The Extinction Of Rebellion.

Not Even Close, Comrades! Occupy made it all the way to New Zealand, but its fate here did not differ substantially from its fate everywhere else around the world. The political praxis of identity politics, its extraordinary disintegrative power, made the organisation of any kind of credible threat to the status quo impossible.

JOHN MINTO IS RIGHT, New Zealand needs nothing more urgently than a mass movement committed to ending the wealth crisis. He is right, too, that those who can have a moral duty to do something about the obscene maldistribution of wealth in this country and across the planet. Nor would I quibble with the list of those we cannot and/or should not rely upon to intervene – i.e. the principal economic and political beneficiaries of wealth inequality, and the mainstream political parties. As John says: “only a broad, well-organised people’s movement will be able to end the wealth crisis.”

Where I suspect John and I would part company, however, is over the question of whether a “broad, well-organised people’s movement” is any longer achievable in the New Zealand of 2023.

John reckons it is. He cites the people’s movements of the past as proof of what can be achieved when New Zealanders get organised – and then get active. Certainly, the broad mass movements he cites: women’s suffrage; halting sporting contacts with apartheid South Africa; opposing the war in Vietnam, abolishing conscription, outlawing discrimination on the basis of sex and sexuality; declaring New Zealand nuclear-free; were all successful in achieving their aims. Unfortunately, all of John’s examples peaked around four (or more) decades ago.

The only appreciably younger mass movement I recall achieving its objective is the early twenty-first century campaign to keep genetically-engineered organisms out of New Zealand. There were others – most notably the mass movement against the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the mass movement against the Trans-Pacific Partnership – but they did not achieve their objectives.

Some may object that I have left out John’s reference to the 1975 Māori Land March, and the protest activity at Raglan, Bastion Point and Ihumatao. (To which I would add the impressive hikoi against the Foreshore & Seabed legislation of April 2004.) My reasons for doing so turn on John’s use of the crucial qualifier, “broad”. Māori have been successful in achieving a great many of their political, economic and cultural objectives, but these have, perforce, been sectional victories: “by Māori, for Māori”. As such, they do not fit John’s paradigm of the mass movement extending across class, race and gender boundaries to engage the broadest possible cross-section of the New Zealand population.

It is precisely the immense difficulties encountered by those attempting to surmount the barriers of class, race and gender identity that leads me to question the practicality of John’s appeal for a mass movement against the wealth crisis. The “Occupy” movement which swept across the English-speaking world in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09 serves as a tragic test case for whether “broad, well-organised people’s movements” can any longer be constructed.

Certainly, it is difficult to imagine circumstances more conducive to the formation of a mass-movement against the obscene maldistribution of wealth than the GFC. Nor is it possible to fault the inspired slogan of the “1 Percent vs the 99 percent”. If any formula could generate unity across the broadest possible cross-section of society, then including on your side of the barricades everyone except the tiny group of super-exploiters memorably referred to by President Theodore Roosevelt as “the malefactors of great wealth” should have been the formula to do it.

And it did do it – but only briefly. Those who rallied to the cause, expecting to find an organisation with a clear statement of aims and objectives, a constitution, elected leaders, and sections dedicated to communications, fund-raising, and keeping the thousands of people eager to get involved in “Occupy” occupied, found something else entirely.

Occupy’s originators, activists drawn from the many manifestations of what people call, for want of a better description, “identity politics”, had no intention of building a movement on the organisational principles of the Boy Scouts of America. There were no elected leaders, speechifying was frowned upon, and rather than applaud or cheer, people were encouraged to wave their hands in the air – but only after they had “checked their privilege”.

Entirely unsurprisingly, most of the people encountering this brave new world of intersectional anarchy turned around and walked the other way. The authorities, initially terrified of this burgeoning political movement, received the reports of their informers and very soon realised that Occupy posed no threat at all. They waited until the Occupy gatherings were reduced to a fractious remnant of their former selves, and then sent in the pepper-spray, tear-gas and billy-clubs to, once again, make the world safe for the 1 Percent.

Occupy made it all the way to New Zealand, but its fate here did not differ substantially from its fate everywhere else around the world. The political praxis of identity politics, its extraordinary disintegrative power, made the organisation of any kind of credible threat to the status quo impossible. Ruling classes, throughout history, have always understood the effectiveness of the “divide and conquer” strategy. In the aftermath of the GFC, however, the “1 Percent” were astounded to discover that its deployment would not be necessary. The “Left” (or what passed for it in the 2000s) was doing it for them.

