the false dichotomy

Austerity v Stimulus

Hobgoblin Issue #5 ISSN 2324-4089 May 2013

Whose side are YOU on?

On being part of the problem or part of the solution

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The Greens deserve to be congratulated for, as co-leader Metiria Turei put it, ‘calling the Government’s bluff’ and stating that the Greens will, given the opportunity, repeal the obnoxious casino deal. A deal that has stymied ‘effective regulation of gaming for the next 35 years’. A pity the same intestinal fortitude was not evident with the theft of the power companies.

Hobgoblin wrote to all the parliamentary opposition parties pointing out that a

simple public statement announcing ‘...an ironclad policy that when returned to

government, they will re-nationalise whatever of these assets is sold and paying

no more than the price the shares were first sold for, less any dividends or other

material advantages derived in the meantime.’ that would scuttle this vile deal.

Some chance. Labour and the Greens are inextricably wedded to the anarchy of

the market place to solve all.

‘The truth is ’ David Shearer tells us ‘ once the assets are gone, they are gone’.

The Greens on the other hand will ‘look at whether it’s possible to buy back the

assets (if they have been sold)’. Hello?

Happy Jack, the kleptocracy’s spokesperson-in-chief, simply smiles and dismisses

both parties as the ‘far-left’.

The reality , as we pointed out in Hobgoblin One, is that neither the neo-liberal prescription of National and its acolytes nor

Labour’s timid ‘Third Way’ experiments have delivered what was claimed of them.

‘The mystery’ according to the OECD ‘is why a country that seems close to best practice in most of the policies that are

regarded as the key drivers of growth is nevertheless just an average performer’.

Twelve months on from issue 1 and the mystery remains no mystery. The model is fundamentally flawed. And that's only

part of the problem, it is capitalism that is the problem; not simply its neo-liberal variant.

For all their faults the National Party had always been clear about who they represent and in whose interests they act. There

is never any ambiguity— witness the full frontal assault they have launched across the spectrum: housing, education,

labour law, you name it and they are on the move.

Those who shy away from stating the obvious are not part of the solution - the class war has reached an intensity we have

not witnessed since the dark days of the 1990s. The issue is clear whose side are you on?

Fowl Play

Why didn’t

Labour and the

Greens simply

say they'd take

the power

companies

back ?

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Keynote Speakers

Author ('The General's Son')

Miko Peled

Palestinian teacher & activist

Yousef Aljamal

National Conference on

Palestine 2013

Auckland June 22nd - 23rd

A Better World is Possible

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A very late

A Political Thesis

By Paul Maunder...

Socialism or Barbarism

By Alexandra Egerton .

It is a time of great confusion politically. The tensions in Europe at the moment produce random reactions – far left, fascist, racist, far right. We lefties tend to spend our time cataloguing the horror stories and much of our effort seems to be devoted to attempting to restore social democracy, that Keynesian interregnum. We search hopefully within the environmental meltdown, but without an overall framework – not so much a meta narrative - but at least a model of the present which contains a future, and which can also meaningfully link with the now demonised socialist past. For me the European postmarxists (Badiou, Negri, Žižek ) are useful in this regard.

Their Proposition

We live in a period where capitalist exchange values have

penetrated to every corner of existence and to every corner

of the world. By exchange values I mean the values that

operate in the market place, where products are bought

and sold. The television is the first thing that gets turned on

in the morning in most households. The ads promise

nirvana if you buy this

shampoo, join that bank etc.

Utopia as commodity greets us.

The family, love, sex, birth,

death, work, leisure and the

natural world are smiling products. Everything is a

commodity obedient to the rules of the market place.

Individuals rate success according to acquisition of

commodities. Nature is a resource. Growth is essential. We

will be better off in the future therefore we can accumulate

debt. Technology will solve all problems that arise. Cheap

energy is a right. Every individual can make their future.

