Conservatives and Revolutionaries: Together At Last!

Peaceful Protest? The inescapable problem for the defenders of the occupation of Parliament Grounds is how to explain the extraordinary violence of the twenty-third day of the protest. They manage it, however, by employing the oldest explanation in politics: the minority responsible for the fires and the violence were in no way representative of the overwhelming majority of the protesters.

WHAT HAS HAPPENED to the conservatives and the revolutionaries of this country? How is it possible that these two groups, separated by ideology, are nevertheless equally persuaded that the occupiers of Parliament Grounds were ordinary, decent New Zealanders engaged in a political protest indistinguishable from a host of similar demonstrations scattered across New Zealand’s recent history?

The most obvious answer is that on both sides of the political spectrum there is a powerful ideological and emotional need to represent the protest as neither threatening nor unusual. Both conservatives and revolutionaries have a common interest in constructing a narrative in which the “innocence” of the protesters, and the “guilt” of the Government, is indisputable.

What could that common interest possibly be?

One possible answer is that the protest offered spectacular proof that “the people” still possessed the power of independent action. As the NZ Herald’s John Roughan put it: “I was proud that a demonstrable minority of New Zealanders have not been persuaded that lockdowns and vaccine mandates are a proportionate response to this virus.” 

That not everyone was willing to follow the science, or put the interests of ordinary New Zealanders ahead of the demands of business lobbyists and pundits convinced they knew more than the experts, was clearly a comfort to Roughan. That the protesters were happy to parade their ontological certainty on Parliament Grounds was even more comforting. The protest might be ignored by the Prime Minister (and all the other party leaders) but it could not be denied.

Roughan’s column is remarkable in many ways – not least by how far its author is willing to diverge from principles usually held dear to the hearts of most conservatives. On how many other occasions, one wonders, has he congratulated the Police for ignoring the expectations of “politicians, media, and the public who think law is something to be strictly enforced at all times”? Mass defiance of the Rule of Law is not the sort of behaviour usually tolerated by conservatives!

Nor is it usual for conservatives to downplay the serious harassment (up to and including physical assault) of innocent citizens going about their lawful business. Roughan refers to the many recorded incidents of Wellingtonians being accosted in the street, by protesters visibly incensed by their attempts to protect themselves from infection, as nothing more than “scoffing at people in masks”. Such minimisation of the actual harm experienced is, sadly, essential if one’s purpose is to maintain the fiction that this was a “peaceful protest”.

It is instructive to compare the description of these same incidents offered by two Marxist revolutionaries, Daphne Whitmore and Don Franks. In an opinion-piece posted on their Redline blog, they say: “There were unpleasant scenes reported of scruffy looking individuals walking on the streets of the city shouting at them for wearing a mask.” 

This description is a definite improvement on Roughan’s “scoffing”. But, although the writers concede that for some the experience was “deeply traumatising”, they also explain how “[m]any more just wandered on, ignoring the rants as you do with anyone who seems a bit unhinged.”

Crucially, they then add: “Those interactions, well away from the parliament lawns were then conflated with the occupation as a whole.” Once again, the purpose is to inoculate the occupation from charges that it was anything other than a “peaceful protest”.

The inescapable problem for both Roughan and Whitmore/Franks is how to explain the extraordinary violence of the twenty-third day of the occupation. They manage it, however, by employing the oldest explanation in politics: the minority responsible for the fires and the violence were in no way representative of the overwhelming majority of the protesters.

Roughan further refines his argument by congratulating the Police Commissioner, Andrew Coster, for the way he dealt with this alien violent element – presenting his final decision to clear Parliament Grounds as a “relief” for all the peaceful protesters, who dutifully packed-up and went home.

Whitmore/Franks are more straightforward. “After 23 days camped outside parliament the End the Mandates protest was stormed by 500 riot police. A few hundred hardcore protesters fought back all day, and around a hundred were arrested.”

It was the Cops wot done it.

At the heart of Roughan’s argument one senses a deep resentment that the views of persons like himself, powerful White conservative males, did not prove decisive in determining the Labour Government’s handling of the Covid-19 Pandemic. Such men are not used to being ignored. The inconvenient fact that the young, female Prime Minister who declined to accept their advice went on to be re-elected in a landslide victory only rubbed salt in their wounds.

It isn’t the fact that Roughan and his ilk represent a minority that galls them (the ruling-class and its explainers will always be a minority) it is that they have been required to share the fate of the minorities which, when power was in conservative hands, they were happy to ignore. The person they blame for this insupportable state of affairs is Jacinda Ardern:

“Once the grounds were cleared, the Prime Minister addressed the nation. She was not conciliatory. She said the violence had vindicated her refusal to engage with the protest for three weeks. She said the occupation would not define us.”

Roughan’s final paragraph is telling:

“As Prime Minister in a pandemic, she ultimately decides just about everything we can do. She can decide to shut shops, close schools, cancel events, keep us confined to home. She even decides what is best for our health. But she doesn’t get to decide what defines us. Not all of us.”

Seldom has a conservative writer provided his readers with such a clear view of his politics – nor one so chilling.

The clue to Whitmore’s and Franks’ uncompromising position on this issue is contained in this paragraph:

“Ostensibly pro working class groups painted the occupation as entirely negative and ‘reactionary’, with zero recognition of the social and economic deprivation which had driven many protesters to participate. Significant sections of End the Mandate protesters included trades people and health professionals who had lost their jobs. That is what drove them to arrive at parliament with their families, demanding audience with the government.”

