A Green New Deal for Aotearoa NZ

Calls have begun to emerge for New Zealand to implement a Green New Deal (GND), with a recent piece by Jess Berentson-Shaw discussing the broad concept of a GND and how one might take shape in Aotearoa. In the interests of moving this conversation further, I want to build on Berentson-Shaw's proposals, drawing on the history of the GND concept and some shortcomings in the concept of the 'circular economy'. My central claim is that in order to move us past the realm of ambitious rhetoric and into transformative terrain, we must ground the GND conversation in analyses of power.

What is a Green New Deal?

The first thing to get clear is what the Green New Deal is.

Let’s start from the beginning.

The original “New Deal” was signed into law by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was a sweeping set of industrial policies, geared toward rebuilding the US economy and public infrastructure in the 1930s. In this way, the situation that we confront now, with decrepit public infrastructure and an increasingly precarious workforce, is at least superficially similar. What often gets glossed over is that FDR didn’t sign the New Deal into existence because he was a benevolent man who happened to occupy the office of the US Presidency, but because workers struggled and fought for it. The result was deeply uneven, with white male workers benefiting the most, while structurally marginalised communities were sacrificed. It is this history of struggle, contingency, and the dangers of a divided working class that should be considered from the legacy of the New Deal - not simply the ambition of its aims. 

The GND entered again into public discussion around a decade ago in the work of Ann Pettifor and Robert Pollan, as the multiple crises inherent to life in capitalist society began to pile up and intersect in increasingly obvious ways (think: the 2008 global financial crisis combined with the failures of successive international climate talks and extreme weather events).

It’s important to place this emergence in context - academics, workers and activists had continued to stare capital in the eye and figure out how to navigate struggles, despite the general post-structuralist turn in the academy and breaking of worker power. Over the last decade broader questioning of our current social contract has broken increasingly into mainstream discussions. There is a wealth of analysis to draw on (and that is drawn on in the more radical versions of a GND) in these discussions. The GND is a terrain on which competing visions for the future of our societies will be fought, and is open to a wide range of possible orientations. As, such, we have to be crystal clear about our diagnosis of the problems we face, which means that we need to strengthen the critique of capitalism in New Zealand. 

 To put this another way: to ensure a Green New Deal is sufficiently radical and well-designed to meet the challenges of our time, we need to name and act on the weaknesses of our system that are becoming increasingly clear. The competing visions of a GND are demonstrated well here: on the left, we have the Obama-era poster and on the right, one of the posters created for the GND campaign led by US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D) and Senator Ed Markey (D). The Obama-era poster, reflecting the tenor of his administration’s policy more generally, advertises a conservative program geared toward kick-starting a market-led energy transition. This is a sector-specific transformation of energy rather than a comprehensive program of change. On the right, the GND poster from the AOC and Markey campaign centres public spaces, high-speed public transport, and workers. The danger is that without a critique of the systems and processes, that have created the social and environmental degradation that we must change, we end up reverting to the former rather than the latter - locking in the problem. 

Catching Up - It’s Hard to be a World Leader with Yesterday’s Ideas

One of the most interesting things about New Zealand’s public discourse (and reflected in the academy and politics) is the general acceptance of an ‘anti-theoretical’ environment, coupled with a vague sense of exceptionalism and being a ‘world leader’. This seeming contradiction has been baked into common sense, but it hasn’t always been like this. The intense struggle of New Zealand’s working class in the 1920s and ‘30s led to one of the best equipped social democratic welfare states in the capitalist world, before this was unceremoniously reconfigured to open up paths for capital accumulation in the 1980s and ‘90s. The work of building a new ‘common sense’ and materially shaping New Zealand society to make ‘collective action’ and ‘solidarity’ dirty words, rather than symbols of character and strength, was certainly well executed - here we are, talking about a GND without talking about class struggle!

We can begin by naming the enemy - it’s not greedy oil executives and landlords. Or rather, it is not the people who occupy these objective positions in our economy. It’s the structure of the economy and its political forms, and the roles that emerge for people out of these. The way this is organised means that some people have to enforce rules of possession and distribution in order to sustain profitable ventures, inevitably depriving those people who cannot pay. When this method of provision runs up against the things that humans need to live - like food, shelter, education and care - conflict emerges.

