For Free Speech or the Liberal Left? I'm With Free Speech

My previous post on this blog argued against the very poorly resourced claims Moana Jackson made in the e-tangata magazine that ‘freedom of speech’ is not a liberal, democratic value, but a shield for racism, bigotry and hatred. What we have seen in the last week is this debate given a practical test in the form of two key players in the ‘alternative-right’ or ‘alt-right’ movement, Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux, in their bid to hold a speaking event in Auckland. These two speakers had their event cancelled after a decision made by Auckland mayor Phil Goff to block them from accessing any council-operated venue, at which point the Bruce Mason Centre (the intended venue) issued a press statement saying that for “health and safety reasons” the event had been cancelled. A little gratuitous, one would think. But this action from the state to censure a speaking tour had full support from the so-called ‘liberal left’. Their support demonstrates yet again that this constituency is turning against both the liberal and leftist values they once held to become the ‘left wing’ of authoritarian reaction that supports capitalism and state-sanctioned interference in the civic arena of debate.

These two positions, the liberal left and alt-right, essentially structure the dominant mode of participating in politics today – debates about ‘culture’ often broadly and erroneously conceived. In my post on Moana Jackson I explained that he is part of an intellectual faction in academia called ‘culturalism’ which insists on the primacy of ethnic group belonging in one’s personal identity. It then tries to put a square peg in a round hole by combining this with a liberal political programme of rights and freedoms. Notably, culturalism never addresses in any systematic or meaningful way the worldwide system of allocation of material resources, or the trajectory of uneven economic development this system follows which gives rise to extraordinary differences between ownership classes and labouring classes. It jettisons these issues so it can talk about culture and the lack of strong investment in traditions as being the problem for marginalised ethnic groups. This utterly misguided phenomenon, which takes no account of the changes to class composition along the lines of those ‘marginalised ethnic groups’ that has taken place since the late twentieth century, is the ‘left’ wing of the cultural debate.

The right wing of the cultural debate accepts much of the claims that form the basis of the ‘left’ form of culturalism. They also believe in the primacy of ethnic belonging, ‘culture’ and tradition. Commonly they are Europeans but not exclusively so; hence there is a lot of just-as-unnecessary and stupefyingly off-base chit-chat about ‘European culture’ being ‘under threat’ and requiring some sort of ‘revival’. Presumably, given the actions of many alt-right figures, what this ‘revival’ requires is a lot of racist caterwauling, making fun of ‘social justice warriors’, and in some cases arguing for societal regressions to essentially feudal systems of social organisation. The alt-right is not a homogeneous phenomenon and has many forms – the ‘anarcho-capitalist’ form that Molyneux represents is one, but Southern appears to represent the self-described neo-Nazi element of the alt-right given the company she has been recently keeping. But their biggest issue above all where they have almost complete agreement on is immigration. They call for practically all immigration to be stopped, and fierce border controls. The wall Trump has proposed to divide the United States and Mexico is a good start. This position follows from the culturalist view that people have different ‘cultures’, coupled with the idea that they must not mix, like they have been allowed to do with the ‘liberal projects’ of mass immigration and multiculturalism.

We can see, then, how the culturalism supported by many elements of the liberal left actually goes some way to complementing the beliefs of the alt-right. They are merely two permutations of the same worldview that have only a second-order disagreement. The basis of these two views is incorrect but widely held. It is the essentialist scenario that instead of being part of a constantly changing human world that must be acknowledged from the start to be wildly heterogeneous, we are born into a discrete set of hypostatic cultural groups that usually carry ethnic or national labels, like ‘European’ or ‘Nigerian’ or ‘Indian’ or ‘Mexican’ or ‘Scandinavian’ or ‘Māori’, or whatever else. These cultures all have traditions that must be respected and honoured. This is a profoundly ahistorical view of the world that freezes people’s understanding of different groups of others in the present, and fails to take stock of how the entire history of the human world has been shaped by ‘cultural’ exchange and also suppression of particular elements through a long, protracted history of empire-building and consolidation. There is also very little attempt made to explain what ‘culture’ actually is in this framework. More often than not reactionary inferences are made to concepts like Volksgeist (national spirit or national character) or indeed essentialist, Romantic reference to an inner cultural ‘spirit’ (very common in ‘indigenous’ theories).

The debate on ‘culture’ and migration has become an issue because of what Jonathan Friedman describes as the “dual process” which motors the tendency towards what is often called ‘globalisation’. The first part of that process is the inexorable movement towards an end to the old international political order dominated by one or two ‘central’ world powers. We now have a multipolar world order caused by the political weakening of Western nation-states as well as the disintegration of the Soviet Union. This is coupled with the constant political anxieties and conflicts of many ‘weak’ postcolonial states. With this decentralisation comes a re-emergence of national identities in those dehegemonised areas, which can be seen particularly in the success of Eastern and Central European nationalist movements and parties such as in Hungary and Poland. These movements are mostly on the right of politics. With the political crises of many ‘weak’ states in weaker areas of the world-system, particularly in African and Middle Eastern nations, enormous waves of migration have occurred from those nations to the old ‘centres’. This can be compared with the status of Eastern Asia that has seen the opposite effect: a suppression of minority politics and a reinforcement of national or regional identities.

