Pseudo-left’s phony “socialist” campaign in New Zealand by-election
By
John Braddock and Tom Peters
28 January 2017
A leader of the pseudo-left group Socialist Aotearoa (SA) has announced he will stand as a “socialist” in the February 25 by-election for the west Auckland seat of Mount Albert.
Joe Carolan, a senior organiser for the Unite trade union, is a fixture of Auckland’s protest circuit, frequently appearing at rallies alongside bourgeois politicians from the Labour Party, the Greens and the Maori nationalist Mana Party.
In the 2014 general election, Carolan was the Mount Albert candidate for Mana, receiving 0.8 percent of the vote. Mana and its ally the Internet Party aimed to enter parliament in support of a Labour-led government, but failed to gain any seats. Both pro-business parties were supported by SA and two other pseudo-left groups, the International Socialist Organisation and Fightback.
Carolan told TV3 on December 20 that he is running this time as “an out-and-proud socialist,” the timing being right “in the post-Bernie Sanders world.” In a January 16 interview on the trade union-funded Daily Blog, Carolan praised British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn as “explicitly socialist, very pro-union, pro-worker.”
The invocation of Sanders and Corbyn, two pro-capitalist politicians, indicates Socialist Aotearoa’s real political orientation. Far from fighting for a socialist solution to the capitalist crisis, SA, on behalf of the upper middle class layer it represents, is moving to establish new formations to derail the growing radicalisation of the working class and subordinate it to the existing political set-up.
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