Fightback is a socialist-feminist, ecosocialist organisation (fightback.org.nz/about) that holds an annual public conference. This year we’re holding the public sessions at St Andrews on the Terrace, Wellington, on the 3^rd-4^th of July [Facebook event]

If you’re interested in possibilities for transforming our exploitative, oppressive society on the basis of social and ecological justice, feel free to come along and discuss!

Free entry (koha appreciated).

Food and drinks provided.

Children welcome. Wheelchair-accessible. Please let us know if you need any assistance to make this event accessible.

This event will have Safer Spaces Contacts available in case you need to raise any concerns related to sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia or other forms of oppression and inaccessibility. These contacts will be marked out on the day. Our Accessibility & Safer Spaces Policy is available here.

Special thanks to the Tertiary Education Union for a donation to assist with catering for this event.

See below for schedule:

FRIDAY 3rd July (St Andrews on the Terrace)

8pm – Taking stock: Where to for the Left?
In the wake of another crushing electoral defeat for the left, in a period with record-low strikes and record-low voter turnout, how do we begin again? Where next for the Left? A discussion facilitated by Fightback.

Daphne Lawless is an indexer, translator, editor, electronic musician and goalkeeper based in Auckland. She is a ten-year veteran of the radical left and co-editor of Fightback’s regular magazine.

Giovanni Tiso is a writer, blogger and translator based in Wellington. His main area of activism is around disability and school inclusion.
[Facebook event]

SATURDAY 4th July (St Andrews on the Terrace)

10am: Registration

10:30am: Consent education in our communities
Public pressure in the wake of the Roastbusters case resulted in some small concessions – reallocation of funding to sexual violence support services, advice that schools should include consent education. This is far from enough. Sexual violence prevention and support initiatives continue to be dangerously underfunded, and consent education in schools is not compulsory or consistent. How can we address gendered violence and implement a consent-based approach in our communities? What are the barriers to transformation?

Sandra Dickson is a Pakeha feminist who has worked to end gendered violence for more than two decades. She will talk about what research tells us works to prevent sexual violence, and why working in schools could be the best chance we have to change rape culture in New Zealand – if we get it right.
[Facebook event]

12pm: Lunch

1pm: Transforming tertiary education
A look at tertiary education, capitalism and resistance. What is the purpose of education? What needs to change? How can we get there?

Speakers:
Sandra Grey, Tertiary Education Union President
Ian Anderson, VUW student and communist
[Facebook event]

2:30pm: Housing and homelessness forum
With the housing bubble set to burst (when rather than if), the National government selling state housing, and homelessness on the rise, housing and homelessness are key concerns for anyone concerned with social and economic justice. A discussion facilitated by Fightback.

Joel Cosgrove (Fightback) will speak on the political economy of the housing crisis.

Steve Flude from The Soup Kitchen will provide an outline of the Te Mahana, Wellingtons collaborative approach to homelessness and the prevention of homelessness.
[Facebook event]

4pm: Break

4:30pm: Reflections on the Zero Hours campaign
In a period when the capitalist class is winning the war, battle victories for our side are precious. Unite’s success in beating back Zero Hour Contracts at major fast food chains is a rare exception to a 30-year rule of expanding casualisation.

Heleyni Pratley, Unite organiser for Wellington, leads a discussion on this campaign.
[Facebook event]

BBC: Syriza supporters celebrate election victory at HQ.

On Friday, Greece delayed its debt payment to the International Monetary Fund. Is a default imminent?

Michael Roberts has worked as an economist for over thirty years in the City of London financial center. His new book,The Long Depression, is out next month from Haymarket.

Article republished from Jacobin Magazine.

In the early hours of Friday morning, according to the British paper the Daily Telegraph, five key players in the Syriza government, meeting in the Maximus Mansion in Athens, made an important decision. They decided that the government would not pay the International Monetary Fund (IMF) its debt repayment installment due that day. Apparently, IMF chief Christine Lagarde was caught badly off guard. IMF officials in Washington were stunned.

