it genuinely stands for their emancipation, by recognising unconditionally their right to self-determination, and to secession from any socialist state. Where the prejudice of white workers prevents them from organising together with black workers, where chauvinism imposes separate organisation for national rights on minorities desperate to escape the iron embrace of the gaols and ghettoes of imperialism, then separate organisations of minority nationalities must be supported by Marxists."31
In this way support for the struggle for indigenous and other minority rights becomes the basis for working class internationalism opposed to capitalist globalisation.
Anti-imperialist united front
The anti-imperialist united front in Austral-asia should be understood as an alliance of the working class with its allies, working farmers, indigenous peoples and women that fights for the completion of the bourgeois revolution as part of the socialist revolution. Today as in the past indigenous peoples' struggles against imperialism goes to the heart of imperialism's restructuring plans. Defending historic rights abused by white settlement, now becomes a make or break issue for international capital.
Maori land and fisheries claims under the Treaty of Waitangi Act, that is the bourgeois legal system, have temporarily halted plans to privatise state assets. Mabo and Wik hit out at the pastoral and mining bosses where it hurt and showed that international capitalism refuse to grant even the most basic rights to indigenous peoples. Where the labour movement has failed to stand up against the neo-liberal revolution, the struggle over basic democratic rights, land rights and Treaties, has become the focal point for all anti-imperialist struggles. Because it is the only effective opposition right now, the bourgeoisie are trying to ferment a racist backlash to and splitting the white working class. For Marxists this is not a bad thing to be avoided, but a necessary fight. The question is how to advance the struggle.
The obvious point is that recent concessions made to indigenous peoples’ claims have the potential for extending tribal demands to land "nationalisation". This is a powerful reason for the vocal right wing opposition to native peoples' rights. Big capital and petty capital is united in opposition to any challenge to private property rights resulting from the spoils of white settler conquest and dispossession. So while indigenous land claims etc should properly demand restitution, this needs to be extended beyond claims over state-owned land and other assets that are already `nationalised'- that is, owned by the capitalist class as a whole. By making claims over ‘private property’ indigenous peoples can open up an anti-capitalist united front that extends to the nationalisation of the land, and expropriation of privatised state assets and the socialisation of capitalist property. 32
The support of Maori and Aboriginal claims and the rights of migrant and minority rights becomes the political means for uniting workers and working farmers of all ethnic groups against imperialism in its efforts to privatise and therefore expropriate state assets. The struggle against privatisation opens the way for extending demands for workers' expropriation or socialisation of capital; of countering capitalist internationalism with proletarian internationalism.
The Gender Front
A second front on which proletarian internationalism has to be advanced is that between women as unpaid domestic labourers and workers in capitalist production. Undet capitalism the working class is divided by a gender chauvinism that has its material roots in privatised domestic labour. This labour is performed outside the capitalist market and it renders the vast majority of women who do it non-citizens subordinated to male citizens. Under semi-colonial capitalism the exceptions are women who are petty commodity produces like self-employed small farmers. It can be argued that capitalism will never abolish gender oppression because it relies upon unpaid domestic labour to reproduce the working class. Therefore, the abolition of gender oppression requires the completion of the bourgeois revolution as the socialist revolution.
Historically, the struggle for women’s rights has been a struggle to socialise domestic labour. During the post war boom, this has usually taken the form of demands for equal rights, equal pay etc in the labour market. Protection of the local market, full employment and the Keynesian welfare state has seen many women employed in the state sector reproducing labour power for a wage. This has pitted the material interests of women as domestic workers against the capitalist class that has an interest in perpetuating unpaid domestic work. While it has seen a rise in women as wage workers, there has been no real freedom from domestic labour for most women as the 'double shift' remains. Against the neo-liberal revolution which has brought rising unemployment, de-unionsation, wage cuts, and a shift towards casualised work, the struggle against the privatisation of state assets is therefore also a fight against the de-socialisation or intensification of unpaid domestic labour.
Restructuring the state sector destroys women’s jobs pushing them back into full-time domestic labour. Cuts in health, education and social services de-socialises the provision of domestic services and throws them back into intensified private domestic labour. Uniting male and female workers around the struggle for women’s rights hinges on the demand for complete equality in society, state provision of free child care, etc. This will only be possible through the uniting of struggle to end gender oppression with the class struggle transitional to the complete socialisation of domestic work under socialism.