What neither writer attempts to explain, however, is why so many other working-class New Zealanders – Māori and Pasifika working-class New Zealanders in particular – who are also the victims of “social and economic deprivation”, fought Covid by organising collective action and mutual support. These were the “essential workers” who stayed at their posts throughout the lockdowns because, if they hadn’t, thousands of their fellow citizens would have died.

The protesters on Parliament Grounds did not “lose their jobs” – they gave them up because they refused to accept the social obligation of vaccination, and then, selfishly, refused to accept the consequences of that refusal.

Had the “Freedom Village” been erected in the name of social justice, by workers determined to build a better world. Had the protesters not blocked city streets, assaulted passers-by, and prevented schools, universities, businesses and courts from functioning. Had they not swung nooses and issued death threats. Then their brutal suppression by 500 police officers would, indeed, have been shameful.

But, the hard, cold truth of the matter is that this protest was a manifestation of narcissistic, sociopathic, passive-aggressive and violent behaviour unequalled in New Zealand political history. It was a gathering of the deluded and the deranged. The only freedom sought was the freedom to ignore the obligations attached to being fully human. And that is pretty much the definition of “reactionary”.

No matter how hard Daphne Whitmore and Don Franks might wish it otherwise, a revolution by proxy just isn’t possible.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 8 March 2022.

There’s Something Happening Here – Again.

Time For Another Change: The social-liberal revolution in which New Zealand seems certain to be engulfed will be even more wrenching than the neoliberal revolution which spawned it, and which it so closely resembles. Its purpose is straightforward: to forestall the political mobilisation of neoliberal capitalism’s economic casualties by aggravating the racial, sexual, and gender issues dividing them.

ONE OF THE BENEFITS of getting older is that you get a feel for when something really bad is happening. The experiences of youth, especially those events leading to profound societal change, tend to be so vivid that those who live through them become acutely sensitised to any experience which feels even remotely similar. That is why I feel obliged to say that, from the events occurring all around us in 2021, I am picking up a truly terrifying feeling of déjà vu.

The last time I experienced the same ominous feeling that something bad was unfolding: something that would change the lives of thousands of New Zealanders forever, and for the worse; something that could not be stopped; it was the early 1980s.

Yes, that’s right, the early 1980s was the period in which the ideology of neoliberalism first began sinking its roots into New Zealand society. It wasn’t called “neoliberalism” then, it’s promoters preferring to identify its goal as the establishment of a “free market”. To achieve this goal “more-market policies” were required. Thinking back to the “New Left” movements of the 1960s and 70s, political journalists took to calling this radical movement towards “economic freedom” the “New Right”.

What made this new ideology so chilling was that its effects were already apparent in the two countries with which New Zealanders (and Australians) most closely identify: The United Kingdom and the United States. Margaret Thatcher had been elected in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in 1980. Free Market policies were, therefore, bound to make their way here. In Australasia, the dominant ideas of London and Washington are culturally irresistible.

As Editor of the University of Otago student newspaper Critic in 1981, I felt obliged to publish articles from students excited by the radical new economic theories percolating through the academic community. It was disconcerting for those of us positioned on the extreme-left of social-democracy. We, too, wanted a shake-up in the way New Zealand’s economy was run – but not like this.

With growing unease, I began to see the post-war Keynesian status-quo coming under fire from both the New Left and the New Right. What I could not see, however, was the New Left winning this intensifying ideological struggle. Not with the USA and the UK weighing-in on what looked like the New Right’s unabashed call for a return to the laissez-faire capitalism of the nineteenth century.

The most important aspect to grasp about the success of the neoliberal revolution in New Zealand is that the revolutionaries were located overwhelmingly in the senior ranks of the public service, academia, and the news media – most notably in the Reserve Bank, the Treasury, and the business press. In these locations, they were ideally placed to exert a steady (and ultimately decisive) influence over the two groups essential to translating neoliberal ideology into practical action “on the ground”: politicians and business leaders.

That the Labour Party ended up being the vector for neoliberalism was due, firstly, to the exhaustion of Keynesian economics as a source for policies that hadn’t already been tested to destruction; and, secondly, to the pig-headed refusal of the National Prime Minister, Rob Muldoon, to embrace the New Right policies of Thatcher and Reagan. Labour’s politicians were desperate for a policy template they could offer up as an alternative to Muldoonism, and were delighted to discover that the people whose help and support they would most need to make it happen – the Reserve Bank and Treasury – were keen as mustard to get the revolution started.

Hence the sense of déjà vu. All around me I perceive the same secretive re-positioning of pieces on the board that characterised the early 1980s. There’s the same apprehension that within the public service, academia and the news media, the key ideological transitions have already been made – at least where they count. Once again, the two essential adjuncts to translating a rapidly consolidating ideological orthodoxy into practical “reform” on the ground – a willing political party (or parties) and a facilitative business sector – are already in place.

All that’s been missing is the “trigger” event: the equivalent of the Snap Election called so foolishly by Rob Muldoon in June 1984. Then came the unprecedented tragedy of the 2019 Christchurch Mosque Massacre, closely followed by the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic. If the next policy revolution is not already in motion, then the Sixth Labour Government is certainly getting ready to turn the key in the ignition. It would have been the purest folly to let these crises go to waste!

The social-liberal revolution in which New Zealand seems certain to be engulfed will be even more wrenching than the neoliberal revolution which spawned it, and which it so closely resembles. Its purpose is straightforward: to forestall the political mobilisation of neoliberal capitalism’s economic casualties by aggravating the racial, sexual, and gender issues dividing them.

