The Woke War On the Cultural Conduits of Capitalism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The belief that men are superior to women.

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

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

The belief that gender is biologically determined.

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

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

That belief that capitalism and democracy are mutually reinforcing.

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

And woke morality?

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

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

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

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

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

Are You A Leftist?

Nothing To Lose But Our Chains: The emancipatory movement which the Left, understood correctly, has always been, cannot accommodate those who are only able to celebrate one group’s freedom by taking it from another. The expectation, always, among leftists, is that liberty enlarges us. That striking-off a person’s shackles not only frees the person who wore them, but also the person who fastened them in the first place.

THERE WAS A TIME when a leftist’s definition of “leftism” corresponded pretty closely to everybody else’s definition. The term identified a coherent world view – to the point where knowing where someone stood on one issue enabled others to predict with surprising accuracy where they stood on a host of others. If a person was opposed to the death penalty, then the chances were high they were in favour of free speech. If they believed in the closed union shop, then they probably also believed in the public ownership of natural monopolies like power and water. It wasn’t easy being a left-winger – especially during the Cold War – but it was remarkably easy to define what it meant.

Today, the term “left-winger” is applied to persons holding an impossibly diverse and self-contradictory set of beliefs. From the traditional leftist who insists that the content and direction of policy should be informed by science; to the contemporary “leftist” who insists that: “Trans women are real women.” From left-wing parties determined to reinvigorate the public sector; to “left-wing” parties with neoliberal economic agendas indistinguishable from those of their right-wing competitors. From leftists who stand firm on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; to “leftists” who insist that “Hate Speech” be criminalised.

The use of scare quotes is, of course, intended to communicate the author’s rejection of the term leftist being applied to any person or party guilty of rejecting science, endorsing laissez-faire capitalism, or favouring the ideologically-driven restriction of their fellow citizens’ freedom.

There is one more test for determining whether or not one is a leftist – the History Test. If the study of history is reduced to little more than a search for evidence of the crimes of pre-ordained “enemies” and “oppressors’”, then by no means can the “historians” doing the searching be accurately described as left-wing. Indeed, those attempting to harness history to ideology are much more likely to be radical nationalists than radical democrats. Always remembering that another name for radical nationalism is “fascism”.

Leftists underserving of scare quotes regard history as a teacher, not a prosecutor; as a well, not a syringe. Ideology retreats before history in the same way that contaminated judgement retreats before the advance of uncontaminated evidence. Nothing gives away fake “leftism” more irretrievably than its deliberate falsification of history in the name of “social” or “national” justice.

A word or two needs to be inserted here to distinguish “leftism” from its numerous component ideologies: social-democracy, socialism, communism and anarchism. In brief: social-democracy seeks to significantly restrict the size of the capitalist marketplace; socialism attempts to extinguish the capitalist marketplace altogether; communism promotes a state dedicated to operationalising the principle “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”; and anarchism seeks to eliminate the state altogether.

As the world discovered, socialism and communism, precisely because they both sought to replace the economic and social structures with which most human-beings were familiar, provoked a great deal of resistance. In crushing that resistance, the socialists and communists were increasingly driven to rely on state-directed repression and terrorism. Consequently, the states which emerged from these struggles, although proudly describing themselves as socialist democracies, were in fact the cruellest of tyrannies, far removed from the emancipatory well-springs of the radical-democratic project called leftism.

That word, “emancipation” is crucial to a proper understanding of leftism. In societies where power and wealth are distributed in such a way that huge numbers of people are rendered economically, socially and politically defenceless, freeing the oppressed must always take priority.

The working-class, whose subsistence depends upon permitting the tiny capitalist minority who pay them to appropriate the “surplus value” of their labour. Women, denied their rightful share of life’s bounty by the systemic and oppressive violence which characterises societies dominated by men. Diverse ethnic communities, economically and culturally subjugated by those who claim superiority over all other ethnicities and who have shaped their societies to reward their prejudices. LGBTQI+, discriminated against because their behaviour challenges society’s gendered norms. One way or another, all these groups seek emancipation. Leftists are committed to making a world fit for free people to live in.

But, the emancipatory movement cannot accommodate those who are only able to celebrate one group’s freedom by taking it from another. The expectation, always, among leftists, is that liberty enlarges us. That striking-off a person’s shackles not only frees the person who wore them, but also the person who fastened them in the first place.

A fair redistribution of wealth and power ultimately liberates the capitalist as well as the worker. By ceasing to be men’s slaves, women make it possible for men to cease being their masters. The emancipation of the queer marches hand-in-hand with the liberation of the straight. Only by freeing the oppressed can the oppressors themselves become free. Slavery invented the whip, only freedom can make it disappear.

Applying these ideas to the salient political issue of the hour – how best to protect and/or give expression to Te Tiriti o Waitangi – where are the leftists to be found? Are they located at the side of those Māori who insist that Te Tiriti is sacrosanct, and must remain inviolate; that the descendants of those who signed the document 184 years ago – Māori and Pakeha – have no right to interrogate its meaning and relevance in the Twenty-First Century?

The answer can only be “No.” To treat Te Tiriti in this way is to fetishise it and, by doing so, eliminate its power, as a living document, to guide the New Zealand people. It would also entail ignoring the historical fact that notions of the Treaty of Waitangi’s intentions have changed radically over the years. Even worse, it would require leftists to turn a blind eye to the blatant revision of the Treaty’s meaning and purpose by Māori-aligned historians and jurists to facilitate the ideological aims and objectives of Māori irredentism.

If the leftist’s goal is emancipation, then the leftist’s role in this issue is to open up the space for a respectful, but open-ended, national debate on Te Tiriti – beginning, ideally, with the ideas contained in Margaret Mutu’s and Moana Jackson’s “Matike Mai Aotearoa”, and the “He Puapua Report”, and expanding outward from there.

To attack the idea of progressing a national debate on New Zealand’s “foundation document” is to expose oneself as someone who elevates ethnic identity above democracy, and, in the context of the current “official” understanding of Te Tiriti, honours the concept of “rangatiratanga” (chiefly leadership) above the democratic rights of individual citizens. Set within the context of the last 100 years of world history, these beliefs could not be defined, even vaguely, as left-wing – quite the reverse in fact.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project of Thursday, 8 February 2024.

Blowing Off The Froth: Why Chris Hipkins Must Ditch Three Waters.

Time To Call A Halt: Chris Hipkins knows that iwi leaders possess the means to make life very difficult for his government. Notwithstanding their objections, however, the Prime Minister’s direction of travel – already clearly signalled by his very public demotion of Nanaia Mahuta – must be confirmed by an emphatic and unequivocal pledge to repeal the Three Waters legislation and start again.

THERE’S FROTH, AND THERE’S BEER. What we see happening on the Waitangi Treaty Grounds every 6 February, not to mention the political performance-art on the lower marae, is froth. The beer of Māori-Pakeha relations is to be found in the private meeting rooms of Waitangi’s Copthorne Hotel & Resort, where the National Iwi Chairs Forum (NICF) deliberates in secret upon Maoridom’s next moves. It is there, in the days leading up to Waitangi Day, that New Zealand’s new Prime Minister, Chris Hipkins, will either face down the men and women driving the stake of co-governance into the heart of the Settler State – or see Labour spiral slowly to defeat.

