Are You A Leftist?

Nothing To Lose But Our Chains: The emancipatory movement which the Left, understood correctly, has always been, cannot accommodate those who are only able to celebrate one group’s freedom by taking it from another. The expectation, always, among leftists, is that liberty enlarges us. That striking-off a person’s shackles not only frees the person who wore them, but also the person who fastened them in the first place.

THERE WAS A TIME when a leftist’s definition of “leftism” corresponded pretty closely to everybody else’s definition. The term identified a coherent world view – to the point where knowing where someone stood on one issue enabled others to predict with surprising accuracy where they stood on a host of others. If a person was opposed to the death penalty, then the chances were high they were in favour of free speech. If they believed in the closed union shop, then they probably also believed in the public ownership of natural monopolies like power and water. It wasn’t easy being a left-winger – especially during the Cold War – but it was remarkably easy to define what it meant.

Today, the term “left-winger” is applied to persons holding an impossibly diverse and self-contradictory set of beliefs. From the traditional leftist who insists that the content and direction of policy should be informed by science; to the contemporary “leftist” who insists that: “Trans women are real women.” From left-wing parties determined to reinvigorate the public sector; to “left-wing” parties with neoliberal economic agendas indistinguishable from those of their right-wing competitors. From leftists who stand firm on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; to “leftists” who insist that “Hate Speech” be criminalised.

The use of scare quotes is, of course, intended to communicate the author’s rejection of the term leftist being applied to any person or party guilty of rejecting science, endorsing laissez-faire capitalism, or favouring the ideologically-driven restriction of their fellow citizens’ freedom.

There is one more test for determining whether or not one is a leftist – the History Test. If the study of history is reduced to little more than a search for evidence of the crimes of pre-ordained “enemies” and “oppressors’”, then by no means can the “historians” doing the searching be accurately described as left-wing. Indeed, those attempting to harness history to ideology are much more likely to be radical nationalists than radical democrats. Always remembering that another name for radical nationalism is “fascism”.

Leftists underserving of scare quotes regard history as a teacher, not a prosecutor; as a well, not a syringe. Ideology retreats before history in the same way that contaminated judgement retreats before the advance of uncontaminated evidence. Nothing gives away fake “leftism” more irretrievably than its deliberate falsification of history in the name of “social” or “national” justice.

A word or two needs to be inserted here to distinguish “leftism” from its numerous component ideologies: social-democracy, socialism, communism and anarchism. In brief: social-democracy seeks to significantly restrict the size of the capitalist marketplace; socialism attempts to extinguish the capitalist marketplace altogether; communism promotes a state dedicated to operationalising the principle “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”; and anarchism seeks to eliminate the state altogether.

As the world discovered, socialism and communism, precisely because they both sought to replace the economic and social structures with which most human-beings were familiar, provoked a great deal of resistance. In crushing that resistance, the socialists and communists were increasingly driven to rely on state-directed repression and terrorism. Consequently, the states which emerged from these struggles, although proudly describing themselves as socialist democracies, were in fact the cruellest of tyrannies, far removed from the emancipatory well-springs of the radical-democratic project called leftism.

That word, “emancipation” is crucial to a proper understanding of leftism. In societies where power and wealth are distributed in such a way that huge numbers of people are rendered economically, socially and politically defenceless, freeing the oppressed must always take priority.

The working-class, whose subsistence depends upon permitting the tiny capitalist minority who pay them to appropriate the “surplus value” of their labour. Women, denied their rightful share of life’s bounty by the systemic and oppressive violence which characterises societies dominated by men. Diverse ethnic communities, economically and culturally subjugated by those who claim superiority over all other ethnicities and who have shaped their societies to reward their prejudices. LGBTQI+, discriminated against because their behaviour challenges society’s gendered norms. One way or another, all these groups seek emancipation. Leftists are committed to making a world fit for free people to live in.