Essentially, the social-liberal revolution has been unleashed to protect the socio-economic interests of the professional and managerial class (PMC) which administers neoliberal society. If neoliberalism was the ideological expression of a capitalist ruling-class under pressure, and its fundamental objective was to smash organised labour and break the power of the working-class, then social-liberalism is the necessary ideological adaptation of the PMC, whose role it is to keep the working-class smashed and broken.

Like neoliberalism, social-liberalism can only be imposed from the top down. This is because all historical precedent suggests that the strongest impulses of those on the receiving end of economic and social injustice is towards unity and solidarity. It requires constant, conscious effort on the part of the ruling-class and its enablers to break up that unity and unravel that solidarity. Hence the need to obscure the common interests of working-class Māori and Pakeha; working-class men and women; working-class cis and LGBT. The elevation of identity over class is the critical cultural project at the heart of the social-liberal revolution.

Many of those destined to play a role in the social-liberal revolution will recoil from this analysis. They do not see themselves as facilitating the continuing upward transfer of wealth from the poor to the One Percent. Quite the reverse. They would position themselves firmly on the Left. Subsuming the struggles against racism, sexism, and gender inequality to those of class, they would argue, is reactionary. If the Sixth Labour Government is prepared to legislate in favour of what the Right calls “Wokeism”, then that just confirms the genuine progressivism of Jacinda Ardern and her colleagues.

What I would invite these aggrieved social-liberals to do is engage in a little comparative historical research.

Compare the early mass struggles of Māori against the failure of Pakeha society to honour the Treaty of Waitangi (back in the 1970s and early-1980s the preferred slogan was “The Treaty Is A Fraud!”) with the wealthy, iwi-based corporations, and the powerful iwi leaders’ group, that have emerged from the Crown-controlled Treaty settlement process of the past 30 years.

Contrast the United Women’s Conventions of the 70s, the mass campaign to reform the abortion laws, and the trade union-led struggle for the Working Women’s Charter of the early-1980s, with the current neoliberal indicator of female equality – the number of women seated around the boardroom tables of New Zealand’s largest corporations.

Turn the same spotlight on the contemporary trade union movement. Compare the lively public debates of the 400+ private-sector working-class delegates who gathered in Wellington for the annual conferences of the Federation of Labour, with the tiny, behind-closed-doors, biennial leadership conclaves of the “middle-class” public sector unions” (PSA, PPTA, NZEI, NZNO) that dominate the Council of Trade Unions.

It has always been a sure-fire way of determining whether or not you are involved in something genuinely progressive, or are simply promoting the interests of a narrow elite: pose the classic revolutionary question. Who? Whom?

Progressive revolutionary change bubbles up from below as the consequence of ordinary people transforming the unity and solidarity they have developed while fighting injustice into mass political action. If the only people to actually benefit from your top-down legislative revolution are a small, privileged, and well-remunerated minority: an elite group already in possession of enormous wealth and power; then you can be absolutely sure of two things:

It ain’t progressive.

And …

It ain’t a revolution.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 15 December 2021.

The Rise, And Fall, And Rise, Of The Revolutionary Left.

"Call Me Tania!" The revolutionary demands and rhetoric so vividly on display in the capture and radicalisation of Patty Hearst in 1974 only appeared to have disappeared in the  Neoliberal era. The truth is, they have simmered away continuously on the Left for more than 40 years. In the 2020s, having completed their "long march through the institutions", the bearers of those revolutionary ideas are now in a position to put their theories into practice.

“THE LOST TAPES” is an excellent documentary series, re-telling pivotal events through the original media footage recorded as they happened. One of the most fascinating programmes in the series examines the 1974 abduction and “radicalisation” of the newspaper heiress Patty Hearst. Of particular interest is the ideologically charged language of Hearst’s captors, the revolutionary urban guerrillas of the “Symbionese Liberation Army” (SLA).

Given the era, it is hardly surprising to hear the Police and other authority figures referred to as “pigs”. More compelling, by far, are the messages recorded by the brainwashed 19-year-old for her wealthy parents. These were littered with references to “white privilege” and the urgent necessity of breaking free from the all-pervading racism of “Amerika”.

Throughout the 1980s and 90s, the Age of Thatcher and Reagan, the unhinged radicalism of groups like the SLA was derided by conservatives as the last futile flarings of the Youth Revolt of the 1960s. They were supremely confident that America, and the world, had swung away decisively from the ideas of such revolutionary and “counter-cultural” figures as the “Frankfurt School” Marxist, Herbert Marcuse; the revolutionary educational theorist, Paulo Freire; and the celebrated author of Rules For Radicals, Saul Alinsky. Events suggested they were right. By 1991, “actually existing socialism”, at least in its Eastern-European and Russian iterations, had blipped-off the screen entirely, and Francis Fukuyama was announcing (prematurely) “The End of History”.

But, the conservatives were wrong. The ideas and slogans of the Left, which had jostled with each other for global headlines in the 60s and 70s, only appeared to have vanished. Within the Left itself they remained very much alive. Indeed, just about all of the jarring ideas “mainstream” audiences are currently struggling to come to terms with around the world, and the bitter debates they have spawned, were played-out across the Left more than 30 years ago. For leftists of a certain age, it is very much a case of “been there, done that, burned the T-Shirt”.

It’s an interesting factoid that “Political Correctness” – the term so over-used by conservatives everywhere – was coined originally by nonplussed left-wingers who detected in the ideological stridency of their comrades behaviour all-too-reminiscent of Chairman Mao’s Red Guards.