The Syriza leaders had the money to pay: it had been raked up from various sources, and they had told Lagarde that they would pay. But at the late hour, they decided not to pay but instead “bundle” all the repayments scheduled for June into one payment at the end of June — or €1.6 billion. This was allowable under IMF rules but had only happened once before (Zambia in the 1980s).

The reason that Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, and the other Greek government leaders decided to hold back payment was two-fold.

First, they were really angry that the IMF and the Eurogroup had completely refused to make any serious compromises on the terms of an agreement to release outstanding funds under the existing “bailout” package, despite the Greeks making huge concessions in the negotiations since an extension was agreed to in February.

Also, the leaders knew that their Syriza party members and members of parliament were incandescent at the attitude of the troika (the IMF, the European Union, and the European Central Bank). There was no way that they were going to support any deal along the lines of further austerity and neoliberal measures demanded by the troika. So the Greeks have fired a warning shot across the bows of the IMF and the Eurogroup, hinting that they may prefer to default rather than be forced into further concessions.

According to sources for the Daily Telegraph, the IMF representative in the negotiations, Poul Thomsen, has “pushed the austerity agendawith a curious passion that shocks even officials in the European Commission, pussy cats by comparison.”

The IMF is demanding further sweeping measures of austerity at a time when the Greek government debt burden stands at 180% of GDP, when the Greeks have already applied the biggest swing in budget deficit to surplus by any government since the 1930s and when further austerity would only drive the Greek capitalist economy even deeper into its depression.

As the Telegraph summed it up: “six years of depression, a deflationary spiral, a 26pc fall GDP, 60pc youth unemployment, mass exodus of the young and the brightest, chronic hysteresis that will blight Greece’s prospects for a decade to come.”

The Syriza government has already made many significant retreats from its election promises and wishes (see Syriza’s latest proposalshere). Many “red lines” have been crossed already.

It has dropped the demand for the cancellation of all or part of the government debt; it has agreed to carry through most of the privatizations imposed under the agreement reached with the previous conservative New Democracy government; it has agreed to increased taxation in various areas; it is willing to introduce “labor reforms”; and it has postponed the implementation of a higher minimum wage and the re-employment of thousands of sacked staff.

But the IMF and Eurogroup wanted even more. The troika has agreed that the original targets for a budget surplus (before interest payments on debt) could be reduced from 3–4 percent of GDP a year up to 2020 to 1 percent this year, rising to 2 percent next year, etc. But this is no real concession because government tax revenues have collapsed during the negotiation period.

At the end of 2014, the New Democracy government said that it would end the bailout package and take no more money because it could repay its debt obligations from then on, as the government was running a primary surplus sufficient to do so. But that surplus has now disappeared as rich Greeks continue to hide their money and avoid tax payments and small businesses and employees hold back on paying, uncertain about what is going to happen. The general government primary cash surplus has narrowed by more than 59 percent to €651 million in the four-month period of 2015 from 1.6 billion in the corresponding period last year.

The Syriza government has only been able to pay its government employees their wages and meet state pension outgoings by stopping all payments of bills to suppliers in the health service, schools, and other public services. The result is that the government has managed to scrape together just enough funds to meet IMF and ECB repayments in the last few months, while hospitals have no medicines and equipment, schools have no books and materials, and doctors and teachers leave the country.

Even Ashoka Mody, former chief of the IMF’s bailout in Ireland, has criticized the attitude of his successor in the Greek negotiations:“Everything that we have learned over the last five years is that it is stunningly bad economics to enforce austerity on a country when it is in a deflationary cycle. Trauma patients have to heal their wounds before they can train for the 10K.”

The final red lines have been reached. What the Syriza leaders finally balked at was the demand by the IMF and the Eurogroup that the government raise the VAT on electricity by 10 percentage points, directly hitting the fuel payments of the poorest; and also that the poorest state pensioners have their pensions cuts so that the social security system could balance its books.

