Reflective Notes on the Left, Post-Corbyn Disaster

Labour’s failure to win this election is saddening and disheartening for many people. There is a lot of fear that Corbyn’s loss, and the fact it has been thoroughly personalised by the media and political classes (and in the minds of the electorate), will mean the Labour party will move to the right. The fact that the ‘centre ground’ completely collapsed, having no impact at all, will have of course escaped mainstream pundits. The worry is, however, that Labour lost because the ‘northern heartlands’ of working-class voters switched to Tory. This is shocking. But it is important to remember that this has been long in the making. Working-class voters have been betrayed by Labour for decades, not least of which, in the final assessment, by Tony Blair, who the middle-class centrists are now fondly reminiscing about and calling for a reversion to. (Remember that right-wing Democrats did the same with George W. Bush after Republicans elected Trump as their nominee. They have long since lost any conception of relativity in the political universe.)  The Brexit foundering, caused by the Labour Right’s squealing to adopt a ‘remain’ position, is the primary reason that has cost them the election in these seats. But as for socialists, there are deep problems that our movement must face if it really seeks to win back the working-class voters it has failed to appeal to for decades.

I have been saying, for at least the last four years, that the major problem the left has to deal with is articulating a clear class programme to those who need it most and avoiding the trappings of identity politics and ‘culturalism’ (which I have written extensively about elsewhere on my blog), because not only are identity politics and culturalism deeply divisive, the working classes in large part do not care about it as it has no material effect on their lives. The ‘intersectionalists’ cooped up in the hollow bastions of postmodern universities have absolutely no concept of the survivalist mentality of the working class in many of their increasingly deprived neighbourhoods, and how issues of representation and morality in popular culture and politics are so far from important to them that they simply are not worth discussing. It is not that people don’t care about these issues; they are simply not priorities for people outside urban, university-educated areas where people also can ‘do it tough’. The real cultural divide has escaped the rubbish that the increasingly cemented academic/professional culturalists have come up with in their endless speculative mythopoeia that utilises a bizarre confluence of racist philosophers such as Heidegger, combined with a ‘liberalised’ racial essentialism, and irrationalist ideas about culture taken from mystical and pseudo-spiritualist woo and largely ethereal, dematerialised conceptions of colonisation and ‘indigeneity’. The real divide in terms of culture that the left has so far failed to exploit is between urban and rural. The urban middle and working classes quite simply do not speak the same political language as the rural working classes.

Meanwhile, leftists continually discredit themselves by making up narratives that simply do not stick to cover over these patently obvious points. ‘The working class are racist and are voting in line with an imperialist/racist colour line that has been held throughout history’ is the most abysmal and stupefying one that is commonly repeated by academic and cultural leftists. Not only is it politically paralysing and unsympathetic, but also just fundamentally wrong because it has emphatically not been held throughout history – only the mythical history the culturalists have been attempting to rewrite. As Andrew Sayer writes, “The poor are not clamouring for poverty to be legitimised or valued. They want to escape or abolish their class position rather than affirm it. At the same time, they do not merely want more material wealth, but recognition and respect as well, in terms of their moral worth, and perhaps for certain aspects of their culture. Class antagonisms are therefore about more than distribution of income and material goods, but they involve a different kind of recognition from that highlighted in identity politics, one that is as old as inequality itself.” I have added emphasis to the word ‘culture’ because what is meant here is not the ethnicity-laden definition used by academic culturalists. Rather it is the habitus of rural and working life, too often wrongly stigmatised by today’s prejudiced urban sociologists as ‘toxically’ masculine, racist and backward.

