Something Very Big.

Freedom Now: Residents enjoy the new order established in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone of central Seattle in Washington state, USA.

IT’S DOUBTFUL whether many of those applauding the current US protests grasp fully the enormity of what is happening there.

Take those six city blocks in Capitol Hill, Seattle, Washington State. By ordering the Seattle Police to evacuate their East Precinct station-house – the city’s mayor effectively acquiesced in the creation of an “Autonomous” and “Police-Free” Zone in her city’s heart. Not even in the wildest dreams of the Black Panthers – the black revolutionary movement of the 1960s – was such a development ever seriously anticipated. Wanted? Yes. Fought for? Definitely. Achieved? Never.

And, as if the creation of “CHAZ” – the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone – wasn’t enough, the adjoining Cal Anderson Park has been converted into a “people’s park”. This development, too, links back directly to the radical struggles of the 1960s.

In 1969, students at the University of California at Berkeley had attempted to thwart the university authorities’ plans to “develop” what had been a free space frequented by the local community, by setting up a “people’s park” and planting a garden. The area was cleared with considerable brutality on the orders of the then Governor of California – Ronald Reagan.

Peoples Park protesters, Berkeley, California, 1969.

What we are witnessing in Seattle – and in a host of other cities across the United States – is an astonishing eruption of ideas and projects long since consigned to what their critics assumed was “the dustbin of history”. That this is so clearly not the case raises some quite intriguing questions about what we are actually seeing in the United States. Perhaps the most important question is whether these events, taken together, constitute a pre-revolutionary situation?

In the CHAZ, for example, the watchword has been “self-management”. The local inhabitants have collectively taken over the functions of the exiled police officers. Health care facilities have been established, along with food distribution centres for the poor and homeless. In short, CHAZ has taken on all the attributes of an anarchist “commune” – something not seen (at least not on anything approaching this scale) since the anarchists took over the Spanish city of Barcelona back in the 1930s. (If you want to know what that was like, then read George Orwell’s “Homage to Catalonia”.)

I would be most remiss if I did not also mention the fact that Seattle, itself, has long been a city where progressive ideas and actions have flourished. It was the famous “Battle of Seattle” which, 20 years ago, called a halt to the hitherto unstoppable forces of “free” trade and globalisation. And 80 years before that, the quasi-revolutionary Seattle General Strike, not only struck fear into the capitalists of Washington State, but also into the entire American ruling-class.

The Battle of Seattle, December 1999.

Similar terrors must now be disturbing the sleep of the USA’s present rulers. In the months following the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09 they had been perturbed, briefly, by the Occupy Movement. The ease with which the Occupy protests were crushed, however, put them off guard. America’s masters allowed their neoliberal ideologues to persuade them that the youth of America had lost all capacity to organise effectively and, accordingly, posed no serious threat to the status quo. Their big mistake was to assume that all American youths were white and college-educated. As we have seen over the course of the past three weeks, there are others.

More worrying still, for America’s rulers, must be the way so many authority figures: mayors, police chiefs, media bosses; have openly expressed their support for the ongoing protest demonstrations and – even worse – indicated their willingness to meet many of their demands. Since Neoliberalism and History don’t really mix, the vast majority of the American ruling-class will be unaware of the ominous historical precedent in which ordinarily reliable defenders of the existing order suddenly embrace the key demands of the revolutionary masses.

On the night of 4 August 1789, the French National Assembly, overwhelmed by the giddy elixirs fermented by the revolution then convulsing the country, voted to abolish the feudal system. The entire edifice of aristocratic privilege came tumbling down in a single night – laid low by the aristocrats themselves.

Watching the Minneapolis City Council vote to disband its own Police Department, or the entire Democratic Party membership of the US House of Representatives “take a knee” in remembrance of George Floyd, indicates just how powerful today’s messages of resistance have grown.

The key question, of course, is: Where will it stop? Or, perhaps, more darkly: Who will stop it? Certainly, President Donald Trump would like to stop all of it immediately. He was quick to insist that the “ugly anarchists” be driven from Seattle’s streets. The rest of the Republican Establishment: Senators, Governors, Mayors; must similarly be asking themselves when the counter-stroke will fall. When will law and order be restored in the streets? When will the revolution gathering pace across America be asphyxiated in a cloud of tear-gas – or worse.

Because there is much, much worse lurking in the shadows of American society than rogue police officers. Those determined to Make America Great Again have a very different utopia in mind from the one taking shape in the Capitol Hill district of Seattle. Such people will be pulling out their well-thumbed copies of the murderous “Turner Diaries” and just waiting for the word to split-open American society like a rotten log. That’s no idle boast, because, as we all know, not only are these Far-Right fanatics extremely dangerous, but they are also fearsomely well-armed.

But, they are not the only men with guns. When the truly serious shit hits the fan it will be the armed forces of the United States that has the final word. Over the course of the past fortnight the world has been heartened to learn how seriously America’s most senior military officers take their oath to “uphold, protect and defend” the Constitution of the United States. In the end, however, it is the common soldiery that will have the final say on who they will – and will not – slay.

