Considering
that I have been intensely interested in politics since my mid-teens, one might
have expected that in the many elections I have taken part in since then, I
would have come out on the winning side more than twice. Alas, it is not so. I
just voted in Quebec this week: my guy did better than usual, came in second in
our constituency, and his party third in the overall seat-count, a result they considered
to be almost a victory.
I think I have to go back to my early
conditioning about politics to understand how come I am usually backing the
losers. I now know that compromise is the
art of politics. Which is to say there is always something that should be
acceptable that the other side is proposing.
My resistance to that commonsense
attitude was born when, at the age of 16 or so, I realized that not a single
favorable word about our government had ever appeared in any New Zealand
newspaper. The government was Labour, and
was made up almost entirely of working class men and women who did their best
to represent the interests of the average worker, and had done some remarkable
things in pursuance of that end.
For example in 1938, the middle of the
Great Depression, they had introduced the English-speaking world’s first
universal health care system. They had also --- or were in processing of doing
so --- overhauled the education system so as to make it more democratic, using
the best educational theorizing of the time in doing so. They had carried on the nation’s good record
of social welfare --- established in 1905 when a Liberal government of the time
introduced one of the first old age pensions in the world ---- and they were working hand in glove with the
diminishing Maori population to attempt a resurgence of that proud people, an
effort that eventually drew wholehearted
admiration around the world. In addition they had introduced a system of
price stabilization for New Zealand’s exports of meat, wool, butter and cheese,
that should have earned them the support of farmers, but did not, the farmers
remaining rhere as always, a stubbornly conservative group.
Not a bad record, one might
think. But the conservative opposition
were so entrenched in their old-fashioned, outmoded ideas, that they couldn’t
bear even to admit the value of what had been done. In other words, they were our
implacable adversaries: I picked up that attitude when in my teens, and I have
not changed.
What I discovered as I ventured out
into the world was that “our side”, the yearning socialist masses, although
they should have been the greatest in number, in fact have always been the
smaller. Everywhere, it has been a struggle to convince the groaning masses
that they could, if they wished, shake off the tyrannical, controlling hand of the wealth-owning corporate class.
As I watched in dismay this failure of the workers to
sweep all before them, I developed a
less ambitious objective than I started out with. “I will vote for anyone,” I decided,
“who will nationalize the banks and insurance companies.” But even these have
been few and far between. I have never been able to accept the arguments for
this failure put forward by our political enemies on grounds of the ineptitude
of publicly-owned services. Rather --- and I know something of what I am saying
in this field, having worked in it for all my life --- rather it is ascribable
to the fact that the wealth-owners have always owned, or if not owned,
certainly dominated, all the means of
communication and the information systems.
With his dominance, they have kept up
a relentless drumbeat of propaganda, so complete that even in the
publicly-owned services, every news item these days is followed by an
advertisement which, in terms of its effect, is really just an argument for
private wealth and private ownership of everything.
In the years before the Second World
War there was at least a countervailing impetus emanating from the global
Communist movement. But the long-term effect of this great movement was stunted
by its fatal subservience to the Soviet Union. Ludicrous decisions were made about that war
which completely discredited the movement among serious people. In the 1930s, Communism was the only serious
opponent of fascism, for example, fronting up against it in Spain when the
effete British ruling class, and the wealthy but extremely conservative
American ruling class, were more than ready to play ball with the rising Nazis
and fascists.
With the signing of the Hitler-Stalin
Pact in August 1939, a month before Britain declared war following Hitler’s
invasion of Poland, the world-wide Communist movement changed overnight from
being against the coming war and fascism, to acceptance of the Pact, thereafter
propagandizing on its behalf, an action which lost them whatever
goodwill they might have previously earned in the Western world by their
staunch defence of the working classes.
That remained official global
Communist policy, each national party falling into line behind Moscow without
blinking an eye, until Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in June, 1941, at which
point they all magically changed sides again, flinging themselves into the war
enthusiastically and becoming a central part of the Resistance against the
Nazis throughout Europe. One might argue that if any nation won that war, it
was probably the Soviet Union, 27 million of whose citizens died in the
process, a burden far ahead of that borne by any other nation.
Just to outline this scenario
illustrates what a tough world it has been for a democratic socialist to make
his way in. In fact, the only successes of democratic socialism have been to
save capitalism from its worst excesses, modifying the system in the United
States with the New Deal, in Britain with the Labour governments, in
Scandinavia with its tenacious governments combining socialist-tinged
communities with capitalist economic systems, and elsewhere with fairly
short-lived governments in smaller
counties like New Zealand and Australia, or, in Canada, the provincial
government of Saskatchewan, which took advantage of the discontent among
prairie farmers to create a spirit for socialism in that province, a spirit
that led to Canada’s universal health-care system today, one of our proudest
achievements.
Speaking as a person who has always
supported social democracy, I have always been aware of this paradox in a
society dedicated to more equality of opportunity, including economic
opportunity: that such an aim can be achieved only by taking the surplus wealth
off the wealth-owners and redistributing it among the ordinary workers, who,
let’s not forget, have actually created this wealth. The wealth-owners are never ready to give it
away, therefore it has to be taken from them. And to persuade an electorate to
accept this as a fact of life has proven to be so difficult in face of the
dominant control of every lever of society by the wealth-owners, that by the time
a standard leftist-leaning party might be voted into government, it has usually betrayed
all its original principles by subordinating everything to the search for
votes. In other words, even if they are elected, they prove to be scarcely
worth electing.
No comments:
Post a Comment