The designation “Iwi Chairs” seems so innocuous. It conjures up the image of a roomful of corporate bureaucrats working their way through a very boring agenda, and breaking-off every now and then to listen to equally boring presentations from bankers, accountants and the occasional politician. In reality, the NICF represents the High Command of Maoridom: the strategic hub of the campaign to take back control of Aotearoa from its Pakeha conquerors. Those gathering at the Copthorne are not a bit like the rag-tag groups of Māori nationalist activists that came together in the 1970s and 80s. If tino rangatiratanga means “the power of the chiefs”, then these are the chiefs who wield it.

Thanks to thirty years of Treaty Settlements, the NICF is both well-positioned and well-resourced to flex its muscles. Between them, the iwi represented at the Forum command assets valued in the billions. That buys them all the big law firms and all the big lawyers they need. It buys them top-of-the-line lobbyists and public relations experts. It buys them influence in the news media and the universities. It means that, when the NICF whistles, serious politicians from all the major parties tend to come running – up to and including prime ministers.

In short, the NICF is what you get when you don’t want hundreds-of-thousands of working-class Māori demanding their fair share of the national cake. An uprising of marginalised urban Māori (the primary focus of Māori political agitation in the 1980s) could hardly avoid inspiring an even larger number of marginalised Pakeha. Such a potent socio-economic alliance would be extremely harmful to capitalism and other exploitative creatures. Hence the Crown’s inspired prophylactic against the further radicalisation of the Māori working-class – the Treaty Settlement Process. Make a handful of Māori aristocrats and other assorted high-flyers rich and powerful, and not only can they then be relied upon to keep the urban Māori poor quiet, but also to co-opt anyone of a mind to stir them up.

For a while.

The great risk of re-establishing a well-resourced and powerful indigenous elite is that, a generation or two later, those responsible will be faced with confident, highly educated young Māori who can think of no good reason why they – the privileged beneficiaries of the Treaty Settlement Process – should continue to provide a buffer between the heirs of their colonial conquerors and the tens-of-thousands of Māori families made poor, and kept poor, by colonisation.

What’s more, this generation will evince no interest in constructing a Māori-Pakeha working-class alliance against either Pakeha Capitalism or the Neo-Tribal Capitalist sub-system brought into being by the Treaty Settlement Process. The generation raised under this ethnically-charged neoliberal regime will not be socialists, they will be ethno-nationalists. If wealth is to be redistributed, it will not be from the rich to the poor, but from the descendants of the Pakeha colonisers to the descendants of the colonised Māori. It will be a revolution driven by race, not class.

There could be no better example of the policies generated by the iwi elites and their political representatives than the project known as Three Waters. Putting Private Members Bills to one side, it is rare to encounter a piece of legislation so closely associated with and shaped by a single member of Cabinet – in this case, the then Local Government Minister, Nanaia Mahuta. Nor is it common to see a legislative project preceded by an advertising campaign subsequently condemned as both misleading and inaccurate. The Labour Government’s decision to reverse its earlier affirmation that local authorities would be free to opt-out of the scheme only compounded the ethical problems besetting Mahuta’s project.

At the forefront of these was the legislation’s commitment to “co-governance”. In the midst of structures specifically designed to protect the relevant “entities” from all forms of democratic accountability, the legislation located a body split 50/50 between members supposedly chosen to represent the interests of local consumers, and those indisputably chosen to represent the interests of local iwi.

NZ First’s Shane Jones’s description of Mahuta’s Three Waters Project was typically robust:

What was initially an attempt to fix some drinking water has turned into a highly divisive and pulverising social experiment that has got nothing to do with poo pipes and infrastructure. Now it’s got everything to do with whether or not tribes should have a superior right [over water].

Jones also argued that Jacinda Ardern’s government had “lost control” of Mahuta’s project:

She was unable to control Nanaia Mahuta, who has proven to be one of New Zealand’s most divisive politicians that God ever put breath into.

Nowhere was Ardern’s loss of control more evident that in the parliamentary debacle which followed the last-minute, constitutionally-dubious, attempt to entrench “anti-privatisation” clauses in the legislation setting up the Three Waters project as it neared the end of its passage, under urgency, through the House of Representatives.

If ever a project needed to be abandoned completely, and the rebuilding of New Zealand’s drinking, storm and wastewater infrastructure reconceptualised in ways that keep it both affordable and accountable, then that project is Three Waters.

Not that the Iwi Chairs gathered at the Copthorne Hotel are likely to see it that way. Mahuta’s project had brought them closer to Jones’s “superior right” over water than any of her predecessors. Their message to Chris Hipkins is likely to be blunt: repeal Mahuta’s legislation at your peril.

New Zealand’s new Prime Minister knows that the National Iwi Chairs Forum has the means to make life very difficult for his government. Notwithstanding their objections, however, Hipkins direction of travel – already clearly signalled by his very public demotion of Mahuta – must be confirmed by an emphatic and unequivocal pledge to repeal the Three Waters legislation and start again.

If Labour is to secure a third term, then Hipkins must make it clear to all New Zealanders – Māori and Pakeha – that his government is not about fulfilling the agendas of corporate/tribal elites. It is about making sure that every New Zealander in need of a job, a living wage, and a warm, dry house, gets one. That their family’s right to publicly-provided, quality health care and education is not denied. And that the promise of equality, enshrined in Article Three of the Treaty of Waitangi, is kept. Because that’s the only beer that’s electorally fit for Labour to drink: the beer of class – not race.

Everything else is froth.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 2 February 2023.

The Two Vladimirs.

First Time As Tragedy, Second Time as ... Tragedy: The Leninist will-to-power is also there in Putin, but the dream is different. Not a speculative blueprint for humanity’s future, but a necromancer’s resurrection of Russia’s obscurantist past. Not the white-hot ripples of modernist self-confidence, but the poisonous fogs and vapours of the Middle Ages.

TWO VLADIMIRS, facing each other across a century of time: joined and separated by the Russian nation. Two Vladimirs – Lenin and Putin – around whose understanding of and aspirations for Russia the whole world has, reluctantly, been forced to circle. Two Vladimirs and their contradictory visions of Russia’s meaning dictating the fate of humankind. Two Vladimirs, more alike than either man would willingly admit.

THE FIRST VLADIMIR, Lenin, saw Russia’s potential. Not, simply, as an empire ripe for revolution in ways that the British and German Empires were not, but as a gigantic Petri dish in which something new and immensely powerful could be cultured.

As a dedicated Marxist, Lenin understood just how dramatically Russia deviated from Marx’s revolutionary schema. It was an quasi-feudal empire of peasants, only slowly beginning to industrialise – the starkest possible contrast with the advanced capitalist economies of the United States, Great Britain and Germany – places identified by Marx as the most likely locations for a humane socialist revolution. Lenin wasn’t bothered. A humane socialist revolution was not on his agenda.

In this respect, Lenin was all Russian. His revolutionary politics were shaped by its traditions of terrorist violence and the imposition of new orders from above.

There was a glittering seam of the most reckless nihilism that ran through Russia’s revolutionary rock. It shrugged-off ethics and laughed at caution, fostering an all-or-nothing approach to politics. Lenin mined that seam assiduously, becoming the most fearless political gambler.

He risked the accusation of being a German spy by allowing the Kaiser to facilitate his return to Petrograd. He risked everything on his Bolshevik Party’s coup d’état toppling the Provisional Government of Alexander Kerensky. He risked the survival of Russia itself by accepting the predatory terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, betting that Germany would not win the First World War, and would ultimately be forced to surrender its gargantuan territorial gains.