If they decide to heed their Commander-in-Chief, then the Republic will fall. If they decide to defend the Constitution, then a new birth of freedom can, indeed, be expected in the USA.

In the powerful invocation of Leonard Cohen’s revolutionary anthem, “Democracy”:

Sail on, sail on, oh mighty ship of state

To the shores of need, past the reefs of greed,

Through the squalls of hate.

Sail on, sail on, sail on.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 16 June 2020.

Revolution in New Zealand? Not Even Close!

No Fires Thanks, We're Kiwis: For the moment, in those close-to-home places where revolutions are born, there may be tetchiness and resentment, frustration and complaint, but nowhere is anybody uttering the cry that will bring a New Zealand revolution into being: “We have found the way to make tomorrow better than today!”

WHERE DO REVOLUTIONS begin? The answer, invariably, is “close to home”. Where demonstrable public need meets unresponsive public authority. Where collective outrage invites violent repression. Where injustice spawns indignation and indignation demands action. Where popular action generates governmental reaction. That’s where revolutions are born.

Once begun, what makes a revolution successful? It is tempting to respond with the purely historical observation that revolutions succeed where they are able to muster sufficient armed force to overwhelm those dedicated to their failure. People with guns allow revolutions to succeed. But is mere armed force enough? Surely, before people are willing to wage war on the Revolution’s behalf, they must first believe its objectives to be both desirable and achievable.

The need for guns, and the willingness to use them, almost always arises when the authorities announce their intention to thwart the people’s intentions. When real change, desperately needed, and now within the people’s grasp, is suddenly faced with the prospect of being halted and/or reversed by forces loyal to the status-quo. That is when people start looking for the means to preserve the imminence of change.

Historically, the people’s determination to preserve the imminence of change is soon extended to ensure the preservation of those who have made them believe that change is imminent. Fearing that the authorities are coming for their leaders, people typically resolve to impede their progress: peacefully if possible; by force if necessary. The leaders themselves, realising that the revolution’s failure will more than likely lead to their demise, are left with little choice but to keep pushing it forward as hard and as far as they can. The revolution’s survival, and their own, become welded together.

The French Revolution of 1789, for example, was kicked-off by the fear that the King’s troops were about to visit retribution upon the revolutionary crowds of Paris. The latter rushed to the Bastille, hated symbol of royal power, because they were convinced that within the fortress-prison’s walls they would find the muskets, cannons and gunpowder they needed to resist the King’s soldiers.

The storming of the Bastille, 14 July 1789.

In the Russian capital, Petrograd, in February-March 1917, the soldiers who had refused to fire on the crowds of women demanding bread for their starving families knew that the Czar would immediately dispatch troops to disarm and punish them as mutineers. If their revolt was not extended, then many of them would die. Accordingly, they reached out to radical left-wing politicians and to their working-class supporters in the factories. By joining forces with the political enemies of the hated Czarist regime, and offering them the protection of their rifles and machine-guns, they helped to turn what had started-out as a protest against bread shortages into a full-scale revolution.

But, the events in Petrograd unfolded more than a hundred years ago. Is there a plausible scenario for revolution in New Zealand in 2020? The short answer is “No.” Nothing has occurred for decades in New Zealand that matches in any way the cultural, intellectual, and political preparations that preceded the French and Russian revolutions.

In Eighteenth Century Europe, for example, the cultural supremacy of the Catholic Church and the political doctrine of Absolute Monarchy had been profoundly weakened by what came to be known as “The Enlightenment” or “The Age of Reason”. Breakthroughs in moral and political philosophy, together with the rapid expansion of science, called into question the existence of the Judeo-Christian God and, thus, the “divine right of kings”. Within the ruling classes doubt grew, and from these doubts ordinary people drew confidence that their own ideas and priorities were as worthy of serious consideration as their lords’ and masters’.

Crucially, in the shape of an elected parliamentary assembly, the people had also identified a mechanism capable of supplanting the autocratic rule of the monarch. The self-evidently desirable objectives of “liberty, equality fraternity” were thus made achievable. In the people’s “deputies”, gathered together in the revolutionary “National Constituent Assembly”, the people’s will had finally found its political vector.

In Petrograd, 128 years later, the critical political vector of the “nation” had been replaced by Karl Marx’s “proletariat”. Likewise, the revolutionary mechanism ceased to be a parliament filled with elected representatives, and became, instead, a multitude of workers’ councils (soviets) filled with instantly recallable delegates elected in the factories and regiments. Replacing the Enlightenment and its philosophers was the revolutionary Marxist party – whose ruthless and highly disciplined “cadres” were determined to inspire and guide the soviets of workers and soldiers.

Other determinants of success were also at work in 1789 and 1917.

Bankrupt of both the ideas and the funds required to address the multiple crises afflicting his subjects, the French king, Louis XVI, set in motion a massive, kingdom-wide effort to identify and collate the grievances of the French people. These Cahiers de doléances provided the core agenda of the Estates General – the feudal body charged with advising the Crown, which had not been called together for 175 years! Thus equipped, the people’s representatives possessed a clear idea of what they had to do.