This authentic celebration of working life in the rural or quasi-suburban towns and country areas populated by working-class people is, at the same time, a difficult thing, and necessary but not sufficient. What is also necessary is a deep understanding of just how the economy has changed over the past 30 years by what is often called ‘neoliberalism’. Leftists have done their homework on housing and know that an economy based on property is parasitic, and have done an excellent job in explaining this to people. However, the problem is that this too is more commonly an urban issue, and although this is a commendable and well-researched start, we should be thinking more broadly than this. One of the most important books on political economy that leftists should read is David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity. If one reads the sections purely on economics, they will be astounded at how many of the claims still hold up today in the actions of so many governments around the world. This claim, in particular, bears important resonance for us today (p. 185-186):

“It was primarily through spatial and temporal displacement that the Fordist regime of accumulation resolved the overaccumulation problem during the lost postwar boom. The crisis of Fordism can to some degree be interpreted, therefore, as a running out of those options to handle the overaccumulation problem. Temporal displacement was piling debt upon debt to the point where the only viable government strategy was to monetize it away. This was done, in effect, by printing so much money as to trigger an inflationary surge, which radically reduced the real value of past debts (the thousand dollars borrowed ten years ago has little value after a phase of high inflation). Turnover time could not easily be accelerated without destroying the value of fixed capital assets. New geographical centres of accumulation – the US South and West, Western Europe and Japan, and then a range of newly-industrialising countries – were created. As these Fordist production systems came to maturity, they became new and often highly competitive centres of overaccumulation. Spatial competition intensified between geographically distinct Fordist systems, with the most efficient regimes (such as the Japanese) and lower labour-cost regimes (such as those found in third-world countries where notions of a social contract with labour were either lacking or weakly enforced) driving other centres into paroxysms of devaluation through deindustrialisation. Spatial competition intensified, particularly after 1973, as the capacity to resolve the overaccumulation problem through geographical displacement ran out. The crisis of Fordism was, therefore, as much of a geographical and geopolitical crisis as it was a crisis of indebtedness, class struggle, or corporate stagnation within any particular nation state. It was simply that the mechanisms evolved for controlling crisis tendencies were finally overwhelmed by the power of the underlying contradictions of capitalism.”

This is the backdrop, the setting, to the ‘new terrain of politics’ mapped out by the ‘Rust Belt’ in the United States and the ‘northern heartlands’ in the UK. For the uninitiated, ‘Fordism’ is the highly industrialised post-World War Two phase of capitalism where assembly-line production was proliferated in the economic ‘centres’ of the world. The economy was kept afloat by what is often called a ‘virtuous circle’ of mass production and mass consumption. Production declined with the 1973 OPEC oil crisis and other spikes in raw commodity prices for industrial companies. This set off a policy programme of inflation, to reduce the value of currency, only this didn’t work as such strategies relied on capital ‘moving’ to less competitive areas and building new economies of scale. Capital was still moving in the early 1970s to countries such as Portugal, the former Yugoslavia, Israel, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Mexico and to some extent India through relocation, but these economies were too weak to assist the dominant economies of that time in overcoming their growing trade deficits. Profit stalls, growth stalls, the balance of payments in the centre turn negative, and thus inflation actually begins to worsen a national economy’s performance. The fallout from such a marked balance of payments crisis is deindustrialisation, from which the ubiquity of free trade agreements has not saved the economies of the ‘centre’ countries.

The bourgeois interpretation of this remapping of class alliances portrays deindustrialisation as a cultural event. Indeed, it is in part a cultural event, but one that has a class basis to it. Yet this was not, and today certainly is not, how it is popularly portrayed. And who do we have to blame for this? The cultural politics of the New Left might be a start, but in my view that is wrong-footed: New Left organisations at the very least had roots in working-class communities and institutional structures of the left. However, the postmodernist shift in political economy, with such concepts as the ‘post-industrial society’ characterised by a disappearance of class allegiances, is definitely to blame. This belief powered Blairism and New Labour, and was of course a self-fulfilling prophecy. Labour’s betrayal of the working classes meant, lo and behold, working-class people stopped trusting in and voting Labour. That is all it takes for class alliances to break when interpreted in this sense, and deindustrialisation was the catalyst. Of course, this naïve story was exacerbated in its stupidity by the cultural left, who assumed that without class in the picture, a ‘left-wing’ or ‘progressive’ battle could be fought on the grounds of identity politics, essentially foreclosing the pursuit of popular appeal and limiting support to minority groups and other interested parties. For a long time this liberal wing essentially grafted itself onto New Labour and, for a time, working-class people supported this. But this mode of politics was never sustainable. One of the most shocking results, in my observation, of this decade is the embourgeoisement and stultification of what were once celebrated as the ‘new social movements’.