These values have penetrated language and thought. And

there is a totalising oneness to this. We can therefore refer

to late-capitalism as The Empire. And The One. The Empire

is narcissistic (and produces narcissists), it is fascist in

essence, is increasingly authoritarian, spectacular in its

diversions and huge on information. It reduces people to

brands and disappears the encounter with history and ‘the

other’ through creating sameness (McDonaldisation) and

having everything under surveillance.

In the past, Marxism, which grew in parallel with, and as

the antithesis of capitalism, was characterised by a series

of singularities: the working class as the one revolutionary

class, the revolution (the working class taking over the

means of production) as the one necessary act, leading to a

singular redemption (after a period of transition involving a

singular dictatorship).

But now, late capitalism is The One. And facing it, as well

as within it, is The Multitude, a diversity of people in terms

of race, gender, sexual preference, ability, ...

Even an entire society,

a nation, or all

simultaneously existing

societies taken

together, are not the

owners of the earth.

They are simply its

possessors, its

beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state

to succeeding generations.

That’s not a novel idea today, but it was when Karl Marx

wrote it.

So perhaps the core aim of socialists has to be to build a

society in which people work consciously to be what the

Canadian eco-socialist Ian Angus calls good ancestors.

Because of its absolute imperative – to grow at all

costs – we know that, as Angus puts it: Capital can’t be

anyone’s ancestor because Capital has no children.

Supporters of the capitalist system point to one

unassailable truth, while largely ignoring another.

The first truth is that there is no doubt that huge

improvements to the material and cultural lives of millions

of people have been made under Capitalism – in food,

housing, transport, communications, health, literature, art

and music (well, up until the last half century anyway).

The other, obscenely ugly truth is that Capitalism has also

given us world and local wars, colonial wars, genocides,

mass poverty, starvation and torture. It may not have

invented all of these horrors, but it was content to persist

with them.

Late Capitalism has become increasingly vicious with

humanity and increasingly destructive of the ecological

environment. The widespread employment of Agent Orange

by the U.S. in its néo-colonial war against Vietnam is a

clear example, as is its use of depleted uranium ordnance

in Iraq. But in addition to such direct and deliberate

destruction, there is the “collateral damage” caused by the

clear felling of native forests internationally, the denuding

of the oceans of aquatic species, open cast mining for

minerals, etc., all in the compulsive demand for maximising

profit. For certain, one way or another, all this attacks the

poor most profoundly. Ultimately, of course, humanity at

large is seriously threatened.

Half a century ago, the German socialist leader Rosa

Luxemburg (murdered by agents of the Social Democrat

Party...) famously said that Humanity was faced with the

choice: Socialism or Barbarism.

More recently, the Vice-Chair of the Intergovernmental

Committee on Climate Change, Mohan Munasinghe, can say

that: Barbarisation is already underway ... ... click for more ... click for more

...Racism and recession in New Zealand

By Jared Phillips .

Understanding Neoliberal Capitalism

m... ..

Several recent events have elevated the issue of racism in

New Zealand. In one case a nationalist MP belonging to the

Danish People’s Party made headlines when she made

racist comments about a traditional Maori welcome.

Also Susan Devoy, who

is unsympathetic to

Maori political issues,

was appointed as the

new Race Relations

Commissioner. At the

same time National

Party Prime Minister John Key has tried to stoke fears about

South Asian refugee boats coming to New Zealand. This is

despite no boats arriving so far.

To top things off a bunch of neo-Nazis staged a so-called

‘white pride’ march in Christchurch. These events vary in

significance but taken together they have created increased

controversy and more discussion in society about ethnicity

and issues of racism.

New race relations appointment

The appointment of former champion squash player, Susan

Devoy, to the position of Race Relations Commissioner is

seen by many as a right-wing provocation. Prior to her

appointment Devoy had become an outspoken

conservative. In particular she had criticised the wearing of

burqas and had chastised Maori for raising political issues

on Waitangi Day.