The other aspect of this process, for Friedman, is the “increased polarization between classes and a transformation of the identities of the classes involved”. This occurs primarily in the old centres of the world-system. The polarisation occurs between “increasing cosmopolitanism among rising elites and increasing localism, nationalism, and xenophobia among declining and increasingly marginalized classes”. We see this happening in the United States where Hillary Clinton of the Democratic Party, seemingly the figurehead of ‘anti-establishment’ opprobrium there, is ignorant to the material plight of the working-class, having the audacity to lump them into a “basket of deplorables” – and the ‘white’ (among other ‘racial’ group) working-classes of the Rust Belt, who have lost considerable economic ground thanks to deindustrialisation and capital flight from North America, supporting Donald Trump and his anti-immigration policies for the presidency. It is repeatedly insinuated by the Clinton faction of the Democrats, however, that these groups in fact do not face ‘economic anxieties’ and this is just an excuse for their ‘racism’ – which only confirms that they pay no attention (or perhaps they don’t want to) to the changes in the capitalist economy going on around them, that have widened inequalities as a result of their own party’s economic policies.

The alt-right and the assortment of European nationalist movements have seized the window of opportunity created by this polarisation of classes, and sought to exploit it. These movements have carried with them sections of the working classes that were formerly supporters of social democratic parties. Hence, many social democratic parties in Europe and North America are now experiencing a crisis of relevancy. The Socialist Party in France is an almost non-existent presence in its national parliament. The SDP in Germany is only hanging on as a junior coalition partner in Angela Merkel’s right-wing government, virtually useless. Populists in Italy ousted the Democratic Party government in a landslide victory; the latter has just 111 seats in a 630-seat Chamber of Deputies. The Liberal Party of Canada under Justin Trudeau has been absolutely shambolic in government and will very likely last just one term. This unprecedented scale of failure by social democratic parties has been repeated across European and North American countries and provinces. It is because they have all abandoned reformist projects to build up a public welfare and social services state, and instead pursued a continuation of capitalist austerity policies that are beneficial to the financial sector and business but have widened class inequalities. It is no surprise that the working classes have rejected such parties. But because of the activities of these new right-wing groups, along with the abject failure of much of the Left to respond with any coherent vision, political investments of the working class have been diverted away from building resentment against the injustices of a broken, pathetic and coiling economic system towards the scapegoating of a pseudo-enemy in the immigrant or refugee.

The liberal left is the constituency that still, with actual gusto, supports social-democratic parties despite their long-held betrayal of the great reformist projects they once promised. The liberal left can do this because it is largely a middle-class phenomenon that has little or no connection to the working-class and views its growing resentment of world elites and slanting towards xenophobia with complete contempt. It can do this with virtually no contradiction to its political outlook because it has abandoned any pretence of being ‘left-wing’ at all. The primary condition of being on the political left is opposing social inequality and supporting forms of class politics. The liberal left, however, has no form of class analysis whatsoever that it cannot channel into a misguided analysis of ‘ethnic’ inequality, gender inequality or anything else but straightforward class analysis. The liberal left is notionally a separate constituency to what I call the ‘cultural Left’ or ‘culturalists’ (of Moana Jackson’s ilk), but they overlap significantly and have entered into the cultural politics debate united, because of the liberal left’s penchant for amplifying identity politics at the expense of class politics.

As a result of its political alliance with the culturalists, not only does the liberal left betray the ‘left’ in its name, but also the ‘liberal’ as well. The liberal left has bought into the authoritarian strategy of censorship of any political group it does not like. Its word for this is ‘no-platforming’ or ‘deplatforming’. This is because the liberal left believes ‘hate speech’ should not have a platform. As I showed in my piece on Moana Jackson, there is considerable latitude applied to what constitutes ‘hate speech’, and there is nothing stopping that definition being turned on its head by opponents, who can use state institutions to censor things they also do not like or present themselves as marginalised groups. This is what Israel Folau attempted to do during the controversy surrounding his comments on gay people. He presented his version of anti-homosexual Christianity as a ‘marginalised’ position, which received support from Destiny Church founder and serial fraudster Brian Tamaki. When Southern and Molyneux announced they were coming to New Zealand for their anti-immigration speaking tour, the liberal left appealed to state institutions to interfere in the civic arena to get it stopped. Little does the liberal left realise this is exactly what the alt-right expect and want from them and it is a primary strategy of recruiting new converts to their political cult.

With the liberal left betraying liberal ideals of a democratic public sphere through their wanton use of state interference at every turn, the alt-right has been able to present themselves as arbiters of the right to freedom of speech. This, however, is even more hypocritical and fake than the actions of the liberal left. The alt-right supports freedom of speech for their own group, but wants to get liberal groups banned and calls the police on people who turn up to their events and picket or protest. They want the right to insult and mock others, but become ‘snowflakes’ themselves if they are ever insulted or mocked – see the hysteria surrounding Michelle Wolf’s actually very funny speech at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner where she made a little bit of fun of Donald Trump’s press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders. They claim to support democratic values whilst advocating for the forced deportation of migrants, and, in some cases, for their indefinite detention or even murder (in the most extreme cases). Lauren Southern, for example, took part in vessel operations of a right-wing extremist activist group’s ship that aimed to thwart attempts to rescue Libyan migrants. Horrifyingly, the right-wing group she participated in is called ‘Generation Identitaire’ – the Identity Generation in French.