It is interesting to note that the mass movements cited by John conform neatly to the mode of mass political interventions listed by historian Michael King in his Penguin History of New Zealand. He mentions the visits of America’s President Johnson in 1966 and Vice-President Agnew in 1970. He covers-off the angry reaction to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and recalls the student protests against the installation of the US Omega spy navigation system near Blenheim. Mentioned, too, is the mass campaign to “Save Manapouri”.

Missing from John’s and Michael’s lists, however, is any reference to the movement responsible for organising the 1960s’ and 70s’ most impressive demonstrations: the biggest and broadest mass movement of them all; the trade unions. Certainly, one of the largest demonstrations of the late-1960s and early-1970s coincided with what was effectively the half-day general strike of 12 May 1970, which managed to shut down most of the capital city’s industry and infrastructure. On that day, tens-of-thousands of workers and their families gathered outside Parliament to protest the soaring cost of living.

In the thick of that massive gathering was CARP – the Campaign Against Rising Prices. Formed in 1966 in Auckland, and 1967 in Wellington, CARP was a radical outgrowth of the Housewives Association. It was spurred to action by the abolition of government subsidies on key food items such as bread and milk. Led by the wives of trade unionists from both the private and public sectors, CARP became a household name for the best part of a decade, and a thorn in the side of both National and Labour governments.

New Zealand’s working families are again experiencing severe cost of living pressures. A movement dedicated to easing those pressures, organised by those most directly affected, and unafraid to take their message directly to the powers-that-be, would be a most welcome development.

Except, of course, the New Zealand of 2023 is not the New Zealand of 1966-67. A Housewives Association would be laughed off the political stage in 2023. It is also true to say that the sort of working-class communities that gave birth to political organisations like CARP, no longer exist. Poorly-paid wage-workers by necessity, de-unionised, ill-housed, isolated, with those forced to live outside the workforce under the constant surveillance of the state’s welfare agencies, the working-class women of today would find in difficult to even conceive of such autonomous and uncompromising interventions.

Although, to be fair, they would probably find it easier than the Council of Trade Unions!

It’s hard to mount a sincere fight against the wealth crisis when your union boss is taking home a six-figure salary. Hard, too, to construct a “broad, well-organised people’s movement” when those same people are immediately divided into their respective identity groups, discouraged from indulging in excessive individual assertion (i.e. leadership) and forbidden from applauding it.

Much and all as I agree with John, that a mass mobilisation against the malefactors of great wealth is what we need, I cannot see how it could be done.

I remain transfixed by the tragic image of all those revolutionary hands refusing to come together.

They’re not waving, John, they’re drowning.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 2 June 2023.

Why We (Don't) Fight.

The Grand Narrative Of Progressivism: Touchstone of post-war progressivism was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations’ General Assembly in December 1948. Though the nations of the Soviet bloc (along with Saudi Arabia and South Africa) abstained from voting to ratify the Declaration, they did not, significantly, vote against it. In the baleful afterglow of the terrible events of the Second World War, no country dared set its face against the principles of human equality and human rights for which so many millions had given their lives. 

LIKE THE CELEBRATED DOG that didn’t bark, the New Zealand Left is proving itself a poor protector of the exploited. A housing crisis on the present scale, occurring fifty years ago, would have generated massive resistance. The trade unions would have been on their hind legs. The churches would have been on their hind legs. The students’ associations would have been on their hind legs. The Maori Council would have been on its hind legs. Consumer groups would have been on their hind legs. Hell – even the Labour Party would have been on its hind legs! Of those groups, only the mainstream churches (the Salvation Army in particular) continue to fight the good fight. What has happened to “progressive” New Zealand? Why don’t we fight?

The most obvious answer is that, fifty years ago, progressive New Zealand agreed about a great deal more than it does today. And what it disagreed about was not permitted to get in the way of putting wrongs to right. Liberal Christians were most unlikely to have much in common with the ideological precepts of the Moscow-aligned communists of the Socialist Unity Party, but that didn’t prevent them from fighting the good fight alongside them in the struggle against the Vietnam War, apartheid in South Africa, and atmospheric nuclear testing. With hindsight, it is easy to see that it was progressive New Zealand’s willingness to agree to disagree over issues peripheral to the specific issues in play that made the creation of mass protest movements possible.