Which meant that while the attention of the ordinary person in the street was focused elsewhere, most particularly on the wonders of modern technology and the celebrity culture it nurtured, the left-wing students of the 1970s were becoming the teachers, journalists, trade unionists and public servants of the 80s, 90s, Noughties and beyond. Certainly, it was rare to hear them talk any longer about “offing the pigs”. But, in deploying such phrases as “ending white privilege” and “fighting white supremacy” they were saying much the same thing.

The Left’s “long march through the institutions” has carried it, and the revolutionary anti-capitalist/anti-racist ideas drummed into “Tania” (Hearst’s nom-de-guerre) by her SLA “comrades”, to positions of real power and influence.

If you doubt the reality and efficacy of its revolutionary power and influence, try reading American journalist Christopher F. Rufo’s chilling article “The Child Soldiers of Portland”, published in the Spring 2021 edition of City Journal. Now, Rufo is a well-known conservative writer, but even allowing for his right-wing views, the picture he paints of a city and state education system “training children to become race-conscious revolutionaries” is deeply disturbing.

And worryingly familiar. Because it’s not just in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon, that parents are reluctantly becoming familiar with a school curriculum based on “equity and social justice”. To get some idea of what the new and compulsory New Zealand history curriculum is like, a friend of mine recently told me to: “Imagine Keith Sinclair’s A History of New Zealand with 90 percent of the pages torn out.”

Most New Zealand parents will have paid little, if any, attention to their local school board’s formal commitment to “indigenisation” and combatting “systemic racism”, and even those who have are unlikely to have registered the slightest misgivings. Supporting Aotearoa’s indigenous people and fighting racism are worthy goals – surely?

Indeed they are – but not at the cost of making our children hate themselves and teaching them to despise the achievements of their ancestors.

Patty Hearst eventually recovered from her months of abuse and brain-washing at the hands of the SLA, but not before joining them in robbing a bank.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 28 May 2021.

Revolution in New Zealand? Not Even Close!

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

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

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

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

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

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

The storming of the Bastille, 14 July 1789.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Seventies: The Decade Right-Wingers Would Prefer Everyone Forgot.

"An Excess Of Democracy": That was the phrase used by the corporate elites on three continents to describe the political crisis besetting the seventh decade of the Twentieth Century. The decade when groups which, for centuries, had suffered in silence: blacks, women, gays and, arguably, the planet itself, found their voice. The history of the past 40 years has been driven by the determination of those same elites to contain, constrain and cynically co-opt the emanicipatory movements of the 1970s.

LONG HAIR, FLARED JEANS AND DISCO: not for nothing were the 1970s dubbed “The Decade That Taste Forgot”. One of the most curious, and little-known facts about the 1970s, however, is how differently the political possibilities of the decade were perceived by Left and Right.

The left-wing revolutionaries of the 1970s took their inspiration from the “liberation movements” of the Third World and openly sneered at the labour movements of the affluent Western nations. Top-heavy, bureaucratic and mired in “reformism”, the working-class parties and unions of Europe, North America and Australasia were written off by leftist ideologues as being either moribund or reactionary.

The view from the Right could hardly have been more different. In the eyes of conservative academics and corporate executives, the steady gains of the enduring centre-left electoral alliances forged during the Great Depression and World War II had whittled away the power of capitalism to the point where the entire economic system of the West was believed to be teetering on the edge of a socialist abyss.

So convinced was the Right that capitalism was facing an existential crisis that they embarked on a full-scale ideological counter-attack against the post-war social-democratic consensus. In his famous 1971 memorandum, Lewis F. Powell, a corporate lawyer, enjoined the leaders of American business to resist what he described as an “assault on the enterprise system” that was “broadly based” and “consistently pursued”.

In the most quoted sentence of what came to be known as “The Powell Manifesto”, the man who President Richard Nixon would later appoint to the US Supreme Court warned corporate America that: 

“The most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism come from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.”

It was to counter these “disquieting voices” that Powell’s followers established the multitude of right-wing think tanks that, in the intervening 40 years, would play such a decisive role in transforming the ideological climate of Western societies.

What was it that blinded so many Western leftists to the true extent of post-war social-democracy’s success?

Where better to turn for an answer than the writings of Karl Marx. In what is arguably his finest piece of political writing, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon”, Marx writes: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Never was this truer than of Western revolutionaries during the 1970s.

Just as the American and French revolutionaries of the late-eighteenth century draped themselves in the costumes of the ancient Roman Republic, the 1970s insurrectionist’s vision of “The Revolution” was typically lit by the crimson glow of Petrograd, 1917. Armed workers and peasants riding through the streets of a capital city festooned with scarlet banners – that’s what “The Revolution” looked like.

That a revolution in one of the affluent welfare states of the West was more likely to be the work of Powell’s “perfectly respectable elements of society”, was an idea that occurred to no one – except the Right. It explains, perhaps, why the neoliberal “counter-revolution” of the 1980s and 90s was rolled out from college campuses, pulpits and the news media: as well by politicians representing all those “moribund” working-class parties the left-wing “revolutionaries” refused to join.

The reason why so many on the Right – especially those from the “New Right” of the 1980s – are so quick to condemn the 1970s should, by now, be obvious. For them, it marks the point of maximum danger. That moment in history when groups which, for centuries, had suffered in silence: blacks, women, gays and, arguably, the planet itself, found their voice. The decade when the Right, confronted by “an excess of democracy” – drove it back.

So, the next time Bill English accuses Jacinda Ardern of wanting to drag New Zealand “back to the seventies”, by reinvigorating the trade unions and reducing our society’s growing inequalities, I sincerely hope she will not, again, airily dismiss his comments as: “So last century!”

