The Woke War On the Cultural Conduits of Capitalism.

WHAT IS WOKE MORALITY? How does it work? More to the point, can it be countered without making use of the same arguments and justifications deployed by the woke themselves?

To begin with, “woke” is just the latest political shorthand for the ethical architecture supporting the tactics and strategies of anti-capitalism. The belief that capitalism lies at the root of all social inequality and injustice has been the prime driver of left-wing thought and action since at least the mid-nineteenth century. (By the arrival of the twenty-first, environmental despoliation and climate change had been added to capitalism’s rap-sheet.)

If only the ingenuity and understanding of human-beings were harnessed to a better purpose than squalid private enrichment, argue the anti-capitalists, then a world of abundance, equality, freedom and happiness would emerge spontaneously from the reeking capitalist corpse.

Certainly the radical reformers of the mid-nineteenth century did not have to work very hard to convince those at the sharp end of the industrial revolution that they were the victims of a viciously exploitative system. To appreciate capitalism’s iniquities, the industrial working-class had only to look around them. Not for nothing did the English poet, William Blake, describe their workplaces as “dark satanic mills”.

Satisfying human need would be a relatively simple matter, declared the anti-capitalists of the 1840s – better known to their contemporaries as ‘socialists’. But overcoming the human greed that fuelled capitalism – that was an altogether more daunting proposition.

Just how daunting was demonstrated by the steady improvement in the lives of working people made possible by the enormous wealth which capitalism was generating. Only a small fraction of capitalist profit was required to improve dramatically the material conditions of working-class life – a fact which the more intelligent capitalists acknowledged by allowing the state to tax the worst excesses of laissez-faire out of their system. More importantly, they also encouraged the state to lay before the best and brightest toilers a pathway out of working-class poverty.

The capitalist promise? That education, augmented by hard work, would conduct the children and grandchildren of the working-class into a larger, more exciting world.

For the socialists, however, this combination of incremental improvement and socio-economic co-option was intolerable. While its material circumstances may have improved marginally, the working-class’s relationship with capitalism had, to socialist eyes, become even more exploitative and unequal.

By providing their employees with a modicum of comfort and leisure, the capitalists had pared down the dangerous ‘Us versus Them’ dynamic of the Victorian era to the much safer ‘Us’ of the early twentieth century. To the socialists, however, the gulf between master and servant remained as great as ever. It was just that rising living standards and the glittering tinsel of empire had made it much harder to see.

How else could the masters have killed and maimed so many millions of their servants in the First World War?

Ah, yes, the First World War. In the wake of its horrors the anti-capitalists of the 1920s were encouraged to exchange their gently persuasive ‘social-democracy’ for the unapologetically coercive ‘communism’ of Lenin and his Bolsheviks.

The left-wing vision of humanity redeemed: its attachment to an emancipatory global revolution in which the world’s peoples, liberated by science and technology, would build a better world in friendship and equity; was still there. But getting there required men and women prepared to use any means – up to and including terror, torture and mass murder – to achieve the revolution’s ends. The omelette of communism would require the cracking of millions and millions of eggs.

This was no gentle poet’s dream of building “Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land”. By the 1920s, the construction of paradise had become the global project of the Communist International – better known as the Comintern. Not a reckoning of masters and servants in one country, but a full-scale assault upon the manifold injustices flowing from European and American capitalism’s attempted subjugation of the entire planet.

Murder, rape and plunder; enslavement and exploitation; all of it perpetrated under the cover of spurious anthropological hierarchies. A global system dedicated to rewarding Europeans in perpetuity for the inestimable virtue of not being black. That, at least, was the way the Comintern portrayed capitalism’s predation upon the rest of the planet. Communism and anti-imperialism were joined at the hip.

By the 1930s, however, the ideological foes of capitalism were growing increasingly embittered. Lenin and Stalin may have embedded communism in the Soviet Union, but everywhere else the emancipatory vision animating the Left was being hacked to pieces by the ferocious forces of a racially and/or religiously charged nationalism.

Why were the masses so unmoved by the communist saints, but so aroused by the fascist devils? Could it be that emancipation was something more than a straightforward exercise in wealth redistribution? Was the refusal of the world’s workers to lose their chains attributable to deeper and darker forces moving beneath the surface of capitalism? Was the Marxist social psychologist Eric Fromm correct in his diagnosis? Did the masses truly live in “fear of freedom”?