What was it, then, that progressive New Zealand agreed about? In its essence, the moral consensus within which Liberal Christians and Moscow-aligned communists were able to make common cause found its most eloquent expression in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations’ General Assembly in December 1948. Though the nations of the Soviet bloc (along with Saudi Arabia and South Africa) abstained from voting to ratify the Declaration, they did not, significantly, vote against it. In the baleful afterglow of the terrible events of the Second World War, no country dared set its face against the principles of human equality and human rights for which so many millions had given their lives.

Seven years after the adoption of the Declaration, the Museum of Modern Art in New York organised a ground-breaking photographic exhibition, later turned into a book, entitled The Family of Man. This astounding collection of images, and the quotations accompanying them, made clear the fundamental kinship of all human-beings. In his prologue to the 1955 exhibition, the poet Carl Sandburg wrote:

To the question, “What will the story be of the Family of Man across the near or far future?” some would reply, “For the answers read if you can the strange and baffling eyes of youth.”

        There is only one man in the world
        and his name is All Men.
        There is only one woman in the world
        and her name is All Women.
        There is only one child in the world
        and the child’s name is All Children.

In the face of napalm-engulfed Vietnamese villages, the racist-inspired massacre at Sharpeville and the deadly radioactive fallout of atmospheric nuclear testing, these were the ideals which progressive New Zealanders did everything within their power to advance and defend.

By the early 1980s, however, the broad progressive unity of the immediate post-war period was dissolving rapidly. The principal solvent came in the form of the “new social movements” – most particularly the movements born out of the struggle for racial and sexual equality. If “mankind” was a single family of equals, then certain members of that family – most obviously, white, male, heterosexuals – were clearly more equal than others. Increasingly, human emancipation came to be seen as a zero-sum game. If oppressed identities (blacks, females, gays) were to win their rights, then those responsible for their oppression (whites, males, heterosexuals) were going to have to give up some of (most of?) their privileges.

Was it just one of those remarkable historical coincidences that “identity politics” and “neoliberalism” advanced together on the global political stage? It is certainly the case that the advance of one almost always hastened the advance of the other. The crushing of the post-war Keynesian economic order and the destruction of the institutional infrastructure it had spawned – most particularly the suppression of organised labour – cleared the field for the advance of identity politics. For the best part of four decades, identity politics has occupied the ideological space cleared by neoliberal capitalism’s undermining of the progressive “grand narrative” which inspired the Universal Declaration of Human Rights possible, and turned The Family of Man into an international best-seller.

Never to be re-issued. At least, that’s how it appeared when neoliberal capitalism’s global system faltered and nearly fell in the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09. The Occupy Wall Street protests, which the GFC spawned, soon morphed into the worldwide Occupy movement. By creating the revolutionary dichotomy of the “One Percent” versus the “Ninety-Nine Percent”, Occupy opened up the possibility of building an international mass movement for radical change.

As events unfolded, it soon became clear that what was possible, and what was actually unfolding on the ground, were at serious odds with one another. The fractious tribes of identity politics simply could not agree to disagree. In practice, their “big idea” – intersectionality – turned out to be one enormous intersection at which ideological traffic, arriving from every direction, snarled and snarled itself into gridlocked ineffectuality. Idealistic kids, inspired by the 1/99% meme, and eager to join the revolution, were confronted with a paralysing Discordia. Not only did it seem that they were being asked to give up their “privilege/s”, but also their sanity. They left the Occupy encampments as disgusted as they were disillusioned. The forces of neoliberal order swatted away what was left like so many buzzing flies.

In the aftermath of the Occupy debacle, many have been moved to pose one of those diabolical questions that we should probably never ask – let alone answer: “If the powers-that-be had set out to create an ideological system designed to render the progressive mass movements of the past utterly unrepeatable; while ensuring that any attempt to confront neoliberal capitalism with a Corbynesque “For the Many, Not the Few” electoral agenda, is instantly paralysed by bitter and protracted factional strife; could they ever have come up with a political poison as effective as identity politics?”

If the progressive dog refuses any longer to bark – even at a moral crisis as profound as the housing poverty which is tearing the New Zealand working-class apart – it is only because so many identities have been telling him for so long to keep his privileged mouth shut.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 26 March 2021.

The Whole World Is Waking