Far from being “the decade that taste forgot”, the 1970s are actually the decade the Right would prefer everyone forgot. Yes, there was long hair, flares and disco: but there was also, as Bob Dylan sang in 1975: “Music in the cafés at night, and revolution in the air.”

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 8 September 2017.

Have The Greens Entered Their Jacobin Phase?

A Green Robespierre? As the following posting was being sent to The Daily Blog, the Greens female co-leader, Metiria Turei, was announcing her resignation from both her position in the party and Parliament. The logic of uncompromising revolutionary virtue is inherently hostile to the notion of politics as the art of the possible - and to liberty itself.

 

THE JACOBINS, along with “Madame Guillotine” and Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, will forever be associated with political extremism. So, the mere suggestion that our very own Green Party might be entering its Jacobin Phase is unlikely to be well received – especially by the Greens!

 

The historical lessons of Jacobinism should not, however, be dismissed unheard. The rise and fall of the Jacobins is instructive to all pursuers of progressive change, precisely because it reveals the calamitous consequences of elevating revolutionary virtue above all other considerations.

 

The tragic irony of the Jacobins is that, in the beginning, they were the new French Constitution’s most avid defenders – most particularly of its Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. It is only as the French Revolution unfolded: each succeeding chapter bloodier and more terrifying than the last; that the Jacobins, its most eloquent, energetic and effective defenders, found themselves propelled relentlessly towards increasingly extreme measures. Believing themselves to be the only reliable champions of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”, they found it easier and easier to brand all those who opposed them as counter-revolutionary agents of the ancien régime.

 

Initially, the eloquence of the Jacobin deputies [MPs] and the venom of their journalistic allies, was reserved for members of the more moderate factions within the National Assembly. But, as the French people’s enemies, both internal and external, multiplied, the Jacobins’ political paranoia worsened. The number of executions rose sharply, causing even the Jacobins’ own followers’ misgivings to grow. Undeterred, their leader, Maximillian Robespierre, intensified the Reign of Terror. The man the people of Paris called “The Incorruptible”, sent former friends and comrades to the guillotine with the same cold resolve with which he dispatched members of the despised aristocracy.

 

To quote his own, memorable, advice to the Jacobin-controlled Committee of Public Safety: “the first maxim of your policy ought to be to lead the people by reason and the people’s enemies by terror.”

 

As the realisation eventually dawned on what remained of France’s revolutionary leadership that if Robespierre was not stopped they would all be killed, the National Assembly was galvanised into action. Robespierre, himself, was declared an “enemy of the people” and laid open to Madame Guillotine’s sibilant kiss.

 

Thus does History instruct us. That any political movement which abandons the reasonable pursuit of achievable objectives and embraces instead a regime dedicated to the imposition and enforcement of a universal and uncompromising “republic of virtue”, may begin by executing its enemies, but it will end by making enemies of, and executing, its friends. Freedom can never be secured by coercion. Every revolutionary movement which tried has ended up devouring itself.

 

If the Greens have indeed entered their Jacobin phase, it is likely to be their last.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 9 August 2017.

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.

Revolution In The UK? Jeremy Corbyn And The Matter Of Britain.

Oh But I Was So Much Older Then I'm Younger Than That Now: In just a few, tumultuous weeks Britain has found itself cast into a political version of Life on Mars. Questions that have not been put to those in power for 40 years are about to be asked again – and by a man who, unbelievably, was there the first time around and remembers them all.

 

AND SO IT BEGINS. According to that house-journal of the British Conservative Party, The Telegraph: “John Mills, Labour’s biggest private donor, said he would stop giving money to the party in the wake of Mr Corbyn’s election and instead fund the MPs plotting to oust him.”

 

The response of the British Establishment could hardly be clearer. Be it Mr Mills and his millions, or the Blairite heavy-hitters who have resigned their front-bench positions rather than serve under a socialist leader, the men and women who have worked so long and so hard to deny British voters a genuine choice between alternative futures, are peeling away from Corbyn in anticipation of all-out war.

 

Looking back through British history, it is difficult not to seize upon the moment when King Charles I, accompanied by his family, and joined by his closest political allies, deserted London for the Royalist stronghold of Oxford. It was there that he raised the Royal Standard against England’s Parliament – thereby setting in motion the English Revolution, and a civil war that would kill more Britons – per head of population – that World War I.

 

Over the top? Maybe. But only “maybe”. Because, whether they realise it or not, the quarter-of-a-million Britons who voted for Jeremy Corbyn were also voting for revolution in the UK.

 

Revolution? Really? Yes, “really”. What else would you call a political project committed to toppling the economic and social status quo? A project determined to roll back 30 years of neoliberalism? A project which openly proclaims its objective of bringing into being a mass, nationwide movement for radical social democracy – and equipping it with state power?

 

Some people get it. Here, for example, is the response of Rob Williams from the National Shop Stewards [union delegates] Network: “‎The victory yesterday by Jeremy Corbyn has changed everything. The vote we saw yesterday was a political revolution. We must build a mass movement against austerity and the anti-union laws. The message must be simple – Cameron: we are going to take you down. Your anti-union bill and your cuts, you’re going down because we are mobilising against you.”

 

And then there’s this, from Mark Serwotka from the powerful Public and Commercial Services Union: “If we are going to see any of those policies realised, we will not get that just through what Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party do in Parliament. If Jeremy Corbyn wants to win on those policies, he absolutely needs a mass vibrant movement in the country… He needs the six-and-a-half million trade union members to ensure that we have that vibrant campaign through strikes, demonstrations, local campaigns, occupations and everything else ….. We have the ability to stop austerity in its tracks, to topple this government and to ensure we get a fairer society.”