Having won Russia, Lenin then proceeded to abolish it. Not even its name remained. Lenin named his Petri dish the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Not that his socialism was all that socialist. He drew inspiration from the way the German war economy had been organised by Walter Rathenau. He admired Henry Ford’s assembly-lines. Had he lived, there is every possibility that he would have prefigured the Peoples Republic of China’s Deng Xiaoping, who famously responded to his party’s bitter internal disputes over which “road” to follow – communist or capitalist – by quipping: “I do not care if the cat is black or white – so long as it catches mice.”

What fascinated and inspired the first Vladimir were the glittering possibilities arising out of a political entity that encompassed one sixth of the planet’s land surface. An entity bursting with resources, and now, thanks to a revolution, a civil war, and the emigration of the Tsarist regime’s fondest supporters, an entity unencumbered by all the usual historical baggage. An entity whose people were a blank slate for his party to write on. An entity which, if it was as lucky as the man who created it, would go on to shape the destiny of the entire world.


THE SECOND VLADIMIR, Putin, looking back over the century separating him from the first, can see with equal clarity not only how much of Vladimir Lenin’s vision was realised, but also the dire, if unintended, consequences of that success. Though raised in Lenin’s Petri dish, and inordinately proud of its achievements, Putin is pinioned by the inescapable fact of its failure.

The Russian people: impassive, resilient, deeply cynical; but also mystical, superstitious and prone to dangerous enthusiasms; turned out to be anything but a blank slate upon which the Bolsheviks could freely write the future. Their country may no longer have been called Russia, but Russians they remained. Their empire also, which, thanks to their heroic efforts against the exterminationist Germans, expanded to encompass all of Eastern Europe.

No Tsar had ever wielded the power of Joseph Stalin. The Soviet Union glowered over Western Europe and the world through black, bear-like eyes: the object, alike, of humanity’s grim admiration and abiding fear.

Lacking in this Red empire was the first Vladimir’s readiness to wager everything to move the experiment forward. Stalin was ruthless, but he wasn’t brave. The man lived his whole life in fear, and made damn sure the Soviet people did the same. Lenin’s Petri dish was poisoned by his fear. The Soviet Empire that evolved may have been bigger and more terrifying that the Tsars’, but Homo Sovieticus was a pretty wretched specimen.

The second Vladimir, like the Russian Federation he rules, is a hot mess of geopolitical and cultural insecurities. He despises the late Mikhail Gorbachev for presiding over the dissolution of the Soviet Union. That event, according to Putin: “was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century. As for the Russian people, it became a genuine tragedy. Tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory.”

What Putin missed completely was the historical courage of Gorbachev’s all-or-nothing bet that the entity created by the first Vladimir might yet prove equal to its creator’s optimistic vision.

That Gorbachev lost the bet is, of course, the best possible proof that Homo Sovieticus was an evolutionary dead-end. That the Soviet Union’s successor states all became hopelessly corrupt kleptocracies merely demonstrated how degraded Soviet Man’s political and economic DNA truly was. That Putin rose to become Russia’s new strongman heaped irony on tragedy.

Because its all there in the second Vladimir: the nihilism, the cynicism, the existential wager on nothing more elevating that re-swallowing the Ukrainian people. First devoured by Lenin in the 1920s, and then eaten again by Stalin in the 1930s. The Leninist will-to-power is also there in Putin, but the dream is different. Not a speculative blueprint for humanity’s future, but a necromancer’s resurrection of Russia’s obscurantist past. Not the white-hot ripples of modernist self-confidence, but the poisonous fogs and vapours of the Middle Ages.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 18 October 2022.

Diagnosing Our Malady.

“The people, united, will never be defeated!” That is as true today as it was in 1793 when the French revolutionary government pioneered the Levée en masse – the mobilisation of the whole nation to resist the invader. And it still works.

FROM WHENCE ARISES our malady? This bewilderment at the present. This confusion about the past. This fear of the future.

The world no longer works the way we think it does. It is run by people we do not know. Such control as we once exerted over events has dwindled away to almost nothing. We have become powerless.

We all feel like this at times. When the world looms so large, and our ability to make the slightest difference appears so very small. We’re wrong, of course. The most powerful force on this planet has always been, and always will be, human-beings acting collectively.

Witness the people of Ukraine: outnumbered, outgunned, but determined to preserve their independence. And they’re winning! “The people, united, will never be defeated!” That is as true today as it was in 1793 when the French revolutionary government pioneered the Levée en masse – the mobilisation of the whole nation to resist the invader. And it still works.

Remembering the power of collectivism isn’t always easy, however. Our society’s relentless focus on the individual all-too-often transforms the experience of powerlessness into a demoralising confirmation of personal weakness and failure.

If you’re not winning, it’s because you’re a loser.

That’s a hard thought to shake – especially when the advertising messages with which we are bombarded every day confirm it. The banks’ ads make the securing of a home loan seem easy. The builders’ ads show satisfied clients singing the praises of their lovely houses. Two delightful children discuss the specifications of their parents’ brand new SUVs. If these stories are not about you, then, clearly, that’s because you haven’t done the things necessary to inhabit them.

“If you’ve got lots, it’s because you’ve been good. If you’ve got nothing, it’s because you’ve been bad. Just ask Santa Claus.”

But that’s not true, either. In the early 1930s, in a country ravaged – like so many others – by the dire economic consequences of the Great Depression, the working poor organised themselves into an unstoppable political force and won full employment, state houses, a public health service and free education for themselves, their children, and their grandchildren. By acting collectively, they turned all New Zealanders into winners.

That could be done again if we were willing to abandon selfies for selflessness. But, it wouldn’t be easy. Following last week’s Budget, Danyl McLauchlan, a scientist, novelist, former Green Party staffer, and social media commentator, had this to say about the enormous difficulties of getting anything done in this country – even when you’re the Government:

… the modern day public sector is very far from the one Michael Joseph Savage built, or even the walk-shorts and glide time stereotypes of the 1970s. It’s an amalgam of public and private entities: departments and ministries and commissions co-existing with law firms, consultancies, public relations companies, NGOs, corporations and other private sector providers. It’s carefully optimised to redirect vast amounts of public spending into private hands, and this is a problem this government struggles to confront.

Danyl has put his finger on the source of our malady. It is the structural negation of collectivism. The transfer of public money into private hands. The deliberate dismantling of the social and economic machinery geared towards meeting the needs of the many, not the few. A system of disempowerment, where not even Ministers of the Crown possess the authority to appoint, or sack, the bureaucrats upon whom we must all rely for the implementation of democratically mandated policies.

Five thousand years ago, acting collectively, the Ancient Egyptians constructed the Pyramids. These astonishing monuments were not the work of slaves, but of a vast army of free labourers dedicated to keeping the spirit and will of their civilisation – symbolised by their Pharaoh – alive for all eternity. Two hundred-and-thirty years ago, acting collectively, the French people preserved Liberty, Equality and Fraternity against the concerted opposition of the crowned heads of Europe. Fifty-three years ago, working collectively, the American people put a man on the Moon. Two years ago, acting collectively, a nation of five million, facing a deadly global pandemic, limited its Covid-19 death-toll to fewer than 30 citizens.

“For, oh, what strength is weaker than the feeble strength of one?”