An example of one of the social movements that has suffered greatly over this decade is feminism. I would take the controversial step of saying that feminism has exhausted its political capital as a social movement and an ideological force, in the Western world. This should not be taken as saying there are no gender issues left in the Western world to deal with, but rather that the ‘feminist movement’ is no longer a viable vehicle to use to resolve those issues. Over the last ten years, feminism has undergone a large-scale professionalisation and corporatisation. It is no longer synonymous with the goals of the left to be a ‘feminist’, but rather to be a Sheryl Sandberg type, where women ‘lean in’, passively listen, vote with their feet on issues in the world of popular culture and commerce, smash ‘glass ceilings’. At the same time, there has been an unnecessary, shameful and embarrassing split on the question of transgender rights. Professional feminists who support transgender rights have used a lot of arguments against their detractors, but rarely have I seen them refer to the most basic, which is an analogised version of gay rights arguments: transgender people are human beings and there is no harm in recognising this human part of themselves. The existence of this ‘debate’ has further delegimitised feminism. This is notwithstanding the fact that academic feminism, pursued in disciplines such as the philosophy of science, has done nothing but damage to those fields as they have amplified idealist and irrationalist ideas about the world and how we make sense of it, that the wider cultural left often accepts as their ideological progenitor – standpoint theory being the most prominent example. On these questions, academic feminists, often with a liberal politics in tow, have made no attempt to respond to developments in ontology and epistemology, instead continuing with tired and deeply anti-solidaristic dogma. Socialism and feminism have long since decoupled, and this is no longer the case of which ‘wave’ of feminism we subscribe to or the battle between ‘liberal feminism’ and ‘socialist feminism’. Many of the particularist principles of socialist feminism have long since become irrelevant as they overlap with the achievements of liberal feminism. What has not been dealt with, in large part, can be dealt with as part of a universalist working-class movement. What is additionally outrageous is that Western feminists have too often been silent, ignorant, or (in the case of those who take up a reactionary culturalist worldview) even been apologists for the same problems women and people with marginalised gender identities face in the non-Western world.

The fact that Corbynism was ‘socialist’ did not detract from the fact that such a brand of leftism is perceived as wholly urban and too greatly influenced by the liberal left. Indeed, the Blairite faction is a ‘liberal left’ without the left part. The liberal left has done nothing for working-class neighbourhoods and likely never will. The question however is whether the socialist left can begin to appeal to them, and how, given that we seem to have lost our ability to do so.

Inequality in NZ Education and the NCEA - An 'Inconvenient Truth'

In a book chapter which is now over ten years old, Martin Thrupp identified what he called the ‘inconvenient truths’ about education in Aotearoa. The biggest is that our system is structured on something he calls ‘middle-class advantage’. This concept is a recognition of the fact that children come into school under very different sets of circumstances in their home life. Their parents have differing levels of education. They have very different experiences of health. Disadvantaged kids may read less in the home. They will be exposed to less ‘curriculum-relevant’ stimuli in early childhood and beyond. Social sciences used to bundle these variables up in one general term – ‘life chances’.  