Waitangi Day is a national holiday which marks the

anniversary of a Treaty of Waitangi signing ceremony in

1840. For decades the Waitangi day anniversary has been

used by Maori as an occasion for forums and symbolic

peaceful protests to address Maori issues.

In reality the treaty was a tool of annexation but it

contained important promises to Maori, including

self-governance through chieftainship. With such promises

not being adhered to the Treaty is seen as a rallying point

of Maori resistance. Maori call for such aspects of the treaty

to be honoured.

Criticism quickly followed Devoy’s appointment especially

because she is completely unqualified. She responded by

saying that she is a “quick learner” with “a good moral

compass”.

Devoy’s view is that Waitangi day should not be used by

Maori for political “shenanigans”. The truth is that it’s

precisely that type of outlook – a refusal to recognise deep

historical injustices – that qualified Devoy for the position in

the eyes of the government.

Even some of the conservative press think that her

appointment is a step too far with one ...

REVIEW

These two excellent books provide

accessible and complementary albeit

differently focused, accounts of key dimensions of the

neoliberal era of global capitalism.

McNally views global neo-liberalism through the lens of

capitalism’s current economic crisis; while Carroll views it

through the lens of the ‘trans-national capitalist class’.

McNally uncovers the structural logic of capital unleashed

by the neo-liberal project; while Carroll emphasizes the

neoliberal ‘will and consciousness’ of the transnational

capitalist class.

Grounded in Marx’s

theory of capitalist

society, McNally offers a

compelling account of

the integrally connected

economic, social,

political, and ideological

dimensions of the crisis

of global neoliberalism.

The broad account is

grounded in an analysis

of how capitalism’s

structural economic logic tends towards overaccumulation,

and how the current ‘global slump’ now entering its fifth

year is a dramatic global expression of capitalism’s basic

economic instability. Overaccumulation, similar to over-

investment, is essentially caused by there being “simply too

many factories producing the same good” (p. 77) that

squeezes capitalist profitability. Hampered by a lack of

productively profitable outlets, capital invests in speculative

and ‘fictitious’ ventures. This ‘virtual economy’ of money is

‘disembedded’ from, and grows in complete disproportion

to, the real economy.

However, while such unproductive

investment enriches the finance frac-

tion of the capitalist class, it implies

capitalism’s deep structural crisis, since

wealth and profitability is ultimately

grounded in productive not fictitious

capital. The

current overaccumulation crisis of

global capitalism is the immediate

manifestation of the crisis of the neoliberal project defined

here as the creation of a market civilization by unleashing

capital autonomy on a global scale. ..

Review By David Neilson .

Working class unity needed to defend rights and living standards

‘The socialist

counter-movement

must also think and

act strategically if we

are to transform

neoliberal capitalism

into a stable and

progressive

Alternative’

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William Carroll, 2010, The Making of a Transna-tional Capitalist Class: Corporate Power in the 21st Century. Zed Books. David McNally, 2011, Global Sump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance. Spectre.

.Alligators in Florida: reflecting on the new men of the right

For the last two decades of the

twentieth century, being a

feminist wasn’t particularly

difficult. Women were on the

rise everywhere. And if some

disappointed (for who would

advocate women in senior

positions that may turn out like

Maggie Thatcher?), western

societies benefitted enormously from increased diversity of

view and approach.

Of course there were many doors that still remained closed.

In general, capitalist organisations allowed women in to the

bottom ranks but not the top tiers. The elite organisations

such as lending institutions, bond and currency traders, the

sharemarket sector, real estate and so on remained largely

male, the odd woman generally inheriting rather than

creating their positions.

In the event this was probably fortunate, as so many of the

senior management in those organisations ended up in

prison as the perpetrators of massive corporate fraud.

John Key’s career before parliament would have seen him

rubbing shoulders with all these masters of the universe,

and living in a unique and well-suited bubble of wealth and

power. Tom Wolfe’s book The Bonfire of the Vanities used

the bond trading phenomenon to reveal the interplay

between wealth and power and race/class divisions in

1980s New York. But he might just as well have focused

on gender.