The answers emerging from World War II, the most destructive event in human history, were not encouraging. When leftists, gasping for breath, finally broke the surface of the War’s bloody ocean, they were slick with the evidence that their faith in human nature may have been … misplaced.

And, as if the Left’s dark night of the soul wasn’t dreary enough, the political managers of post-war capitalism made everything worse by shrewdly applying the scientific and technological advances of the War to the much more congenial challenges of peace. For close to three decades, in those parts of the world beyond the repressive concrete drabness of “actually existing” Soviet-style socialism, apprehension had grown on the Left that its vision of a free, equal, and abundant society might end up being realised by capitalism itself.

More than a few Capitalists were equally apprehensive that the Left might be right: that, just as Marx predicted, the system would end up digging its own grave. But not, they resolved, on their watch. Since the 1970s, the number one priority of these uncompromising free-market capitalists has been very clear: stop digging!

The accommodating capitalism of 1946-1976: the capitalism responsible for strong unions, social welfare, public housing, and an ever-expanding state sector, had to be utterly destroyed – along with the left-inspired “new social movements” its policies were at once empowering and emboldening.

These new social movements have, over the past 40 years, become more and more synonymous with what most people identify as ‘The Left’. It was within their ranks that the word “woke” was first used to describe the need to be alert to all the manifestations of injustice. They were born out of the conviction that human emancipation cannot be delivered by economic means alone. That unless the root causes of oppression, those psychic and cultural conduits sustaining human exploitation and violence, are exposed and destroyed, then the capitalist tree, no matter how many times it is felled, will always grow back stronger from the stump.

What does this mean in terms of woke politics? It means attacking all the belief systems, all the institutions, all the cultural practices, that the Left has come to identify as the fundamental sources of oppression.

The belief that men are superior to women.

The belief that Europeans and their cultural heritage are superior to all the other ethnicities and cultures of the world.

The belief that the family is the single most important constitutive component of human society.

The belief that gender is biologically determined.

The belief that science and technology are the neutral arbiters of human progress.

The belief that the human world and the natural world are separate entities.

That belief that capitalism and democracy are mutually reinforcing.

These are the beliefs the woke are going to war to extinguish.

And woke morality?

It is the philosophical system which, since the 1930s, has been constructed by anti-capitalist intellectuals to identify the core cultural components of capitalism; the prime enablers of its exploitative and oppressive behaviours; and thereby to awaken capitalism’s victims to the urgent necessity of destroying  them.

The characteristic zealotry and intolerance of woke politics is a consequence of its practitioners’ conviction that nothing good can be achieved unless and until the whole repertoire of contemporary capitalism’s self-justification is confronted, challenged, and disabled. In the moral universe of the woke, virtue is only obtainable through the active extirpation of vice.

To build a better world, the woke are convinced that this one must first be burned to the ground.

They can only be countered by the rest of us proving them wrong.

A version of this essay was posted on The Good Oil website on Monday, 21 April 2025.

A Fast-Track Backwards.

Dubious Destination: What New Zealanders face in the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Government is an attempt to return the country to the policy settings of half-a-century ago. What Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop’s fast-track legislation is designed to rehabilitate and revivify is the “national development” mindset of the 1970s and 80s.

IT IS RARE INDEED to encounter a measure as ripe for political exploitation as the Coalition Government’s “fast-track” legislation. Simultaneously, the measure assaults the natural environment, the democratic process, and the rights of te iwi Māori. Serendipitously, on the left of New Zealand politics there are three parties perfectly positioned, at least theoretically, to champion each one of these embattled realms. The damage they could inflict, collectively, upon the Reactionary Right over the course of the next two years is, at least potentially, enormous. In short, if Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori were battle-ready, then they could be governing New Zealand by the end of 2026.

But, how many voters would take that bet?

What New Zealanders face in the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Government is an attempt to return the country to the policy settings of half-a-century ago. What Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop’s fast-track legislation is designed to rehabilitate and revivify is the “national development” mindset of the 1970s and 80s.

Driving this reanimation project forward are business-people, investors, and politicians who have convinced themselves that the social and cultural forces ranged against them are nothing like as powerful, electorally-speaking, as they believe themselves to be. If the question is put to voters: “Jobs or Frogs?”, then the Coalition’s and its backers’ money is all on “Jobs”. As far as Bishop and his NZ First attack-dog, Shane Jones, are concerned, Forest & Bird, Greenpeace, and all those other “environmental terrorists” are nothing more than re-cycled paper tigers.

