A Commentary on the Passing Scene by
Robert Paul Wolff
rwolff@afroam.umass.edu
Monday, June 22, 2020
SCARY BIT OF SCIENCE
If you are a college or university professor, you might want to look at this. It really raises doubts about whether an on-campus fall semester can happen.
I am a bit surprised that in the model over 90% of classes have 50 students or fewer. I am not sure if that would apply to my own university which is about the same size as the one the authors envisage. In Philosophy (as also in Psychology in which subject my daughter is a tutor) most of the first-year courses are a hundred-plus.
Hopefully this will not be a worry for me. At the moment in New Zealand t looks as if the hours had been eliminated in the general population, the only worry being lax quarantine enforcement at the borders. (This is almost entirely returning New Zealanders, foreigners currently being largely banned) Thus I will be teaching safely face-to face- in the second semester starting in on the 6th of July. If there is another outbreak (and the best laid plans of even competent governments gang aft agley) we will simply revert to online teaching which isn't great but is way short of calamitous.
For many in Chile, New Zealand is the model to imitate these days just as Finland was a first years ago and way back when it was Cuba. Jacinda Ardern is presented as the future, in terms of horizontal female leadership. What is the secret of New Zealand, if there is one? You people most be doing something right.
I've never been in New Zealand nor ever read a book about it, so my questions are entirely innocent. By the way, I already ordered the Russell book which you recommended yesterday.
Should have been 'it looks as if the virus has been eliminated ' not 't looks as if the hours had been eliminated'. Poor typing skills plus an overzealous autocorrect.
For Wallerstein’s benefit here is a potted history of New Zealand.in the late Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries to together with my opinions and political adventures. New Zealand is a country which developed a Left Social Democratic polity in the middle years of the 20th Century under the First Labour Government (1935-1949) To quote Wikipedia, the First Labour Government was responsible for a 'wide range of progressive social reforms. During its time in office, it set the tone of New Zealand's economic and welfare policies until the 1980s, establishing a welfare state, a system of Keynesian economic management, and high levels of state intervention’. These social democratic policies and institutions were overthrown or undermined in the late 1980s and 1990s s by a Neo-Liberal (or New Right) Revolution initiated by the *Fourth* Labour Government led in the first instance by David Lange but dominated from the policy point of view by the France Minister Roger Douglas. (Lange became increasingly ambivalent about the revolution over which he was presiding and eventually jumped ship after a savage political battle with Douglas in which they fought each other to a standstill.) The revolution was if anything accelerated under the ensuing National Government led by Jim Bolger (National being the principal conservative party) but dominated in its initial phases by *its* reforming Neo-Liberal Finance Minister, Ruth Richardson. (The late eighties and early nineties are sometimes described as the era of Rogernomics and Ruthanasia.) By 1989, I (like many another) had come to feel that the Labour Party had been so corroded by neo-Liberal ideology as to be almost rredeemable and I joined a break-away group The New Labour Party‘ dedicated to developing and pushing a genuinely Social-democratic alternative. (I always felt a bit guilty about not having done enough to resist Thatcher in my native UK .)
In the seventies and the eighties I had always considered myself a pretty pale pink but given the right-shift of New Zealand Politics I soon found myself on the extreme Left of the electable spectrum. (Even in the NLP the Dunedin North Group , of which I was a member, was known the Party as ‘The Dunedin North Soviet’ though the leadership was largely composed of non-Marxian social democrats many with a pronounced aversion to Leninism.) Meanwhile the country adopted a form of proportional representation. Partly under pressure from the NLP (which combined with a couple of other odds and sods to form the The Alliance ) Labour in opposition shifted a little Leftwards allowing the Alliance to eventually combine with Labour in a coalition government which also included the Greens. The fifth Labour-led government (1999-2008), led by Helen Clark, was essentially a Third Way administration which despite its defects was a lot better than the preceding neo-liberal regimes. But the Alliance exploded owing to a factional dispute in which the majority favoured a more critical attitude to Labour whilst the leader (then Deputy Prime Minister) favoured silent cooperation. The Alliance effectively expired in 2003 ending fourteen yers of activism on my part. [Interested readers should consult, my memoir/polemic ‘Gedda Life’ at https://www.academia.edu/5532485/Gedda_Life_]
The Helen Clark administration was succeeded by the National government of John Key, which though objectionable to a social democrat such as myself, was a lot less so than the Bolger/Shipley regime of the 1990s, partly because Key was aware that the price of power was not shifting too for to the right. Nonetheless the legacy of his government was massive underfunding to the public services and a lot of child poverty, all done to finance tax cuts fo the rich. And that brings us up the present with the Sixth Labour government led by Jacinda Ardern (in Coalition with the Greens and New Zealand First) which was elected three years ago. Again she is a bit too much of a Third Way politician for my taste (she served as a staffer for Tony Blair ) but her management of the Covid Crisis has been beyond praise. And Keynsian economics currently is de rigeur since there is no other way to deal with the upcoming recession. So currently I am fairly happy with the political scene in NZ though I will be voting for the Greens rather than Labour in the upcoming election.