My own background is in education, about as female a

sector as you can get outside hairdressing or nursing. Even

so, I puzzle about how male colleagues and students of

mine, sometimes not the brightest cards in the pack, have

seemingly sailed into high positions while immensely

talented women appear to have been left behind, or

dropped out of the race completely. Odd things happen in

post-feminist New Zealand.

So imagine what it is like inside the male/wealth bubble,

where women have never made much headway. They may

still be seen as oddities or, worse, as sexual playthings. It

is notable that the endless saga of sexual shenanigans

among politicians of the right (mainly, but not of course

exclusively), and their wealthy colleagues, has not stalled

in this supposedly more equal world.

Especially now, I might add, when the tide seems to have

turned against the promotion of women into all areas of

public life. It seems the taste of equality we were given

last century was all the dose we were to be allowed: thus

far (and temporarily), but no further.

Oh, there will be many women who will do well,

By Liz Gordon

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The Memoirs of William (Bill) Lock dictated on his deathbed, July 2nd – 3rd, 2056.

Preamble

When one gets to my advanced age, when one’s vital organs are showing definite signs of wear and tear, when one’s hearing and vi-sion is becoming impaired, well, one tends to get quite maudlin and philosophical. One tends to review one’s life, not at this late stage to speculate on what might have been, but to celebrate one’s achievements and to excuse one’s failures. Not that I had any failures!

Not that I intend to be modest. The time for false modesty is long past. My achievements have been many and I’m proud of them. Why should I not be? I’ve made a differ-ence, that I can say without fear of contradiction, and how many men can claim that at the end of their lives?

But it’s an axiom that no man can serve two masters, and I have been true to this belief all my political life.

Childhood.

One of the best prefabricated myths of my political life is that I was brought up in a state house in the poor suburb of Porirua. While this may be technically true, Porirua has a great variety of housing, from those abominations of the early fifties, the semi-detached, to nice stand-alone bunga-lows in quite salubrious streets. It was in one of these that I spent my childhood. My father died when I was only seven and, frankly, left my mother quite comfortably well off. In effect, she rorted the slack welfare system because her income, from his investments, which he contrived to conceal remarkably well, would have disqualified her from occupying a state house, where her rent was limited to twenty-five percent of her widow’s benefit.

Consequently, my childhood was not at all deprived. Not in the least. There was little I wanted that my mother could not provide, from education at one of the most prestigious state schools in Wellington, to not needing a student loan for study at Victoria University.

I earned a Bachelor of Commerce in accounting from Victoria and then and there decided that my future lay with money, and more specifically, with my own acquisition of that commodity. In this I was spectacularly successful, ac-quiring my first million before I was thirty years old.

My success led me to the prestigious firm …

Sa

tire

By Tony Veitch

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Hobgoblin: How it Works

Hobgoblin is an electronic newsletter best read while online.

The majority of articles contain hyperlinks either within the text or at the conclusion of the piece. Hyperlinks are identi-fied by either underlining (when within text) and symbols like this

Articles written specifically for us are often, because of their length, concluded on the web. These articles are printed in full for snail-mail members.

If you a find broken link please let us know.

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education and communications do not want the Left to claim him as an icon.

Well, we assert that claim

Albert Einstein’s essay on socialism was originally published in the first issue of the independent U.S. socialist journal Monthly Review in May 1949. Its relevance remains extant today.

notes, emails and other records concerning a meeting between a delegation from the FBI and Cuban State Security in Havana in June 1998...

..Crises of Capitalism and Social Democracy John Bellamy Foster is best-known as author of Marx's Ecology in which he corrects the popular misapprehension that Marx did not 'get' environ-mental limits

In his latest book, The Endless Crisis Foster analyses what he calls the 'stagnation-financialisation trap'. This is the economic pre-dicament many countries find themselves in

In your new book, The Endless Crisis, you and Robert McChesney talk about

...Me, the FBI and the documents … Take 33

As you may recall, our ongoing, never-ending correspondence began in May 2010 when I first requested copies of “all reports, correspondence, memos,

..Why Socialism?