What this old-fashioned “workerist” line of argument ignores is the brute demographic fact that the number of people interested in working down a mine, digging in a quarry, picking fruit, or doing all the other hard, dirty, and dangerous jobs associated with the primary sector is a great deal smaller than it was half-a-century ago. The massive importation of migrant labour is a direct response to the pronounced reluctance of Kiwis – especially young Kiwis – to work in high-risk and uncomfortable industries for lousy pay.

These labour market changes notwithstanding, a large number of New Zealanders still hark back nostalgically to the romance of yesteryear’s heroic toilers. They admire the grainy photographs of long-dead coal-miners, their coal-dust-smeared faces wearing the same expressions as soldiers returning from the front. The problem for Jones and his ilk is that these photographs are most likely to be encountered on the white walls of a Remuera lawyer’s residence.

Heroic toilers, or workers without choices?

There’s a very good reason why a lawyer’s grandfather was a coal miner and she is not. Nobody in their right mind spends their life underground filling their lungs with coal-dust for a wage just big enough to pay the bills. Well-paid professionals may celebrate their forebears as working-class heroes, but the heroes themselves wanted something better for their offspring. Something vaguely resembling a choice.

The Coalition Government is, almost certainly, unaware of the sheer magnitude of the political project they have set in motion. It is nothing less than an attempt to rehabilitate the joys of blood, tears, toil, and sweat. An anachronistic effort to drive men back into the raw exploitative enterprises that gave rise to the hard-working, hard-drinking, emotionally unavailable “jokers” of New Zealand’s past.

It’s a forlorn hope. Weather-worn West Coast baby-boomers may applaud Shane Jones’ “Good-bye Freddy!”, screw-the-environment, hommage to the “rip-in, rip-out, rip-off” model of economic development, but not their long-since-moved-away offspring. These young New Zealanders, and their children, are more likely to be found marching up the main streets of the major cities in protest.

Then again, all this masculinist domination-of-nature rhetoric may be nothing more than political distraction. “Matua Shane” is forever ordering the “nephs” to get “off the couch” and find themselves a job. It’s a trope that plays well among NZ First voters.

But, there’s another way of telling this story. One could construct a narrative in which the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Government encourages foreign investors to take advantage of an under-utilised workforce. Of young, unskilled Māori, trapped in New Zealand’s poorest communities, harried by MSD, just waiting to be driven, as their grandfathers were driven in the 1950s and 60s, to fill the jobs vacated by upwardly-mobile Pakeha. Could this be the dirty little racist secret at the heart of the Coalition’s fast-tracked projects?

All of which poses a host of vexing questions concerning the Opposition parties’ response to the Coalition Government’s first year in office. Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori could hardly have asked for a larger, or more indefensible, target than the one their opponents have so generously provided.

The Opposition’s counter-narrative to the Coalition Government is obvious. New Zealanders are being invited to return to the historical era that preceded the full flowering of environmental consciousness. Back to the period of what might be called “heroic” national development, when rivers were damned, native forests felled, neighbourhoods levelled to make way for motorways, and everyone cheered on the “unstoppable” March of Progress.

This is a story that Labour, the Greens, and Te Pāti Māori are perfectly placed to tell together. Taking turns to expose the sheer madness of pretending that fifty years of history can be cast aside. Highlighting the sheer folly of proceeding as if the insights and advances of ecological science can, somehow, be ignored. Warning the Government that the legislative edifice constructed out of New Zealander’s growing environmental awareness cannot be dismantled without incurring significant political cost. And, finally, if it becomes clear that the Coalition Government isn’t listening, warning the voters that its reactionary programme can only be progressed by riding roughshod over the entire democratic process.

How else should the Fast-Track Approvals Bill be described?

The Treaty, too, cannot avoid being over-ridden. Because the Coalition’s great leap backwards cannot avoid returning New Zealand to the era in which te Tiriti o Waitangi was dismissed as “a simple nullity”. New Zealanders growing understanding of Te Ao Māori, and the critical role it is already playing in shaping the nation’s future, simply will not survive the reimposition of a nineteenth century capitalist narrative in which the ruthless destruction and exploitation of the natural world (along with the indigenous people who lived in harmony with it) is presented as both beneficial and cost-free.