Neither of the two sides in the ‘cultural’ politics debate genuinely supports free speech. This is evidenced by the actions that have been taken by key players on both of those sides. Interestingly enough, key New Zealand politicians have actually indicated their support for free speech. Winston Peters, the Acting Prime Minister, has done so as well as the leader of the centre-right opposition National party. The Labour party has largely avoided the issue; there is probably disagreement internally on it. The only party that has declared opposition to free speech is the Green party, increasingly becoming the central base of New Zealand’s identity-based liberal left. Its co-leader, Marama Davidson, said she received death threats from extreme-right activists. This is a key tactic of the extreme-right whenever a challenge is made to them from any frontier of politics and it demonstrates that they are in fact not committed to free speech at all as I have already shown. What Davidson unfortunately does not realise is she has inadvertently contributed to their cause. She has confirmed for sceptics leaning towards the conspiratorial worldview of the alt-right that the ‘liberal establishment’ does indeed silence the views of those it does not want to hear and is uninterested in the sentiments of those classes experiencing profound downward social mobility.

The socialist left’s position on this issue should be to support free speech in this instance. Socialism is not a political system that lies in opposition to the principles of liberalism and democracy, but is in fact the realisation in full of those principles through overcoming the contradictions that capitalism and servitude introduces to them. Figures on the contemporary left like Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, and Glenn Greenwald have written excellently against censorship. Karl Marx supported unequivocally the right to freedom of speech, even if he did not approve of what was said in any instance, evidenced in his youthful writings against the Prussian Censorship law and his chastisement of the “silence which is observed in the European press” regarding acts of cruelty and injustice committed by the English government of his time.

What the alt-right preaches is disgusting. Southern and Molyneux included. It is very often nonsensical and illogical. But it is better to know full well what they do preach, rather than the confected, performative guise they sprinkle over it when publicly questioned. We should take up the challenge they often make to us, but do not themselves tend to honour when asked, of debating and refuting their views in public. To that end I condemn the liberal left for their reckless actions and support the ‘free speech coalition’ – a very, politely put, ‘eclectic’ group of people, some of whom have not always supported freedom of speech evenly in the past. Not only must we be against censorship, we must be ready to debate the views we do not like with a clear head. It is our responsibility we must pay to the next generation, if nothing else. And we must reject the fatalistic narratives of culturalism and identity politics in favour of a socialist politics of equality, fraternity, and democracy.

Why Moana Jackson is Wrong About Free Speech

In a recent piece for online magazine e-tangata, Moana Jackson outlines the need for society to “debate the whole context and meaning of ‘free speech’”. He does this with reference to the prominent case of rugby player Israel Folau, who said on Instagram to a fan that God’s plan for gay people was to send them to hell. Unfortunately, Jackson’s fundamental argument for why free speech should be curtailed revolves around a central mistake. He argues that because ‘Europeans’ betrayed their Enlightenment ideas and liberal democratic values by extending the project of capitalist imperialism through colonisation, this shows that the right of freedom of speech is ultimately a lie. Now freedom of speech is just used as a shield for racism and bigotry. These two comments are both completely mistaken.

The Israel Folau debacle is not actually a helpful example for Jackson’s argument. In fact, the wave of public backlash and spirited debate with Folau’s comments demonstrated precisely why free discourse and the laxity of limitation on speech is preferable to a culture of censorship. Many young Pacific Islanders demonstrated their unhappiness and resentment with Folau’s comments. Some shared stories of how their gay and lesbian relatives were persecuted and harassed. Others talked about how for Islanders, homosexuality was a taboo topic within families and this encouraged a toxic culture of silence that hurt gay people. Folau’s comments reignited this ongoing conversation in New Zealand and Australia about homosexual acceptance, but more specifically among Pacific Island communities. It is that spirit of ideological clash that allows for the possibility of an understanding, a comprehension of people and their beliefs and conceptualisations of the world that otherwise would be viewed in a prejudicial manner as a feared ‘Other’. Nothing should be beyond criticism, but in order to criticise nothing should be beyond comprehension. Jackson’s talk about ‘colonisation’ being the issue for Folau is all very well and good, but it more or less appears as a nice excuse for Folau to hide behind. By blaming ‘the coloniser’ Jackson also neatly sidesteps the very real work we have to do in our communities to fight residual prejudices, which is actually helped – not hindered – as a result of freely flowing discourse.

People will inevitably say things that offend others. Offense is actually a highly subjective feeling, not an objective function of a supra-ideological matrix of ‘oppression’ as many sociologists and political theorists influenced by the dogmatic reductionisms of ‘identity politics’ wrongly believe today. Offense comes from many places, both legitimate and illegitimate. Speech will offend different people to differing degrees at any one time. The question for us is, in a democracy, how that offense is dealt with in the very informal court of public opinion and debate. The way in which the Folau situation sparked an ongoing conversation, which invited reflective comment on a large scale and for otherwise politically-neutral institutions to seriously question their activities (such as Rugby Australia) shows the benefit that such an explosion of public commentary has to society.