New opportunities for left realignment The impact of austerity has thrown politics in Britain into turmoil. Both parties of the ruling coalition government -- the Conservative Party (Tories) and the Liberal Democrats -- lost heavily in municipal elections in England last week to the United

the 'stagnation-financialisation trap'. What do you mean by this? People commonly see what happened in 2007 and 2008 when the bubble burst as a financial crisis and nothing more. But the real problem is a tendency towards ...

today: dependent for growth on a system of financial bubbles which have now burst, they remain mired for the foreseeable future in a condition of chronic stagnation.

Article Monthly Review

Author, Stephen Kimber, writes to the FBI in search more information on self-confessed ter-rorist Luis Posada Carriles. Yep two articles, on that rough state, in one issue of Hobgoblin. Why?

As NZ is moved closer economical, politically and military to the US by the current govern-ment – the nature of that relationship must be of

concern to more than just the left where is the peace movement , Human Rights activists etc.

Article by Stephen Kimber

... click for more

Probably most New Zealand school chil-dren will have heard of Einstein. They may not know who he was, where he was from or what he did that made him famous. But they use his name either to reference the ‘brainy’ one in their peer group or, sarcastically, to sneer at one who does or says something foolish. The more ad-vanced might mention the famous E=mc2

equation and even have some understanding of what it means. The science-fiction inclined might have a view on Einstein’s theories about time, travel and the speed of light.

But few will have any knowledge that Ein-stein applied his prodigious intellect to the socio-economic environment and human values. That’s not surprising, because Einstein was a socialist. And the mass media and the capitalist states’ organs of

are no essential methodological differences between astronomy and economics: scientists in both fields attempt to discover laws of general acceptability for a circumscribed group of phenomena in order to make the interconnection of these phenomena as clearly understandable as possible. But in reality such methodological differences do exist. The discovery of general laws in the field of economics is made difficult by the circumstance that observed economic ...

The Hobgoblin Network project is simply about reasserting a radical counter hegemony in Aotearoa by fostering active engagement (exchange of ideas, development of indigenous theory, etc) between the various strands of the militant left others look to the bigger project rebuilding a viable left party – the article reviews the situation in the U.K.

Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) – a right-wing, populist, anti-immigration party that is pulling all the main parties to the right. Labour’s performance was better but poor, since its answer to austerity is its own brand of ...

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...Did the CIA's Drone Program - 'Bargaining Chip' Killing? Obama’s recent handwringing about drone strikes and the torture camp in Guantanamo – was just that picturesque handwringing – here’s more on a rough state gone feral.

Article Rolling Stone

Knife, also claims that the agency switched to kill-ing accused ter-rorists – rather than capturing them – because of a 2004 internal review ...

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troubling origins of the CIA's targeted killing program in Pakistan – which he says began in 2004 with the killing of one of that country's internal ene-mies, not a member of al Qaeda. The piece, which is adapted from Mazzetti's new book, The Way of the

In a major story in Sunday's New York Times, national security reporter Mark Mazzetti details the

Back Issues

Cartoons displace the blame for social

consequences of neoliberal policy away from real

culprits ... click for more

Is it advisable for one who is not an expert on economic and social issues to express views on the subject of socialism? I believe for a number of reasons that it is.

Let us first consider the question from the point of view of scientific knowledge. It might appear that there

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Dear Douglas

I’ve read with care your letter and leaflet “Positive Money”. In seeking access to Hobgoblin for your Social Credit/Positive Money groups, you state that “it is a mistake to assume that all people who could be involved with the (Hobgoblin) network would be necessarily socialist”. You also say (correctly in my view) that those two groups would not want to be labelled as “...left wing, let alone so-cialist.”

