liberation

Hone Harawira – rebel with a confused cause

Hone Harawira’s departure from the Maori Party was almost always inevitable. The contradictions that plague that party – resulting primarily from the fact its base is amongst left-leaning low-income Maori and yet its leadership is situated on the political right, has now led to a spilt. The party has attempted to be a movement for all ‘its people’ – that is, a pan-Maori party claiming to represent the interests of low-income supporters as well as elite Maori (sometimes referred to as the Brown Table). The party has also represented a uniting of both pro and anti-establishment currents from the tino rangatiratanga movement. The MP Tariana Turia represents the most conservative wing of the party, with her exposal of a pro-capitalist ideology, attacks on the welfare state and her claims that the National Party has always given more to Maori due to its pro-market philosophy. Harawira had clearly represented the left-wing of the party, what with his history as a militant activist, his links with left-wing figures such as Matt McCarten, and with his occasional statements of support for unions and poor pakeha. However, the contradictions contained within the Maori Party are also present within the ideological makeup of Harawira himself, who espouses and represents both the ideas of class politics and identity politics. In this guest blog, John Moore argues Harawira should be respected for standing up against the Maori Party leadership, but that his eclectic beliefs will act as a barrier to him building a lasting new political movement that reaches beyond a narrow ethnically–defined constituency. [Read more below]

Inequality in NZ: [3] The eclipse of economic inequality by ‘social inequality’

There are obviously different types of inequality that pervade contemporary New Zealand society. Traditionally the political left – and those concerned with equality –have been most concerned with socio-economic inequality, but this changed in last few decades of the twentieth century. This third blog post on ‘Inequality in NZ’ explains how the left shifted its concern from issues of economic inequality to that of social inequality, or as one academic book title put it, ‘How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality’ (Benn Michaels, 2007). The material in this blog post is taken from a draft paper that I delivered to a interdisciplinary Workshop on Inequality at the University of Otago in June entitled ‘Why Economic Inequality Matters’, and it also draws heavily on previous blog posts about ‘Identity politics vs class politics’.  [Read more below]

Identity politics vs class politics - 10: Introduction to Slavoj Žižek

The rock-star status currently attached to philosopher Slavoj Žižek indicates a shift in thinking away from post-ideological, post-political frameworks and is symptomatic of a flourishing of critical questioning of the politics of liberal multiculturalism. Everywhere that intelligent debate supposedly occurs – from universities, to the Guardian newspaper, to the blogosphere – Žižek is increasingly all the rage. Žižek’s popularity and notoriety might seem strange given his recent pronouncements of support for communism, Leninism, and his attacks on political correctness. However, the popularity of his ideas can be seen as stemming from the failure of liberal orthodox ideas and theories (postmodernism, identity politics, muticulturalism) to ask the right questions regarding the pressing crises humanity faces in the 21st century. Thus the philosopher’s critiques of social liberalism are essential to the debates around identity politics vs class politics, and guest blogger John Bernstein will examine what we can learn from Žižek over the a number of blog posts on this topic. This will include an examination of Žižek’s call for a reengagement with the concepts of class and an anti-capitalist universalism. [Read more below]

Identity politics vs class politics - 1: Introduction

Phil Goff has recently challenged issues that are at the core of socially liberal politics in New Zealand. The Labour Party leader has been asserting a more class-oriented and leftwing version of politics, effectively seeking to shift Labour away from a core part of its project of the last three decade: liberal identity politics. The meaningfulness and authenticity of this shift can be questioned, but the intrinsic tilt to the left cannot. While the conventional media and blogosphere interpretation of Labour’s new direction is to label it as either ‘social conservative’ or ‘rightwing’, Goff’s repositioning is in fact nothing of the sort. It is actually a newfound expression of relatively leftwing positions on important issues. What’s more, the controversy over the speech has sparked an important and long overdue debate within the New Zealand left about what it means to be leftwing in 2009, and what the way forward is for those interested in fighting for a more equal and just society. It has made the left confront questions of how concepts such as ‘social liberalism’, ‘political correctness’, ‘post-materialism’, and ‘identity politics’ fit into the leftwing project, if indeed they do at all. Yet, much of this significant debate occurs in an incredibly murky and confused manner, mainly due to an inability to conceptualise the different elements at play. So, in an attempt to contribute to this discussion, this blog post introduces a whole series of posts discussing these issues. The series attempts to reframe the debate and the terms of the debate in a way that is hopefully useful. It argues that to understand what’s going on in the Labour Party, what Goff has recently pushed for, and indeed what’s happened to the Green Party, is not a case of social liberalism versus social conservatism; nor is it left versus right; but instead it’s liberalism versus leftism – or simply: identity politics versus class politics. [Read more below]

The changing nature of ideological conflict in New Zealand electoral politics (1996-2008): The rush to the centre & the rise of post-materialist issues