Acting collectively, there is nothing we cannot conquer – not even our present and besetting malady of individual greed and selfishness.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 27 May 2022.

Trusting Ourselves To Do The Right Thing.

Democracy 1.0  Athenian democracy was mostly a reaction to bad government, not an experiment in good government. The freemen of the army and navy who defended the independence of the city-state, reacting against the misrule of tyrants (strong men) and oligarchs (rich men) came up with the last ditch idea of entrusting the government of the city to themselves.

IN THE END, the question comes down to this: can human-beings be trusted to do the right thing? If you think they can, then you are a democrat and, probably, a socialist. If people can be trusted, what possible objection could you have to not trusting them? All of them. All of the time. With everything.

The problem with trusting all of the people, all of the time: that is to say, with democratic socialism; is that most of us don’t trust them. Not all of the people. Not all of the time. Most of us work on the principle that there are some people who cannot, and should not, be trusted.

Some people are simply too stupid to be trusted. Others are too venal – too greedy. Still more are dishonest and manipulative. And, finally, a certain irreducible percentage of any given population are just too damned evil to be trusted – with anything.

But, once you admit that only some of the people can, or should, be trusted, then your journey away from democracy and socialism has already begun. The moment our common humanity ceases to be a sufficient qualification for determining society’s course, then it becomes necessary to establish some other criterion for participating in the decision-making process.

Immediately, this presents us with a new problem. Who gets to set the criteria for participation? Should it be the wisest? The richest? The strongest? The most cunning? It’s a question that has perplexed the thinkers of every age, from Plato to Peter Thiel.

History’s answer is unequivocal: decision-making in practically every society there has ever been settles eventually upon the shoulders of the richest and the strongest. (Although the most cunning usually contrive to also have a say in the running of things!)

What about Ancient Athens? The world’s first democracy? Well, for a start, Ancient Athens was a far cry from a system of government that trusted all of the people, all of the time. If you were a woman, or a slave, your participation in decision-making was expressly forbidden. The same applied to “foreigners”, no matter how long they had lived in the city. Only free Athenian males could vote or hold office.

What’s more, Athenian democracy was mostly a reaction to bad government, not an experiment in good government. The freemen of the army and navy who defended the independence of the city-state, reacting against the misrule of tyrants (strong men) and oligarchs (rich men) came up with the last ditch idea of entrusting the government of the city to themselves.

What the freemen of Athens never overcame, however, were the political effects of the unequal distribution of talent and guile. Some men were good talkers. Others were superb schemers. Democracies throughout history have proved to be extremely vulnerable to such individuals.

The other great paradox of democracy is that it tends to be undermined by its own success. Democratic Athens became extremely wealthy and could not resist the temptation to use its riches to overpower its weaker and poorer neighbours.

Unfortunately, the building of empires renders democracy increasingly fragile. Those made wealthy by imperialism – always a minority – all-too-often use their ill-gotten riches to corrupt the democratic process. The resulting progression toward oligarchy and plutocracy can only then be stopped by the intervention of a demagogue who, if successful, soon assumes the role of tyrant.

Rich men, or strong men. It is not an appealing choice.

But, surely, these ancient precedents do not apply to us? In the Twenty-First Century just about every member-state of the United Nations boasts universal suffrage. Democracy, of a sort, has become the norm. All of the people: regardless of their race, colour, sex or creed; get to decide. Maybe not all the time, but certainly every few years – at the ballot box. So, aren’t we all democrats now?

Democrats, maybe. But certainly not socialists. The most important thing to note about the governing arrangements of the last 200 years is the way in which political power has been separated from economic power. In a nutshell, more and more people have been given a say over less and less.

The truth of this observation becomes obvious the moment the ordinary citizen gives a moment’s thought to how much power they get to wield every day in the place they spend most of their waking hours – the workplace. The contemporary capitalist enterprise (think Amazon) is not in the least bit democratic. Subtract the hours spent travelling to and from the workplace, and the hours spent sleeping, and most of the lives of most human-beings are lived in a world where tyranny is the norm.

Nothing is more fiercely resisted in the capitalist enterprise than workers attempting to democratise the employment relationship. (Once again, think Amazon.) The greatest political struggles of the past 200 years have been sparked by the attempts of working men and women to wrest some measure of control over their economic circumstances from the capitalists whose enterprises have come to dominate more and more of their lives.

Social-democracy cannot be countenanced by capitalism, precisely because it seeks to merge politics and economics into a single argument and a single movement. In order to fight social-democracy effectively, capitalist intellectuals, after many false starts and diversions, arrived at the startling conclusion that no human-beings can ever be trusted to do the right thing. That people are, indeed, too stupid, too venal, too greedy, too dishonest, too manipulative, and, ultimately, too damned evil, to be entrusted with decision-making power over anything.

The truly innovative aspect of this radically anti-democratic and anti-socialist doctrine is that the capitalist intellectuals include themselves among the human-beings who can’t be trusted. They do this because they are convinced that a mechanism exists, vastly superior to the human brain, which can be relied upon to produce optimal outcomes in every conceivable set of circumstances.

Into this mechanism are fed the billions of choices made by human-beings everyday over every aspect of their lives. From the cut and style of a suit, to the creaminess of an ice-cream, to the speed and efficiency of a motor vehicle: the market mechanism is wiser than any individual, more efficient than any government, and confers upon each participant in its processes the freedom that comes from relinquishing all responsibility for the lives of others. According to this doctrine, the dollar bills spent by ordinary citizens are a more effective determinant of the public good than any number of triennial ballot papers.

The only politics which these radical capitalists (whom some call Neoliberals) are prepared to tolerate, is the politics dedicated to protecting and extending the market mechanism. Theirs is a politics devoted to identifying the designs of the social-democrats, and devising the most effective means of defeating them. It is a politics dedicated to instilling in the ordinary person a level of faith in the market mechanism that is practically religious. A politics which paints every attempt to force the market to generate specified outcomes as the work of totalitarian socialists: arrogant politicians and bureaucrats, whose necessarily limited information cannot produce anything other than economic catastrophe and the extinction of personal liberty.

Their so far winning wager has been that those who decline to trust their fellow human-beings to do the right thing will, in very short order, cease to trust themselves.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 14 April 2022.

Reality and the Left – A Bitter Divorce.

Things Fall Apart: The events of the past ten days offer ample evidence of just how seriously social decay has weakened New Zealand society. A more confident New Zealand Left, recognising the weakness of the system, and its acute vulnerability to those who would enlist the aid of “gangsters, racketeers, swindlers, petty criminals” would have no hesitation in identifying the so-called “Freedom Convoy” as the reactionary, quasi-fascist, enterprise it has always been.

WHERE IS REALITY HIDING amidst all these claims and counter-claims concerning the protest encampment in Parliament Grounds? In an excruciatingly post-modern political moment, reality seems to have gone AWOL, leaving behind only a noisy collection of competing narratives.

To make matters worse, the state itself, supposedly the supreme arbiter of what is and is not politically real, is refusing to do its job. Even though it is his sworn duty, the Commissioner of Police, Andrew Coster, has made it frighteningly clear to the public that he lacks both the will and the means to assert the state’s authority. The New Zealand Defence Force, meanwhile, holds itself aloof from the fray. Jacinda Ardern and Christopher Luxon, powerless to intervene, look on ineffectually. The crisis deepens.