In 1917, also, the Russian people’s priorities were clear. Czar Nicolas II had led them into a disastrous war with the Austro-Hungarian and German empires. Millions of conscripted peasant-soldiers had been killed, the Russian economy was in ruins, and the Russian people were starving. Their lords and masters had failed utterly to protect them and were either unable or unwilling to feed them. When the leader of the revolutionary workers’ party, Vladimir Lenin, arrived at Petrograd’s Finland Station, his speech to the workers’ and soldiers’ delegates was short and to the point: “Peace! Bread! Land! All power to the soviets!” With these simple but highly effective promises, Lenin’s party ruthlessly blew away the political fog engulfing the ineffectual Russian parliament and set in motion the world’s first socialist revolution.

Lenin promises "Peace! Bread! Land!" at the Finland Station, Petrograd 1917.

It should be clear by now that New Zealand’s cultural, economic and political situation bears no comparison with the two great Western revolutions. Neither Maori nor Pakeha culture offers anything to compare with the devastating ideological critiques which the Enlightenment and Marxism brought to bear on the political regimes of France and Russia. Animism with corporate clip-ons is no more a revolutionary doctrine than post-modernism incongruously blended with the politics of identity.

Nor is New Zealand trapped in the sort of intractable economic and military crises that brought down the Bourbon and Romanov dynasties. In fact, it presents itself as a highly successful neoliberal capitalist economy. Which is not to say that poverty has been eliminated, or homelessness overcome, merely that the levels of inequality and social injustice which beset all but a handful of western states is not dramatically worse in New Zealand than it is in other comparable countries. Certainly, the grave challenge of Climate Change looms over New Zealand’s future but, once again, that is a problem to which the entire world has yet to find a workable solution.

Most importantly, the New Zealand ruling-class retains sufficient faith in its ability to manage the nation’s affairs to render any challenge to its dominance ineffective. No mass movement with a practical programme of revolutionary change exists in this country. Nor does it contain a disciplined revolutionary party dedicated to creating one. Those who proclaim themselves champions of change and fighters against injustice are currently more willing to go to war with each other than with neoliberal capitalism. Indeed, it is possible to argue that identity politics, far from being a revolutionary phenomenon, has become the paradoxical vector for neoliberal consolidation. The ever-more-strident calls to recognise every new construction thrown up by the social kaleidoscope have a way of drowning out the truly revolutionary demands for a radical redistribution of the economic pie.

For the moment, in those close-to-home places where revolutions are born, there may be tetchiness and resentment, frustration and complaint, but nowhere is anybody uttering the cry that will bring a New Zealand revolution into being:

“We have found the way to make tomorrow better than today!”

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 21 January 2020.

Revolutionary Principles, Reactionary Values.

The Revolutionary Trinity: The three constitutive principles upon which the French Republic was founded: Liberty. Equality. Fraternity. If ever a nation is entitled to boast about its core values: about the ideas deemed fundamental to its very existence; then that nation is France.

YOU WILL SEE them chiseled into the lintels of public buildings all over Paris. The three constitutive principles upon which the French Republic was founded: Liberty. Equality. Fraternity. If ever a nation is entitled to boast about its core values: about the ideas deemed fundamental to its very existence; then that nation is France.

Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (which preceded the French Revolution by 13 years) and his ringing affirmation that: “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” undoubtedly proved inspirational. But, essentially, Jefferson was presenting an argument. Those three words: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity; pronounced in an absolute monarchy; were unequivocally revolutionary.

Which is why, nearly 230 years after the storming of the Bastille, there remains a part of France which angrily denounces the revolutionary trinity of 1789. Thousands still living in France today, remember the very different trinity pronounced by Marshall Petain in June 1940. Not Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, but Work, Family, Fatherland.

Petain’s Vichy regime was but the culmination of the reactionary tendencies which had harried and fought the legacy of the Revolution ever since the restoration of the Bourbon Dynasty in 1815. Urged on by the Catholic Church; complicated by the personal ambitions of the Bonaparte family; poisoned by a virulent antisemitism; reactionary France, the France that sent Captain Dreyfus to Devil’s Island on trumped-up charges; the France that made peace with the Nazis; the France that even today swells the vote of the Front Nationale; has never gone away.

In the light of this centuries old quarrel about the meaning and purpose of La Belle France, Europe’s most enlightened nation state, what were the delegates to the NZ First Party’s annual conference thinking by voting for a remit legally requiring immigrants to New Zealand to swear allegiance to their adoptive country’s “core values”?

Almost certainly, they were not thinking of embroidering their nation’s banner with the French trinity of revolutionary principles.

Not that there haven’t been times in New Zealand’s own history when Liberty, Equality and Fraternity constituted the terse programme of home-grown revolutionaries. The “Red Feds” – those militant trade unionists whose exploits enlivened the years immediately prior to World War I – were not above letting-rip with a lusty rendition of La Marseillaise as they marched to do battle with “Massey’s Cossacks”. (Armed farmers on horseback, enlisted by Prime Minister Bill Massey to crush the “Red Feds”.)