To what extent does the left-right political dimension still structure political party competition in New Zealand politics? Where do the parties sit on that spectrum? What other political dimensions now underpin our electoral politics? This extensive blog post presents the findings of a regular survey of New Zealand political scientists about party ideological conflict that has been carried out for the three MMP general elections of 1996, 2002, and 2008. Explaining the results, and drawing on some previous blog posts, it argues that the left-right spectrum is of declining importance in New Zealand politics, and that ideological conflict is cohered to a greater degree by post-materialist issues. The major political parties in New Zealand now all agree on the basic post-Keynesian economic framework that dominates discourse and policy formation. No party fundamentally challenges the paradigm shift that occurred with the neoliberal revolution that occurred from 1984 onwards. All parties now agree, explicitly or implicitly, that the market is the best mechanism for generating wealth and distributing good and services. Within this ‘new policy consensus’ there is, of course, room for some limited discussion of when and where the state should intervene to correct market failure, but because there is essentially no debate of any substance around material/economic issues, what might be called ‘postmaterial issues’ now represent the arena for ideological and political conflict in parliamentary politics. Furthermore, within this post-reform era political conflict is underpinned by a strong pragmatism rather than principle. Some explanations are proposed for the rise of the new consensus, the decline of left-right conflict, and the increasing salience of societal issues in electoral competition. [Read more below]    

What’s left in 2009 in New Zealand?

In July I gave a talk to the Dunedin branch of Drinking Liberally on the topic of “What’s left in 2009 in New Zealand?” The rough notes I used for my talk are below (although I didn’t actually read the speech sentence-for-sentence, nor did I use every paragraph). It sparked off some very interesting discussion about the state of the left. Some of the main questions I was asking were:

• Is the left-right political spectrum still relevant to politics in New Zealand?
• What other spectrums are now useful for understanding politics?
• What is the difference between left-right and liberal-conservative in modern NZ politics?
• Why is politics increasingly based more around societal issues instead of economic ones? [Read more below]

RAM – the minnow party implodes

One amusing theorem about minor parties says that ‘the intensity of party politics is in inverse proportion to the amount of power the party has achieved’. Well, the Residents Action Movement (RAM) party showed itself to be a great distance from power at the last general election when it won only 465 party votes (despite claiming a membership of 3000). And now the future of the fledgling party is up in the air, with the recent departure of some key activists and ongoing internal fights over the future of the party. [Read more below]

Did Marx predict the current economic crisis?

The following quote from Karl Marx has apparently been doing the rounds of Wall Street:

Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalised, and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism (Das Kapital, 1867)

The only problem is that it's a bogus quote. Yet the whole saga is still a fascinating insight into the current state of politics. After all - most of the quote does apparently actually exist in various parts of Das Kapital, and the fact that so many people find the quote of interest is significant in itself. [Read more below]

[NZ intellectuals] Laurence Simmons

The editor of Speaking Truth to Power (Auckland University Press, 2007), Laurence Simmons has performed a huge service to both politics and the left in New Zealand by putting together his book about the decline of the life of ideas in this country. He argues that ‘Not all intellectuals are academics, and not all academics are intellectuals’ [Read more below]

Liberal heroes #1: Gandhi

Mahatma Gandhi is more revered than understood by Western liberals, who generally only remember him for his campaign against British colonialism in India and his advocacy of non-violence. Actually he was also a crank, a mystic, sexually-dodgy, and a racist. This week sees the re-release of An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth by Mahatma Gandhi by Penguin. You can read a good review of this by Pankaj Mishra in the Guardian, which says that the book shows 'Gandhi was too concerned with diet, sex, household affairs and politics to be the otherworldly saint that many people took him to be.' Mishra also explains that Gandhi's objective was to reintroduce religion into politics, and despite his reputation as a great commentator on the world, his book has nothing  'on the big issues - mass society, technology, total war, ideological totalitarianism - that exercised many intellectuals and artists in his time'. However, for an even more irreverent view of Gandhi, see the 5 minute Penn and Teller 'Bullshit' deconstruction of him. They argue that Gandhi was a racist (against blacks) and a sexual pervert!

Chris Trotter loses his monopoly

Chris Trotter has played an incredibly valuable job New Zealand politics, keeping alive some sort of critical left analysis within the mainstream media for the last 20 years. He’s a free-thinking guy with a fascinating mind and I always look forward to reading his opinion pieces. More so than most, however, Trotter’s work is incredibly uneven, and some of his columns have exasperated me. Others on the left see him even more unkindly than myself (especially in the old Alliance party), but often that’s because of the mistaken notion that ‘the left shouldn't criticise the left’. And as Trotter would correctly reply, ‘where would we be if we didn’t learn from our mistakes - nothing should be beyond critique’. But as I've said before (here and here), I think that Trotter’s output has suffered during the last year or so from a strange softness for the Labour Party. Wellington insiders say that Prime Minister’s office had a deliberate strategy of trying to neutralise Trotter by coopting him into their discussions and social activities. But as Trotter points out in his most recent, dire column, Check the Left's score, Matt, he now has the solidarity (or competition?) of three other astute media commentators: Matt McCarten, John Minto, and Laila Harre. Yet in the same column he strongly criticises McCarten’s excellent critique of the new KiwiSaver. Trotter’s illogical allegiance towards KiwiSaver is a bit of a mystery. My best bet is that like many on the left, Trotter pines for the good old days when Labour (or any party) had some ‘big ideas’, and this is him clutching at straws and believing that some such thing has finally arrived – and to hell with pesky arguments that the new ‘big idea’ is actually going to be bad for the poor.