 

It is statements such as these that prompted the British Prime Minister’s, David Cameron’s, terse response to the Corbyn landslide. “The Labour Party is now a threat to our national security, our economic security and your family’s security.”

 

Just pause for a moment and absorb the meaning of those words. Think about all the other individuals and groups which, over the decades, have been described as “a threat to national security”. Recall, if you can, the sorts of measures the British “secret state” (most particularly, MI5) felt entitled to take against these many and various “threats”.

 

Were they not long out-of-print, I would recommend two books – Smear! Wilson and the Secret State, by Stephen Dorrill and Robin Ramsay, and The Wilson Plot: How the Spycatchers and Their American Allies Tried to Overthrow the British Government, by David Leigh – as useful guides to the likely fate of any Labour leader who steps beyond the boundaries of what the British Establishment deems to be politically acceptable. Alternatively, you could watch the excellent 2006 BBC docudrama The Plot Against Harold Wilson – which covers much the same ground.

 



 

The events described in the books and the docudrama all took place the 1970s. Jeremy Corbyn was a young man in his 20s when the decade began. As a middle-class boy steeped in the history and traditions of the Left (his parents had met each other in the Spanish Civil War!) Corbyn soon gave up the life of a half-hearted Polytech student to become a trade union organiser. Living in the capital city through the drama of the 1973 Miners Strike; the fall of Edward Heath’s Tory Government; the sudden resignation of Harold Wilson; the IRA’s bombing campaign on the British mainland; the tragic 1978-79 “Winter of Discontent”; and the ominous rise of Margaret Thatcher; he could hardly fail to absorb the political lessons of that most querulous and perilous of decades.

 

Perhaps it was the fact that he did not go to university that saved Corbyn from the trahison de clercs  that saw the CPGB stalwarts behind Marxism Today end up singing the praises Tony Blair’s “new times”. Then again, it might simply have been the grounding effect of his day-to-day trade union work. Whatever it was that steered him clear of “New Labour’s” siren song, Corbyn remained true to the mass-based, radically democratic and very public politics of the era in which he came of political age.

 

He had seen this politics at work on the streets, in the factories and down the pits, and he had realised how much it frightened the powers that be. He’d also witnessed the lengths to which those same powers would go to demobilise and demoralise the ordinary people who are the only reliable drivers of progressive economic and social change. If Jeremy Corbyn’s politics were forged in the 1970s, they have been well-tempered in the treacherous decades that followed.

 

Labour’s new leader, and his enemies, are both acutely aware of the power of the political genie the party’s leadership election has released. In just a few, tumultuous weeks Britain has found itself cast into a political version of Life on Mars. Questions that have not been put to those in power for 40 years are about to be asked again – and by a man who, unbelievably, was there the first time around and remembers them all. They are not easy questions – many of Corbyn’s younger followers have never heard them asked before – and the answers are likely to prove painful for many and, for a few, very costly. But only in the asking, and the answering, of these, the most fundamental of questions: about Justice, and Equality, and Liberty, and Love; can the Matter of Britain be moved forward.

 

And did those feet in ancient time

Walk upon England’s mountains green:

And was the holy Lamb of God

On England’s pleasant pastures seen!

 

And did the Countenance Divine

Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here,

Among those dark Satanic Mills?

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 14 September 2015.

With A Little Help From Your Friends: Labour Betrays The Greens - Again.

With Friends Like These: Andrew Little's decision to exclude the Greens from Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee is proof of Labour's determination to shake the monkey of alleged Green "extremism" off its back. One is moved to inquire of the unfortunate Greens: "How's that Labour's left-wing conscience thing working out for you?"

 

DEAN PARKER, New Zealand’s leading left-wing playwright, tells a great story about two old Bolsheviks.

 

It’s 1917, half way between the February and October Revolutions, and these two old comrades are complaining about what’s happened to their local branch of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. They cannot believe the numbers turning up to branch meetings. Hundreds of people have been regularly packing out the little hall where, formerly, twenty was regarded as a good turnout. What’s more, most of the newcomers are people the regulars have never seen before. And so young! With no respect for older comrades who have been with the party for years and years – even when it was illegal – back before the Tsar granted Russia a parliament! Truth to tell, these poor old codgers actually preferred political life before the revolution. The meetings were quieter, and the comrades so much more polite.

 

According to Soviet historians, the membership of the “bolshevik” [majority] faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, in the year before the outbreak of World War I, 1913, stood at roughly 25,000. By the end of 1917, however, the ranks of the Bolsheviks had swollen to a figure in excess of quarter-of-a-million.

 

Dean’s story offers us a tiny glimpse of what that sort of explosive growth might have felt like on the ground. It is also a useful historical reminder of how ordinary people respond when politics suddenly stops being an elite sport and they find themselves invited to join the game. That’s when everything changes – including the rules.

 

The story should also remind us that the aspirations of most political parties – even those on the Left – are considerably less heroic when revolution is not in the air. In a capitalist society, under “normal” circumstances, the preoccupations of parliamentary parties are all about maximising their vote at the next election; securing more seats that their rivals; amassing sufficient funds; seeking out friendly journalists; and making themselves more electable by keeping the party’s radical elements under strict control.

 

It is absolutely pointless for non-parliamentary “revolutionaries” to wail about this state of affairs. Because behaving in any other way, under “normal” capitalist conditions, has been proved, over and over again, to be utterly self-defeating.

 

Which is why Andrew Little, as Leader of the Opposition, used the opportunity provided by Prime Minister John Key to humiliate and alienate the Greens. Rather than invite Metiria Turei to take Russel Norman’s place on the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament, Little nominated his colleague, David Shearer, to join him in over-seeing the work of the Security Intelligence Service and the Government Communications Security Bureau.