One question that is never asked, yet is certainly just as ‘inconvenient’, however, is how the very structure of our education system actually exacerbates such differences. For the last fifteen years, New Zealand secondary schools have used a unique standards-based system to measure achievement called the NCEA. The way students are measured is based on the accumulation of credits from standards that are not ‘topics’ in the conventional sense. Instead, they are assessments of individual skills or competencies in a ‘domain’, in a wider structural framework that mimics those of many countries’ vocational education systems. The system was notoriously beset with major problems early on, and has undergone two major cycles of change that have fundamentally altered how it works. Arguably, its latest cycle has produced the most worrying outcomes, and here is why.

First, it is important to understand that as of 2007, New Zealand does not have a national curriculum per se. It has a curriculum document, largely filled with warmly written vision statements and educational jargon, with next to no substantive contents inside. But the question of what is in fact taught at school is left up to the school itself. Second, the NCEA can be broken up into two types of standards: internal and external. External assessment is entirely centrally moderated and internal assessment is marked by the school (with small samples being centrally moderated). Third, it is common to hear proponents of the NCEA praise its ‘flexibility’ as a key positive over other alternatives. This is because schools can choose any arrangement of individual ‘standards’ to offer in whichever combinations they wish. To the progressive-minded individual, all of this is sounding wonderful, even approaching the utopian dream.

The reason why the reality is far from the utopian dream that should theoretically follow from these settings, is that schools have begun to manipulate their results in the pursuit of a ‘good news story’ or a favourable position on league tables. This is precisely because they can. Additionally, this is happening more in low-decile schools, on both class and ethnic lines. But this is not just about fairness in awarding results. The most significant problem that arises is one of social justice, whereby students of socially disadvantaged backgrounds are receiving a greatly diminished curriculum. One practice that is becoming more common in schools is the withdrawal of students from enrolment in standards that the school predicts they will fail. This is usually not for any educational reason, but largely because failing a standard is recorded and counted in national pass rates, while being withdrawn is not a result that is recorded. One school engaged in this practice to such a reckless and extraordinary degree that it was placed under statutory management by the Ministry of Education as a consequence. 

Many factors play a role in this, including Thrupp’s own discussion of the way zoning works to reproduce the class structure within schools, which dovetails with the growing inequalities in school experiences I have just mentioned. As Thrupp says, ‘by failing to raise middle class advantage in education as an issue, politicians and policymakers imply that it is a natural part of the world order, over which they have no control. And so we have a society where most people see putting their child into a high socio-economic school as value-free’. This has also given immense favour to critics of the NCEA whose concerns about the system are increasingly evident. In 2015, former Auckland Grammar headmaster John Morris, who is a well-known opponent of NCEA, presciently identified what was now happening in schools all over the country:

The NCEA system encourages schools and students to choose soft-option unit standards and easier achievement standards so that schools reach the 85% pass rate demanded by the government. […] It is common knowledge that ‘gaming’ occurs. For example, schools maximising the easier to get internally assessed standards and minimising the more demanding external assessments, and withdrawing candidates from NZQA data who are failing, to ensure higher pass rates.

The new NCEA change package, which proposes reducing the number of internally assessed standards and modularising credits in larger blocks for the purposes of curriculum coherence, is a good step in the right direction. But already there are attempts by defenders of the current structure to mislead people about the effects of these changes. Stuart Middleton is one of these, who on his blog likened the change package to a throwback to the days of School Certificate:

[T]he discussion about NCEA […] has got bogged down in a nostalgic dragging up of all the old features of the examination system that was replaced by NCEA […] We see this in a quest for large blocks of credits (something already able to be done), in the need to squeeze credits into recognisable conventional subjects […] 

                                                                                   

Middleton is someone who clearly believes that education is about becoming qualified to enter a career, but talks about little else besides. He asserts without evidence that ‘The process of starting those [career] journeys requires the availability of learning that can [sic] attempted in small chunks with rapid rewards.’