As usual with this line of argument, Jackson conflates the intellectual movement known as Enlightenment, which he identifies as the origin of freedom of speech, with colonialism and racial ideology. He pours cold water on those who use the wonderful quote misattributed to Voltaire – “I disapprove of what you have to say, but I defend to the death your right to say it”. But ultimately, Jackson’s view of the Enlightenment is a product of the worst kind of reductionism; historical inaccuracies and false attributions of collusion that plague contemporary understandings of colonisation, which are everywhere divorced from long-run historical perspective. Jackson says “in the far from noble history of colonisation, the notion of freedom, and certainly free speech, has always been a term subjected to troubling interpretations”; that is, interpretations which result in the dispossession and displacement of indigenous peoples. The reality is that the Enlightenment had nothing to do with these interpretations. The Enlightenment was an intellectual period, not a self-identical ‘project’ as post-colonial scholars claim. It is very difficult to draw a line between it and the expansionist economic project of capitalist imperialism and the political project of empire-building, which in any case was not a specifically ‘European’ project – a view which also arises from an occlusion of history.

Jonathan Israel, the world’s most eminent historian of the Enlightenment, distinguishes between two main ‘tracks’ the Enlightenment took. The ‘liberal Enlightenment’, the public faces of the movement, consisted of well-known philosophers like Kant, Hume and Locke. But the ‘radical Enlightenment’ of Spinoza, Condorcet, Diderot and others is conveniently less well-known. The two tracks were divided on a number of questions, including whether reason and thought should triumph in human affairs (the radical position) or whether reason should be constrained by religion and tradition (the mainstream position). The liberal thinkers did turn to race-thinking and theories when it seemingly became apparent to them that equality was not forthcoming. Because social divisions persisted despite movements in the direction of equality, they took on an illusion of permanence – Marx would say they were reified. Voltaire, Hume, Kant and Hegel all used racist language, although generally, the Enlightenment belief in a universal human nature meant that racial taxonomies appeared very little in Enlightenment works. The radical Enlightenment thinkers, on the other hand, were explicitly anti-racist.

Take Scottish thinker George Wallace for example, who said that slavery was an abhorrent institution and every slave had a right to liberty. Those imprisoned as slaves were human and therefore ‘had a right to be free’. Wallace did not only militate against slavery but against the entire institution of ownership of private property: ‘it must be necessarily banished from the world before an Utopia can be established’. Condorcet said racial theories made ‘nature herself an accomplice in the crime of political inequality’. These ideas not only influenced the French Revolution, the usurpation of the ancien regime, but also the Haitian Revolution led by Toussaint L’Ouverture. As C.L.R. James writes in his book on the revolution, The Black Jacobins, L’Ouverture studied the ideas of those radical intellectuals and put them to use, leading an ultimately successful slave revolt that established the nominal independence of Haiti. The universalist conception of humanity those intellectuals held not only conceives our species as common beyond national or cultural specificity, but also as an idea exceeds social and historical location. Moana Jackson, however, is worryingly keen to localise the radical ideas of the Enlightenment, positioning his system of thought (the fundamentals of which are essentially liberal pluralism and particularism) in opposition to it, and altogether producing an historically incorrect picture of its constitution and effects. To say this reveals that Jackson is not fighting a battle between ‘the West and the rest’, as he thinks. The battle is actually between the liberationist ideologies of progressive and revolutionary movements on the one hand, which Jackson does not realise he opposes. He instead proffers as an alternative a highly undesirable conservative ideology of appealing to tradition and ‘culture’, against those liberationist impulses.

What might happen if we employ Jackson’s preferences for speech in practice? Let’s revisit the Folau case as a demonstration. Jackson says that the idiom “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me” is a “Western idea” and that “our people” (presumably Māori) “have understood the contrary”. Putting aside the highly specious nature of such an argument, what Jackson is essentially arguing, though conveniently in an implied manner and in not so many words, is that words which ‘hurt’ a person’s or group’s feelings must be censored. In the Folau case, the group that is presumably ‘hurt’ by these remarks is gay people. If a gay person says they are hurt by Folau’s remarks, Jackson says they must be retracted. But it is unclear whether Folau himself could claim that his religious beliefs are being maligned as a result – for this is exactly what he did do. With the dubious help of venomous creatures like Destiny Church founder Brian Tamaki, Folau constructed for himself a convincing victimhood that popular religious-conservative figures tend to do when their beliefs are challenged in public. How does Jackson decide that Folau’s feelings, and by extension the feelings of religious conservatives, are not also hurt? The condition that Jackson qualifies to be eligible for consideration of hurt feelings, that the person or group must be ‘marginalised’, does not seem to suffice here. For in a liberal polity that has now legally sanctioned same-sex marriages and enshrined gay rights into law, is Folau’s viewpoint not acceptably ‘marginal’ to be nominated as such? But this is not the only thing that is put into question if we adopt Jackson’s mistaken precepts. It is questionable as to whether the same level of public discourse and fervour on the subject – getting usually quiet and taboo-restricted Pacific Island communities to talk about these latent issues – would have actually manifested had Folau merely been silenced by liberal bureaucracy and that was the end of it.