Finally, the Opposition’s critique of the Coalition’s reactionary programme should clearly identify the two, closely-related, elements at its heart. The first is the Reactionary Right’s fear of, and resentment towards, the new social movements that have, over the course of the last 50 years, come to dominate the politics of Western nations. These new forces for social change include the civil rights movement and its demand for full racial equality; feminism; the movement for LGBTQI+ rights; and the worldwide effort to protect the biosphere. The Reactionary Right’s second great fear, itself a manifestation of humankind’s growing ecological awareness, is the scientific confirmation of anthropogenic global warming. Full acceptance of climate change is inimical to the Reactionary Right’s promotion of endless economic growth. Which is why, its ministers’ lip-service notwithstanding, the Coalition’s policies confirm its three constituent parties as radical climate change deniers.

If the three Opposition parties cannot organise an effective sharing of their urgent collective responsibility to expose both the madness and the menace embodied in this Coalition Government; if, together, they are unable to present themselves as the nation’s best defence against the dangerous policies of the Reactionary Right; and if they fail to demonstrate a capacity to work together effectively, in anticipation of forming an enlightened and democratic coalition government; then New Zealanders will not, and should not, vote for them.

In those circumstances, that part of the nation which still believes in rational and compassionate government will have to hope that, by the time the 2029 election rolls around, there is still enough left of Aotearoa-New Zealand to make it worth saving, and sufficient progressive Kiwis to effect the rescue.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack page on Wednesday, 9 October 2024.

Burning Down The House: Will The Greens Be The Death Of The Left?

Collateral Damage: For the Green Phoenix to be reborn, the funeral pyre so patiently assembled by its identity politicians over the course of many fractious years – but with growing intensity over the past three – first has to be ignited. The terrible probability, of course, is that, in setting themselves on fire, the Greens will end up immolating the hopes and aspirations of the whole progressive movement.

CAN THE GREENS get themselves back on track? Once a political party has made the decisive turn towards identity politics is there anything short of electoral disaster capable of inducing a change of direction? There are two problems here. The first relates to ideology, and is at least theoretically fixable. The second is about the political praxis of identity politics – how Greens actually perform politics. Sadly, to fix that you’d need a neutron bomb. [A particularly nasty kind of nuclear device that kills people, but leaves structures standing. – C.T.]

Tom Walker is a British comedian whose alter-ego, Johnathan Pie, has gained a worldwide audience by addressing the follies of – well – just about the whole cast of characters encompassed by the United Kingdom’s manifold political catastrophes. One of Walker’s latest offerings depicts the dire consequences for Pie (supposedly a journalist covering politics for one of the big television networks) that flow from his innocently allowing a participant in a pro-Brexit rally to take a selfie with him. It is a chillingly funny piece of satire – as applicable to the New Zealand Green Party as it is to the increasingly “woke” workplaces of the UK media.

The toxic culture satirised in Walker’s vignette is the inevitable result of interpreting events through the severely distorting prism of identity. Once embarked upon, this journey proceeds towards its inevitable denouement in utter organisational disintegration and failure.

One of the very first local instances of organisational collapse brought on by identity politics was the New Zealand University Students Association (NZUSA). Beginning in the late 1970s, the student movement’s activist minority persuaded NZUSA to restructure itself to reflect the growing strength of the so-called “New Social Movements” – especially Feminism, Anti-Racism and Gay Liberation.

NZUSA “Vice-Presidents” proliferated accordingly, and the May and August meetings of the organisation became ideological battlegrounds where the identarians fought to wrest control of the student movement from the Marxist Left. With every passing year, NZUSA drifted further and further away from its core functions until, in the early-1990s, the entire “politically correct” (originally a left-wing term) structure was demolished by the champions of “ordinary” (i.e. conservative) students.

A very similar fate awaited the highly successful aid organisation, CORSO, which was taken over by Maori nationalists and transformed into an instrument for promoting the early-1980s movement for “Maori Sovereignty”. Unsurprisingly, the tens-of-thousands of Pakeha donors who had built CORSO weren’t having a bar of it. They voted with the feet – and, more importantly, with their chequebooks. CORSO’s new managers received these defections as proof positive of the pervasiveness of Pakeha racism – even on the political Left. They may well have been right, but being politically correct wasn’t enough to save CORSO.