I am likely not the only one unsure about what the changes he lists have to do with School Certificate. It remains to be seen what is so wrong with, as he calls them, ‘recognisable conventional subjects’ – perhaps the reason subjects are ‘conventional’ is, rather than being arbitrary, because they have disciplinary conventions that must be understood as part of the learning process. Proponents of NCEA, however, largely subscribe to the further fragmentation of learning programmes. They believe the solution to students being unable to integrate understanding in a discipline is to merge them together into an indistinct bubble – in eduspeak this is known as ‘interdisciplinarity’. They are, of course, forgetting that ‘interdisciplinarity’ is meaningless without ‘disciplinarity’. Nonetheless, the fact remains that this fragmentation, however it is dressed up, has contributed to the vast inequalities of school experience between low- and high- decile schools that have re-emerged, as many in the profession are finally now realising.

The characterisation of opponents as constantly looking backward to the days of norm-referenced assessment is a fig-leaf defence for the current miasma of chaos swirling in our schools. NCEA is a system that is, right now, the centre of the ‘inconvenient truth’ – that standards have been covertly dropping in our schools and that the assessment system has directly contributed to an extreme worsening of class and ethnic inequalities. In 2017, just one percent of decile one students entered a professional degree. New Zealand ranks second in the world in terms of inequality in reading levels between the richest and poorest students. These statistics not only sound appalling – in truth they show an education system in crisis. But it appears NCEA has only endured in its current form for so long as part of its proponents’ strategy for survival – pretend that nothing is wrong with it and constantly remind those who are sceptical about the ‘bad old days’. It is time for the truth to be revealed.

This blog was originally published elsewhere in a forum inaccessible to the public. I have adapted it for my own blog for those who are interested.

Further reading:

Collins, S. (2018). Unicef ranks NZ education among world’s most unequal for boys and girls. Education Central, 30 October 2018. URL: https://educationcentral.co.nz/unicef-ranks-nz-education-among-worlds-most-unequal-for-boys-and-girls/.

Middleton, S. (2019). Arriving back at the beginning not knowing where we have been! EdTalkNZ, July 25 2019. URL: https://www.stuartmiddleton.co.nz/2019/07/arriving-back-at-the-beginning-not-arriving-back-at-the-beginning-and-not-knowing-where-we-have-beenking-where-we-have-been/.

Morris, J. (2015). NCEA/Cambridge debate – clearly the blinkers are still on at PPTA headquarters. New Zealand Herald, 22 September 2015. URL: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11517082.

Thrupp, M. (2008). Some inconvenient truths about education in Aotearoa-New Zealand. In St John, S. and Wynd, D. (eds.) Left behind: How social inequalities damage New Zealand children (pp. 109-119). Auckland: Child Poverty Action Group.  

Ihumātao: The class conflict in Māori politics opens up

Two and a half years ago I wrote about the class divide opening up in Māori politics. This was a divide between an emerging indigenous elite stratum and the Māori working class. It was this divide that was the basis of my prediction that the National Party would lose the next election on account of losing their coalition partner, the Māori Party – who eventually assumed a role as the representatives of the indigenous elite. This was, in fact, the election outcome and Labour took power in a coalition with New Zealand First. I then wrote a piece after last year’s Waitangi Day expressing my delight that Labour at least seemed to be making good on its plans to ditch the class interests of the indigenous elite, which National had increasingly beckoned to, in favour of working-class interests and a universalist politics.

It seems Labour has trouble finding an issue where it cannot in some way stuff up. The situation in Ihumātao is a case in point. Ihumātao is a village in Auckland, the oldest settlement in the city, where a planned housing development threatens to go ahead on sacred Māori lands. This development is proceeding with support of two particular iwi groups that have little relationship to the tangata (people) who live in Ihumātao. The group of rangatahi – young people – advocating for the villagers go by the name SOUL – ‘Save Our Unique Landscape’. They are currently undertaking a courageous protest action surrounded by police. The land at Ihumātao presently in dispute was confiscated by the government in 1868, as part of its wider plan to displace Māori from the land at that time. It has never been returned. The land was sold by its private owner to Fletcher Building, one of the largest companies in New Zealand. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has claimed her government will not be intervening in the situation. She forgets that the police officers currently at the site trying to defuse the situation are in fact acting on behalf of her government. The Māori caucus has, astonishingly, been similarly coy on the issue.