Ask yourself: what does it mean when tow-truck drivers, asked to assist the Commissioner of Police, refuse? At what point during the last decade did citizens begin to tell themselves that they had no obligations to the society in which they live? That nobody had the right to tell them what to do – not even the Police? What business is it of theirs if the people of Wellington, their neighbours, need their help?

It has been reported that at least one towie openly declared his support for the protesters encamped on Parliament Grounds. Entirely understandable. The occupiers don’t accept that their government has the right to require their vaccination against Covid-19. Nor do they believe that they owe their fellow citizens even the slightest co-operation in the fight to limit the harm of the virus. That tow-truck driver recognised kindred spirits when he saw them. Andrew Coster and Wellingtonians could go fuck themselves.

Not all the towies were so bloody minded. According to media reports, some of them were just plain scared. They claimed to have been threatened with dire retribution if they allowed their trucks to be used by the Police. Considering those trucks carried the names and phone numbers of their owners, it’s not difficult to understand the impact of such threats. Were someone to burn down a towing company’s premises, torch its trucks, that would be multiple livelihoods lost and a business ruined. Who wouldn’t think twice?

Such tactics are, however, remarkably effective. I remember reading about Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters’ bitter battles with the trucking companies. The bosses could rely on local politicians, local judges, local editors and local cops to defend them against Hoffa’s strikers. The union was on a hiding-to-nothing, until Hoffa reached out to the Mafia. It only took a few dozen torched trucks for the bosses to get the message. The Teamsters won their improved contract. But the spoon Hoffa took to his dinner with the Devil wasn’t quite long enough. His beloved Teamsters’ Union now belonged to the Mob.

Now, you might think that people on the left of New Zealand politics would recognise the danger of holding up the occupation of Parliament Grounds as a praiseworthy assertion of working-class power. As if poverty and marginalisation, frustration and anger, ignorance and credulity are always and everywhere evidence of moral force and progressive intent.

Karl Marx himself recognised the acute political danger inherent in what he called the Lumpenproletariat. According to the Encyclopedia of Marxism, this social formation is composed of the “outcast, degenerated and submerged elements” of industrial society:

It includes beggars, prostitutes, gangsters, racketeers, swindlers, petty criminals, tramps, chronic unemployed or unemployables, persons who have been cast out by industry, and all sorts of declassed, degraded or degenerated elements. In times of prolonged crisis (depression), innumerable young people also, who cannot find an opportunity to enter into the social organism as producers, are pushed into this limbo of the outcast. Here demagogues and fascists of various stripes find some area of their mass base in time of struggle and social breakdown, when the ranks of the Lumpenproletariat are enormously swelled by ruined and declassed elements from all layers of a society in decay.

That our society is in decay can hardly be doubted. The events of the past ten days offer ample evidence of just how seriously that decay has weakened New Zealand society. A viable Left, recognising the weakness of the system, and its acute vulnerability to those who would enlist the aid of “gangsters, racketeers, swindlers, petty criminals” would have no hesitation in identifying the so-called “Freedom Convoy” as the reactionary, quasi-fascist, enterprise it has always been.

Alas, New Zealand no longer possesses a viable Left. Identity politics has schooled a whole generation to accept the self-definitions of “oppressed groups” at their face value. Drilling down into the actual character of such groups, and scrutinising their relationship to the ruling class, is not encouraged. Even among those leftists who still acknowledge the primacy of class politics there is a pronounced unwillingness to subject movements like the Freedom Convoy to any kind of rigorous class analysis.

For these leftists, it is enough that the occupiers of Parliament Grounds are, or were, members of the working-class. So desperate are these “revolutionaries” for the slightest hint of revolutionary consciousness that they are willing to overlook the absence of anything remotely resembling a concrete programme for the social and economic emancipation of the working class. The only programme in evidence among the occupiers is the one demanding the instant cessation of all measures aimed at minimising the hurt and suffering of Covid-19.

How self-proclaimed “socialists” could possibly mistake such a noxious potpourri of anti-social attitudes for anything remotely progressive is a mystery. Perhaps it is no more than the curious allure of the demi-monde, coupled with the magnetic eccentricities of the Bohemian temperament, that has led these desperate socialists to mistake reactionaries for revolutionaries. Clearly they have forgotten that Adolf Hitler himself was a Lumpenproletarian. A more “declassed, degraded and degenerated” specimen History has yet to supply!

It was the Italian socialist, Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) who understood most completely the extraordinary fluidity of reality in periods of acute social stress and political disintegration. Moments in history when the hegemonic explanations of the ruling-class have lost, or are beginning to lose, their power to allay the fears and misgivings of subordinate classes. In such times – and we are living through them now – people are desperate for new and more persuasive narratives about the nature of reality.

Not all of those narratives are addressed to the best that is in human nature. Sorting out the lies of charlatans and demagogues from genuine revolutionary truths isn’t always easy – especially in this age of social-media algorithms. Leftists are often surprised to learn that Mussolini was a socialist before he became a fascist.

Gramsci put it best when he wrote: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Or, more succinctly: “Now is the time of monsters.”

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 17 February 2022.

Following Labour's Lead.

Red And Proud: The only real question, after Thursday’s Budget, is: How long will it take National to realise how profoundly the political game has been – and is being – transformed by Covid and Climate Change? Socialism is no longer a dirty word.

YOU HAVE TO ADMIT, Judith Collins made a reasonable fist of responding to Grant Robertson’s 2021 Budget. It wasn’t enough, of course. It would have required a truly Churchillian performance to dispel the magic of Robertson’s speech. Labour has well-and-truly learned what National appears to have forgotten: that people feel long before they think. And Robertson had just made a goodly portion of the New Zealand electorate feel righteous. As performances go, his was a bloody hard act to follow.

Still, the leader of the Opposition has not forgotten how to use her sword. Her thrust against “Meccano lessons” at the Hillside Workshops was deadly. Unfortunately, she failed to follow it up with an equally devastating assault upon the whole import substitution policy to which Robertson’s proudly proletarian pitch paid homage. There was, after all, a reason why Labour, in the early 1980s, began casting around for something to replace the Sutchism that had dominated Labour’s policy-making since the late-1950s.

It is one of New Zealand political history’s greatest ironies that Rob Muldoon, the “Young Turk” who won his spurs attacking the massive import substitution programme unleashed by the Second Labour Government, should have ended his career amidst the wreckage of “Think Big” – as he called his own updating of the left-leaning economist, civil servant and historian, Bill Sutch’s, radical economic development policies.

Indeed, it is interesting to speculate on what might have happened if Muldoon had remained true to the instincts of his younger, private-enterprise self, by continuing to reject state-directed development in New Zealand. Had Muldoon embraced the same ideas as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the late-1970s and the early-1980s, it could easily have been Labour which ended up betting the farm on one last roll of Sutch’s dice.

As things turned out, it was Labour’s new leader, David Lange, who found himself proclaiming that New Zealand couldn’t go on being run “like a Polish shipyard”. Egged-on by his Treasury advisers, and the smarter elements of the Fourth Estate, he was persuaded to join his backers (Roger Douglas, Michael Basset, Mike Moore and Richard Prebble) in “thinking the unthinkable” about New Zealand’s economic future.

