liberation

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!

Ban nothing; question everything; legalise BZP!

Banning party pills is just the latest clumsy and heavy-handed interference from the state that’ll ultimately be counterproductive. Unless there's an overwhelming societal consensus in favour of a ban on something, it’s highly problematic to unilaterally just outlaw something that’s disliked by the Government. After all, party pills are the fourth most widely used drug after alcohol, tobacco and cannabis. About 20% of NZers are said to use them – contributing to a $35m industry that has sold about 8m tablets. What this 20% of society puts into their bodies and how it parties should be a question of personal liberty and individual freedom. [Read more below]

More hard Labour

Ideas about the current government being ‘left-wing’ are sorely mistaken. Below is an article I wrote in 2002 for revolution magazine. Although it’s now five years old, it’s far from out-of-date, as very little has changed. The article runs through the defining features of the Fifth Labour Government to show that this is a status quo administration. [Read more below]

Angela Davis in NZ

American academic, socialist organiser and general revolutionary symbol, Angela Davis has been in the country giving talks in Auckland and Wellington. Being in Dunedin, I wasn't able to make it to the talks, but have received a limited amount of feedback on the events. Her trip was sponsored and supported by various academic and ethnic-oriented groups such as Amokura, Nga Pae O Te Maramatanga, Va'aomanû Pasifika: Samoan Studies and Pacific Studies, Te Kawa a Maui: Maori Studies, and the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Victoria University. What's more - the Maori Party provided security for her! While it's great to see these groups openly supporting a revolutionary in NZ, it's also kinda ironic for a number of reasons. [Read more below]

Green Party compromise and contradiction

The Greens' market-based climate 'solutions' have received very little critique or analysis. Yet the party's policy is far from being principled or even terribly coherent. For example, the Greens often trumpet their sound-bite that 'polluters should pay', but the party's finer print shows that they are quite soft (by their own standards) on business and farmers (who actually make a fair portion of their voter base). In terms of farmers, they say 'we are not proposing that farming should cover the cost of all its emissions' - they single out sheep and beef farmers for a total exemption and suggest that dairy farmers should only pay for about 20% of their emissions. Furthermore, the party's greener-than-thou 'Climate Change Score Card' which ranked the parties in February, even contains false claims about their own policies. It suggested that the Greens are better than other parties because it would not let protectionism influence climate policy. The score card tested the parties on the measure that: 'NZ must pull its weight, even if trading partners don't'. However, in their 'Kicking the Carbon Habit' brochure, the Greens claim that 'industries who compete with companies in countries with no price on carbon, and whose survival would be at risk from higher energy prices, should be largely protected from this carbon price until their competitors also face a carbon price'. Is this sort of forked-tongue double-speak why the Greens are only on 4% in the latest poll?

Working class heroes mix punk and politics?

The pop-punk band Green Day has covered John Lennon’s Working Class Hero as part of the Amnesty International album of Lennon covers entitled Instant Karma: The Campaign To Save Darfur. (See the emotive and powerful black and white video here. Or Lennon’s original here). Working Class Hero is a classic of Lennon’s and is considered his most caustic and political song, with its themes of class and alienation. [Read more below]

Labouring for capital

The Labour Party is now decidedly middle-class, and even its electoral hold upon working class voters happily appears to be diminishing. This is a point that is seldom acknowledged by academics or political journalists – and it’s an area I hope to do further research, blogging, and publishing on. To start off this process I’m posting the below article entitled ‘Labouring for capital’, which I wrote in 2001 for ‘revolution’ magazine about how Labour has lost its class alignment, and working class politics in New Zealand is dead. I intend to update in the future. [Read more below]

Maori Liberation vs the Treaty Process

Race relations and Maori politics have been one of the major political issues in New Zealand for some years now. Those on the left that are interested in true liberation need to formulate an alternative view on race relations - a view that rejects both Labour's liberal Treaty politics as well as National's continuing, contradictory and hypocritical “One law for all”. We need to argue against Maori nationalism and identity politics, and instead argue for a solution that unites the working class of all ethnicities and fights for true equality. This blog post aims to get across the alternative ideas on race relations and the Treaty that has previously been argued in revolution magazine and The Spark. [Read more below]