But, the emancipatory movement cannot accommodate those who are only able to celebrate one group’s freedom by taking it from another. The expectation, always, among leftists, is that liberty enlarges us. That striking-off a person’s shackles not only frees the person who wore them, but also the person who fastened them in the first place.

A fair redistribution of wealth and power ultimately liberates the capitalist as well as the worker. By ceasing to be men’s slaves, women make it possible for men to cease being their masters. The emancipation of the queer marches hand-in-hand with the liberation of the straight. Only by freeing the oppressed can the oppressors themselves become free. Slavery invented the whip, only freedom can make it disappear.

Applying these ideas to the salient political issue of the hour – how best to protect and/or give expression to Te Tiriti o Waitangi – where are the leftists to be found? Are they located at the side of those Māori who insist that Te Tiriti is sacrosanct, and must remain inviolate; that the descendants of those who signed the document 184 years ago – Māori and Pakeha – have no right to interrogate its meaning and relevance in the Twenty-First Century?

The answer can only be “No.” To treat Te Tiriti in this way is to fetishise it and, by doing so, eliminate its power, as a living document, to guide the New Zealand people. It would also entail ignoring the historical fact that notions of the Treaty of Waitangi’s intentions have changed radically over the years. Even worse, it would require leftists to turn a blind eye to the blatant revision of the Treaty’s meaning and purpose by Māori-aligned historians and jurists to facilitate the ideological aims and objectives of Māori irredentism.

If the leftist’s goal is emancipation, then the leftist’s role in this issue is to open up the space for a respectful, but open-ended, national debate on Te Tiriti – beginning, ideally, with the ideas contained in Margaret Mutu’s and Moana Jackson’s “Matike Mai Aotearoa”, and the “He Puapua Report”, and expanding outward from there.

To attack the idea of progressing a national debate on New Zealand’s “foundation document” is to expose oneself as someone who elevates ethnic identity above democracy, and, in the context of the current “official” understanding of Te Tiriti, honours the concept of “rangatiratanga” (chiefly leadership) above the democratic rights of individual citizens. Set within the context of the last 100 years of world history, these beliefs could not be defined, even vaguely, as left-wing – quite the reverse in fact.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project of Thursday, 8 February 2024.

Democracy's A Drag.

What’s That You Got There? For an increasing number of people, both here in New Zealand and around the world, Democracy is the problem – not the solution. It gets in the way. It’s fake. It slows everything down. Or, it just takes too much effort.

LET’S FACE IT, Democracy’s a drag – in every sense of the word. The beatnik sense: It’s drag, man. Meaning a state of affairs characterised by boredom and frustration, where something or someone stands between you and your desires. Then there’s the “drag” of play-acting, imposture and pretending to be something you’re not: He appeared in drag. Not forgetting the scientific definition of “drag”: something that retards or impedes motion, action, or advancement. And, finally, “drag” in its most common usage: to cause to move with slowness or difficulty. There’s more, of course, but you see where this is going.

For an increasing number of people, both here in New Zealand and around the world, Democracy is the problem – not the solution. It gets in the way. It’s fake. It slows everything down. Or, it just takes too much effort.

Out on the edge of our political culture – the place where the people who were evicted from Parliament Grounds usually park their camper-vans – Democracy is often dismissed as a chore and a bore.

That’s because representative democracy involves a lot of work. Founding a party. Drawing up a constitution. Working out what it is that you stand for. Collecting the names and addresses of more than 500 eligible voters who have also paid the party’s membership fee (receipts required). All of these things must be done before you can be registered by the Electoral Commission as a political party. And, of course, you’ve got to be a registered political party before you can field electorate candidates and/or lodge a Party List.

What a load of bullshit! How is people’s freedom protected by forcing them to jump through all these bureaucratic hoops? Obviously, it just a way of dampening the ardour and deflecting the energy of free individuals.

You don’t have to be Albert Einstein to see that the moment your movement agrees to adhere to the Electoral Commission’s rules and regulations, the whole sick business of politics becomes inescapable. Factions form. Factional leaders appear. Factional strife erupts. The most ruthless and thick-skinned bastards in your movement end up running the show. You’re fucked before you’ve even begun to raise money and trudge the streets in search of votes. Which is exactly what the Powers That Be intended all along.