Workers' and Farmers' Socialist Republics
A multi-racial and multi-gender socialist movement capable of overcoming the reactionary national and gender chauvinism(s) would fight in the first instance for basic democratic rights. It is the denial of such rights to indigenous peoples, women and oppressed minorities, that today makes their realisation impossible in a semi-colonial formation dominated by imperialism. Therefore, to achieve what are basic bourgeois democratic rights, the working class has to take these demands as their own and incorporate them into its struggle against imperialism and against capitalism.
Such democratic demands must be integrated into a political programme which has as its political objective a workers' and working farmers' socialist Republic of Austral-asia. The bourgeois revolution would be finished and transcended at the same time as a workers or socialist Republic. Such a state would be a Workers' Dictatorship - that is, the democracy of the vast majority, as opposed to a bourgeois dictatorship, the democracy of the small minority.
Under a Socialist Republic the means of production would be socialised. The forces of production would be further developed under workers' management through an international division of labour established among all socialist states in a given region – A Socialist Federation of Austral-asia, the South Pacific, the Pacific, the world! 33
The remnants of bourgeois nationalism would "wither away" and be superseded by workers' and peasants' internationalism. The rights of national minorities, oppressed peoples, and women would be fully and freely expressed within socialist property relations (including the right of national minorities to secede).
A Federation of Socialist Republics of Austral-asia
leaves the possibility open that such states may, like the small Pacific
Island states, include a separate Maori or Aboriginal nation(s), or that
they may be future multicultural Socialist Republics within a wider Federation
of Socialist Republics of the Pacific and Asia!
Notes. (go to bibliography)
1. Keith Sinclair, Imperial Federation.
2. Marx regarded his method as scientific and the critique of capitalism as an extension of physics(Capital, Vol 1 Preface to First Edition.)
3. A fabulously parsimonious law that accounts for `the 'economising of labour-time' as the progressive principle that drives capitalism willy nilly. Marx defines the LOV: Capital Vol 1 part one.
4. Also expressed as the contradiction between the forces of production and relations of production, this law expressed the antagonism between the historically specific need for use-values as the nemesis of the drive for private profit that would break the barrier of private property to unleash the forces of production. See Rosdolsky's discussion in The Making of Marx's Capital.
5. Capital Vol 3 pp Chapter 13. Bourgeois apologists try to wriggle out of the grip of the TRPF. But no 'counter-tendency' including fascism has proven capable of outlawing theTRPF.
6. Among them the epistemological relativism sometimes know as postmodernism. For a critique of postmodernism ignorance of science see Sokal and Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures.
7. Lester Thurow, The Zero-Sum Society. Thurow has achieved prominence in NZ as the guest of Mike Moore at Labour Government `seminars'. His conception of the economy assumes a zero–sum struggle for scarce resources, so that economic policy is about how manage capitalism to achieve an equitable distribution of resources.He continues in this vein in one of his last books The Future of Capitalism.
8. It is incredible but true that Giddens thinks that capitalism is a 'post-scarcity' society in Beyond Left and Right
9. See discussion in Chapter 'For a Living Marxism'.
10. What is striking about such arguments is the constant reference to government policy as experimental, attempting to reform the market and correct for earlier experiments, pitting different ideas and policies against one another. Explanations for this fail to show how monetarist ideas brought about a liberal revolution in most advanced capitalist countries. How is it that the `accident' of government spending resulting from `indicative planning' created a situation `ripe' for the application of monetarist ideas in the form of the liberal revolution similtaneously across the whole capitalist world? This is no explanation at all because while it is forced to explain the surface events of the market as disturbances of distribution and exchange it cannot explain these other than to posit an assumption of market equilibrium, `or state of nature' from which governments deviate in their attempts to manage the economy.