Thanks. I had no idea that Ardern was a staffer for Blair nor do the Chilean lefties who sing her praises as the new hope for humanity, but of course people change and maybe she has.
Charles Pidgen, I enjoyed your sketch of New Zealand politics and your account of your own political journey, but I was struck by the, by your account, quite unmotivated turn towards neo-liberalism in the late 1980s and 1990s. Had I not recently read an essay by the New Zealand (and Johns Hopkins) historian J.G.A. Pocock I wouldn’t have noticed that. But he begins his “Deconstructing Europe” by noting his return in 1991 to a New Zealand deep in economic and cultural crisis because Britain’s turn towards Europe had massive consequences for a country no longer embedded within any meaningful economic and cultural Commonwealth. To quote:
“Not having found—wherever the fault may lie—new markets of outlet, it has resorted to policies of privatization which amounted to the forced sale of national assets in the hope of attracting new investment capital, a subjection of national sovereignty to international market forces such as the European Community . . . is supposed to stand for. This had reached the point where it was being seriously proposed to sell New Zealand public schools to their own boards of trustees, and the trustees were making it known that they had no money to buy them with.”
Maybe a dictatorship founded on a US-sponsored military coup, such as happened in Chile, was not on the cards in New Zealand. But Mitterrand’s 1983 u-turn from the common programme towards neo-liberalism surely warned how even a quite powerful country whose leadership enjoyed substantial domestic political support could not withstand international pressure to conform to the new politico-economic dogmas. I don’t mean to suggest that the New Zealand government was correct in pursuing the path that it did. But would it have been sufficiently supported domestically and internationally had it taken any other course in a desperate situation?
I do, however, applaud your resistance to that turn, which has surely been part of a mounting resistance across the world, even in the main bastion and for so long the principal beneficiary of the neoliberal order. But that’s surely what it takes: half a century and more of mounting grass roots hostility and organization to overthrow an eventually clearly bloated and arrogant international order—one now increasingly seen to also have been making the consequences of a pandemic even worse. Too bad that its rejection incurs such horrors as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, to name but two. And who knows what further horrors await us while an insupportable system collapses?
T R McD Yes the shift to neo-liberal policies was not unmotivated (which is not to say that it was intellectually justified) . Two factors: 1) Britain's entry in to the EU meant that the formerly guaranteed market for NZ's agricultural produce was very much reduced. This precipitated an ongoing crisis. 2) The conservative Keynsian politics of Muldoon's National Government with its 'Think Big' projects were not very successful
But the contrast here with the Australian Labour governments of the eighties which faced similar problems but did not succumb to neo-liberalism to anything like the same extent. and which were much more successful (in narrowly economic terms).
I am a bit surprised that in the model over 90% of classes have 50 students or fewer. I am not sure if that would apply to my own university which is about the same size as the one the authors envisage. In Philosophy (as also in Psychology in which subject my daughter is a tutor) most of the first-year courses are a hundred-plus.
ReplyDeleteHopefully this will not be a worry for me. At the moment in New Zealand t looks as if the hours had been eliminated in the general population, the only worry being lax quarantine enforcement at the borders. (This is almost entirely returning New Zealanders, foreigners currently being largely banned) Thus I will be teaching safely face-to face- in the second semester starting in on the 6th of July. If there is another outbreak (and the best laid plans of even competent governments gang aft agley) we will simply revert to online teaching which isn't great but is way short of calamitous.
For many in Chile, New Zealand is the model to imitate these days just as Finland was a first years ago and way back when it was Cuba. Jacinda Ardern is presented as the future, in terms of horizontal female leadership. What is the secret of New Zealand, if there is one? You people most be doing something right.
ReplyDeleteI've never been in New Zealand nor ever read a book about it, so my questions are entirely innocent. By the way, I already ordered the Russell book which you recommended yesterday.
Should have been 'it looks as if the virus has been eliminated ' not 't looks as if the hours had been eliminated'. Poor typing skills plus an overzealous autocorrect.
ReplyDeleteFor Wallerstein’s benefit here is a potted history of New Zealand.in the late Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries to together with my opinions and political adventures.
ReplyDeleteNew Zealand is a country which developed a Left Social Democratic polity in the middle years of the 20th Century under the First Labour Government (1935-1949) To quote Wikipedia, the First Labour Government was responsible for a 'wide range of progressive social reforms. During its time in office, it set the tone of New Zealand's economic and welfare policies until the 1980s, establishing a welfare state, a system of Keynesian economic management, and high levels of state intervention’. These social democratic policies and institutions were overthrown or undermined in the late 1980s and 1990s s by a Neo-Liberal (or New Right) Revolution initiated by the *Fourth* Labour Government led in the first instance by David Lange but dominated from the policy point of view by the France Minister Roger Douglas. (Lange became increasingly ambivalent about the revolution over which he was presiding and eventually jumped ship after a savage political battle with Douglas in which they fought each other to a standstill.) The revolution was if anything accelerated under the ensuing National Government led by Jim Bolger (National being the principal conservative party) but dominated in its initial phases by *its* reforming Neo-Liberal Finance Minister, Ruth Richardson. (The late eighties and early nineties are sometimes described as the era of Rogernomics and Ruthanasia.) By 1989, I (like many another) had come to feel that the Labour Party had been so corroded by neo-Liberal ideology as to be almost rredeemable and I joined a break-away group The New Labour Party‘ dedicated to developing and pushing a genuinely Social-democratic alternative. (I always felt a bit guilty about not having done enough to resist Thatcher in my native UK .)