Further down the road, the troika wants major cuts in the pensions system by raising the retirement ages and increasing contributions. The Syriza leaders were even prepared to agree to some VAT rises and pension “reforms,” but the two specific demands of the troika appear to have been just too much.

As Mody put it: “I am frankly shocked that we are even having a discussion about raising VAT at all in these circumstances. We have just seen a premature rise in VAT knock the wind out of a country as strong as Japan.” 

As for pensions, they have already been slashed under previous bailout agreements with the Troika. Main pensions have been slashed 44–48 percent since 2010, reducing the average pension to €700 a month. Contributors to a supplementary scheme receive a top-up averaging €170 a month. About 45 percent of Greek pensioners receive less than €665 monthly — below the official poverty threshold.

The troika wants more. It is pressing for across-the-board cuts in both main and supplementary pensions; the abolition of a special monthly stipend for pensioners receiving the lowest benefits; an increase in the retirement age to sixty-seven; the ending of special arrangements that allow working mothers and people in “dangerous” occupations to retire early on full pensions; and the merger of dozens of sectoral pension funds into three main funds.

The horrible truth is that none of these further cuts would be necessary if the troika had just cancelled some of Greece’s public sector debt back in 2012 when the debt was “restructured.” Instead, the banks of Germany and France were paid off for their holdings of Greek government bonds with just a small “haircut,” and the debt burden then fell on the shoulders of the new eurozone bailout institutions and Greece’s own pension funds.

Greece’s pension funds lost an estimated €25 billion of reserves that were held in government bonds as a result of the debt restructuring. They have been unable to replenish them. Meanwhile, contributions to the system fell sharply as unemployment soared above 25 percent and outlays rose sharply as more than sixty thousand public sector workers opted for early retirement, fearing their jobs would soon be eliminated.

The reality is that Greece can never pay back these loans. Greek capitalism is in a deep depression and experiencing deflation.  The OECD has just slashed its Greek GDP estimates to 0.1% in 2015 from 2.3% in its previous forecast published last November. So the debt burden is rising not falling despite (and partly because of) austerity. The IMF recognizes this and suggests that the Eurogroup agree to a haircut on its loans (while the IMF still expects full repayment of its loans).

The Eurogroup has already agreed that no repayments on its debt need be made until 2020, but won’t agree to a debt haircut (yet). And both the IMF and the Eurogroup want to cut the debt in the meantime and thus are demanding more austerity measures.

Syriza has made a very modest proposal to cut the debt burden in the future, but this proposal has been ignored by the troika, at least until Greece capitulates on the current bailout terms.

The Greek government is running out of cash to pay back the IMF and the ECB, and very big repayments are scheduled for July and August. It will definitely run out of money by the end of this month, when the choice will be between paying the IMF the bundled-up debt or paying government workers their wages.

The cruel irony is that if Syriza agrees to the demands of the troika on VAT, pensions, and other austerity measures, the money it receives under the existing bailout agreement of €7.2 billion (and some €1.9 billion in held-back ECB profits on Greek bonds) would just beimmediately transferred back to the IMF and the ECB. Nothing would touch the sides of the Greek government to pay its employees or suppliers.

So even if there’s a deal soon (and it will have to be done probably by June 18, when the next euro summit takes place, so that the German and Greek parliaments have time to endorse the deal), almost immediately negotiations will have to be concluded on a new package so the Greeks can make repayments to the IMF (scheduled up to April 2016) and to finance any deficits and interest payments down the road. Greece will be tied into another five years of austerity.

The late-night decision of the Syriza leaders shows that they have reached the end of their tether and it will not be possible to persuade their own party to accept troika demands that would mean accepting in full everything that the previous New Democracy government agreed to. If that happened, what would be the point of a Syriza government, supposedly elected to reverse austerity?

