The Ideology That Dares Not Speak Its Name.

The March Of Neoliberalism: In essence: a codification of the economic, social and political pre-conditions required for massive social inequality to become a permanent feature of contemporary capitalist society; neoliberalism generally prefers to avoid self-identification.

 

THERE IS SOMETHING PECULIAR about an ideology that dares not speak its name. Historically speaking, those who claimed to have discovered how the world works were never reticent about giving their discovery a name. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels did not publish The Manifesto in 1848, they published The Communist Manifesto. By the end of the Nineteenth Century there were very few educated persons who did not grasp the essence of the Marxists’ economic, social and political programme.

 

In the case of neoliberal ideology, however, we are presented with a very different picture. In essence: a codification of the economic, social and political pre-conditions required for massive social inequality to become a permanent feature of contemporary capitalist society; neoliberalism generally prefers to avoid self-identification.

 

Last week, for example, The National Business Review’s Rob Hosking responded to Sue Bradford’s accusation that the Greens had sold out to neoliberalism like this:

 

“As always, it isn’t clear what is meant by ‘neo-liberal’, apart from ‘bad things’.”

 

In the age of Google, Hosking’s professed ignorance as to the term’s meaning is curious. Even the humble Wikipedia could have offered him enough to be going on with:

 

“Neoliberalism (neo-liberalism) refers primarily to the 20th-century resurgence of 19th-century ideas associated with laissez-faire economic liberalism. These include extensive economic liberalisation policies such as privatisation, fiscal austerity, deregulation, free trade and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society. These market-based ideas and the policies they inspired constitute a paradigm shift away from the post-war Keynesian consensus which lasted from 1945 to 1980.”

 

Admirably clear. And while there’s certainly scope for scholarly debate around detail and emphasis, Wikipedia’s definition is more than sufficient to dispel the feigned ignorance of neoliberalism’s most zealous defenders.

 

Why, then, do neoliberals like Hosking continue to insist that they have no firm grasp of the term’s usage – other than as an expression of left-wing abuse?

 

The answer is simple. To survive and prosper, neoliberalism and the policies it inspires cannot afford to be seen as ‘just another ideology’ – like communism or fascism. Rather, it must be accepted as a law of nature – as unyielding to human influence as the weather.

 

What absolutely must not become widely understood is that neoliberalism is, indeed, an all-too-human artefact: formulated by twentieth century economists and given popular currency by individuals and institutes funded by extremely wealthy and politically motivated capitalists.

 

In the face of multiple post-war democratic challenges, these capitalists were anxious to recover and consolidate their class’s dominant position. This had been in steady decline since the 1930s and, by the 1970s, was facing an emancipatory explosion of hitherto suppressed social groups: workers, ethnic minorities, women, youth, gays and lesbians.

 

Consider the fate of these groups since the neoliberal counter-revolution of the 1980s, and the neoliberals’ reluctance to speak their true name becomes clear.

 

The destruction of the trade union movement as a vital economic and political counterweight to the power of capital has permitted a massive transfer of wealth from the employees of capitalist enterprises to their shareholders and senior executives.

 

The elimination and/or privatisation of the public providers of Maori employment ripped entire communities apart – giving rise to social pathologies that, three decades later, are not only still prevalent in Maori society, but increasing. It is no accident that the Maori incarceration rate, at 56 percent, is higher now than it has ever been.

 

In spite of a massive rise in post-war female workforce participation, Kiwi women are still paid, on average, 12 percent less than men. Violent sexism still oppresses them.

 

After 33 years of neoliberalism, young New Zealanders find themselves burdened down with debt and, increasingly, shut out of the housing market.

 

From being among the most forthright critics of capitalism’s power to define the “normal” in the early-1980s, the twenty-first century LGBTI community finds itself re-defined and re-presented as proof of neoliberal capitalism’s tolerance. Many LGBTI individuals now inhabit happily social institutions which their predecessors rejected as oppressive.

 

It is, however, neoliberalism’s unique ability to empty the future of hope that goes to the heart of its apologists’ reticence.

 

The young All Souls Fellowship holder, Max Harris, has written a whole book on what he sees as young New Zealanders’ alienation from politics. But how could a generation raised under neoliberalism be anything else? All their lives they have been told that to be human is to compete. That the way they buy and sell things (commodities, other people, themselves) is much more important than the way they vote. That their position in the socio-economic hierarchy is entirely attributable to the wisdom or unwisdom of their personal choices.

 

“I am interested in whether love could be made a bigger feature of our politics”, writes Harris.