Similar challenges assailed the trade union movement, but the entrenched power of the traditional Left was more than equal to the task of stopping the identarians in their tracks. It took Bill Birch and the National Party to destroy what identity politics couldn’t dent. Interestingly, by the time the Employment Contracts Bill became law in 1991, a great many of those engaged in identity politics had already made their peace with the hegemonic ambitions of the neoliberal economic and political order. The latter was only too happy to see the activist energy formerly devoted to smashing capitalism diverted into building iwi corporations, placing upper-middle-class women on the boards of New Zealand’s biggest companies, and seizing the commercial opportunities of the pink dollar.

What is truly surprising about the Greens is how long a party more-or-less constructed out of the new social movements of the 1960s and 70s was able to resist the centrifugal forces inherent in identity politics. So long as the battle to save the global environment remained the central focus of the party, and so long as in fighting for the environment the Greens were willing to pit themselves against its deadliest foe – Global Capitalism – then the other social movements, while important, were unwilling to dilute the political potency of the party’s prime directive: Save the Planet!

In this respect, they were assisted immensely by the charismatic leadership of individuals like Rod Donald, Jeanette Fitzsimons, Sue Bradford, Keith Locke, Sue Kedgely and Nandor Tanczos. These individuals could not, however, hold at bay forever the claims advanced on behalf of Te Tiriti, gender equality and the rainbow agenda. Neither was it possible to drown out forever the siren song of parliamentary power, nor the ideological compromises necessary for its acquisition. If the Tangata Whenua, Third Wave Feminism and the Rainbow Community could make their peace with the realities of neoliberal globalism, then why not Green Environmentalism?

Could the Greens be argued out of their present, deeply compromised, political orientation? Theoretically, yes. Never before in human history has the need to resist environmental despoliation been more urgent or self-evident. If Capitalism is not defeated, then the fate of humankind is sealed. The evidence admits of no other conclusion: uncompromising resistance to the capitalists’ wilful destruction of the biosphere is the only rational political choice. A strong leader would have little difficulty in making out this case in a movement whose prime directive is – Save the Planet!

And, therein, lies the problem. Organisations which have fallen victim to the self-consuming logic of identity politics become viciously intolerant of anything even remotely hinting of strong leadership. Nothing twists together the component strands of identarian culture faster than the prospect of a single individual taking back control of the political narrative. And, almost always, those strands end up being twisted around the offending individual’s neck. What this process fosters is not leadership, but the very worst sort of “palace politics”. All trust is lost; every back becomes a target; nothing strong or inspirational is permitted to survive; and the hard-won wisdom of experience is dismissed with a snappy “Okay, Boomer!”

For the Green Phoenix to be reborn, the funeral pyre so patiently assembled by its identity politicians over the course of many fractious years – but with growing intensity over the past three – first has to be ignited. The terrible probability, of course, is that, in setting themselves on fire, the Greens will end up immolating the hopes and aspirations of the whole progressive movement.

And with the time remaining to save the planet so very short, that would be a crime.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 18 February 2020.

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.

Of “Safe Areas”, “SJWs”, And No One Caring About The Chiefs.

SJW? The abbreviation SJW stands for “Social Justice Warrior” and it is used pejoratively by the Right against those who defend the strictures of political correctness as the only effective means of combatting the use of hate speech and other discriminatory behaviours against women, minorities and the LGBTI community. SJWs are dismissed as self-validating attention-seekers using social media to advance socially progressive views as inauthentic as they are strident.

 

YOU CAN LEARN A LOT from blog comments. A recent posting on the Rugby Union’s report into the Ōkoroire Hot Pools incident attracted this terse response:

 

“I thought you would have heard the news, Chris. No one cares about people who take offence anymore. Maybe you could go to a safe corner till you feel less offended. Take an SJW with you.”

 

There’s a lot packed into these four short sentences, so bear with me while I attempt to unpack them.

 

Let’s begin with the commentator’s central assertion: “No one cares about people who take offence anymore.”