Recognising the structural imperatives of a capitalist economy means we can challenge the system, not the person, and thus get to the heart of the problem. Berentson-Shaw recognises this in part when she claims that New Zealand should be moving toward worker-owned cooperatives, as is happening in other parts of the world, however I suggest that the missing piece for New Zealand is an analysis of power - an understanding of how our economy has got to where it is now and the mechanisms by which change might occur. 

It seems that, often enough in New Zealand, critiques of capitalism are dismissed as conspiracy theories. We have seen the rise of right-wing populism across the world as people’s reactions to the material security of their lives being ripped away has provoked a backlash, laced with xenophobic nationalism, racism, sexism, ableism, and every imaginable reactionary strain of prejudice and hatred. If the Left refuses to name the enemy, continues to dismiss the structural causes of people’s pain, then what could be the power to up-end exploitation and demand better lives for all gets channeled into poison.

This is a complicated story that cannot be done full justice here, but the plea is simple: we must do the work to bring New Zealand up to speed with the progressive research and politics that has germinated and spread across the labour and social movements of other capitalist states in decline. This is not to suggest that we lack existing knowledge and knowledge-holders with razor-sharp critiques of capitalism’s settler colonial face in Aotearoa (unsurprisingly, Te Tiriti is indelibly linked to these conversations); rather the aim is to further bolster these voices by demonstrating how they link with the surge of progressive work emerging under the banner of the GND. 

The False Promise of the Circular Economy as Transformative

Not all research coming out of overseas academies and institutions has been progressive in the ‘big L’ sense of the Left. Particularly within the field of heterodox economics, ideas that have been simmering for decades have been re-heated and presented as bold and paradigm-shifting. I speak, of course, of the circular economy (though Mariana Mazzucato’s state is another version that desperately needs to be unpacked). 

The circular economy (or, in one its latest iterative forms, the ‘doughnut economy’) hails from the field of ecological economics. This field emerged as the failures of the neoclassical synthesis to apprehend the vagaries of the physical world became increasingly clear. Yet it has languished in semi-opposition for the decades of its existence. I will make the case that this is because it has no adequate theory of power - but first, to the foundational aspects of the school. 

Ecological Economics

Ecological economists apply the concepts of thermodynamics to the economy. This means that they conceive of the Earth as a closed loop system, meaning that energy flows become more entropic over time. By pushing earth systems beyond the point of regeneration through relentless entropy (driven by the need for never-ending economic growth and attendant ‘physical throughputs’), the capitalist system might ‘overshoot’ and cause catastrophic ecological (and therefore economic) breakdown. This school of thought suggests that by bringing production and consumption within a ‘steady-state’ model - essentially stabilising economic and population growth within definite limits - this might be averted. 

This approach has obvious appeal to those with training in the physical sciences, but for a social scientist the alarm bells go off immediately. How might production and consumption be brought back within ‘limits’? Don’t a huge number of people on Earth already not have their subsistence needs met? How does this address the structural imperative to growth of capitalism? How are we intending to prevent that?

Similar questions can be directed at other ‘leftist’ programs such as the de-growth movement, which seeks to subvert the growth imperative inherent to capitalism without always connecting this demand to a theory of power and change in capitalism. It should be noted that increasingly sophisticated attempts to address these questions are emerging from within the tradition(s), however these repeatedly run into the requirement for a theory of power and change based in mobilising people, and thus the need to define who ‘the people’ are and how to move them. 

The Doughnut Economy

The ‘doughnut economy’ presents the basic concept of the steady state with a handy diagram that shows us the ‘ecological outer limits’ and the inner boundaries of humanity’s needs for regeneration. Absent from the image? The same thing again - power.

It relies on the same technocratic reading of the problem - and implication that we are all equally responsible for it - rather than structural analysis that identifies the opposing forces in capitalist society and demonstrates how these opposed interests may result in an action plan for seizing democratic control of the economy.