A strong case can be made that Labour’s willingness to “think the unthinkable” made it possible for National to give up thinking altogether. Initially confounded by Labour’s abrupt change of ideological direction – not to mention the near universal praise heaped upon its new “more market” policies by the mainstream news media – National floundered hopelessly. Its win in 1990, which the news media proclaimed a “landslide”, was, by MMP standards, a remarkably close contest. National may have received 47.82 percent of the popular vote, but the combined popular vote for Labour, New Labour and the Greens was 47.15 percent.

Thanks to the First-Past-the-Post electoral system, the new National prime minister, Jim Bolger, was spared the challenge of governing with a one-seat majority. He may have campaigned in the poetry of “The Decent Society”, but the prose he governed in was all written by the same neoliberal scribes who had authored Labour’s policies – albeit with considerably sharper pens. The National Party’s finance minister’s, Ruth Richardson’s, “Mother of All Budgets”, so loudly condemned by Grant Robertson in Thursday’s Budget Speech, was really only Roger Douglas – with bells on.

By the time Labour (with the Alliance in tow) was back in control of the Treasury Benches, its acceptance of the ground rules of Neoliberalism was, if not complete, then sufficiently substantial for the emergence of a style of governance that could be, as John Key went on to prove, as readily adopted by National as Labour. Conservative purists railed against Key’s “Labour-Lite” approach, but it proved more than equal to the challenge of a global financial crisis and a devastating earthquake. It was certainly enough to secure nine years of National Government, which might easily, in the absence of “Jacindamania”, have stretched into twelve.

Historically, this is par for the course with National. From the Opposition Benches, it railed against the Keynesianism of the First Labour Government, only to embrace it as the price of electoral victory.

Muldoon shot down radical Sutchism in 1961, only to see Holyoake and Marshall adopt a watered-down version of the same well into the 1970s. In 1979, beggared for options in the face of seemingly indefatigable “stagflation”, Muldoon became the last, and easily the most radical, of the Sutchists.

Bolger played the same game with Neoliberalism: railing against its brutalities from Opposition; then allowing Bill Birch to crush the trade unions, and Richardson to poleaxe what was left of the welfare state, from the safety of the Government benches.

In 2008, Key accepted a less-sharp-edged version of Neoliberalism from Helen Clark, and cruised effortlessly to three electoral victories in a row.

And now, thanks to Covid-19, Labour finds itself, once again, strategically placed to set a new course for economic and social policy in New Zealand. With the monetarist policies that have, for the past 40 years, constituted the core of Neoliberalism, discredited (by that inveterate foe of all theories – Reality) Prime Minister Ardern and Finance Minister Robertson find themselves at a turning-point very similar to the one their party encountered in the early-1980s.

Confronted with the immediate challenges of a global pandemic, and, behind them, the even more daunting challenges of climate change, governments all over the world are shrugging-off the dogma that there is no problem so great that it cannot be solved by giving the market its head. State action, on a massive scale, is once again being seen, by politicians with an eye to the future, as the indispensable agency of economic and social survival.

Ardern and Robertson have grasped this ideological shift a great deal faster than any of their rivals. Certainly, it has encouraged them to deploy the sort of rhetoric that would have made their predecessors cringe. Targeting Richardson’s Mother of All Budgets and raising benefits in a long-delayed one-fingered salute to this hated left-wing symbol of neoliberal cruelty, was only the beginning. As the Budget Debate wore on, Labour’s backbenchers could not forbear from getting in on the act. The new MP for Wairarapa, Kieran McAnulty, delivered the lines most likely to raise the National Party’s collective blood-pressure:

“Yes, I am a socialist and I’m proud of it. Yeah, there you go. Thank you very much. Bring it on. And I’m very proud to say to the good people of the Wairarapa that they elected a proud socialist as their MP.”

The only real questions, after Thursday’s Budget, is how long will it take National to realise how profoundly the political game has been – and is being – transformed by Covid and Climate Change? Will it be two, three, or four terms? And, how many leaders will the party have to elect, and discard, before it finally masters the new language of electoral victory?

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website of Monday, 24 May 2021.

Lessons From A “Legendary Teacher” Prof. James R. Flynn 1934 – 2020

A Truly Wise Man: For Flynn, the contest between truth and falsehood was never about “bad people” peddling “bad ideas”: it was only ever about inadequately supported propositions. And, the best way to demonstrate their inadequacy was to challenge them on their own terms, in public, with the evidence.

“A LEGENDARY TEACHER”, was how University of Otago Vice-Chancellor, Harlene Hayne, described Professor James R. Flynn (1934-2020). The thousands of first-year politics students who attended his lectures down the years will certainly attest to the accuracy of Haynes’ description. The stories that grew up around the often slipper-shod professor were as colourful as the man who inspired them. Following his death last Friday, at the age of 86, “Jim” Flynn’s former students will be recalling those stories with that tearful mixture of sadness and pride that distinguishes the passing of all truly outstanding individuals.

Flynn was not just a teacher of university students, however, but of two whole generations of New Zealand leftists. Born in Washington DC, Flynn was that rarest and most admirable of things – an American socialist. There are very few democratic nations in the world where it is harder to ply the socialist trade than the United States, and those who make the attempt require the most extraordinary fortitude.

The man after whom Flynn’ son is named, Eugene Victor Debs, spent years in a federal prison for the “crime” of opposing military conscription during the First World War. Flynn himself, although a prodigiously talented scholar, was repeatedly fired from his university posts on account of his membership of Debs’ Socialist Party of America. It didn’t help his career prospects that Flynn was also an active participant in the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 60s. Not when the colleges that hired (and then fired) him were located south of the Mason-Dixon Line!

The American South’s loss proved to be New Zealand’s gain, however, when Flynn and his wife, Emily, sought refuge in what was still regarded, in the late-1960s, as one of the world’s most successful social-democratic nations.

The politics department which Flynn brought into being at the University of Otago, and which he would lead for the next 30 years, largely eschewed the sterile empiricism of “political science”, offering its students, instead, a strong grasp of the philosophical and historical origins of political ideas. To do well in Flynn’s “political studies” department, students not only had to be able to count, they also had to be able to read. (Nothing so alarmed Flynn in the latter part of his career than the dramatic fall-off in ‘voluntary’ reading among under-graduates.)

Although the contemporary university is legally obligated to be the “critic and conscience” of society, it is an obligation more honoured in the breach than in the observance. That could never be said of Flynn, however, who threw himself into the political life of his adopted country with gusto. He had hardly unpacked his belongings before he was quietly advising the Leader of the Labour Opposition, Norman Kirk, on New Zealand’s foreign policy options. In Dunedin, he soon became one of the leading-lights in the Committee on Vietnam. Whether it be leading an anti-war march down George Street, or debating socialism with his students in the Captain Cook Tavern, the lanky figure of the bearded professor soon became a fixture of the academic left in Otago.

In New Zealand, as in the rest of the world, the “Red Seventies” were roughly shouldered aside by the Neoliberal Eighties and Nineties. For Flynn, one of the most egregious effects of the “free-market” counter-revolution was the re-emergence of “Scientific Racism” – especially the notion that the IQ of Blacks was inherently inferior to that of Whites.

To counter this old and pernicious heresy, Flynn immersed himself in, and mastered, the intricacies of psychology, statistical science and higher mathematics. The result: an empirical demonstration of the social malleability of intelligence “scores”, now known, universally, as the “Flynn Effect”, undercut decisively the arguments of the new “racial scientists” – most particularly, Arthur Jensen and Charles Murray.