 

Taken at face value, this is obviously false. Just consider the Rugby Union’s swift response to the avalanche of criticism that came crashing down on its report. Given sponsorship’s vital role in the funding of professional rugby, the game’s administrators’ acute sensitivity to such sustained public criticism – especially in relation to the vexed issue of gender relations – is readily understood. That the Union felt obliged to announce that it’s seeking the help of anti-sexual-violence campaigner, Louise Nicholas, shows how much they needed to be seen to “care”.

 

At a deeper level, however, the commenter is more accurate than many New Zealanders might care to admit.

 

It is one of the proudest claims of the Baby Boom Generation: that it confronted the racism, sexism and homophobia of its parents’ generation; defeated it; and ushered in a new era of tolerance and social equality. The Boomers point to the Black Civil Rights struggle in the United States; the onrush of so-called “Second Wave” Feminism; and the Gay Rights Revolution of the 1970s and 80s. Without these “new social movements”, they claim, neither the dramatic and permanent shifts in social attitudes, nor the legislative reforms they inspired, would have been possible.

 

But the question seldom asked of the Baby Boomers is whether their much-vaunted changes were the product of an entire generation – or just a fraction of it. Just how deeply did the ideas of the new social movements penetrate? All the way down to the public bars and rugby club changing-rooms? Or only as far as the common-rooms of the universities; the editorial offices of the more respectable media outlets; and the screenwriting teams of movie and television studios?

 

Politically-speaking, it has long been the contention of the Right that the social changes of the 60s, 70s and 80s were only ever the project of a wafer-thin layer of left-wing activists. As proof they point to such contrary historical indicators as the white riots against Dr Martin Luther King’s attempt to racially integrate Chicago’s public housing in 1966; the defeat of the feminist-inspired Equal Rights Amendment in 1982; and, to use a New Zealand example, the 800,000-signature petition (the largest in the country’s history) against the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1986.

 

It is this conspiratorial version of the West’s recent social history (in defence of which, rightists love to quote the 1960s student radical, Rudi Dutschke’s, advice for comrades to undertake “the long march through the institutions”) that spawned the notion of “political correctness”. According to the Right, political correctness is the method by which left-wing elites impose their ideas about what is, and isn’t, acceptable political discourse on the rest of society.

 

The references in the comment quoted above to a “safe corner” and an “SJW” trace their origins to this Left-Right struggle over political correctness.

 

“Safe Areas” are spaces to which university students in the US are able to retreat when the language and behaviour of the politically incorrect on campus is deemed to have grown too confronting and/or dangerous. Derided by the Right for pandering to the alleged preciousness of the students making use of them, safe areas are also assailed for implicitly curtailing the rights of those from whom their users are seeking refuge.

 

The abbreviation SJW stands for “Social Justice Warrior” and it is used pejoratively by the Right against those who defend the strictures of political correctness as the only effective means of combatting the use of hate speech and other discriminatory behaviours against women, minorities and the LGBTI community. SJWs are dismissed as self-validating attention-seekers using social media to advance socially progressive views as inauthentic as they are strident.

 

Unpacked like this, our commenter’s observations offer us a clear insight into the Right’s estimation of the Ōkoroire Hot Pools incident, and the Rugby Union’s response. The key suggestion on offer is that any and all offence taken as a result of the interaction between the stripper “Scarlette” and the Chiefs at Ōkoroire is, or should be, a matter of indifference to those mainstream New Zealanders who remain unconvinced by political correctness, safe areas, SJW’s – and left-wing writers. He further assumes that these unoffended Kiwis constitute a clear majority.

 

The scary thing is – I’m not so sure he’s wrong.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 13 September 2016.

Sour Fruit: Why I’m Not Pinning My Hopes On ESRA.

What Sort Of Tree Are They Planting? The genetic make-up of ESRA reflects the personal histories of its creators. Its core inheritance comes from the Maoist Left of the 1970s. There are also genes from the unemployed workers and Maori nationalist movements of the 1980s. Still more hail from the pacifist, radical feminist and Green philosophies. Finally, there is a generous contribution from the academic Marxist gene-banks located in the political science and sociology departments of the nation’s universities.

 

IS IT TOO SOON to pronounce judgement upon ESRA? Economic & Social Research Aotearoa has only just been launched. So, surely, we should give it a little time to show us what it can do? Except that we already know what ESRA will do, because we already know what ESRA is. ESRA is a Far-Left “think tank” whose contribution to the formulation and implementation of broadly acceptable progressive policies will range from negligible to nil.

