Is This A “Merchants” Government?

The Merchants of Menace: The Coalition Government has convinced itself that the “Brahmins’” emollient functions have become much too irksome and expensive. Those who see themselves as the best hope of rebuilding New Zealand’s ailing capitalist system, appear to have convinced themselves that a little bit of blunt trauma is what their mollycoddled country needs if it’s to recover it “mojo” and get “back on track”.

ARE YOU A BRAHMIN, or a Merchant? Or, are you merely one of those whose lives are profoundly influenced by the decisions of Brahmins and Merchants? Those are the questions that are currently shaping the politics of New Zealand and the entire West.

It was Thomas Piketty, the French author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) Capital and Ideology (2019) and A Brief History of Equality (2022) who devised the Brahmins versus Merchants dichotomy, drawing his inspiration from the Indian caste system. Brutally simplifying Piketty’s argument, his contention is that the evolution of modern capitalism has divided its ruling class into those who make, and those who manage.

The vast expansion of higher education and the multiplication of professional and managerial specialisations made necessary by the growing technological complexity of contemporary capitalism have radically restructured the social architecture which upholds it.

In the Western nations where capitalism first took root, the classic Marxist schema of an ever-increasing working-class doing the making, and a steadily-shrinking ruling-class doing the managing, has been superseded by a society in which a vastly expanded class of technologists, professionals and managers superintends a much diminished working class which no longer makes but serves. A working-class without factories (off-shored by capitalists for obvious economic and political reasons) is a working-class without power. All the action, politically-speaking, now takes place in the hugely expanded socio-economic layers above the downsized proletariat.

Hence Piketty’s Brahmins and Merchants. Those tasked with the financing, design, maintenance, management, sales, and distribution of physical production: bankers, accountants, engineers, software-designers, marketing, sales and distribution managers; the people tasked with producing real goods and services; are the Merchants. Those tasked with preserving and enhancing the socio-cultural conditions in which profitable production can take place: judges, senior public servants, lawyers, architects, academics, teachers, journalists, social workers, counsellors, probation officers; the people who keep society on an even keel; are the Brahmins.

The politics of these two groups are relatively straight-forward to map. The production, distribution and exchange of profitable goods and services requires a society in which practical decisions are able to be made with a minimum of state interference. It requires hierarchies responsive to the exigencies of command and control. A system in which the needs of workers and the environment come well down the pecking order – along with every other potential impediment to the realisation of profit. Accordingly, Merchants veer towards the Right.

What the Brahmins understand is that a society constructed solely for the realisation of profit is likely to be a harsh, even violent, place, and subject to the constant political disruptions attendant upon systems that rely upon force and intimidation to keep the wheels turning. Wherever possible, the Brahmins prefer to deploy the techniques of persuasion and pacification, rather than the blunt-force trauma of coercion.

It is their contention that the hegemony of capital is more effectively maintained by giving ordinary people the fewest possible reasons for attacking and overthrowing it. Brahmins provide the social lubricants that keep the capitalist machine operating smoothly. While not being of the Left themselves, they’re responsible for maintaining the institutions and practices that contemporary leftists tend to identify, erroneously, as their own.

The upshot of this pragmatic compromise between the people responsible for the steel wheels and the people responsible for the grease-guns, is that the principal ideological battleground has shifted from the factory to the campuses of higher education. Not all university and polytechnic students will vote for the parties subscribing to the ideas of the Brahmins (Labour, Greens, Te Pāti Māori). Engineers and accountants still tend to take their capitalism neat, scorning ice and mixers. But, given the huge numbers of graduates required to keep capitalism sweet, it is hardly surprising that those identifying as left-wing in the Twenty-First Century tend to be the holders of tertiary qualifications.

And those without tertiary qualifications? Which way does the working-class, or what’s left of it, break – Left, or Right? On the face of it, all those benefitting from the Brahmins’ emollient interventions should be voting for their parties. And, to be fair, a majority of them still do. Labour, in particular, whose history spans the era of factories and freezing-works, to the era of warehouses and call-centres, continues to attract significant working-class support. It is, however, worth noting that the union movement, largely responsible for creating the Labour Party, is now almost entirely composed of those who do the Brahmins’ business: public servants, teachers, nurses.

But, not all workers will vote for what logic suggests is in their own best interests. This is due, primarily, to the other massive change that has transformed capitalist society. When capitalism ceased to be bounded by the borders of the nation state (thanks primarily to the off-shoring of production) the opportunities for both Merchants and Brahmins expanded to encompass the entire globe. Qualified professionals and managers could work anywhere, providing they were willing to embrace the new culture of globalism. The options for those with limited education and low skills were much more constrained. For them, the nation state, alongside religion, remained one of the few accessible sources of consolation and pride.

The sudden emergence of “Identity Politics”, and its growing power over the lives of professionals and managers, may be nothing more than the codification of what it means to be a good global citizen. Racial prejudice, sexism, homophobia, extreme ethno-nationalist beliefs: none of these attitudes are conducive to getting-on and getting-along in institutions staffed by men and women from wildly diverse backgrounds and all countries. Acquiring globalist values and expectations appears to have become as vital to a rewarding international career as a first-class university degree. Certainly, it would pay those hailing from countries that were colonisers in the past, to become firm advocates of decolonisation in the present.

Clearly, the present National-Act-NZ First coalition government is more sympathetic to the values and aspirations of the Merchants than it is to those of the Brahmins. Indeed, it owes its majority in the House of Representatives to the ability of its component parties to appeal variously to the Merchants’ growing impatience with the sheer scale of Brahmin grease-spreading; the deep resentment of those on the receiving end of Brahmin condescension and control (especially during the Covid-19 pandemic) and the intrusion of Brahmin “wokeness” into the Merchants’ domain.

The degree to which the Coalition has rewarded its Merchant supporters, attacked the Brahmins’ strongholds in the public sector, and indicated its intention to extract the cost of its self-rewarding policies from the pockets of the largely friendless working-class, does, however, suggest a growing conviction among at least some in the Coalition Cabinet that the Brahmins’ emollient functions have become much too irksome and expensive. Those who see themselves as the best hope of rebuilding New Zealand’s ailing capitalist system, appear to have convinced themselves that a little bit of blunt trauma is what their mollycoddled country needs if it’s to recover it “mojo” and get “back on track”.

Politically, this is an extremely dangerous notion for Christopher Luxon’s coalition to entertain. Historically, New Zealand could almost be called the birthplace of Brahminism. What else was the Liberal Government of 1890-1912 and its Labour successors, if not an international exemplar of the wisdom of greasing the wheels of capitalism’s high-friction machinery? It may be tempting to run roughshod over the well-educated, and working-class, New Zealanders, but it’s a temptation this Merchants’ government would be well-advised to resist.

Attacking the smartest and most resilient people in the room is never a good idea.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 13 May 2024.