 

In the current political climate, Little is acutely aware that Labour’s close association with the Greens is a big political loser. Too many people who would like to vote Labour are declining to do so because they fear the influence of the Greens within what all the polls tell them would be a coalition government of the centre-left. It is one of the reasons why so many Labour supporters split their votes. They are happy to give their electorate vote to the Labour candidate, so long as, by party-voting National, they can keep the Greens out of government.

 

Clearly, by so publicly mistreating the Greens, Little hopes to convince potential Labour voters that his party is no longer willing to be lumped-in with Green “extremism”. His message is clear: in any future coalition government the Greens will serve on Labour’s terms – or not at all.

 

The Greens, having digested this latest helping of dead rat from their Labour “friends”, should ask themselves (one more time, and with feeling!) how the job of being Labour’s left-wing conscience is working out. Has the strategy of locating the Green Party to the left of the empty ideological husk that Labour has become been a good thing or a bad thing in terms of advancing the Green agenda? If it’s been a bad thing (and Lord knows, after 15 years in the wilderness, it’s hard to characterise it any other way!) might it not be time to consider a new strategy? One in which the slogan “Neither left, nor right, but in front!” is fleshed out programmatically in a way that leaves the Green’s parliamentary caucus open to offers from both sides of the political spectrum?

 

It took a world war and almost complete internal collapse to propel the Bolsheviks into the job of effecting the revolutionary changes demanded by the Russian people. As climate change begins to bite, and the planet’s carrying capacity is exceeded once, twice, three times over; what sort of party will find its membership exploding? Will it be the mean-spirited party of an attenuated social democracy? The party of discredited neoliberal extremism? Or, will it be the party which, like Lenin’s Bolsheviks, has never ceased telling anyone who would listen that this day would come?

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 18 February 2015.

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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



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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Encountering Resistance

Offering Resistance: At the tender age of 26, I learned the hard way that mass support should never be assumed, or demanded. It has to be earned. "Resistance" was modelled on the Polish "Solidarity" (can't ya tell!). In theory a "movement of movements" seemed like a fine idea. Putting it into practice turned out to be a little more difficult.

HAVE YOU EVER HEARD of Resistance? No, not The Resistance, which fought the Germans in occupied France during World War II, but Resistance – as in the single word – like Solidarity? Don’t worry. Unless you lived in Dunedin in 1982, and have a very good memory, there’s no reason why “Resistance” should mean anything to you at all.

The only reason I remember it, is because I set it up.

Radicalised by the Springbok Tour protests of the year before; despairing of formal electoral politics following the narrow return of Rob Muldoon’s National Government; and inspired by the exploits of Poland’s free trade union, Solidarnosc (Solidarity), I was hoping to set up, right here in New Zealand, a similar extra-parliamentary people’s movement, broad enough to encompass all of the big issues of the day.

The movement was to be launched at what I called, with youthful grandiloquence, “The Dunedin People’s Congress”. Invitations went out to interest groups of all kinds: unions, students associations, environmental organisations.

It was a flop. Only a handful of people turned up. And, at the tender age of 26, I learned a bitter – but immensely valuable – lesson about political agitation. Mass support cannot be assumed, or demanded. It must be earned.

The then President of the Labour Party, Jim Anderton, summed it up for me a few months later, when he advised the radical core of Labour Youth’s Dunedin branch to: “Always build your footpaths where the people walk.”

Today, nearly thirty years on, the “Occupy Wall Street” (OWS) movement, and its multitude of emulators in the USA and around the world, are inspiring a new generation of activists – just as Solidarity inspired activists in the early-Eighties. In Auckland and Dunedin, small encampments have been erected in the city-centre by “occupiers” eager to assert the OWS slogan “We are the 99 Percent!” Occupy Auckland has even borrowed OWS’s ultra-democratic, consensus-based, decision-making process: setting up its own “General Assembly” to govern the occupation.

I simply couldn’t avoid a wry grin of recognition when I saw the big “General Assembly” banner unfurled in Aotea Square. “Dunedin People’s Congress” anyone?

The central question that Occupy Auckland and Occupy Dunedin now have to answer, after six days of occupation, is whether or not “the people” are walking on the “footpaths” these groups have, with such enthusiasm (and not a little self-importance) constructed? Or, like the doomed “Dunedin People’s Congress”, is their General Assembly only attracting the most idealistic and/or naïve of the Radical Left?

Earlier this week, a friend of mine e-mailed me the link to a YouTube clip of the 15 October demonstration in Madrid. The Spanish capital’s most central public square – La Puerta del Sol – and the broad avenues leading into it were filled with demonstrators. There must have been at least 100,000 of them; an angry swarm of “indignant” Spanish citizens. The sort of crowd that, here in New Zealand, only great sporting events like the Rugby World Cup can assemble.

When Occupy Auckland and Occupy Dunedin are able gather support on a similar, massive, scale, their claim to speak for “the 99 percent” of the population which cannot boast great wealth, nor wield great power, will acquire a measure of credibility.

But that day is, I fear, far away.

New Zealand is not Spain. We do not face an unemployment rate of 20 percent. Our government has not unleashed the sort of savage austerity measures that have so incensed the Spanish people. At time of writing, Police have yet to pepper-spray, tear-gas or baton-charge any of the non-violent occupiers camped-out in Aotea Square or the Octagon. And, if for some reason (the MV Rena sinks, for example) people do become indignant enough to fill those public spaces, the radical Left will soon discover just how conservative most ordinary people really are. Broad agreement is possible on economic issues – but on precious little else.