According to opinion polls, the Greek people still overwhelmingly want to stay in the eurozone and they still give strong support to Syriza in polls, but support for the government’s negotiations with the troika has been fading. The people want a deal but they don’t want austerity. This appears to be an unresolvable conundrum.

What next then? Well, assuming that the troika does not blink and drops its latest demands, and assuming that the Syriza leaders do not capitulate, then default on the debt will take place at the end of this month. The government will have to take steps to introduce capital controls to stop the flow of funds out of the banks and abroad, already sizable in the last few months.

In my view, Syriza would finally have to grasp the nettle and take over the banks; reverse all austerity measures; launch a program for state investment and jobs and appeal directly to labor movements in Europe for a continent-wide program of action over the heads of the euro leaders. Up to now, Syriza has failed to do this, but it is not too late to start at ten minutes past midnight.

As I said in a post last March:

The issue for Syriza and the Greek labour movement in June is not whether to break with the euro as such, but whether to break with capitalist policies and implement socialist measures to reverse austerity and launch a pan-European campaign for change. Greece cannot succeed on its own in overcoming the rule of the law of value.

2003 NZF billboards

Submitted to Fightback by David Comrade.

In the run up to the Northland by-election I found myself at first surprised, then increasingly depressed, at the support given to Winston Peters by socialist friends on Facebook. While much of the support was grudging, along the lines of ‘I hate like Winston, but I hate National more’, some of it was whole-hearted. Following Peter’s victory, there were many more expressions of varying degrees of support, and only a couple of other people expressing any criticism of Peters and his party.

I posted a status saying that while I could understand people being happy that National had suffered a defeat, ‘I think it is just as likely to mark a (very negative) turning point for the radical left, and especially for Mana.’

Happily, this set of a pretty stimulating debate. Unhappily I moved into a house with no internet before the debate had run its course. So I am very pleased to be asked by Fightback to write this article.

Problems with politics
The main reason leftists celebrated Peters’s win was that it was a defeat for National. And right now many on the left are desperate to see National defeated. This feeling isn’t confined to activists. “The worst government we’ve ever had” is how one family friend described Team Key, and that was several months before National’s impressive election victory. To me, this seemed a weird comment coming from someone who protested against the tyranny Muldoon only to be blind-sided by the betrayal of Rogernomics.

It is obvious that most New Zealanders don’t share this desperate hatred for National, because National keeps winning elections. I think frustration with Key’s continuing popularity has blinded some leftists to the reality that National has not been the neoliberal terror they were expecting.

Despite coming into government in the mist of the Global Financial Crisis, National didn’t launch the massive austerity (cost cutting) drive. Following the Christchurch earthquakes there were predictions from many on the left that National would unleash the kind of neo-liberal ‘disaster capitalism’ described in Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine. But instead of privatising anything still standing and letting the free market dominate the rebuild, National opted for central planning and massive public investment. It’s the City Council, led by former leftwing union official and Labour MP Lianne Dalziel that is now planning the assets sell off.

Both National and Labour share a common commitment to maintaining the fundamentals established by the neoliberal reforms of the 80s and 90s, while being prepared to use extensive state planning and intervention if they think it is needed. Three decades after the neoliberal lightening war, I think most people accept this mix as the new normal.

As I see it, socialists and other radical leftists should be trying to break free from this post-neoliberal consensus and point the way to a positive alternative. Instead, by focusing solely on how bad National is, we end up endorsing a Labour-led government as the only alternative, even though we (and most everyone else) know that Labour is no alternative at all.

The threat of NZ First
With so many leftists uncritically cheering for Winston, there is a risk that NZ First will become a major focus of those who are fed up with both National and Labour. This is a problem partly because what is most distinctive about NZ First’s politics is reactionary, racist nationalism, which not closes down rather than opens up space for thinking about more radical change.

The potential rise of NZ First is a particular threat to Mana, because NZ First competes with Mana in three significant areas. Firstly, both parties hope to appeal to those who have no faith in National or Labour over the past 30 years. Secondly both have significant support among Maori. And thirdly, both now have a base in Northland.

