We shall overcome

The relative calm of the slow days between Christmas and New Year afford an opportuntity for reflection. 2024 has been a challenging year. We have endured a complex hard-right political blitzkrieg from the coalition government. Their focus is on legislative and policy frameworks which promote ‘business freedom’ by facilitating optimum conditions for private profit. This flowering of capitalist fundamentalism (neo-liberalism on steroids) is supported by a range of deceptive ideological tropes – shallow and false representations of equality, such as the idea that the interests of capital and labour are the same or the notion that we can all be capitalists. A raft of contradictions lies below the surface layer of political deceit:

Protections for organised labour are unnecessary in this distorted universe. Māori can all prosper through business enterprise. New Zealand Corp is happy enough to allow Iwi Māori to develop their brand  – Indigenous culture is a very marketable commodity, right? However, what we have really seen is a multi-pronged offensive against the rights of Māori and the interests of working people.

The last government was far from perfect but it is interesting the way we seldom recognise a high tide mark until the ocean begins to rush out again. The current regime benefits the privileged and it does so by punishing those at the bottom of the heap. Wacquant described authoritarian neoliberal governments as centaur states, riding roughshod over excluded and demonised sections of the population: think gang patch laws or sanctions against beneficiaries when government policies manufacture unemployment. This strategy is nothing new and was central to nineteenth-century liberalism – it is a ‘win-win’ for Capital – providing a scapegoat for social suffering and dividing the working class.

There have been significant job losses in the public sector in particular. In a small economy like ours, policies of austerity lead to economic recession. The coalition don’t like dissent and they don’t like research that contradicts their business model dogma. In part public sector restructuring is anti-democratic – concentrating power in the hands of the nascent political and managerial class. Cutting capacity flows on to reduced time, money, discretion and professional autonomy, i.e., the ability of street-level bureaucrats to prioritise human need.

Essentially public services don’t function well in a minimalist state, at least not for those most in need, because they are not intended to do so. It was the famous French thinker Pierre Bourdieu (Wacquant’s mentor) who pointed out that the functioning of the welfare state requires compassion and flexibility – the work of bureaucrats who are least imprisoned in their function. The current political regime wants its public servants back in the iron cage.

I have lost my own job at the University of Auckland; disestablished as part of an efficiency drive. As I reflect on swimming (somewhat) against the neoliberal tide over the last forty years, I wonder what lies ahead for dissenting voices. I see how individuated capitalism has infiltrated the daily rhythms of our lives but I do take heart in evidence of a new generation of (better organised and connected) thinkers and actors across the broad political left.

I think of my own Pākehā grandparents and their struggles to live decent lives. I only met one of them in person and the rest comes from family stories and ancient faded photographs: David, the Glaswegian iron foundry worker, veteran of the Somme and the Marne, out for a drink with his pals – Saturday night gangsters. Nancy, his wife, all five foot of her, bending over the cast iron stove in the tenament kitchen. Vi Fox, my fierce English grandmother from the old East End of London and her more mysterious husband William who worked as the head steward of a golf course. A house went with the job and he was told he would always have a job. Took his own life in a gas oven when it turned out otherwise. The interests of capital and labour, of right-wing politicians and working people, aren’t the same. I don’t need to read Marx to know that: it is inscribed in my whakapapa.

2025 will mark ten years since this little RSW blog site started up in response to the ideological restructuring of child welfare in 2015. Has it served a purpose among the torrent of social media and news-feeds? I like to think it has helped, a little – provided / motivated some informed dissent, encouraged some social workers and others to at least understand the political and economic interests that define the horizon of possibility in their working lives – and to have the courage, individually and collectively, to imagine that we can (and will) come to live in better ways. Opposition can be difficult, and it is always easier to side with power, but it is critically important – now more than ever.

So, my thoughts today are with all the social workers, human service / community workers, academics and activists who have struggled to recognise and address (in some way, shape, or form) the effects of big-picture oppression on the lives of the people they serve. Rest and recharge before you turn your faces into the wind once again. Kia kaha: get up, stand up – find your allies and keep the fire burning! We won’t be crushed – resistance is in our DNA.

Image Credit: Y@nnickR