Moana Jackson belongs to what is increasingly becoming the dominant political faction of humanities and social sciences academia. This faction’s thought-system is called ‘culturalism’. It attempts, and ultimately fails, to synthesise a belief in the primacy of ethnic belonging in one’s life with a liberal political outlook. The spirit of ideological debate I have just outlined can only be celebrated if one thinks that it is important for people to unite under a common sign of humanity despite apparent differences. The left used to believe this. The theory of historical materialism postulated that history was defined by class struggle. The systems of material organisation of resources have invariably led to differentials of accumulation and desert, whether in slave societies, feudalism or capitalism. The global structure of capital accumulation can only continue to function if inequality between the capitalist class and workers is maintained. Otherwise profit is cancelled out and the system ceases to work. Marxists saw this class division as the key antagonism of an otherwise unified humanity that should struggle together to realise freedom. Other divisions, such as race and gender, were illusions that sought to divide humanity further. Today’s left wrongly sees the nebulous and largely confected realm of ‘culture’ as the primary foundation of difference. This is what culturalism does. It accepts social division prima facie and coolly distances itself from the idea of a common humanity, sneered at as outmoded, or worse, a function of European colonialism. Jackson has repeatedly made this mistake throughout his work, as have his main intellectual ancestors like Ranginui Walker. 

The culturalist left today that Jackson is a part of performs the same function that the liberal Enlightenment did back in the eighteenth century. When inequality fails to disappear, and people lose faith in the grand narratives of social transformation such as Marxism and the radical Enlightenment, consolatory narratives borne of that failure appear in their place. When the Soviet Union dissolved, Francis Fukuyama wrote that the world has reached the ‘end of history’ – liberal democracy has prevailed. Identity politics is precisely one of those fatalistic narratives that reflects the retreat of the left. But even now when liberal democracy is seriously fraying around the world, the culturalist leftists have barely passed judgment on the dangerous political machines of nationalism and chauvinism sweeping the world, instead choosing to double down on identity politics and bureaucratic means of controlling ‘diversity’. This is not the zenith of progressivism but its exact opposite: an admission of a lack of ambition. Instead of empowering people to identify the sources of social conflict, view social problems objectively with long-run historical perspective, and throw off the shackles of fear and risk to threaten political and economic elites with a project of egalitarian transformation, Jackson and those of his liberal-left ilk view people of ‘minority groups’ as vulnerable victims who are too weak to stand up to these expansionary forces and require special protection. This view of humanity is profoundly negative. It insulates people from developing the critical faculties, argumentative skill, and systems of thought that enable the challenging of power. It also infantilises people in a culture of vulnerability that reinforces gendered and racialised prejudices, for example, the stereotyped ‘weakness’ of women amidst a culture of sexism that threatens their frail being at every turn.

The identitarian notions of censorship are indeed taking a dark turn – take, for example, Carrie Stoddart-Smith’s claim that the phrase “Māori tribal elite”, used in the context of identifying the extraordinary growth of inequalities among Māori as a result of iwi-led corporatisation processes, was a ‘racist’ phrase and ‘distorts how Māori view who they are”. The function of Stoddart-Smith’s claim is to silence those, mostly Māori, who are attempting to speak truth to power by identifying those class inequalities and linking them to wider socio-historical processes of capitalist class reconfiguration. She does this by turning this issue of class and material resources into an identity-based issue that is inappropriate to speak about because it causes offence. This is highly disturbing, yet is precisely the consequence of the narrow-minded culturalist view. This view actually energises the opposite tendencies it claims to support: it reifies differences, encourages prejudicial backlash, and homogenises voices of the distinct ‘cultures’ by amplifying self-appointed representative lobbyists and spokespeople who largely come from the middle class and promote the capitalist status quo. The example from Stoddart-Smith merely demonstrates that culturalism is only a barrier to serious liberationist and emancipatory political movements from emerging. This barrier is set up by figures that have a rhetorical veneer of leftist radicalism in what they say, but they do not actually adhere to any meaningful leftist principles which would differentiate them from current liberal orthodoxy.

The abuse or manipulation of, or diversion from, an ideal does not invalidate the ideal itself. To end on a quote from an 1860 speech from Frederick Douglass, black leader and former slave: “Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power. Thrones, dominions, principalities and powers, founded in injustice and wrong, are sure to tremble, if men are allowed to reason of righteousness, temperance, and of a judgment to come in their presence. Slavery cannot tolerate free speech.” We should take Douglass’ word. Asserting the right to free speech is central to fighting racism and bigotry, rather than Jackson’s futile request that it be censored away.

A Staunch Warning to the Green Party

Julie Anne Genter’s comments last Thursday about older white men on company boards needing to ‘move on’ to make way for younger, ‘more diverse’ talent has cemented my position that Marama Davidson should be the Green Party female co-leader and not her.

I essentially take Genter’s comments, made as Minister for Women, to demonstrate that under the leadership of her and James Shaw, the Green Party will drift rightward to essentially be the identity-left, particularist complement to Labour’s increasing pivot to universalism. It will become a party singularly focused on diversifying the elite strata of society in finance, commerce and politics, whilst having to give up to Labour’s ransom the more radical elements of their economic and social programme.

The only reliable base for the particularist remainder of Green politics is what I call the ‘liberal-left’, a predominantly urban, cosmopolitan, middle-class political grouping that bases its ideology on an increasingly radicalised ontological form of the now largely obsolete ‘new social movements’ of the 1960s and 70s. Unfortunately, however, the ‘liberal-left’ is fast converging on the old, tired battle lines once occupied by the cold and uncaring Stalinist and Maoist authoritarians, where ideas from which, as many are now realising, have an easily freed up place within capitalist bureaucracies. It relies on self-elevated representatives or ‘voices’ to ‘speak’ for constituencies considered oppressed, which are schismatic and fragmented. It does this while weakly placating the class antagonisms of capitalism with various disorganised reforms, or at worst ignoring class politics altogether. Instead, the diversification of the capitalist elite is considered a legitimate issue by ‘intersectional’ feminists, which is increasingly becoming liberal feminism recoded. The issue is wrongly considered by followers of this popular but vague sociological analytic as one that sits in the ‘intersection’ between class and gender. Such thinking is reflective of how much of the Left currently misdefines class politics as either an identity issue or directly correspondent to a classical liberal notion of ‘opportunity’. The attendant relativism that goes along with this is not only intellectually sloppy and lazy, but also invites the inversion into the censorious authoritarianism I have just mentioned.