In the seventies and the eighties I had always considered myself a pretty pale pink but given the right-shift of New Zealand Politics I soon found myself on the extreme Left of the electable spectrum. (Even in the NLP the Dunedin North Group , of which I was a member, was known the Party as ‘The Dunedin North Soviet’ though the leadership was largely composed of non-Marxian social democrats many with a pronounced aversion to Leninism.) Meanwhile the country adopted a form of proportional representation. Partly under pressure from the NLP (which combined with a couple of other odds and sods to form the The Alliance ) Labour in opposition shifted a little Leftwards allowing the Alliance to eventually combine with Labour in a coalition government which also included the Greens. The fifth Labour-led government (1999-2008), led by Helen Clark, was essentially a Third Way administration which despite its defects was a lot better than the preceding neo-liberal regimes. But the Alliance exploded owing to a factional dispute in which the majority favoured a more critical attitude to Labour whilst the leader (then Deputy Prime Minister) favoured silent cooperation. The Alliance effectively expired in 2003 ending fourteen yers of activism on my part. [Interested readers should consult, my memoir/polemic ‘Gedda Life’ at
ReplyDeletehttps://www.academia.edu/5532485/Gedda_Life_]
The Helen Clark administration was succeeded by the National government of John Key, which though objectionable to a social democrat such as myself, was a lot less so than the Bolger/Shipley regime of the 1990s, partly because Key was aware that the price of power was not shifting too for to the right. Nonetheless the legacy of his government was massive underfunding to the public services and a lot of child poverty, all done to finance tax cuts fo the rich. And that brings us up the present with the Sixth Labour government led by Jacinda Ardern (in Coalition with the Greens and New Zealand First) which was elected three years ago. Again she is a bit too much of a Third Way politician for my taste (she served as a staffer for Tony Blair ) but her management of the Covid Crisis has been beyond praise. And Keynsian economics currently is de rigeur since there is no other way to deal with the upcoming recession. So currently I am fairly happy with the political scene in NZ though I will be voting for the Greens rather than Labour in the upcoming election.
ReplyDeleteCharles Pidgen,
ReplyDeleteThanks. I had no idea that Ardern was a staffer for Blair nor do the Chilean lefties who sing her praises as the new hope for humanity, but of course people change and maybe she has.
Charles Pidgen, I enjoyed your sketch of New Zealand politics and your account of your own political journey, but I was struck by the, by your account, quite unmotivated turn towards neo-liberalism in the late 1980s and 1990s. Had I not recently read an essay by the New Zealand (and Johns Hopkins) historian J.G.A. Pocock I wouldn’t have noticed that. But he begins his “Deconstructing Europe” by noting his return in 1991 to a New Zealand deep in economic and cultural crisis because Britain’s turn towards Europe had massive consequences for a country no longer embedded within any meaningful economic and cultural Commonwealth. To quote:
ReplyDelete“Not having found—wherever the fault may lie—new markets of outlet, it has resorted to policies of privatization which amounted to the forced sale of national assets in the hope of attracting new investment capital, a subjection of national sovereignty to international market forces such as the European Community . . . is supposed to stand for. This had reached the point where it was being seriously proposed to sell New Zealand public schools to their own boards of trustees, and the trustees were making it known that they had no money to buy them with.”
Maybe a dictatorship founded on a US-sponsored military coup, such as happened in Chile, was not on the cards in New Zealand. But Mitterrand’s 1983 u-turn from the common programme towards neo-liberalism surely warned how even a quite powerful country whose leadership enjoyed substantial domestic political support could not withstand international pressure to conform to the new politico-economic dogmas. I don’t mean to suggest that the New Zealand government was correct in pursuing the path that it did. But would it have been sufficiently supported domestically and internationally had it taken any other course in a desperate situation?
I do, however, applaud your resistance to that turn, which has surely been part of a mounting resistance across the world, even in the main bastion and for so long the principal beneficiary of the neoliberal order. But that’s surely what it takes: half a century and more of mounting grass roots hostility and organization to overthrow an eventually clearly bloated and arrogant international order—one now increasingly seen to also have been making the consequences of a pandemic even worse. Too bad that its rejection incurs such horrors as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, to name but two. And who knows what further horrors await us while an insupportable system collapses?
ReplyDeleteT R McD
Yes the shift to neo-liberal policies was not unmotivated (which is not to say that it was intellectually justified) . Two factors:
1) Britain's entry in to the EU meant that the formerly guaranteed market for NZ's agricultural produce was very much reduced. This precipitated an ongoing crisis.
2) The conservative Keynsian politics of Muldoon's National Government with its 'Think Big' projects were not very successful
But the contrast here with the Australian Labour governments of the eighties which faced similar problems but did not succumb to neo-liberalism to anything like the same extent. and which were much more successful (in narrowly economic terms).