It is also the differences between the two parties that make NZ First a threat to Mana. Whereas Mana emerged from the long term movement building of tino rangatiratanga activists who have repeatedly challenged the Crown’s racism and sought to put power in the hands of grass roots Maori, Winston Peters has always opposed this. He represents the most conservative side of Maori politics, committed to the institutions established by colonialism, rubbishing the very idea of tino rangatiratanga, and actively promoting racism. The more influence Peters gains, particularly in Northland, the more difficult it will be for Mana to rebuild.

Members of NZ First deny that their party is racist. And some others are confused about whether Peters is personally hates Asian people or not. But although individual prejudice is often the most obvious form of racism, it’s not the only aspect. Racism describes both systems of oppression and the ideas that justify them. Racism is also used to divert blame for social problems away from The System and divide proletarians of different races against one another.

Whether or not Peters and the other MPs who echo his rhetoric really do feel threatened by a growing Asian population isn’t the point. They know that racism is a way of making NZ First stand out from other parties, and they know that while it will turn some voters off, many will overlook it, and some will agree.

Seen like this, NZ First’s racism is a political ploy. For those already deeply cynical about politics, it may be an indication of Peters’s skill at playing the political game. But ‘playing the race card’ also has an impact on the lives of real people, outside the parliamentary play pen. It tells people who are personally racist that it’s OK to hate on Asian people, because they really are a threat, not just to the individual, but to the nation.

Beyond this, the politics of blame are an important part of how people respond to social problems. One of the reasons why there is so little protest around bread-and-butter issues like youth unemployment, income inequality and housing affordability is that many people accept there is very little that governments can or should do about these things. They accept that market forces are outside government’s control, that people on benefits or low wages should take responsibility for themselves. And if they’ve been listening to Winston Peters for the past 20 years that Asian immigration is to blame for these problems anyway. The first two points are classic neoliberalism – this is what we’re getting from National, and to a lesser extent Labour, for the past 30 years, but blaming immigrants and foreigners fits right in.

An alternative
For some of the participants in the Facebook debate, any concerns about NZ First were over-ridden by a desire to see National defeated, and the hope that this would see at least some changes in policy, a little less environmental destruction, a little more support for the poor.

The attitude seemed to be (and I apologise if I am misrepresenting comrades here) that things were so desperate that these immediate needs overrode long term goals, like building a left-wing alternative to Labour.

This raises a question. Is there a way we, socialists and other radical left activists, can make a real difference in people’s lives right now, while opening up the possibility for big changes in the system?

I think there is, but it will involve a return to and a revaluation of basic principles of the radical left, like the 1960s slogan Power to the People, or the 1870s classic, “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves”.

In practical terms it means that our emphasis should be on organizing ourselves and other working class people to fight for and win what we need to survive and live a good life. It means seeing poor people not as victims in need of charity, but as potentially powerful agents who can change their own conditions and change the system if we stand together.

A discussion facilitated by Fightback.
Joel Cosgrove on the causes of the current housing bubble.
Kassie Hartendorp on queer youth homelessness.
Kawika Aipa on homelessness in Hawai’i.
Robert Whitaker on Renters United.

Free entry
2-4pm, Sunday May 31st
17 Tory Street
Whanganui-a-Tara/Wellington
[Facebook event]

Since more people access Fightback content through the website and social media than our magazine, Fightback has moved to a less regular publication schedule, using the magazine for themed issues.

In the wake of a slew of victories against zero-hour contracts in Aotearoa/ New Zealand, Fightback is running an issue on the fight for secure hours and living wages. In a neoliberal era marked by insecurity and rising inequality, victories for working-class organisation are rare and necessary.

To get your hands on a copy of our latest issue, please Subscribe or contact your nearest branch.

Next up, Fightback is planning a crowd-funded issue dedicated to paid writing by women and gender minorities. To support this initiative, click here.