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Living in New Zealand can be extremely depressing. Although protests here still take place, and once in a while there's even a big one, the protests are generally disconnected from each other and from any wider questioning of society. Very different from youthful years as a high school kid, when went up to the city centre one Friday night to a mass anti-Vietnam War march, a few Fridays later there would be a march on something else, organised by some of the same people, often belonging to the old Socialist Action League, then there'd be an all-Saturday anti-Vietnam War educational and planning conference, then a week or two later, a women's liberation picket, then a socialist educational gathering and on and on and on, interspersed with industrial pickets, workers' struggles. . . Now workers here hardly ever resist anything, even the loss of their own jobs. It's hard to predict exactly what the ruling class would have to do to provoke any sort of significant response. In Ireland meanwhile, where I spent a significant part of my political activity, recent years have seen massive mobilisations against austerity and against new taxes in the south such as the household tax and, now, the water tax. Hundreds of thousands have been out on the street, more refused to pay these taxes, although the Dublin government got round this with the household tax by declaring they'd take it out of people's pay packets. (They can't do this with the water tax, because they need to know how much water any household has used and part of the resistance is sabotage of the meters.) It's interesting how different capitalist countries have quite distinctive working class reactions to things. In the case of Ireland and NZ, it isn't just now that things are different. Both countries had very significant labour disputes in 1913 - in Ireland the 1913 lockout in Dublin is the most famous industrial dispute in the island's history; the waterfront dispute of 1913 in NZ led to the numerically largest number of workers in dispute with the government. In both cases, workers' protests were attacked by cops and people got badly beaten - in Dublin two workers were killed. The response was entirely different, however. In NZ, workers and militant unionists complained about police violence; in Dublin, the workers formed their own militia to "put manners on" the police, got arms and became what Lenin called Europe's first 'red army'. Uniformed and tooled up, they marched around Dublin over the next few years and just three years later were a key component in a revolutionary uprising. Ireland, of course, has a revolutionary tradition - republicanism - whereas NZ has none. There was some armed resistance by Maori to what was effectively the annexation of the country by Britain, but those who took part in armed resistance were a very small minority and never established any ongoing movement, least of all with roots in the working class, the way republicanism grew and developed as a 'lower orders movement' in Ireland. Armed poor people in Ireland were not commonplace, but they certainly weren't especially unusual either. And suggesting workers get armed was not way, way beyond popular consciousness. Similar differences exist in Europe - for instance, southern Europe (and to some extent France) have revolutionary traditions which make factory occupations, set-tos with the state, fighting in the street and so on, part of how the working class and radical middle class youth do business. It might to time to migrate to one of these places!!! http://rdln.wordpress.com/2014/11/08/working-class-resists-water-tax-in-south-of-ireland/ http://rdln.wordpress.com/2013/09/03/1913-ireland-and-new-zealand-when-workers-fought-back/ Phil _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