It was a genuinely “classical” demonstration of the way in which propositions one believes to be without foundation should be countered. Not for Flynn the contemporary preference for naming and shaming one’s opponent’s on social media; “de-platforming” them from all university venues; and presenting them with the choice of either offering-up a humiliating recantation and apology, or, losing their jobs. Flynn simply went in search of the evidence. If it wasn’t there, then the propositions of one’s opponents could be exposed as academically unsustainable.

For Flynn it was never about “bad people” peddling “bad ideas”: it was only ever about inadequately supported propositions. And, the best way to demonstrate their inadequacy was to challenge them on their own terms, in public, with the evidence.

It is, without doubt, one of the most important intellectual lessons of this “legendary teacher”: that truth is the product of free and open debate; and that any university unwilling to stand up for free and open debate is, ultimately, unworthy of the name.

Arguably, Flynn’s most important political lesson is the principle he did so much to enshrine in both the NewLabour Party, and in its successor, the Alliance. Significantly, it is based on the same intellectual rigour that gave birth to the Flynn Effect.

Essentially, Flynn’s political argument was a simple one. It is ethically insupportable and, ultimately, electorally self-defeating, for a left-wing political party to make promises to the electorate which it cannot show to be fiscally sustainable. Left-wing political leaders, said Flynn, have a moral obligation to demonstrate, by drawing up a mathematically coherent Alternative Budget, how all the good things they are promising will be paid for.

Does this approach have a political cost? Of course it does! Voters don’t like to hear that their taxes will need to be raised and/or new taxes imposed. But, Flynn’s argument was that until the electorate can be persuaded that paying higher taxes is a necessary condition for living in a just society, then any electoral victories on the part of the Left will only ever be temporary. The mission of the true democratic socialist, argued Flynn, was not, primarily, to win votes in the short term, but to effect a long-term change of voters’ hearts and minds – by telling them the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Idealistic? Quixotic? Naïve? Flynn was called all of those things in his time. At no point, however, did I hear anyone, from either the far- or the centre-left, demonstrate the fault in Flynn’s operating principles for a genuinely democratic socialism. As he proved in relation to race and intelligence, if the numbers do not stack-up, then neither does the argument.

Though a life-long atheist, Flynn was not above offering his classes and comrades the odd biblical quotation. One of his favourites was from the Book of Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun that – The race is not to the swift, Nor the battle to the strong, Nor bread to the wise, Nor riches to men of understanding, Nor favour to men of skill; But time and chance happen to them all.

I always thought of it as a curiously self-refuting quotation. For if time and chance determine all things, then the quest for truth and justice is vain and doomed to disappointment. But, perhaps, it is in that quote from Ecclesiastes that we find the true measure of James R. Flynn: philosopher, mathematician, socialist. That in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, the pursuit of truth and justice remains the only accurate test of our determination to become fully human.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 14 December 2020.

Dean Parker: 1947 - 2020

Dean Parker - Socialist, trade unionist, journalist, novelist, playwright, screenwriter. Photo Credit: Roger Fowler.

YESTERDAY, Tuesday, 14 April 2020, New Zealand lost Dean Parker, one of its most important socialist artists. His death is a tragic loss to the whole NZ Left. To his family, friends and comrades, I offer my heartfelt sympathy.

Dean was one of the most creative and entertaining individuals it has been my privilege to know. His knowledge of the history and culture of the socialist movement, both internationally and domestically, was second to none. He had the ability as a writer and playwright to make the past come alive and to infuse the present with political possibility. His “Bloomsday” productions were unforgettable. 

I will miss you Dean - and all that you stood for.

Haere ra Comrade.

CHRIS TROTTER

This posting is exclusive to Bowalley Road.

Hands Off Venezuela!

People Power: The United States and its "assets" in the New Zealand news media, would like us to believe that all those protesting against Maduro’s inept handling of the unceasing political and economic crises by which he has been beset are unanimously for the self-declared "Iterim President", Juan Guaido. They are not. Many are seeking new elections and new leaders. But, they are not seeking a restoration of elite power. Nor will they countenance an American invasion of their homeland.

VENEZUELA DESERVES DEMOCRACY, but that is not what Venezuela is going to get. What it will get – as the whole world is currently witnessing – is a brutal assault on its people by the world’s most powerful nation. Venezuela is being threatened with economic strangulation, civil war and, should these stratagems prove ineffective in dislodging the government of President Nicolas Maduro, a full-scale military invasion led by the United States itself.

That such an invasion would constitute a flagrant violation of the United Nations’ Charter will count for nought. The world stood by and did nothing in 2003 when the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia violated the UN charter by invading Iraq – a country whose armed forces had not committed the slightest act of aggression against the belligerent powers, or any other UN member state.

The New Zealand Government, regardless of its private misgivings, will remain silent and inactive as the Venezuelan people are tortured into submission by the United States and its allies. To follow any other course of action would attract the attention of the very forces who have fastened Venezuela to the rack. Not wishing to be hit with US sanctions; unwilling to risk the seizure New Zealand’s overseas assets; Jacinda Ardern and Winston Peters will keep their mouths shut and their heads down.

If they’re lucky.  Because a shameful silence is about the best we can hope for from the Coalition Government. If we are unlucky, the murderous thugs who are currently managing the subjugation of Venezuela will decide that New Zealand keeping its head down is insufficiently supportive of US policy. In these circumstances, Jacinda and Winston will be required to publicly endorse the Trump Administration’s excesses. Lest silence be misinterpreted by the rest of the world as disapproval or, God forbid! – defiance.

Regardless of Washington’s ultimate directive to its “very, very, very good friends” in New Zealand, the Coalition Government will be beset by a chorus of right-wing voices demanding that New Zealand recognise immediately the self-proclaimed “Interim President”, Juan Guaido, as Venezuela’s legitimate head-of-state. This pressure from the Right will only intensify as, one after the other, the USA’s closest allies abandon Maduro in favour of Guaido. That recognising this puppet politician will make New Zealand complicit in a US-backed coup d’état will in no way deter the Right from testing the Coalition Government’s “commitment to democracy”.

To facilitate just such an outcome, the Right has, for several weeks, been waging a co-ordinated campaign against the current Venezuelan Government, along with the “Bolivarian Revolution” championed by Maduro’s charismatic predecessor, Hugo Chavez. Right-wing commentators, led by Liam Hehir, have characterised the economic crisis brought on by the collapse of world oil prices; intensified by the economic sabotage perpetrated by Venezuela’s capitalist class; and aided immeasurably by the constricting effects of US sanctions and asset seizures; as evidence of the inevitable fate of any nation foolish enough to embrace socialism.

In eerie anticipation of the United States Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo’s, invitation for governments to “pick a side”, in this looming fight, Hehir has publicly demanded that all those left-wing commentators (myself included) who have, in the past, proclaimed their support for and/or admiration of Hugo Chavez and his Bolivarian Revolution, must immediately recant their criminal folly and join with the Right in demonizing  Maduro, Chavez, Bolivarian Socialism, and all its works.

Hehir does not appear to be the least bit ashamed of his embrace of the very worst tactics of 1950s McCarthyism. One almost expects him to demand of all those unwilling to endorse the overthrow of a sovereign government: “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?”