Contrary to what certain Green Party members might believe, the issue of whether company boards are more or less ‘diverse’ is not a left-wing one in any sense. The term ‘diverse’ in itself is fast becoming a pervasive and condescending shorthand for anyone who is not a white male, and has sinister and weird connotations that seem to have escaped the usually panoptic eyes of liberals on these matters. The inclusion of the term everywhere in the commercial and corporate orbit of human resourcing signifies the almost total incorporation of identity politics into the macro-structural tendencies of capitalism. Genter’s call is what I have previously called an ‘attitude adjustment’ reform option, based on a ridiculous belief that immense social change would occur if only more women and less white men were on company boards. Not only is this belief untrue, it commonly relies on spurious gender-based stereotypes (which feminists berate others for as sexism) such as the trope that women would be more caring in positions of power, or that they can manage finances better, like they once used to in the domestic realm. It confirms for many sceptical Marxian or otherwise anti-identity leftists, who are/were very often sympathetic to feminist ideas, that feminism today for the mainstream left has become entirely focused on the women who matter to capitalism: the corporate world and the middle-class.

By making these comments, Genter has also opened herself up to criticism from the Right. National Party leader Simon Bridges has pointed out that the Labour-NZ First coalition government has less women in Cabinet than under former Prime Minister Bill English, making her statement seem neatly like idle talk. And now a Conservative Party local board member in Christchurch has made a complaint to the Human Rights Commission, saying he is “tired of the continual denigration and stereotyping of European males of older ages in politics and the media”. This opportunistic complaint on behalf of rich men nonetheless plays to the very real exhaustion that working-class ‘white’ people currently have with liberal-left finger-waggling and virtue signalling.

While I like Julie Anne Genter and have commented positively, among other things, on her skill at articulating complex policy to laypeople in the past, this is undoubtedly a misjudged comment from a minister in a government that I have rapidly receding patience for. Marama Davidson by contrast has run what I see as a largely grassroots campaign and seems to somewhat represent a left-wing faction of the Green Party that will not get as mired in the diversification of company boards and other elitist marginalia as the more right-wing factions inevitably will. Identity politics has done and will do nothing to stem the increasing entrenchment of class divisions in society. The class-focused, socialist sections of the left must urgently make a case for why the liberal-left’s unstable hegemony must be usurped – for liberal-left politics is a solipsism that will achieve nothing other than the empowerment of the currently surging neo-fascist and conservative elements of the ‘anti-establishment’ Right.

Waitangi Day: New Directions in Maori Politics? (written February 22)

In February 2017, roughly seven months out from that year's general election, I wrote that over the last two years a new divide had emerged (or rather re-emerged) within Māori politics. It had come to my attention that the Māori Party, choosing to be absorbed by the National coalition, had become complacent and had begun to lose popular support to the Labour Party. Upon further inquiries into this I discovered what I had long suspected – Labour’s Māori politicians had begun accentuating class politics in predominantly rural communities to counter the feeble culturalism of the Māori Party. They had also pointed out the government’s close relationship to the growing iwi elite and how the existence of the group was perpetuating inequality within Māoridom. This strategy proved to be hugely successful for Labour, as I had predicted, achieving a clean sweep of the seven Māori seats in the election – which was also crucial to their usurpation of National from office.

Almost exactly a year later we have seen that this new appreciation of Māori class politics was not mere talk from opposition to get Labour elected. Bravely, Jacinda Ardern’s Waitangi speech made the new government’s position on Māori inequity lucidly clear. Political scientist Bryce Edwards noticed as much in his recent round-up, describing it broadly as a shift from the previous government’s espousal of culturalist ideology, to a universalist social-democratic approach. Grant Robertson confirmed this shift shortly afterwards. We would not be having a reprisal of the evanescent ‘Closing the Gaps’ solution that Helen Clark’s Labour tested in government. There will be many who see this as Labour turning its back on its promises to Māori, as John Tamihere (who is one of the main practitioners of Māori class politics) has recently remarked confusingly. But this shift in approach for Labour should be watched closely, and with approval, by the political left.

The truth about the culturalist ideology that previous governments believed would solve Māori inequality is that it does not, and will never, work. If anything, such ideologies by design are set up in order to perpetuate those inequalities. This ideology includes the portrayal of Māori as a homogeneous, marginalised ‘indigenous’ tribal collective, and the promotion of ‘indigeneity’ as an ahistorical phenomenon that exists antagonistically to a ‘settler’ identity. Such fictive constructions often have a partial truth underlying them, but given the recent exacerbation of Māori class inequalities, the consensual power of the ‘indigenous’ identity is starting to erode. Ironically, its deployment by the Māori elite is also starting to fray relations between Māori and other New Zealanders. The idea that Māori are a unified tribal collective paints a false picture of the effects of culturalist policies, to the extent that given recent Treaty settlement payouts (set up to compensate Māori for colonial oppression and historical grievance) many New Zealanders believe that all Māori have benefited and those who are still poor have simply ‘squandered’ their share. In fact only a very small group of Māori have benefited from the Treaty settlement process. This group is now a recognisable ‘class-for-itself’ that has significant Crown-legitimated political influence and controls billions of dollars of essentially privately-owned and corporate assets.