Democracy? It’s a drag, man.

Then there are the people who for whom Democracy is a Drag Queen.

The costuming is fantastic: Freedom! Justice! The make-up is perfect. Have you ever seen anyone who looks more honest, caring, or kind? But that’s all it is, folks – lipstick and a wig. Fake News. Forget the frocks, the face-powder, the accessories. Lady Liberty is really Captain Capitalism. And all those love songs to the people she belts out? Lip-syncs the lot of them. Captain Capitalism can’t sing a note.

Neoliberals also characterise Democracy as a drag. Not drag as in boring. Not drag as in fake. But drag as in something which slows everything down. Most particularly, as something which slows down or – even worse – actively impedes the operations of the free market.

That’s why Neoliberals do everything within their power to make “government of the people, by the people, for the people” a practical impossibility. Strip the people’s representatives of their power to interfere in the workings of free enterprise. Privatise everything owned by the people. Starve the state of the funds it needs to look after its citizens properly by cutting taxes – and then by cutting them some more. De-regulate everything you can persuade the voters is an impediment to their happiness – especially the overweening power of the trade unions! Make a bonfire of rules and regulations. In the immortal words of Mark Zuckerberg: “Move fast and break things.”

Don’t let Democracy become a drag on your freedom.

And then there’s the rest of us. The ordinary, decent, conscientious participants in the electoral process, for whom Democracy has come to feel like a huge and heavy collection of failures and broken promises that we are compelled to drag behind us.

Every general election it’s the same. The political parties lay out their wares before us in the political marketplace. We lay down our money and we make our choice. If we’re lucky our party wins. If it loses, we shrug and say “there’s always next time”. The problem, though, is that, win or lose, nothing ever seems to get better. No matter which party occupies the Treasury Benches, the business of living just gets harder and harder.

There was a time – or so the history books tell us – when the promises of politicians meant something. Every three years the parties would issue manifestos stuffed with policies which, if they won the election, they would implement. The parties themselves were large organisations, with thousands of members, and political mechanisms for translating their wishes into policies, and policy into law. It wasn’t a perfect system, but it worked well enough to keep people believing that Democracy was something to be cherished.

Exactly when it all started to go wrong is difficult to pinpoint – although there are many who identify the election of 1984 as the beginning of Democracy’s decline in New Zealand. They point to the fact that what Labour put in its manifesto bore absolutely no resemblance to the policy revolution unleashed upon the country by David Lange and his Finance Minister, Roger Douglas. New Zealanders were told that there was no alternative to the Labour Government’s “reforms” – which must have been true, because in 1987 Labour didn’t both to publish a manifesto at all.

Others say that the rot really set in in 1990. Tired of Labour’s reforms, nearly half the country turned to the National Party’s Jim Bolger who was promising to restore the “decent society” that Labour had destroyed. Except that, even before all the votes had been counted, National began to break its promises. Instead of the decent society, New Zealand got the “Mother of All Budgets”. More of the same – only worse. Much worse.

Democracy no longer seemed to work, but the people could neither repair it nor improve it. They tried. New Zealanders abandoned their First-Past-the-Post for a Mixed Member Proportional electoral system. But, if anything, that only made matters worse. The decisiveness of governments elected under FPP, the power to keep their promises, was swapped out for government by coalitions, which, as everybody knows, can only ever be as honest as their most deceitful members.

Promises no longer mattered, because no party was ever in a position to keep them, or, at least, not all of them.

Until the election of 2020, when, in recognition of its superb handling of the Covid-19 Pandemic, Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Government won an absolute majority of the seats. Now, at last, her party’s promises could be kept.

But they weren’t. Labour politicians and the governmental system they served appeared to have forgotten how.