I refer you to the socialist objective as outlined in the first issue of Hobgoblin, thus:

“Well, we don’t mean simply seeking and even obtaining very worthy reforms – such as those introduced by the first Labour Government – valuable as such reforms certainly are for ordinary people. But even the most significant state reforms and initiatives in the public interest (in health, education, housing, labour law, transport, energy, communications, etc.) can be and often are reversed by subsequent governments.”

No. for reforms and initiatives beneficial to the great majority of people to be sustained and extended requires a fundamental and radical restructuring of the very anatomy of our society.”

Hobgoblins, as we further stated “...are opposed not just to the worst excesses of the capitalist market but to the structure and essence of the very system of Capital that allows such excesses...”

Given that that is what we are, you would surely think us foolish indeed were we to provide both a platform and an audience, through Hobgoblin, to your politics - which are, in your own words “not intrinsically left wing”.

I take the opportunity to respond briefly to some of your other comments. For example, you focus on electoral reform as if it is the kernel of political democracy (much as

...Thanks, but no thanks . . . Opposition to the political situation in Aotearoa and the search for a cohesive and united response is felt in all sectors of the resistance - including among the adherents to social credit.

This letter, by Paul Piesse, is a reply to an attendee at one of the Hobgoblin regional meetings.

(name changed to provide privacy)

What's happening at Hobgoblin

It seemed a simple idea at the outset - form a network which attracted people from a range of positions, organizations, and backgrounds who want to promote the solidarity and perspectives of democratic socialism in 21st century NZ.

Rather than offering a party framework, Hobgoblin was seeking to facilitate constructive debate about both the nature of New Zealand’s contemporary neoliberal path and the programmes and strategies that need to be constructed in order to build a counter-hegemonic movement beyond neo-liberal capitalism.

Simple it has not been, many have worked long and hard but the rewards are slowly materialising.

The Core Group that oversees the decisions being made, solicits articles, arranges regional meetings etc. continues so grow with the addition in the last few week of Paul Maunder (West Coast), Reuben McNabb (Christchurch), Jen Olsen (Dunedin), and Sue Bradford (Auckland).

Initial discussions are under way on developing a series of seminars that can be taken around the county, as are plans for further regional meetings.

The Hobgoblin Team

social credit sees the banking system as the pivot of the economy). For socialists, the right to vote once every three years is indeed important, but a genuine democracy is much more than that. It requires an understanding that it is essentially antagonistic for the production of goods and services to be co-operative and collective, as efficiency and effectiveness requires, whilst ownership and control of those goods and services remains in private and individualist hands. A genuine democracy cannot exist without public ownership and participation in economic and social planning, with a mixture of direct and delegated democracy.

A market economy, the holy grail of capitalism, is inherently anti-democratic. Where there is the indiscriminate capitalist imperative of growth at all costs – which means regardless of the social and ecological environment – inescapably there will be a growing gap between the super-rich and the rest of us, with a swelling number of people at the very bottom. Every dollar a rich person or a poor person has is a vote in the economy. Thus a minority - the rich – dominate our economy, and thereby their values and ideology prevail in our politics.

You don’t address that by dealing with just one facet of capitalism – the banking system. Indeed, a polemicist might argue that the myopic focus on banks reflects the frustration of lower middle class small business elements at finding themselves in thrall to the banks, frustrating their ambition to become bigger business. Again, we see the destructive capitalist growth imperative, driving not just banks and big business but also many not in that élite who might be characterised as “would-be-if-they-could-be ”.

The myopic focus on the banking system does not address what constitutes the State or its class nature; it does not confront the inadequacies of productivist economies; it does not deal with questions of equity in the relations between citizens and in their rights and obligations; it avoids issues of international behaviours and relations; it has nothing to say about either the ecological or the social environment.

Douglas, I respect and concur with your desire to put the boot into the banking system.

But it’s not enough, Douglas. Not nearly enough to build a really democratic economy and humanised social system.