11. eg Conrad Blyth, in Bollard and Buckle (eds) Economic Liberalisation in New Zealand. sees the neo-liberal `revolution' as as policy response to the post-war `indicative planning'. Both are `experiments' which are not `inevitable' but optional. Just as the experiment of indicative planning was "half–hearted, tentative, and inconclusive", the liberal revolution stems itself from the revolution in ideas in the 1970's, of Friedman and Hayek. It is a reaction to excessive government spending, arising mainly by accident. What is wrong with the NZ liberal experiment is not that the ideas ("NZ was ripe for the liberal revolution") but the sequence in which they were implemented. In Blyth's opinion, Douglas got the sequencing wrong. He should have attacked exporting costs and state spending before he freed–up the exchange rate and capital flows. Instead high interest rates have led to capital inflows and a revaluing of the dollar working against exporters. Blyth and other bourgeois economists all agree on the need to restore export competitiveness by cutting costs including state spending. No new productive investment to replace or develop farming will occur unless wages fall to competitive levels. (19)
12. See eg. Pusey, Rationalism; James, Jones and Norton; A Defence...Castles, Gerritson, Vowles, The Great Experiment; Smyth and Cass, Contesting..; Dean and Hindess, Governing Australia. In NZ see Kelsey, The NZ Experiment; Easton, Commercialisation...; Chatterjee, Harris, Eichbaum,etal. A Third Way; Jesson , Only their Purpose....
13. In NZ this is the debate about the ‘failure of neo-liberalism’. Kelsey, Easton, Dalziel etc use national accounts to argue that Rogernomics in NZ has slowed growth. For a critique of this voluntarist view of society see my 'From the Cradle to the Grave...' The basic problem is that capitalism does not measure its rate of accumulation in terms of national accounts and such measures as GDP, income distribution and poverty rates.
14. See 'Marx the Next Great Thinker" NYT. Soros and other big name bourgeois apologists recognise the depth of the potential crisis of overproduction.
15. A similar split between economy and society/government bedevils the `socialist' left. From Sutch to Rosenberg, the `national socialists' are left–wing versions of bourgeois economists like Thurow who draw their inspiration from Fabian socialism and Stalinism. Either way the labour bureaucracy uses the capitalist state to reform the market in the supposed interests of the working class.
16. Wellington Writers' Group, "The Crisis of Social Relations"in Red Papers, 3, 1978/79.
17. John Macrae and David Bedggood, "The Development of Capitalism in NZ" in Red Papers, 3, 1978/79. Andrew Wells, Constructing Capitalism.
18. This section is discussed more fully in the other chapters in this book.
19. 10 years ago, this prediction usually met with total disbelief. Fascism was an historic phenomenon and could not happen here. The Stalinists talked about "creeping fascism" right through the 1970's and this helped to bastardise the concept. But fascism has a specific content – it characterises the extreme reaction of the state in periods of extreme capitalist crisis, and the object of fascism is the smashing of the labour movement. Of course to be smashed, the labour movement has to pose a threat to state power first. No Marxist would entertain a third possibility, that the working class remain totally quiescent in the face of mounting attacks on its living standards, rights and freedoms.
20. eg Connell and Irving, Class Structure...
21. Conrad Blyth, cited above;
22 . Rob Steven, " A Glorious Country for a Labouring Man" in Race, Gender, Class. 1, 1, July, 1988. In the Chapter "Glorious Countries for Doctoring Marx" I try to provide a detailed classic Marxist rejoinder.
23. Macrae and Bedggood, cited above. See also the Chapters on Class.
24. See Bedggood, ‘From the Cradle to the Grave’ NZ SOCIOLOGY 11(2) 1996. And Bedggood, ‘Beyond Dependency…’ Policy Studies, 20 (2) 1999
25. The 1970’s revival of the Marxist theory of the state based on Marx's scientific method derives the form of the state from fetishised social relations. (see Holloway and Picciotto, Marxist Theories of the State. Arnold, 1978.
26. Owen Gager, "Anti–imperialism and Republicanism" in Spartacist. Vol 3 (1), 1973.
28. Bill Sutch, Takeover New Zealand, 1971
29. Fitzpatrick, The British Empire in Australia. Wheelright and Buckley, Political Economy of Australian Capitalism.
32. In the Marxist mode…state property has to be capitalist property under capitalist social relations.
33. NZ Spartacist League, Towards a Socialist Polynesia. September, 1982. Auckland.
END