Fascist America, in 10 easy steps

The left is generally far too quick to toss around the term fascist at its enemies, which usually displays the left's ignorance of what the term actually means. Nonetheless, here's an interesting (and long) argument by Naomi Wolf on why the US appears to be moving through the following ten steps towards fascism: 1 Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy; 2 Create a gulag; 3 Develop a thug caste; 4 Set up an internal surveillance system; 5 Harass citizens' groups; 6 Engage in arbitrary detention and release; 7 Target key individuals; 8 Control the press; 9 Dissent equals treason; and 10 Suspend the rule of law. See: Fascist America, in 10 easy steps

What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom

Political journalism is just about dead. In New Zealand we have very little informative and critical journalism to help us see what lies below the world of surface appearances (especially with the ongoing cuts in journalism). That's why it worth trying to see the fascinating documentary series entitled The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom by Adam Curtis, which has just screened on the BBC in the UK. This three-party series explores the dominant anti-collective ideology that views human beings as selfish, mistrustful, isolated individuals and which has been incredibly influential on politics and general life in the west since the end of the cold war. [Read more below].

Make charity history?

Recently I read that New Zealanders give $1.27bn in donations each year, and that this compares very poorly to other countries. I thought it was maybe a good thing to find that we give only 0.81% of our national income compared to 2.2% in the US (where they obviously have a strong philanthropic culture). But then I was also impressed to read elsewhere that Latin American emigrants sent home about NZ$100bn to their families last year. Apparently such remittances are typically sent home by 'fruit pickers, nannies and cleaners' earning NZ$150-450 a month, and keep about 10m families out of poverty. This money actually exceeds the combined flow of aid and foreign direct investment' to Latin America. But why do I feel so differently about the two different examples above? [Read more below]

Communist manifestoon

Check out this application of new politics to spread the ideas of Karl Marx: the Communist Manifestoon - which is Marx and Engel's manifesto being read out over the splicing and editing together of retro Disney et al's children's cartoons. Quite effective and funny.

The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality

The title says it all: "The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality". This is a new book recently published in America that makes a very strong argument against identity politics in favour of a more class-oriented leftwing project. A very good review of the book can be read in the US Observer newspaper online in part one and part two. [Read more below]

John Pilger: The return of people power

John Pilger's latest column on The Return of People Power outlines some of the popular resistance movements in action around the world. In particular he points to the fast growing mass resistance movements throughout Latin America that are now overshadowing the traditional parties. Also in Lebanon he points to the fact that a strong part in seeing off the invasion by Israel was the fact that civilians acted in defiance of the land invasion and returned from refugee camps to their southern Lebanon towns as the Israeli army advanced. Pilger says that 'Here in the west, as people abandon the political parties they once thought were theirs, there is much to learn from resistance movements'. He also refers to recent polls that show the sea-change in public opinion is happening in places like Britain, especially in regard to Blair and the Labour Party: 'No less than 80 per cent regard him as a liar; 82 per cent believe his warmongering was a principal cause of the London bombings; 72 per cent believe he has made this country a target.' And 'More than three-quarters of the population believe Brown and Blair have merely made the rich richer'.

Pilger also corrects some un-truths in the reporting of the resistance in Iraq:

In Iraq, in contrast to the embedded lie that the killings are now almost entirely sectarian, 70 per cent of the 1,666 bombs exploded by the resistance in July were directed against the American occupiers and 20 per cent against the puppet police force. Civilian casualties amounted to 10 per cent. In other words, unlike the collective punishment meted out by the US, such as the killing of several thousand people in Fallujah, the resistance is fighting basically a military war and it is winning.

Marx's Das Kapital: A Biography

Francis Wheen wrote an excellent biography of Karl Marx a few years ago, and is now back with Marx's Das Kapital: A Biography. I haven't seen the book yet, but you can read a reflection on it on spiked-online by Michael Fitzpatrick, who agrees with Wheen that Marx's 'Capital is unique, there is "nothing remotely like it".' Fitzpatrick relays his discovery of the brilliance of the book in the 1970s, and how it has become trendy again in the 1990s when it had apparently lost its subversive potential during the new period of capitalist triumphalism. Fitzpatrick correctly points out that against popular thinking, 'Marx does not advance a mechanistic thesis of collapse [of capitalism] or predict the inevitable downfall of capitalism.' Marx was not a fatalist but someone who saw the key factor of class struggle as changing the world.