 

Not while neoliberalism endures, Max.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 4 April 2017.

Je Suis Charlie

Fraternité: Of the three great founding principles of the secular French state, it was the third, fraternité, that united France in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Fraternité: that healing warmth, born of human fellowship and empathy, without which the two other animating principles of the democratic republic – liberté and égalité – remain empty and impotent.

 

THE THIRTY THOUSAND PARISIANS who braved the mid-winter cold in the Place de La République last Wednesday declared they were “not afraid”. I didn’t believe them. Horror, fear, and anger clamped hard around my heart as I absorbed the news of the deadly attack on the offices of the French satirical newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, and the equally deadly sieges that followed. Had the French people not been gripped by very similar emotions, they would not have been human.

 

Especially unnerving was the Parisian demonstrators’ silence. Clustering protectively around the towering statue of Marianne, personification of the French Republic, they gave no audible expression to their feelings. Instead there was an intense stillness. People lit candles. Some carried hand-lettered signs. Many read, simply: “Je suis Charlie.”

 

I am Charlie.

 

Of the three great founding principles of the secular French state, it was the third, fraternité, that bound this vast crowd together: that healing warmth, born of human fellowship and empathy, without which the two other animating principles of the democratic republic – liberté and égalité – remain empty and impotent.

 

It was the violation of fraternité that took France’s breath away. The coolly proficient murderers who gunned down two gendarmes, a janitor, and the core of Charlie Hebdo’s editorial team, spoke in accentless French. It was this chilling fact that punctured the nation’s heart. That these young men, nursed at Marianne’s breast, felt not the slightest tremor of brotherly feeling as they gunned down twelve of their fellow citizens.

 

The killers’ pure and utterly merciless manifestation of religious outrage was as shocking as it was, perversely, awe-inspiring. Their absolute certainty about doing God’s work freed them from every social obligation and legal restriction. In a world made luminous by the eternal and unchallengeable injunctions of the divine, they’d turned themselves into holy instruments: as impervious to remonstration and remorse as the cutting edge of the Prophet’s sword, or the 7.62mm rounds of their AK47 assault rifles.

 

If there is a design fault in the human animal then, surely, this is it. Humanity’s ability to conjure itself into the dissociative fugue state of religious and/or ideological rapture. A state in which all awareness of personal responsibility falls away and we are driven to the most extreme acts by the conviction that, in hastening the arrival of the heavenly – or earthly – paradise, we are doing good.

 

To bring the whole of humankind into the body of the faithful. To advance social justice through the dictatorship of reason and virtue, Aryan genetics, or the proletariat. To establish the sovereign individual within a perfectly free and unfettered market economy.

 

In the name of perfecting humanity, everything is permissible.

 

The West is delusional if it believes itself immune to this deadly condition. We may congratulate ourselves that the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition lie safely in our past and that, as heirs of the European Enlightenment, we have moved beyond the reach of religious extremism. But this is to overlook Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, Stalin’s gulags and Hitler’s death camps. Or, if these seem too far away, the IMF’s structural adjustment programmes and George Bush’s “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques”.

 

Charlie Hebdo itself falls squarely into the long European tradition of exposing the rank hypocrisy of those who set themselves up as the inerrant judges of human frailty. From Chaucer to Boccaccio, Voltaire to Swift, the failure of individuals and institutions in authority to live up to their own moral precepts has inspired artistic works of satirical genius.

 

The French, in particular, have an historical aversion to “clericalism” – i.e. the unwarranted interference of religious institutions in education and politics. Indeed, “anti-clerical” French republicans have been doing battle with the French religious authorities since at least the Eighteenth Century. The French Left is, accordingly, forever on its guard against any threat – be it Christian, Judaic or Muslim – to the cherished principles of the French Revolution’s secular republic.

 

France is also the home of the expression “épater la bourgeoisie” (shock the middle classes). Alarming and/or outraging the fatuous and far-too-comfortable beneficiaries of the political status quo has been a favourite sport of iconoclastic and revolutionary French artists and writers since the mid-Nineteenth Century. In this, too, Charlie Hebdo is as French as frogs-legs.

 

A curiously symmetrical symbolic relationship thus embraces both the holy warriors who gunned down the staff of Charlie Hebdo, and the latter’s militant secularist mission. On either side of this tragedy stand fervent believers in, and unflinching defenders of, compelling religious and political traditions.

 

Perhaps the great mass of Parisians in the Place de la République remained silent in conscious acknowledgement of the deadly consequences that follow when we make ourselves captive to the battle-cries of uncompromising conviction. A charge upon which both the slayers and the slain, fused now forever in death, must – tragically – stand convicted.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 13 January 2015.