Therein lies the problem, of course. From the moment New Zealand became a British colony in 1840, the tension between those who came here to build a better life in a better country than class-riven Britain; and those who came here for the sole purpose of making money to enhance their reputation and status; has been palpable.

NZ First’s conundrum has always been to decide which of these two conflicting impulses it should endorse. Like their leader, they are torn between the allure of socio-economic elevation, and the stirring egalitarian verses of Dick Seddon’s and Mickey Savage’s Hallelujah Song.

Even those two men, the tutelary patriarchs of socialist New Zealand, might struggle to agree on the precise nature of New Zealand’s core values. Seddon favoured a white nation, untainted by either the brown or the yellow peril. Savage, by contrast, had imbibed the magic of Wiremu Ratana and knew that whatever New Zealand might eventually become, it would always be Maori first.

From the recorded comments of the remit’s promoters, it seems pretty clear that NZ First tends more toward Seddon than Savage. The core values they are seeking to defend are those of the “Better Britons” which the New Zealanders of the late-nineteenth century believed themselves to be.

Far from the universal principles of the French Revolution and the undying political legacy of the European Enlightenment; the core values which NZ First hopes to enshrine in law are grounded in exclusion. Their purpose is to impress upon Muslim immigrants the entirely unacceptable character of their religious and ethnic traditions, and to make it clear that the price of New Zealand citizenship is the attenuation, or outright abandonment, of those traditions.

The trinity worshipped by NZ First is not the unabashed revolutionary’s Liberty, Equality, Fraternity; but the half-arsed reactionary’s threefold tribute to the Kiwi Way. Authority. Orthodoxy. Conformity.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 5 October 2018.

Freedom Of Expression And Its Discontents.

If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. - John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

 

FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION has long been regarded as the cornerstone of liberty. Indeed, without the ability to speak our minds freely the whole notion of liberty begins to unravel. Freedom of expression is vital in at least one other respect – it helps us to arrive at and recognise the truth. This is important because, as many philosophers and religious leaders have observed, it is the truth that sets us free.

 

The Left’s relationship with freedom of expression has never been an easy one. Ever since the French Revolution of 1789-99 the desire to maintain the purity of the revolutionary message has weighed heavily against those who dared to raise objections concerning the Revolution’s means – if not its ends.

 

The relaxation of state censorship is the first and most important gift to any revolutionary cause. Historically, the sudden appearance of posters, pamphlets, newspapers and books authored by those whose voices had hitherto been suppressed has always been the surest sign that the old order was crumbling. In today’s repressive regimes it is the unfettered use of social media: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and blogs; which signals the arrival of the revolutionary moment. Think of the Arab Spring.

 

In its youth the Revolution hails freedom of expression as sacrosanct. The revolutionaries know that without it the power of the elites cannot be challenged. As the Revolution matures, however, and new power structures begin to replace the old, the criticism and analysis which freedom of expression makes possible seems less and less like an unqualified good. To the new occupants of these new structures, it is the protection and consolidation of the Revolution’s gains that should take priority. There is no surer sign that the Revolution is over than when the new power elite begins to punish people for exercising their right to free speech.

 

By this analysis it is clear that the social and cultural revolutions of the 1960s and 70s have well-and-truly passed their expiry date. The great provocations of the Hippy era: think of the Broadway musical “Hair”; the proliferation of revolutionary underground comics; the human “Be-Ins” and “Love-Ins”; Ken Kesey’s “Acid tests”; would today be dismissed as either infantile or inappropriate.

 

Only last week, on the University of California’s Berkeley campus, birthplace of the “free speech movement” which touched off the student revolt of the 1960s, the world was treated to the spectacle of furious students doing everything in their power to prevent the Alt-Right provocateur, Milo Yiannopoulos, from exercising his right to (yep, you guessed it) free speech.

 

In discussing these sorts of incidents with contemporary leftists, I have been staggered by the consistency of their responses. “What you’ve got to understand, Chris,” they reply, “is that while people have the right to express themselves, they have no right to expect that the things they say will not have consequences.”

 

If free speech is met with "consequences" - is it any longer free?

 

Just what those consequences look like can be seen every hour of every day on social media. Relentless incivility; extraordinary personal abuse; the issuing of threats to attack (and even kill) those whose expression is deemed offensive to, or transgressive of, the great revolutionary “truths” of the once “new” social movements; this, sadly, has become the norm on what passes for the “Left” in 2017.

 

The liberal tradition of responding to the expression of ideas with which you disagree with a reasoned, evidence-based argument in rebuttal no longer seems to fall within either the ideological of intellectual repertoire of today’s left-wingers. The only form of argument they seem capable of deploying is the abusive and circumstantial “Argumentum ad Hominem” – attacking the person rather than his or her ideas.

 

In his celebrated treatise, “On Liberty”, the nineteenth century English philosopher, John Stuart Mill, states: “If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”

 

In the ears of far too many contemporary leftists this oft-quoted passage will sound either incomprehensible or offensive. (Mill does, after all, use the sexist noun “mankind” rather than the more appropriate and gender-neutral term, “Humanity”.) To their way of thinking it is entirely right and proper that those who give voice to offensive or hateful opinions should be silenced. If these people would rather not endure the consequences of exercising their freedom of expression, then they should STFU.

