Monday 8 June 2015

Quote of the Day: “The Greens are as dead in the water as Labour…”

“The Greens are as dead in the water as Labour: they’ve gone about as far
as they can go … Just as Labour has lost its working class roots through the disappearance of the working class [by prosperity], so the Greens have lost
their environmental roots as the environment outlook looks better than ever.”

- Jo Holmes, from her post ‘Metrosexual Greens need to stop blubbering’ at the JoHolmes blog

3 comments:

Angry Tory said...

disappearance of the working class [by prosperity],

oh please. There is still a large swathe of "working class" in NZ. Most workers in NZ don't have a university degree.

The problem for Labour is that they all vote National. Labour is now the party of the bludgers, the non-workers; the Greens are the party of the Bureaucracy, also non-workers; Winston the party of the ex-workers, the codger-bludgers.

ACT has stopped being the party pushing Labour policies of the late 1980s and is now the party pushing Labour policies of the late 2000s.

National is the party of the Workers. It is also Democratic, backing MMP (good grief!) and as we've seen it its latest budget is also socialist. Sort of like the New Zealand Democratic Socialist Workers Party.

Peter Cresswell said...

@Angry: WTF has a uni degree got to do with it, except to further prove the point, i.e., that Labour's degree-enjoying MPs are very different to those they claim to represent.

Anyway, to the point: a century of increasing real wages has all but made the working class the middle class; Marx's "industrial proletariat" just don't exist, and those who you might characterise as working class are now reviled by Labourites as "sleepy hobbits." (And see Labour's nasty backlash in Britain at "the workers" refusal to vote the way class analysis told Labourites they should.)

Sure, there is an underclass, but that's mostly a non-working class... and if Labour has an electoral power base outside academia, that's it.

MarkT said...

@ Angry - Your comments about university degrees aside, you do make a good show of appearing to disagree, whilst at the same time making essentially the same point.

I think both the quote and most of Angry's generalisations are correct. The left has become less about the 'working class' and more about the 'welfare class'. The attempts to create artificial class boundaries based on the socialist premise that wealthy are parasites on the working class is being increasingly recognised as a sham, which leads them nowhere to go but defend parasitism on principle (i.e. the welfare class). That's a logical progression - and also a positive one, beside it defines the battleground more clearly.

As the quote suggests, I see a similar trend with the Green movement, albeit perhaps not as far advanced. As the evidence mounts that Green principles don't really lead to an improvement in the environment but more about throttling economic progress on principle, it's credibility and influence should eventually wane.