Outflanked On The Left - By The Voters!

Public Service Notice: Across the Western World there is evidence that the political parties ostensibly standing for progressive change are being comprehensively outflanked by their own supporters - on the Left. Is it possible that the people are becoming more radical than the politicians "representing" them?

 

WITH LABOUR’S POLL NUMBERS FALTERING, there will undoubtedly be much agitated discussion in the Office of the Leader of the Opposition.

 

“What’s wrong with everybody?!” David Cunliffe’s advisers will wail. “Why didn’t anyone like KiwiAssure? What was not to like about a state-owned insurance company? What on earth do people want!?”

 

Well, if the news from abroad is anything to go by, they want a good deal more than the cautious gestures they’ve seen so far. Indeed, if the research published recently in both the United Kingdom and the United States is correct, a substantial chunk of the electorate is willing to embrace economic and social policies that are genuinely and unashamedly radical.

 

A YouGov survey for the Centre for Labour and Social Studies (Class) think tank, carried out at the end of last month, showed that UK voters “strongly supported support state-imposed price controls on the utilities, re-nationalisation of the railways and Royal Mail, an end to private cash in the public sector and even state power to regulate rents”.

 

Putting it bluntly: a solid majority of the UK electorate is well to the left of Ed Miliband’s Labour Party.

 

Nick Assinder, the political editor of the IBTimes, summed up the poll results rather incredulously with the observation: “[I]f the findings continue to be borne out as the general election campaign moves into top gear, and if Labour takes them to heart, it could spark the sort of ideological debate which Britain has not seen since the late 1970s and 1980s – for good or ill.”

 

Something similar would appear to happening on the other side of the Atlantic. New polling from Hart Research Associates, undertaken on behalf of Americans For Tax Fairness, indicates a strong, pundit-confounding, public appetite for imposing higher taxes on the rich.

 

On the liberal website, Campaign For America’s Future, blogger Richard Eskow writes: “As that covert recording of Mitt Romney showed last year, some of the ‘1 percent’ think other Americans aren’t pulling their own weight in this economy. As this new polling confirms, the feeling’s mutual. By a seventeen point margin (56 percent to 39 percent), the American people want the next budget agreement to include new tax revenues from corporations and the wealthy.”

 

One of the reasons David Cunliffe won the leadership of the Labour Party was the widely held view among the party’s rank-and-file that he – alone of all his rivals – “got” this. On the day he announced his candidacy, his “You betcha!” response to a question about raising taxes on the rich had thrilled not just his Labour Party followers, but a large portion of the wider electorate.

 

At Labour’s annual conference, held in Christchurch at the beginning of this month, considerable behind-the-scenes diplomacy went into blunting the sharper edges of policy proposals from branch members and union affiliates who had taken Mr Cunliffe’s radicalism at face value. For the most part, the radicals were happy to oblige – not wanting their man to be embarrassed in front of a sceptical news media.

 

But, if the trends from abroad are any guide, smoothing off the radical edges of Labour’s policy platform was exactly the wrong thing to do. If Mr Cunliffe would improve his political fortunes, he should think about sharpening – not blunting – his party’s attack on the status-quo.

 

The Labour Caucus, too, needs to summon up the courage to abandon what may turn out to have been its entirely unnecessary caution. It is one thing to protect the party leader from stepping beyond the limits of the electorate’s tolerance; quite another to stand between the voters and the radical policies they’re hungering for. Neoliberalism has been weighed in the balance and found wanting – Labour MPs should not attempt to second-guess the zeitgeist.

 

Bill Clinton’s campaign-team’s note-to-self: “It’s the economy, stupid!” has become the stuff of US political folklore – and a potent reminder to stay focused on voter priorities.

 

Perhaps Mr Cunliffe’s note-to-self should be: “Radical policies for a radicalised electorate!”

 

This essay was originally published by The Dominion Post, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 22 November 2013.

In Praise Of Dinosaurs

Evolutionary Success Story: Dinosaurs dominated the Earth for 135 million years. The way we're going, we Homo Sapiens will be lucky to celebrate our millionth birthday! So, the next time someone accuses you of being a dinosaur - take it as a compliment.

IT’S POSSIBLE the human species will dominate Planet Earth for longer than the dinosaurs – but I wouldn’t bet on it. The reign of these massive reptiles lasted 135 million years and was only ended by the ultimate, exogenous, extinction level event: an asteroid strike.