 

“Those who defy the self-evident truths of the new order,” thunder its uncompromising defenders, “must endure the consequences – humiliation and pain!”

 

What tyrant king or totalitarian dictator could possibly disagree?

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 8 February 2017.

Frightening Governments

The Habit Of Revolt: The moment the state ceases to fear the wrath of its own citizens, it will move with terrifying swiftness to reverse the equation. Until ordinary citizens once again learn the knack of frightening their governments, their governments will continue to frighten them.

SHOULD A GOVERNMENT be frightened of its people, or, should the people be frightened of their Government? If your answer to this question is that governments should, indeed, fear the wrath of those they govern, then you are a revolutionary. If you believe that it’s best to follow the rules and do as you’re told, then you are something else. In a world ruled, more-or-less fearlessly, by top-down governments, exactly what that may be is fast becoming the most worrying question of the twenty-first century.

 

There is some comfort to be drawn from the fact that rule by fearless governments is not yet universal. France, for example, has long been upbraided by free-market economists for not implementing the sort of disciplinary economic “reforms” with which the citizens of the English-speaking countries have long grown familiar. The reason why the French people enjoy such a generous welfare state; and why French workers are blessed with a 35-hour week; is, however, very simple. French governments are frightened of the French people. Any perceived threat to their rights, or to the benefits they have extracted from their rulers over decades and centuries, is met by the French people with action – on the streets.

 

Hardly surprising, perhaps, when one considers that the French national anthem, La Marseillaise, is forever calling upon the French people to take up arms against every blood-stained banner tyranny advances against them. Modern France, like the United States of America, was born out of revolution. Where the two great republics differ, historically, is over the desirability of repeating the exercise. For the French, revolution (or the plausible threat of it) has become a habit. For the Americans, once would appear to have been enough.

 

Which is not to suggest that the USA hasn’t had to deal with considerable and repeated eruptions from below. Writing in the latest issue of The Atlantic, American historian, Kim Phillips-Fein’s, article “Why Workers Won’t Unite” looks back at the great trade union battles of America’s past and asks: “Is there a new way to challenge the politics of inequality?”

 

Phillips-Fein’s explanation for the apparent passivity of contemporary American workers is that, unlike their immigrant ancestors, they have no experience of either the personal autonomy inherent in small-scale, artisanal production; or, of the essential (if impoverished) collectivism of the peasant communities from which so many late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century immigrants to the United States had fled. In her words:

 

“The new proletarians longed to restore the economic autonomy they had once taken for granted—and, not yet steeped in the culture of the marketplace, they believed this was possible. The factories, corporations, markets, and banks that they viewed as their oppressors were still so new that their endurance hardly seemed assured. Many workers imagined that sweeping transformations would continue. They felt that the horrific world they saw around them could not last, that they had the power to help usher in a more humane and egalitarian social order.”

 

One hundred years later, it is clear that Capitalism ain’t going anywhere. Equally obvious is the fact that the “more humane and egalitarian social order”, which the struggles of the grandparents and great-grandparents of today’s working-class Americans brought into existence, is rapidly disintegrating. Working peoples’ faith in “sweeping transformations” is, similarly, at an historically low ebb. When those at the bottom of the social pyramid cease to believe that change is possible, is it at all surprising that governments do everything within their power to further convince them that resistance is futile?

 

The New Zealand working class’s history of struggle and transformation, though nowhere near as bloody as the United States’, was much more successful. And yet, the New Zealand and US labour movements both find themselves representing less than 10 percent of the private sector workforce. Strikes in both countries are at an all-time low. The confidence in collective action that unleashes a strike, and the solidarity that keeps it going, being almost wholly absent from today’s workers.

 

For those young people in possession of marketable skills, the preferred method of self-advancement within twenty-first century capitalism is networking. The old adage – it’s not what you know, but who you know, that counts – has never been applied with more determination than today. That networking might represent a dramatic reversion to the self-advancement strategies of feudalism, is not a question that those who already find themselves enmeshed within an organisation where power flows, exclusively, from the weak to the strong, have either the energy or the inclination to consider.

 

For those without skills, King Richard II’s curt response to the defeated remnants of the 1381 Peasants Revolt: “Villeins [serfs] ye are, and villeins ye shall remain”, sounds cruelly appropriate.

 

It would seem that the habit of revolution, and the knack of frightening governments, are forgotten at the people’s peril.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 7 April 2015.

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Some Thoughts On The Political Trinity

And The Greatest Of These Is Liberty: As Eugene Delacroix (he's the one holding the musket) graphically illustrated in his famous 1830 painting Liberty Leading The People, the prime mover of all great revolutionary struggles is humanity's determination to be free.