 

Unfair? I don’t think so.

 

If I were to show you the first fragile leaves of a lemon sapling, and ask whether or not you wanted a lemon tree in your garden, I very much doubt that you would say: “Oh, let’s not be hasty. That might not be a lemon tree after all. Or, if it is a lemon tree, it might prove to be one of a very special kind – one that does not bear sour fruit.” More likely your answer would depend on how you feel about lemons.

 

If you like lemon trees, and lemons, you’d say: “Oh, by all means, let it grow.” If you don’t like lemons, you’d tell me to pull it out.

 

Well I don’t like lemons. At least, I don’t like lemon trees that take up space and consume resources I would much rather allocate to other plants.

 

The genetic make-up of ESRA reflects the personal histories of its creators. Its core inheritance comes from the Maoist Left of the 1970s. There are also genes from the unemployed workers and Maori nationalist movements of the 1980s. Still more hail from the pacifist, radical feminist and Green philosophies. Finally, there is a generous contribution from the academic Marxist gene-banks located in the political science and sociology departments of the nation’s universities.

 

Perhaps the founders of ESRA are hoping to harvest some hybrid vigour from these waning ideological strains. Certainly their individual evolutions offer scant cause for optimism. The latest historical research paints Mao Zedong as a monstrous figure whose “Great Leap Forward” and “Cultural Revolution” cost the lives of millions of Chinese workers and peasants. The unemployed workers’ movement collapsed in ideological and personal rancour even as Rogernomics and Ruthanasia were tearing the New Zealand working-class to pieces. The so-called “new social movements” (pacifism, anti-racism, feminism, environmentalism) proved easy meat for the assimilative/transformative powers of neoliberalism. Second Wave feminism was reduced to tallying-up the number of female company directors. Maori Nationalism turned into the Iwi Leaders Group. Green became the new Pink. And academic Marxism remained practically impenetrable to anyone not writing a doctoral thesis.

 

It’s not a whakapapa that inspires much confidence. Simply keeping so many unruly horses pulling in the same direction will require the wisdom of a sage and the patience of a saint. There are many on the Left, however, who’ll happily attest to ESRA’s founding mother, Sue Bradford, being over-endowed with both those qualities. All I’m prepared to say is: she’ll need them!

 

Sue has called ESRA a “left-wing think-tank”. Indeed, she wrote her doctoral thesis on the desirability and practicality of establishing just such a beast. Unfortunately for the NZ Left, (which desperately needs a think-tank of its own to match the Right’s Maxim Institute and NZ Initiative) ESRA is nothing of the sort.

 

What stands out the most about the historical phenomenon of the think-tank is its unswervingly practical focus. At the end of World War II the Right stood discredited: its political leadership by their affinities with the defeated fascists and Nazis; its economic theories by the multiple lessons and legacies of the Great Depression. Social-democracy, on the other hand, armed with the economic and social insights of Keynesianism, was in the ideological ascendant. By the early-1970s, it was poised to put an end to capitalism as generally understood. Something had to be done.

 

The principal weapon of the Right’s ideological fightback was the think-tank. Not only did it relentlessly critique the social-democratic assumptions of the era, but it produced a never-ending stream of practical suggestions for action. The process was as simple as it was effective: commission a report on an institution, or a practice, you wish to change. Release the report to the media and make its author available for interviews and public meetings. Arrange private meetings with sympathetic politicians and/or journalists where practical advice can be given and received. Repeat as required until a parliamentary majority is assembled in favour of your “reform”.

 

After more than 40 years, the Right’s refinement of the think-tank “weapon” has developed to the point where a body called the American Legislative Exchange Council is able to supply right-wing state legislators with pre-drafted “model” legislation. Committed to advancing the “fundamental principles of free-market enterprise, limited government, and federalism at the state level through a nonpartisan public-private partnership of America's state legislators, members of the private sector and the general public” ALEC makes the work of the Right’s parliamentary foot-soldiers almost too easy.

 

If this was the sort of tree Sue and her comrades were planting this weekend, I’d be cheering them on. Sadly, they are committed to an organisational model that seeks to bring about radical economic and social change without enlisting ESRA as a skilled participant in the day-to-day, down-and-dirty, cut-and-thrust business of political influence-peddling. But that is what a think-tank is. It’s what it does. Aspiring to be a think-tank that doesn’t get its hands dirty, is like aspiring to be a prostitute who doesn’t sell sex.