 

Homo-sapiens, by contrast, is barely a thousand centuries old, and well on the way to perfecting its own endogenous, extinction-level catastrophes. (Nuclear war, global warming, rogue bio-tech, take your pick.)

 

If we make it to our millionth birthday, we’ll be doing very well indeed.

 

The dinosaurs undeniable evolutionary success, and their blameless demise, has not, however, prevented human-beings from applying the term “dinosaur” to any institution or person who refuses to be convinced by, or bow to, the forces of “progressive” change.

 

In spite of the devastating asteroid strike’s role in the extinction of the dinosaurs being understood for more than thirty years, it would seem that earlier explanations for the dinosaurs’ disappearance die hard. Until 1980 it was a given that the dinosaurs had simply “failed to adapt” to a changing environment.

 

Hence the insult. Anybody deemed deficient or incapable of adapting to a changing world must ipso facto be “a dinosaur”.

 

Over a lifetime of advocating for ideas and institutions deemed inconvenient by those determined to “reform” society to their own advantage, I have been branded a “dinosaur” many times.

 

As if change of any description can only ever be “a good thing”, and resistance to change “a bad thing”.

 

My first serious encounter with the dinosaur insult came with the introduction of what we now call “Rogernomics”. Among the most forthright opponents of the onrush of the Fourth Labour Government’s “reforms” were, not surprisingly, the party’s trade union affiliates.

 

Predictably, the Labour Cabinet, and a fair chunk of the Labour Caucus, were infuriated by the unions show of resistance. If there was, as Roger Douglas and his Treasury advisers asserted, “no alternative” to the “free market” (as they insisted on calling the market-rigging ideology of neoliberalism) then the unions’ refusal to accept the Government’s changes was evidence not only of their economic ignorance but also of their wilful refusal to evolve.

 

They were “dinosaurs” – and we all know what happened to dinosaurs!

 

So, you see, the label wasn’t just a term of abuse. Wrapped up inside the insult was an implied, but unmistakeable, threat.

 

Those who stood in the way of change risked disappearing from the scene altogether.

 

It is hardly surprising, then, that anyone ambitious to rise in their chosen field will go to considerable lengths to avoid being branded a dinosaur. Regardless of their misgivings about any proposed course of action, and irrespective of the cogency or force of any arguments mounted against it, those in search of the “change agents’” approbation will raise no objections. Indeed, to ingratiate themselves with the people in charge, and more-or-less guarantee their patronage, the ambitious climber will dismiss all the critics of their plans as “dinosaurs”.

 

Giving voice to the insult is, therefore, another way of saying: “I’m with the programme – one hundred percent. Come what may, you can rely on me. Because, unlike our opponents, I ‘get it’.”

 

Of all potentially fatal evolutionary strategies this is the most effective. To supress all one’s doubts, and reject all contrary evidence, for reasons of personal ambition is to place one’s institution on the royal road to extinction.

 

It is, therefore, of some concern to discover that the dinosaur epithet is again being tossed about in Labour Party circles.

 

Nothing could signal more forcefully the return of the same debilitating factional strife which tore Labour apart in the late-1980s and early 90s than this renewed willingness to characterise one’s political opponents as lumbering behemoths of maladaptation lacking the simple decency to shuffle off the evolutionary stage.

 

Of even more concern is the news that even in the trade union movement one can now hear the dinosaur epithet.

 

So convinced is the senior leadership of the trade union movement that they – and they alone – possess all the answers to working people’s problems, that anyone expressing doubts about the movement’s current strategies and campaigns, or, worse still, advocating policies which the trades unions’ friends in the Labour Party have already rejected as “naive” and “stupid”, can only be creatures deserving of, and destined for, extinction.

 

With the benefit of historical hindsight it is now very clear that it was a similar refusal to engage with its critics and encourage open debate that left the leadership of the New Zealand trade union movement so utterly unprepared for that Everest-sized asteroid called the Employment Contracts Act which brought it so close to extinction in 1991.

 

Those labelled dinosaurs may simply be the first ones to have spotted that bright object in the night sky – the one heading straight for us.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 19 March 2013.

It Was A Fair Cop, Hekia, And Treasury's To Blame

Suck It Up, Minister: Education Minister, Hekia Parata, was forced to reverse her government's own policy on class sizes in the face of massive public opposition. Had she possessed sufficient critical intelligence to challenge the policy's prime promoter, Treasury Secretary, Gabriel Makhlouf, she could have saved herself - and her government - a very large serving of very dead rat.