Significantly, Hehir is either ignorant of, or unwilling to acknowledge, the fact that the private sector’s share of the Venezuelan economy has actually grown under Maduro’s presidency, not shrunk. Or, that the nationalisation of Venezuela’s oil industry took place more than 40 years ago – long before Chavez and Maduro were ever elected to the Venezuelan presidency.

The straightforward facts of Venezuela’s economy: that it has always relied in an extremely narrow range of commodity exports (coffee, oil) for its national income, and that it has consistently failed to make itself less dependent on imported necessities – especially food – by diversifying and/or industrialising its economy – are omitted. Hehir is simply not interested in informing his readers that severe economic crises – sparked by sudden collapses in key commodity prices – have been a regular feature of Venezuela’s economic history.

Maduro’s failures – and there are many – are attributable less to his socialist beliefs than to his own, and his predecessor’s, failure to use the massive economic surpluses, racked up when oil was fetching almost twice as much on the international markets as it is currently, to diversify Venezuela’s economy. That they were more concerned to lift the living standards of the poorest Venezuelans as quickly as possible, while understandable, was also – given the country’s history – unforgiveable.

Both Chavez and Maduro should have understood that economic crises experienced under right-wing governments are regarded very differently by the United States than economic crises which strike when left-wing and/or anti-American governments are in power. In the case of the former, the nation’s troubles are merely the result of impersonal market forces. In the latter’s case, however, economic crisis is presented as incontestable proof of socialism’s failure. And, if the economic and social elites can magnify the hardship and suffering of those on whose behalf the left-wing government has been acting, then why wouldn’t they? Especially when the US Government is so willing to help them out with money and advice. “Make the economy scream”, said President Richard Nixon’s advisers – back in the early 1970s, when the US was faced with another democratically elected left-wing government in South America. It worked then – it’s working now.

It’s what I find so hard to forgive about the position taken by Hehir and his right-wing colleagues. That they are aligning themselves with those who are most to blame for the travails of the Venezuelan people. The Bolivarian Revolution, itself, grew out of the popular resistance inspired by the vicious austerity measures which the poorest of the Venezuelan poor were expected to bear in order to rescue the economy form yet another commodity-price collapse back in the 1990s.

Hehir has nothing to say about the coup mounted against Chavez by Venezuela’s economic and social elites in 2002, after the wretched inhabitants of the capital city’s slums had had the temerity to vote him into power. Or how the education Chavez’s Bolivarian Revolution had given them in their constitutional rights as citizens propelled the poor onto the streets in their thousands to rescue their president – and their democracy.

Hehir and his ilk would like us to believe that all those protesting against Maduro’s inept handling of the unceasing political and economic crises by which he has been beset are unanimously for Guaido and his American puppet-masters. They are not. Many are seeking new elections and new leaders. But, they are not seeking a restoration of elite power. Nor will they countenance an American invasion of their homeland.

Those who await with such eagerness the tramp of military boots on the streets of Caracas are partisans of coup, counter-revolution, and the violent repression of the poorest citizens of Venezuela. The Right is, therefore, ranging itself alongside the most ruthless and selfish elements of Venezuelan society. Elements whose democratic rights have, for more than a decade, been upheld by the very government they are pledged to destroy: with democracy, if possible; without it, if necessary. Hehir lambasts Chavez and Maduro as the Lenin and Stalin of socialist Venezuela. It’s a puerile accusation. Had Chavez been a genuine Leninist, and Maduro an unashamed Stalinist, then the streets of Caracas would have run red with bourgeois blood.

And yet, unaccountably, the Venezuelan elites have survived: to plot in safety, and protest in their tens-of-thousands. Demanding, like the Chilean elites before them, that the military intervene ruthlessly on their behalf. Confident, in equal measure, that the Americans will not let them down, and that the rivers of blood flowing through the streets of Caracas will not be theirs.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 5 February 2019.

Keeping Power Homeless.

The Road Not Taken: The Workers, warned Karl Marx's contemporary and fellow revolutionary, Mikhail Bakunin, “once they become rulers or representatives of the people, cease to be workers. And from the heights of the State they begin to look down upon the toiling people. From that time on they represent not the people but themselves and their own claims to govern the people. Those who doubt this know precious little about human nature.”

WHERE DO WE GO when both the market and the state have been weighed in the balance and found wanting? How much better-off would the peoples of the world be if, instead of the towering ziggurats of global capitalism, their skylines were dominated by the equally absurd wedding-cake skyscrapers of global socialism? Would the planet be any less ravaged? Would bureaucracy be any less oppressive? Would the individual feel any freer – or less crushed?

The traditional Marxist response to these sorts of musings is that socialism, once fully established, would lead to a “withering away” of the state. Karl Marx himself equated life under communism with the manifestation of freedom in its broadest possible sense: “[I]n communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wished, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd, or critic.”

Not a vision that would enthuse too many animal rights activists or vegans! Still, it’s easy to imagine a great many huntin’-shootin’-fishin’ Kiwis saying “Where do I sign-up?” Buried in Marx’s bucolic depiction of his communist paradise, however, is the easily overlooked phrase “society regulates the general production”. Society? Who’s that? And how does s/he “regulate the general production”? Who writes these regulations? Who enforces them? And out of which particular part of Planet Earth is all this “general production” to be extracted? You can see already how many serpents this passage sets loose in Marxist communism’s Garden of Eden!

Mikhail Bakunin, a contemporary of Marx – and a fellow revolutionary – was never one to let glib phrases about society regulating production pass him by without a very close inspection. He understood intuitively that the sort of society the socialists were hoping to bring into existence would necessitate a vast and all-embracing bureaucracy. It was a prospect that gave him considerable pause for thought – and not a few misgivings:

Workers, he said, “once they become rulers or representatives of the people, cease to be workers. And from the heights of the State they begin to look down upon the toiling people. From that time on they represent not the people but themselves and their own claims to govern the people. Those who doubt this know precious little about human nature.”

In those few lines, Bakunin describes the fatal flaw which lies at the heart of Marx’s vision. The flaw that, when Lenin’s Bolsheviks set about establishing the world’s first socialist state in post-World War One Russia, led ineluctably to the monstrous bureaucratic tyranny by which every one of the nations in which “actually existing socialism” held sway was to be so appallingly disfigured.

How to escape from this awful conundrum? Is there no way that the material abundance which human ingenuity’s technological creations make possible can be equitably distributed? Is there no way of overcoming the private and public bureaucracies so determined to preserve, at any cost, their power to create and administer scarcity? For what else is the state if not an elaborate mechanism for sorting-out (in Leonard Cohen’s arresting phrase) “who shall serve and who shall eat”?

Bakunin’s answer was as unequivocal as it was disturbing. If the state is oppressive by its very nature, then attempting to “take it over” is pointless. No matter how well-intentioned the revolutionaries may be when their banners are as yet unstained by the blood of their comrades, in the very act of exercising power over their fellow human-beings, of administering the state, the revolutionaries’ intentions are altered, distorted and, ultimately, perverted.

That being the case, said Bakunin, the only creditable aim of the true revolutionary is to smash the state: to destroy it; so that human-beings are free to take the “general production” directly into their own hands. Rather that create a brand new structure for power to dwell in, he counselled, keep it homeless. More importantly, learn to do without it altogether. In his own words: “Anyone who makes plans for after the revolution is a reactionary.”

Bakunin, the revolutionary contemporary of Marx, was neither a socialist, nor a communist.

He was an anarchist.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 5 July 2018.