IF IT HAS DONE NOTHING ELSE, the Charlie Hebdo tragedy has reacquainted us with the goals of the first great revolution of the modern era. Over the past painful fortnight the French people and their political representatives have repeatedly invoked the three founding principles of the French Republic: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. There is no disputing the revolutionary potential of these principles. Individually and collectively, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity define the modern democratic project. Since 1789, every major revolutionary episode has drawn inspiration from at least one of them.

 

It is no accident that the French revolutionary credo is presented as a trinity. Hostile though the French revolutionaries undoubtedly were to the claims of organised religion, they also understood that the French state occupied a special place in the heart of the Catholic Church. This was because the Catholic Church had for centuries occupied a special place in the hearts of the French people. If Church and State were to be separated, as the Enlightenment values of the revolutionaries dictated, then the sacred trio of Father, Son and Holy Spirit would have to be replaced with an equally compelling trinity.

 

The correspondences between the Christian and the revolutionary trinity are interesting.

 

If it is true that “in the beginning” was God the Father, “the maker of Heaven and Earth”, then it is also true that Liberty – Freedom – lies at the very heart, and is the prime mover, of all truly revolutionary movements. Without freedom, all the other revolutionary goals are soon compromised. Indeed, it is precisely the restriction of freedom that allows inequality to flourish and renders human solidarity impractical.

 

But, if Liberty is the first demand of the revolutionary, that is only because the injustices of inequality are so many and so urgent that they cry out for the freedom necessary to address them. Equality thus plays the role of Jesus in the Christian trinity. Theologically speaking, although God precedes Jesus, Jesus is also God – or at least that much of Him as can be rendered intelligible to human-beings. Philosophically speaking, Equality cannot exist without Liberty, and yet it is also the state-of-being for which Liberty is constantly sacrificing itself.

 

Hence the need for Fraternity – the revolutionaries’ answer to the Christians’ Holy Spirit. Without the solidarity and empathy so crucial to fraternity’s historical expression, Liberty and Equality can very easily become empty, potentially contradictory – even deadly – political objectives.

 

The French Revolution itself bears witness to the consequences of abandoning Liberty in the name of Equality. Robespierre’s “Reign of Terror” was intended to coerce the French people into virtue. A surfeit of Liberty, according to Robespierre, had placed the egalitarian fatherland in mortal danger. Accordingly, the newly ratified Rights of Man and of the Citizen were suspended, pending the final destruction of the ancien regime and its aristocratic supporters. Fraternity, not surprisingly, was the first to feel the embrace of Madame Guillotine.

 

The destruction of Fraternity is, therefore, incontrovertible evidence that the revolution is in the process of being, or already has been, betrayed. Just as the concept of Holy Spirit acts as a sort of miraculous glue – binding together God, Jesus and the faithful in an ineffably mysterious unity – so, too, does the principle of Fraternity serve to keep the people’s eyes on the revolutionary prize. One has only to be reminded of Stalin’s order to “eliminate the Kulaks as a class”, or recall Pol Pot’s genocidal determination to empty Cambodia of every human-being who was not a peasant or a party worker, to understand what happens when solidarity and basic human empathy are branded “counter-revolutionary” sentiments.

 

Madame Roland, the French revolutionary leader whose moderation earned her the enmity of Robespierre's Jacobins, and whose own faction, the Girondins, were duly purged as soon as the Jacobins gained political ascendancy, is best remembered for her words addressed to the statue of Liberty in the Place de la Revolution as she awaited execution: “Oh Liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name!”
 



Madame Roland: "Oh Liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name!"
 

But Madame Roland was wrong. It is not Liberty that inspires political extremism, but a perilous ambition to reduce all the dazzling diversity of the human family to a dull and ominously silent uniformity. As if Equality was a purely mathematical concept meaning sameness, instead of a political ideal describing the social condition of human-beings who are free to create rich and productive lives for themselves and their families while protected from chance and adversity by the collective love and support of their fellow citizens.

 

A Left that does not proclaim Liberty as its primary objective; a Socialism that is not of its essence emancipatory and libertarian; a Labour Party not proudly committed to helping their fellow citizens’ pursue happiness; none of these has a future – and, frankly, does not deserve one.

 

In a Christian’s life, St Paul told the Corinthians, only three things truly matter: Faith, Hope and Love – and the greatest of these is Love. When it comes to political salvation, however, the only three things that truly matter are Liberty, Equality and Fraternity – and the greatest of these is Liberty. We must never forget, however, that Liberty, like God, comes as part of a package deal.

 

Being free on your own is the best definition of Hell I can think of.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 19 January 2015.

Privileged Status

The Settling Of Social Scores: The poor of Paris leer at the abused body of the Princesse de Lamballe, friend of Queen Marie-Antoinette and, ironically, a passionate advocate of social reform. Jamie Whyte's comparison of the "privileged" legal status of Maori with the legal privileges of the Aristocracy of pre-revolutionary France inevitably raised the ghosts of the Revolution's aristocratic victims. In the words of the Race Relations Commissioner, Dame Susan Devoy: “Equating Maori New Zealanders to French aristocrats who were murdered because of their privilege is a grotesque and inflammatory statement.”