Nevertheless, middle-class academics and political pundits persist in deploying this category. While it is absolutely excellent to see that support for solutions to Māori disadvantage, as well as learning the Māori language – an official language of Aotearoa – has become popular, what is also becoming popular are the common self-made stereotypes used in a significant amount of Māori academic literatures. We hear such dogmas about ‘Māori culture’ including: it is matriarchal and has always supported gender fluidity, it is rural and attuned to nature, it is particularly whanau-oriented, everything can be explained through genealogy, etc. These claims are essentially Romantic bromides which are very common and are not limited to the idle, evidence-free musings of certain Māori academics. All over the world we see similar variants of these nostalgic sentiments, longing for a return to nature, to the safety of family bonds, etc.

The political left, rather than suspecting such claims, have claimed them as their own. When the Māori Party was first set up it maintained the illusion that it was a ‘social-democratic’ party, similar to Labour, with the main difference being that it campaigned on ‘Māori issues’. The vast majority of mainstream liberal-left pundits still believe this. In the last election this idea was dispelled and the Māori Party were evicted from office, shocking much of the liberal-left.  It was revealed to the electorate that the Māori Party were now viewed by Māori themselves, rightly, as a deeply conservative party that had abandoned redistributive solutions to Māori material disadvantage and had been reduced to meaningless platitudes about Māori unity that coincided with National’s ignorance of continued social inequality. Labour’s attacks to its left meant the Māori Party struggled to tread water. There was also denials that the party was on the wrong track. One Māori Party candidate, during the election campaign, wrote that the very phrase “Māori elite” was racist and “distorts how Māori view who they are”. Such phrases are an extraordinary attack on democracy and the ability of Māori to think independently of their tribal leaders. Despite this, these sentiments were supported by much of the self-righteous liberal-left, who had no idea just how offside with working-class Māori they in fact were.

The fact that the largely Pākehā, middle-class liberal-left supported the ideology of the Māori Party goes to the heart of how disfigured the ‘left’ label has become today. Although the Marxist ‘left’ has of course historically had problems, its basic programme was to eliminate class society, which by extension meant any institution that separated people into racial groups and systematically discriminated against people. Even social democrats used to predominantly focus on class politics, often to the neglect of other important issues. This is the major criticism used by the liberal-left, which focuses on identity politics at the expense of class politics, to marginalise the traditionally dominant class-based left. The problem that exists today with this criticism is that it does not recognise any recent changes within capitalism (which as it happens are extremely significant) nor how these changes have affected the efficacy of liberal-left politics. Because today’s capitalism has now incorporated the politics of diversity into its class reconfiguration processes, identity politics is now relatively powerless to do anything besides influence situational rights-based issues.

The liberal-left’s problem was that it wrongly saw in the Māori Party’s deeply conservative culturalism a reflection of its own identity politics. Because, for the liberal-left, any talk about empowering marginalised people is automatically progressive, it imbued the Māori Party with progressive significance. Although this may have been the Māori Party’s original intention, the liberal-left did not notice the changes that the party underwent during its time in the National coalition government. The party slowly inducted leading members of the Iwi Chairs Forum and the Iwi Leaders Group, and adopted increasingly conservative policies, while the liberal-left only saw its rhetoric about Māori disadvantage and the fact that the Māori Party voted against a significant amount of National’s legislation. It believed the false claim that the role of the Māori Party was to hold the National government to account from its confidence-and-supply position, which, as we can see from the Green Party’s struggle in the current government, was never a legitimate claim. It thus also believed the gratuitous tantrums of Marama Fox after the party’s election loss: statements that Māori “lost their independent voice” and “returned to their abusers [Labour]”. In reality, the Māori Party was, as any coalition partner is, crucial to the upholding of the National government. This is also what working-class Māori voters saw and why they responded with vengeance against the party.

Culturalism is actually an ideology that has its origins on the political right. Key European philosophers that can be labelled as such include Herder, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, all of whom are known for their reactionary beliefs. Nietzsche and Heidegger were key inspirations for German fascism. The key pillars of the dominant form of culturalism include the reduction of everything to value-judgments and interpretations, a view of truth as relative, a view of the world as hypostatically separated into discrete units that can be called ‘cultures’, and the incommensurability of cultural viewpoints. These pillars are now common on the left of politics, to its peril. Although it is now common to associate the new social movements of the 1960s and 70s with culturalism and identity politics, what separated such movements from these ideologies is that they achieved their goals based on collective organisation and struggle to achieve concrete political advancement. Those movements did not believe in the precepts of culturalism as intensely as the liberal-left does today. Nga Tamatoa, for instance, was a movement that united liberal and conservative as well as Māori and Pākehā allies. Identity politics today has few concrete goals in sight and is no longer interested in unity, but rather solipsistic division.  This is because culturalism, when pushed to its extreme as the liberal-left and the Māori Party have done, actually swings from being something vaguely nebulous or even somewhat helpful to a reactionary political force that invites people to identify with exclusionary labels in order to insulate themselves against others.