IN THE END, it all comes back to Treasury. Education Minister, Hekia Parata, like so many politicians before her, has taken the advice of Treasury’s ideologues, and paid the price. This willingness of right- and left-wing politicians to drag their careers over a cliff, by following the lead of an agency which has consistently failed to tender either reliable or useful advice to government, bears testimony to ideology’s uncanny knack for over-riding the urgings of electoral common sense.

The debacle over class sizes may be traced back to Treasury’s advice to the incoming Minister of Education following the 2011 General Election. Faced with an intensifying fiscal crisis, Treasury Secretary, Gabriel Makhlouf, saw an opportunity to attend to Treasury’s unfinished business with this country’s disconcertingly independent educationalists.

The proudly professional culture of New Zealand’s highly regarded education system (we rank sixth out of thirty-four OECD countries) continues to stand athwart Treasury’s relentless ideological advance.

It thus constitutes a standing rebuke to Treasury’s otherwise unassailable neoliberal mandarinate. Its collegial values and altruistic purposes sit most uncomfortably within the neoliberals’ highly individualistic and competitive reading of human nature. While achieving a large measure of success in the universities (attributable mostly to New Zealand academics’ timidity and lack of solidarity) Treasury’s neoliberal policies have been staunchly and successfully resisted in New Zealand’s primary and secondary schools. This is due, almost entirely, to the strength of New Zealand’s two main teacher unions – the NZEI and the PPTA.

Before New Zealand’s teaching profession can finally be “neoliberalised”, it will first be necessary to break these teacher unions. There are two ways of doing this. The first, and most brutal, is to do what Scott Walker, Governor of the US state of Wisconsin, did: pass legislation stripping state employees of their right to collective bargaining. The second, and much more effective, way to break a union is to undermine its members’ solidarity: to divide and conquer.

The classic method of decollectivising a workforce is the introduction of performance pay. Once workers’ remuneration ceases to be reckoned by the job to be done, and is set, instead, by the boss’s perception of how well each individual worker is doing the job, the ability of the workforce to maintain collective cohesion and purpose rapidly falls away.

New Zealand has, of course, already attempted a legislative “final solution” to the union problem. But, although the Employment Contracts Act (1991) proved highly successful at breaking the power of private sector unions; public employees – especially teachers – by sticking together and fighting back, have resisted every attempt to set one colleague against another, undermine the union, and hand the education sector over to Treasury (and its political handmaidens) for neoliberal “re-education”.

It is, therefore, very difficult not to read the Treasury Secretary’s advocacy for trading-off a few extra pupils in every class-room for a lift in the quality of the country’s teachers, as a way of admitting performance pay (and undermining the teacher unions) by the back door.

Prime Mover: The author of the "class-size-increase-for-improved-teacher-quality" trade-off, Treasury Secretary, Gabriel Makhlouf.

Citing the highly contestable figure of “one in three” school-leavers entering the New Zealand workforce as an educational failure, Mr Makhlouf argued strongly, and very publicly, that this scandalous “output” of the system could only be rectified by encouraging better teaching. By this he did not mean that we should embrace the Finnish policy of keeping a very high teacher-student ratio while, at the same time, ensuring that teaching remains one of that country’s best qualified and well-paid professions. No, what Mr Makhlouf wanted was an opportunity to pit teachers against one another in a quest to find “the best” teachers, and then, presumably, offer them individual employment contracts and higher pay. This competitive model would also have identified “the worst” teachers, allowing them to be purged from the system. School staff-rooms would thus become battle-grounds where “winners” prospered and “losers” lost their jobs. Collegial values, ill-adapted to Treasury’s new “survival of the fittest” environment, would be driven to extinction – followed closely by the teacher unions.

The triumph of the competitive market model within the teaching profession would, inevitably, see its operating principles installed in every class-room. The transmission of skills and knowledge, the system’s outputs, would be subjected to detailed empirical measurement. Every pupil would be “tested”, and every school’s resourcing determined by the results of those tests. New Zealand’s internationally admired education system would very quickly join the derelict systems of the United States and the United Kingdom.

Was Ms Parata really seeking this disintegration of New Zealand’s education system? Of course not! Why, then, couldn’t she decode Mr Makhlouf’s policy prescription? The answer is simple: to decipher neoliberal ideology one needs to adopt a critical perspective; and that presupposes ideological agnosticism.

Had Ms Parata felt equal to challenging Treasury’s ideologically-driven recommendations, she’d never have been required to undertake her embarrassing political “reversal”.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 6 June 2012.