I speak from experience. Because, you see, I did end up at a Dunedin “people’s congress” – of sorts. It was called the Otago Trades Council, and its 100-plus delegates represented more than 25,000 unionised workers throughout the province. You dared not take these ordinary New Zealanders for granted. Their trust was a precious commodity – and you had to work hard for it. But when you’d earned it: when it was given; resistance was guaranteed.

This essay was originally published in The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times, The Greymouth Star and The Waikato Times of Friday, 21 October 2011.

Could It Happen Here? (A Scenario Inspired by Egypt’s Revolutionary Moment)

The Fire Next Time: Suppose the 30,000-strong hikoi that rolled into Parliament Grounds in May 2004 had refused to disperse? If New Zealand is ever to have an "Egyptian Moment", that moment will be created by the tangata whenua - on behalf of us all.

THE GREAT HUMAN SPECTACLE of revolutionary passion in Cairo’s Tahrir (Liberation) Square has prompted me to think about what could possibly spark a similar uprising here in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

To my mind, there is only one chink in the armour of the existing state apparatus large enough for something sharp and dangerous to be driven into its heart – and that is the increasingly ill-defined relationship between the New Zealand State and the tangata whenua.

Crucially, the State’s own perception of its powers and responsibilities in this bitterly contested area, including its sense of legitimacy, has become deeply confused and conflicted. Confronted with a sufficiently powerful challenge from the Maori people, it is possible the Government would become politically paralysed just long enough for events on the street to spiral out of control and acquire the sort of unstoppable momentum that brought down President Hosni Mubarak.

It might begin with something as simple as the recent call by Maori Council members from Tamaki Makaurau for a nationwide hikoi against the Marine & Coastal Area Bill. The call was accompanied by a vote of No Confidence in the Maori Party leadership, which could easily be interpreted as an invitation to the Maori rebel MP, Hone Harawira, to make himself available to lead the proposed hikoi – just as he led the 2004 protest against Labour’s Foreshore & Seabed Bill.

Let us assume that the simmering dissatisfaction with the Maori Party leadership’s handling of the Marine & Coastal Area Bill, and its treatment of Mr Harawira, is powerful enough to mobilise the same sort of numbers as the 2004 hikoi. And, let us further assume that in 2011 an additional list of grievances gets added to the protesters' bill-of-fare.

What if issues such as the sale of New Zealand land to foreigners; the threat to privatise state assets; the loss of sovereignty inherent in the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement; and the constant degradation of Aotearoa’s natural environment; were grafted on to the injustices of the Marine & Coastal Area Bill? What if the hikoi’s leaders possessed the revolutionary sophistication to forge a conceptual link between the abrogation of tino rangatiratanga in the Nineteenth Century, and the loss of New Zealand’s economic sovereignty in the Twenty-First? Between what happened to Maori then, and what is happening to Pakeha now? What if Maori and Pakeha grievances became conjoined?

A hikoi filling the streets of Wellington, armed with a list of revolutionary demands, and made up of not only of Maori of all ages, but also of a surprising number of Pakeha, advances on Parliament. The protest leader tells the vast throng filling Parliament Grounds that the time for piecemeal change has passed: that only a thorough-going revision of New Zealand’s constitutional arrangements – as promised by the National Government – will rescue Aotearoa. Such a revision, he declares, must be based on Treaty of Waitangi, and must guarantee to Maori and Pakeha, alike, the full and undisputed possession of all their rights – political, cultural and economic.

Then, over the cheers of the 30,000-strong crowd, their leader warns them that they must learn from the events of 2004. That they must not simply return to their homes and leave the making of change to others. That they must stay where they are – until their demands are met.

With this last suggestion, the revolutionary potential of the hikoi becomes ominously clear. Watching from the Beehive, the Prime Minister must now decide whether to clear the grounds, or enter into dialogue with the protesters – and thus confer upon their demands an aura of legitimacy.

The Government dithers, and the delay is fatal. As word spreads – by e-mail, texting, Twitter and through the blogosphere – hundreds, and then thousands, of young people pour into Central Wellington to join the uprising.

Reluctantly, the Prime Minister orders Police to clear the protesters from Parliament Grounds. The Police Commissioner is uneasy. There are close to 50,000 people participating in what is already being called the Peoples Constitutional Convention of Aotearoa. Moving them will require a massive use of force.

Rumours quickly spread that the Police intend to use tear-gas on the protesters. The crowd’s instant response is to storm Parliament Buildings. The front doors are forced open – the revolutionary crowd now occupies the House of Representatives.

Right-wing students and business executives, whipped into a murderous fury by right-wing bloggers, attack the protesters still occupying Parliament Grounds. Shots are fired. Several people are killed and many injured. Police officers are accused of allowing the right-wingers through their lines. Some accuse AOS personnel of handing out weapons to the counter-revolutionaries.

The Prime Minister declares a State of Emergency and calls upon the Military to "assist the civil power". Mass demonstrations and strikes break out in all the main centres. Tens of thousands march to mark the funerals of the murdered protesters. Occupations of Auckland’s Aotea Square, Cathedral Square in Christchurch, and the Octagon in Dunedin, follow.

Those in occupation of the House of Representatives declare themselves to be the Provisional Government of the Bi-Cultural Republic of Aotearoa/New Zealand and order the New Zealand Defence Force to defend the Tangata Whenua and Tangata Tiriti from their enemies.

Maori soldiers, ordered to suppress the uprisings, mutiny. The Provisional Government of the new republic now has an army.

The revolution becomes unstoppable.