It was not just blindness to the Māori Party’s growing flaws that reinforced its support from the liberal-left. The structural features of the liberal-left’s identity politics played an important role in the retention of its fellowship. Key to the operation of identity politics is the elevation of self-appointed, self-elevated ‘cultural’ representatives that claim to speak for the interests of particular categories of marginalised people. It is the instruction to all good ‘allies’ that they listen to such representatives without question, as in their relativist universe where without truth there is a vacuum of meaning, their word is the gospel that fills the void. Māori members of Parliament in the Māori seats are almost, in a sense, bound to this role institutionally. The Māori Party, however, embraced this role as it labelled itself the “independent voice for Māori”. Liberal-left allies were thus affirmed in their positions by being in lockstep with such a party, even as it continued to attack Labour and the Greens for opposing its conservative social policies and right-wing economic initiatives. What is ironic is that many of these ‘cultural representatives’ come from the middle-class or even elite, and are hardly ‘marginalised’ at all. The impoverished majority of Māori in fact have many opposing views to them, but they have for a long time been disenfranchised and silenced by the noise about the ‘indigenous collective’. Time will tell whether the recent election, which exposed this growing antagonism, will lead to a revelatory moment for the liberal-left. So far, however, it appears that the liberal-left are quite happy to continue existing in their delusional bubble.

The main difference between the Marxist left and the identity-focused liberal-left is not that ‘one respects identity while the other does not’. It is not ‘class reductionism versus a more intersectional’ approach. Both of these are the excuses the liberal-left has armed itself with to legitimise its behaviour of paying lip service to class politics and marginalise the Marxist or even soft-workerist left. Marxism has far more progressive positions on racial ideology and gender than identity politics or liberalism does, with a longer history to boot – so much for ‘disrespect’. ‘Intersectionality’ is just an analytical mess that in most cases privileges identity politics and reduces the causal power of class, which is in fact the primary mechanism through which material society is organised. Thus it commonly leads to serious theoretical misapprehensions. The liberal-left’s craven excuses should not be believed by anyone serious about the perpetual debate going on amongst the left about how to reconcile ‘class’ and ‘identity’ politics.

The truth is that the main difference is an ontological one. This is a point rarely explored by either side, largely left to philosophers. It goes to the heart of how we conceive of reality and the nature of being in the world. All political ideas presuppose a particular ontological position that often goes unacknowledged. The Marxist left believes in the theory of historical materialism, and today is increasingly also scientifically naturalist and materialist. Reality is organised according to antagonisms correspondent to the social organisation of production. We can thus identify key tendencies – not laws but tendencies – that are verified by historical evidence, as well as making predictions on what the future holds if such conditions were to change. An objective reality exists that is shared by all who observe it. Certain phenomena may mean that there are variations in how that reality is experienced, but the reality exists nonetheless in this case. This mind-independent reality is how we give meaning to our experiences.

The alternative to an objective reality is solipsism, which funnily enough happens to converge with the position of the identity-based liberal-left. The liberal-left in the main disavows the idea of a mind-independent reality. What is common to all members of the liberal-left is their relativism on the question of truth. They believe in the empty-headed statement that each ‘culture’ – or, in extreme variants, each person – has its own ‘truth’ or version of how the world works. It is held that none of these versions are false. This incoherent idea should be rejected. It also does not work in practice, as critics like Slavoj Žižek have shown in an admittedly roundabout way. The liberal-left’s relativist discourse implies universal tolerance and respect, but in reality such tolerance can never hold. There is always an undesirable ‘other’ that is excluded – in this case it is working-class Māori that were not listened to by the liberal-left, in favour of the publicly available self-appointed ‘representatives’ of Māori in Parliament and on social media. The liberal-left’s cultural relativism is a deeply hypocritical position that has divisive implications.

Putting this tortuous debate with the liberal-left to one side – and I have no doubt the liberal-left will simply ignore it, to its own disadvantage – the question remains as to whether Labour is able to deliver on its new rhetoric of universalism and its promises to lift people out of poverty. This is why the political left should watch closely with only some approval at the shift that has occurred. Labour is still showing signs that it is a government of compromise. It has revived the overwhelmingly unpopular Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, which allows corporations to sue governments that pass laws affecting their abilities to conduct business. It has also relaxed its commitments to roll-back National’s punitive employment law and social welfare policies, leaving some of their revanchist measures intact. This is despite serious lobbying and discomfort of both of Labour’s coalition partners. Despite the powerful and sincerely inspiring oration and genuineness of Jacinda Ardern, there are many examples where Labour has had to be dragged kicking and screaming to adopt basic modern social-democratic positions. New Zealand First had to force Labour into higher increases to the minimum wage than the latter campaigned on. The Greens have pushed Labour towards being more environmentally conscientious.

Labour’s universalism is a step in the right direction, away from the unjustified and untested ideology of culturalism, and perhaps in time the liberal-left will see that. The objective of the left now is to shift the Overton window. The left should adopt Labour’s universalist rhetoric for itself. Having done that, it then needs to ask serious questions of how to extend universalism’s reach. It should also ask whether in fact Labour and the Greens are even reliable conduits through which to do this, or whether a new party should be created. I cannot decide for myself which is the better strategy at this point. Regardless, our job now is to concentrate on how to make socialism (in the words of philosopher Roy Bhaskar) the ‘enlightened common sense’ of our age.