And so we poor Kiwis keep trudging forward, harnessed like plough horses to this dead weight at our backs. This rotting corpse of Democracy that we are forced to drag behind us. It’s a sad story, but the saddest part of all is how easy it would be for the right person, using the right words, to persuade us to cut the traces connecting us to our democratic burden – and simply let it go.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 22 March 2022.

Keeping Power Homeless.

The Road Not Taken: The Workers, warned Karl Marx's contemporary and fellow revolutionary, Mikhail Bakunin, “once they become rulers or representatives of the people, cease to be workers. And from the heights of the State they begin to look down upon the toiling people. From that time on they represent not the people but themselves and their own claims to govern the people. Those who doubt this know precious little about human nature.”

WHERE DO WE GO when both the market and the state have been weighed in the balance and found wanting? How much better-off would the peoples of the world be if, instead of the towering ziggurats of global capitalism, their skylines were dominated by the equally absurd wedding-cake skyscrapers of global socialism? Would the planet be any less ravaged? Would bureaucracy be any less oppressive? Would the individual feel any freer – or less crushed?

The traditional Marxist response to these sorts of musings is that socialism, once fully established, would lead to a “withering away” of the state. Karl Marx himself equated life under communism with the manifestation of freedom in its broadest possible sense: “[I]n communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wished, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd, or critic.”

Not a vision that would enthuse too many animal rights activists or vegans! Still, it’s easy to imagine a great many huntin’-shootin’-fishin’ Kiwis saying “Where do I sign-up?” Buried in Marx’s bucolic depiction of his communist paradise, however, is the easily overlooked phrase “society regulates the general production”. Society? Who’s that? And how does s/he “regulate the general production”? Who writes these regulations? Who enforces them? And out of which particular part of Planet Earth is all this “general production” to be extracted? You can see already how many serpents this passage sets loose in Marxist communism’s Garden of Eden!

Mikhail Bakunin, a contemporary of Marx – and a fellow revolutionary – was never one to let glib phrases about society regulating production pass him by without a very close inspection. He understood intuitively that the sort of society the socialists were hoping to bring into existence would necessitate a vast and all-embracing bureaucracy. It was a prospect that gave him considerable pause for thought – and not a few misgivings:

Workers, he said, “once they become rulers or representatives of the people, cease to be workers. And from the heights of the State they begin to look down upon the toiling people. From that time on they represent not the people but themselves and their own claims to govern the people. Those who doubt this know precious little about human nature.”

In those few lines, Bakunin describes the fatal flaw which lies at the heart of Marx’s vision. The flaw that, when Lenin’s Bolsheviks set about establishing the world’s first socialist state in post-World War One Russia, led ineluctably to the monstrous bureaucratic tyranny by which every one of the nations in which “actually existing socialism” held sway was to be so appallingly disfigured.

How to escape from this awful conundrum? Is there no way that the material abundance which human ingenuity’s technological creations make possible can be equitably distributed? Is there no way of overcoming the private and public bureaucracies so determined to preserve, at any cost, their power to create and administer scarcity? For what else is the state if not an elaborate mechanism for sorting-out (in Leonard Cohen’s arresting phrase) “who shall serve and who shall eat”?

Bakunin’s answer was as unequivocal as it was disturbing. If the state is oppressive by its very nature, then attempting to “take it over” is pointless. No matter how well-intentioned the revolutionaries may be when their banners are as yet unstained by the blood of their comrades, in the very act of exercising power over their fellow human-beings, of administering the state, the revolutionaries’ intentions are altered, distorted and, ultimately, perverted.

That being the case, said Bakunin, the only creditable aim of the true revolutionary is to smash the state: to destroy it; so that human-beings are free to take the “general production” directly into their own hands. Rather that create a brand new structure for power to dwell in, he counselled, keep it homeless. More importantly, learn to do without it altogether. In his own words: “Anyone who makes plans for after the revolution is a reactionary.”

Bakunin, the revolutionary contemporary of Marx, was neither a socialist, nor a communist.

He was an anarchist.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 5 July 2018.