 

Maori are legally privileged in New Zealand today, just as the Aristocracy were legally privileged in pre-revolutionary France.

 

Jamie Whyte, Act Party Leader, 26 July 2014

 

REPROVED BY DAME SUSAN, condemned by the Maori Party, castigated by most of the news media, it remains to be seen whether Jamie Whyte’s equation of Maori legal “privileges” with the feudal privileges of the French aristocracy was electorally clever or stupid.
 

The example of Don Brash’s Orewa Speech undoubtedly looms very large before any right-wing political leader whose party is languishing in the opinion polls. The National Party leader’s notorious address to the Orewa Rotary Club, in which he promised to nullify nearly all of Maoridom’s political rehabilitation since the 1970s, saw his party’s poll ratings advance by an unprecedented 17 percentage points. It put the National Opposition back in the race – with a vengeance!
 

The New Zealand electorate, it seems, is one vast racist itch just waiting for a scratch. And if it remains as easily satisfied as it was ten years ago, then Whyte’s speech to the Act Party’s Hamilton conference – and all the fallout from it – should produce a statistically significant up-tick in his party’s support.
 

And really, what else could Jamie do? The New Zealand voter is ill-disposed toward philosophical speculation and debate. The finer points of John Locke’s defence of individual liberty and the role played by private property in its preservation, are not the stuff of all that many Pakeha conversations. The merits or otherwise of their Maori neighbours, on the other hand, remains the subject of lively speculation.
 

Richard Prebble understood and accepted this inconvenient truth about the New Zealand voter. He had watched good-naturedly as Roger Douglas and Derek Quigley (Act’s founders) toured the country (on millionaire Craig Heatley’s dime) preaching the pure gospel of neoliberalism to anyone who would listen. Which, as Prebble already knew, would always be far too few to secure a solid footing for Act in the new MMP parliament. He had the data, he knew what it would take to move 5 percent of his fellow Kiwis into Act’s camp – and it wasn’t John Locke.
 

What Jamie Whyte lacks, however, is his predecessor’s wry political cynicism. If he was to raise again the divisive issue of Maori “privilege” (at Act’s campaign manager, Richard Prebble’s insistence?) then he was determined to do so with all the panache of a swashbuckling Cambridge philosopher. Not for him the mean-spirited snarling of the hard-bitten provincial voter that Prebble translated so well. No, he would wage war on the legal privileges of Maoridom in the guise of an antipodean Robespierre.
 

“Maori are legally privileged in New Zealand today,” Whyte told Act’s annual conference in Hamilton, “just as the Aristocracy were legally privileged in pre-revolutionary France.”

Really?
 

Presumably, in making this bold comparison, our Cambridge graduate had some notion of what those aristocratic privileges included, even if many in his audience, subscribing to Henry Ford’s view that “history is bunk”, did not.
 

Let’s list just a few of them:
 

·        The French Aristocracy were exempt from taxation.

·        French aristocrats presided over their own seigneurial courts – i.e. they were able to try their own tenants for any beaches of the law alleged to have taken place on their own estates.

·        Deceased tenant farmers of aristocratic land were prevented, under the law of mainmorte (the “dead hand”) from bequeathing the tenancy rights they enjoyed whilst living to their descendants. Upon their death the right to use the property reverted to its aristocratic owner who was then free to dispose of it as he saw fit – even at the cost of evicting the deceased tenant’s family. The aristocrat could, of course, be “persuaded” against this course of action by the tenant’s descendants paying their lord a “fine” for the right to go on farming the land.

·        Aristocrats also enjoyed a range of monopolies within their domains. For example, requiring tenants to have their grain ground in the aristocrat’s mill.

·        In many parts of France, a tenant wishing to get married had first to acquire his or her lord’s permission.

·        The aristocrat’s prior permission was also required before a tenant farmer could vacate his tenancy – i.e. move away from the lord’s estate.

·        To secure these aristocratic consents it was customary for tenants to pay yet more “fines”.
 

Do any of these legal privileges bear any resemblance to the supposed legal privileges enjoyed by Maori? Are Maori exempt from taxation? Do Maori preside over their own courts? Are Maori able to prevent the alienation of their tribal resources by imposing restrictions on their tenants’ ability to bequeath, sell or otherwise transfer their interest in tribal property? Do Maori enjoy monopolies over specific goods and services? Is prior permission required from Maori before a citizen is able to exercise his or her rights?
 

Perhaps the most questionable aspect of Whyte’s historical comparison was the aspect the Race Relations Commissioner, Dame Susan Devoy, picked up on in her statement of Wednesday, 30 July, in which she stated: “Equating Maori New Zealanders to French aristocrats who were murdered because of their privilege is a grotesque and inflammatory statement.” Quite true, because to link the French Aristocracy and the French Revolution is to conjure up images of angry crowds, clattering tumbrils, rolling drums and the sudden descent of Madame Guillotine’s blade.
 