How do the requirements for profit conflict with the ability of workers to access housing, food, adequate clothing, community, and care? How does this square with our professed commitment to human dignity and the right to a good life? Until these questions are broached, the doughnut model provides a vision of a future state, but no roadmap for how to get there.

The Question of the State

A question that any conversation about economic and societal transformation must confront is the challenge presented by the state. This often gets skated over, or perhaps mentioned as something to be avoided via ‘grassroots’ mobilisation, but the state remains the epicentre or stabiliser of any capitalist economy and so must be confronted theoretically and practically by those seeking change. Without attempting this tough conceptual task, and making it understandable enough to inform a new common sense, we will never be able to do the ‘smashing’ and altering, shifting and removing of institutional power in its current forms required for transformation of our economy. 

In step with this, the task is not only to depart from dominant understandings of the state (and accompanying theories of change, i.e. liberal democratic reforms) and to grasp the materiality of the state (its institutional forms and how power is exercised through it), but to do so while keeping a global perspective always in mind.

New Zealand, like all other nation-states, is not an isolated variable connected to the world purely by our national air service and a floating exchange rate. It is but one site of capitalist social relations in a world of interconnected production and consumption. For this reason, any GND or other program of transformation must connect New Zealand to the world - and it must do so not with a sense of exceptionalism (and possibly a niche luxury organic farmgoods export strategy), but with a sense of solidarity. 

The central concern in navigating questions of the state is to avoid ‘locking in’ capitalist social relations by creating sections of the economy that are sheltered from the profit imperative, thus ensuring that there are always new frontiers for the imperative to expand into (replicating the effect of the 1980s, where public services slowly became privatised as the welfare state was dismantled). This is to remove services from the dictates of accumulation through a process of decommodification, while transforming the societal whole (as connected to the international economy).

What decommodification means, in simple terms, is taking things out of the market - saying that some things are too fundamental to be provided for via a market mechanism. While easily scribbled here, this is an area of extreme (though often generative) disagreement on the Left. We need to bring those disagreements more clearly into public discourse in New Zealand, linking them with the work of Māori scholars critiquing the colonial state. 

Decommodification

What would such decommodification of core human needs look like and how might we get there? One frontier of struggle that responds to New Zealand’s housing crisis could be the fight for decommodified housing - the right to a home, not mediated by market logics. This would have to confront the power of landlords and concentration of home ownership, a task that seems of Herculean proportions.

Again, New Zealand is not exceptional - fights for the decommodification of housing occur across the developed world, in the beating heart of capitalism (and thus resistance) that is New York City. We can look to struggles from our own past and to parallel struggles unfolding across the world for inspiration. Other frontiers of decommodification include energy democracy, food sovereignty, childcare and elder care (another front on which privatisation has created monstrous realities for our most vulnerable). If you’ve ever been repulsed by the idea of companies controlling access to life-saving medicines despite having gained the technical building blocks for them from state-led investment, then you might be an unwitting fan of decommodification. 

Transformation

We have our work cut out for us. It is true that top-down policy approaches will not work if the aim is socio-ecological (and therefore economic) transformation. But we must think harder about the categories that we use to investigate ideas; we must be bold enough to genuinely take part in the critical discussions evolving across the world as crises of capitalism accelerate and compound one another.

For analyses of power and how to create grand shifts in our lives, we need to reach for inspiration from those who have won concessions in the past, the Indigenous sovereignty and trade union movements - and not just visionary leaders within, but the movements as a whole.

We need to dream bigger than those concessions this time around; there is a vanishingly small margin of exploitative potential left in nature and human societies - we should demand the transformation we need rather than attempting to replicate a past golden age.

Decolonisation, democratisation, decommodification and, ultimately, decarbonisation are the keys to transformation. We need to do all of this while thinking hard about how we theorise the capitalist state, and how we uphold Te Tiriti with this in mind. We have to be bold, not ahead of the world, but in lockstep with all those fighting for a future where we do not only survive, but collectively thrive. 


Anna Sturman