 

It’s a tremendous pity, but ESRA is a lemon.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Saturday, 3 September 2016.

The Arrogant Left

It's for your own good, Mr McMurphy: The ice-cold "charity" of Ken Kesey's Nurse Ratched brilliantly exemplifies the key political functions of the managerial-professional class: infantilising the working-class and marginalising their representatives on the traditional Left.

FOR SOMEONE WRITING from a left-wing perspective, Rob Salmond’s "Poll of Polls" makes dismal reading. Reinstated, after a lengthy hiatus, on the "Pundit" blogsite, Rob’s scientific homogenisation of the findings of the four major media polls (Colmar Brunton, Reid Research, Roy Morgan and DigiPoll) illustrates all-too-graphically just how vast the ideological gulf between Right and Left has become.

Something, or someone, must be responsible for this widening gap: something or someone so objectionable that the majority, rather than be counted among the Left’s supporters, is prepared to overlook the lengthening list of right-wing policy failures. That willingness to turn a blind eye is now so pronounced that just under two-thirds of those most recently questioned by Roy Morgan’s pollsters agreed that the country was "headed in the right direction".

This is an extraordinary figure. New Zealand is only slowly hauling itself out of a deep recession. Job insecurity is rife; mortgagee sales are rising; the cost of living keeps going up and up – and yet, all of these difficulties notwithstanding, 65 percent of Roy Morgan’s respondents think we’re on the right track.

What is it about the Left’s beliefs, behaviour and overall policy prescription that has driven it below the 40 percent line on Rob Salmond’s Poll of Polls graph? And what is Labour doing (or not doing) that keeps it trailing behind National by a morale-sapping 21.1 percentage points?

At the heart of all these questions, I believe, lies the problem of left-wing arrogance. It’s the problem that has kept me firmly on the outside of the Left’s inner-circles for the best part of forty years. Even as a teenager (when, supposedly, I was most susceptible to the allure of the Left’s grand, all-encompassing theories) I found the superior attitude of left-wingers intolerable.

Like Plato’s ring of invisibility, Marxist-Leninist ideology seemed to grant its adepts the power to sin with impunity. The rest of humanity were regarded as mere raw material – objects upon which they were free to work without ethical restraint. The crimes of their enemies were shrilly condemned, while those committed by their friends and allies were passed over in silence.

This superior attitude was by no means restricted to the multitude of communist sects. If anything, it was even more pronounced among the radical followers of the so-called New Social Movements: Anti-Racism, Environmentalism, Feminism, Gay Rights. Like the heroes of the 1969 cult-movie Easy Rider, these "new" leftists saw themselves as an enlightened but despised minority trying to do right in a world populated overwhelmingly by the ignorant and hostile.

Even today, this deep contempt for the majority remains clearly evident in the Left’s language. To question the ideology of Maori nationalism is to reveal oneself as a racist "redneck". Working-class communities attempting to defend their jobs from the demands of environmentalists are dismissed as "feral" or "white trash". The slightest challenge to the sacred precepts of Orthodox Feminism will provoke torrents of vitriolic abuse.

Traditional Labour politics was very different. The premise here was that a working-class party can only be the political vehicle for working-class needs and aspirations. Labour politicians, if they were worth a damn, saw themselves as nothing more than the frothy margins of the popular tide: markers of the masses’ reach. For these sort of leftists the will of the majority was sacred.

It was only when Labour ceased believing in the wisdom and decency of the majority that its hold on popular affection began to weaken. It broke altogether when, in the mid-1980s, the brute arrogance of Roger Douglas and his fellow neoliberals made common cause with the smug superiority of the managerial-professional New Leftists who had taken over the party.

Labour only rebuilt its relationship with voters by aligning itself with the vast anti-neoliberal majority of the 1990s. Once in power, however, the parliamentary party’s distaste for the values and beliefs of its own supporters grew more obvious with every passing year. By the end of its term Labour’s distaste had matured into open contempt.

In 2008 many Labour voters happily returned the complement.

Nearly two years on and Labour may talk about polices for "the many – not the few" but it’s the few, not the many, who are writing them.

The Left’s poll-results will only start improving when it stops trying to lead the people – and starts following them.

This essay was originally published in The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 16 July 2010.