The historical details surrounding the persecution of the French Aristocracy are, as is so often the case, even worse. The guillotining of condemned aristocrats in the manner so vividly described by Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities certainly did take place, but at least as many more aristocrats met their deaths at the hands of the Parisian Mob. In a grotesque settling of centuries-old social scores, aristocratic families were dragged from the relative safety of the city’s overcrowded prisons and butchered in the streets. Whipped up to a frenzy by such fanatical foes of privilege as Jean-Paul Marat, the poor of Paris fell upon these defenceless men women and children and quite literally tore them to pieces.
 

These are dangerous precedents to play with in a country whose racial and social prejudices lie buried in such shallow graves. Politicians who make persistent, but groundless, claims that a minority of the population is enjoying legal privileges which the majority of ordinary citizens do not possess, can hardly hold themselves blameless when those same ordinary citizens turn against that minority. Or, God forbid, upon them.
 

As the great Russian playwright, Anton Chekov, once remarked: “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.”
 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 4 August 2014.

French Lessons

Aux Armes Citoyens! Exacerbating Labour's current difficulties is the unfinished character of the rank-and-file's 2012 revolution. It was as if the revolutionary crowds of Paris, having torn down the Bastille, then decided to build it back up again!

“APRÈS MOI, LE DÉLUGE.” These famous words are attributed to King Louis XV of France. He saw the waters of discontent rising behind the straining dykes of royal absolutism and sensed that when he had gone the barriers to change would finally burst. “After me, the flood.” is what he said. What he meant was: “After me, revolution becomes inevitable.” Swept away by the French Revolution, the luckless Louis XVI could hardly disagree.
 

Observing the hapless Labour Party: watching it struggle in the coils of its own contradictions; I cannot help but be reminded of Louis XV’s ominous quip.
 

The last successful Labour leader, Helen Clark, with what can only be described as a royal absolutist grip, contrived to keep her party’s factional mongrels in their kennels. Indeed, with her Chief-of-Staff, Heather Simpson, playing Cardinal Fleury to Clark’s Louis XV, scarcely a mouse dared move in Labour’s Versailles without the permission of at least one of these all-powerful duumvirs.
 

With Clark’s departure, however, the party’s absolutist era came to an abrupt end. Labour’s grandees did everything they could to protect the monarchical style of leadership that Clark had perfected, even though, as is now painfully apparent, none of them possessed the requisite political stature to occupy her vacant throne for very long.
 

Besides, at the base of the Labour Party, in the branches and affiliates from whence the aristocrats of Labour’s caucus drew the deliverers-of-pamphlets and erectors-of-hoardings needed to win elections, revolution was afoot. Clark and Simpson may have ruled Labour’s members with an iron fist, but at least they had given them victories. The pretenders to Labour’s Iron Throne – Phil Goff and David Shearer – brought the rank-and-file nothing but defeat and humiliation. A caucus aristocracy incapable of supplying Labour with a credible king or queen wasn’t worth keeping. Henceforth the peasants would elect their own leader.
 

Unfortunately, Labour’s rank-and-file neglected to first elect themselves a Robespierre: someone to oversee the ruthless beheading of the ancien regime. Poor dears! Far from introducing Labour’s electorate-based aristocracy to Madame Guillotine, the members generously acquiesced in their re-selection! It was as if the revolutionary crowds of Paris, having torn down the Bastille, then decided to build it back up again.
 

Two months out from the General Election we are thus presented with the absurd spectacle of the Labour peasantry’s elected king, David Cunliffe, holed-up in the Opposition leader’s office and surrounded by a caucus aristocracy seething with thwarted ambition and regicidal intent. Many of King David’s courtiers would happily drive a rapier through his guts. And rather than carry the fight to the National Party foe, his sworn enemies vie with one another to make the first thrust.
 

There are only two ways out of this impasse. Either Labour’s peasantry make good on their revolutionary promise and utterly destroy those caucus aristocrats who would restore Helen Clark’s royal absolutism. Or, one of those aristocrats finds the courage to crush the peasants’ revolt, seize the throne, and restore the ancien regime.
 

Then again, if we’re following the grand arc of French history, perhaps, somewhere in Labour’s ranks, there exists a young commander of artillery with vaunting ambitions and inordinate strategic skills. Someone ready to deploy the rhetoric of the revolution to secure the absolute power of the throne. Not for the peasantry, who lack the will to lead. Nor yet for the corrupt aristocracy, who don’t deserve it. But for him – or herself – alone.
 

Just where this Napoleonic figure lies in waiting is difficult to say. Not in the unions, whose opportunity to grasp the brass ring of power came and went 23 years ago when they refused to fight Bill Birch’s Employment Contracts Bill. Not in the careerist warrens funded by the tax-payer through Parliamentary Services and the DPMC. Not among the horse-traders on Labour’s Party List. Not even among the rank-and-file who still refuse to accept the consequences of their revolution.
 

No, if there is a Napoleon out there in the Labour Party my best guess is that you will find him or her toiling away in the corridors of local government. It will be someone who understands what it takes to get elected by your fellow citizens – without the benefit of party colours.
 

If Helen Clark’s departure unleashed the flood, perhaps this new, Napoleonic, Labour leader can drain the swamp.
 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 25 July 2014.