The Ihumātao situation is – or should be – a watershed moment for Māori politics. It demonstrates the potentially explosive nature of the looming conflict between a growing self-interested class of moneyed iwi leaders, and those Māori who are working-class or poor and utterly destitute who have not benefited in any way whatsoever from treaty settlements. This class conflict was arbitrated in the 1980s, with the setting up of the Waitangi Tribunal, and has only deepened ever since. Iwi have become corporations controlling a collective multibillion dollar portfolio of assets. Yet Māori on average are three times worse off than non-Māori across socio-economic indicators. How has this persisted for thirty years with no change – sometimes even decline – while such wealth has been concentrated in the hands of so few? The answer is the same old one – the realities of capitalism, state action in ‘redressing’ the violence of colonisation, and the formation of a new economic class as a result of that ‘redress’.

However, if you looked at what the liberal-left commentariat has produced you would not know that what is going on at Ihumātao is the result of a class conflict. It seems that some people still struggle to analyse Māori politics in terms of class, while others wilfully misrepresent the issue. Today’s Radio New Zealand story by Meriana Johnsen writes that “a generational divide is at the heart of the ongoing battle to stop a housing development at Ihumātao” – as if the problem was merely oldies versus youngies (note that this is the narrative the iwi representatives are trying to promote – one of elder disrespect). Julia Whaipooti, chair of JustSpeak, said on Twitter that she is “struggling with what is happening at Ihumātao” and said although she sympathised with the protesters, “it’s not black and white”. Criminal lawyer Kingi Snelgar (who is from my neck of the woods) said that the division was part of “the divide and conquer policy of the Crown” rather than an organic unfolding of a class conflict over the last forty years – he has since acknowledged the existence of a corporate class within Māoridom. Green MP Golriz Ghahraman tweeted that she “stand[s] with the mana whenua of Ihumātao”, although given that this is a dispute between the so-called ‘legally recognised mana whenua’ and the actual tangata of the village, she is rather unhelpfully contributing to a particularly unclear picture of the shape of the dispute and the interests of the parties involved. She is just one of many people who I’ve seen make the same mistake while talking about this conflict. Her colleague, Marama Davidson, was clearer that she stood with those “protecting the land”.

The liberal left is, as usual, playing catch-up on these issues. Remember, the liberal left was tricked by the Māori Party’s seemingly progressive stances against the Crown and the “Pākehā government” that they in fact were a part of. Last year, I wrote:

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.

Regardless, it really is past time to think seriously about the real class divides in Māori politics that have opened up, and how this makes old alliances impossible. It is not just about colonisation anymore when it comes to Māori and Pacific disadvantage. At a time when inequality is starker than it ever was during the birth of the ‘neoliberal’ era, we have to start taking seriously the problem of class, and how elites within “our communities” (if you’ll pardon what I think is tortuous phrasing) have ascended to positions of such power and privilege.

I wish all the protectors at Ihumātao well and, although I cannot personally be there, I stand with all of you in your struggle.

Against the 'Decolonial Turn': Problems in Contemporary Readings of C.L.R. James

Paper delivered 15 July 2019, ACLALS Conference (Association of Commonwealth Language and Literatures)

Today’s metropolitan academy has made much of a supposed new ‘decolonial turn’ at the same time as the future of its apparent predecessor, postcolonial theory, is under a cloud. Postcolonial theory does not seem to have adequately addressed the litany of critiques from theorists such as Aijaz Ahmad, Benita Parry, Arif Dirlik, Terry Eagleton, Neil Lazarus, Vivek Chibber, and many others. Common among all the critics I have just made is a call for a return to Marxist political economy and philosophy, which can better explain, and provide a political programme to solve, the problems facing what is alternately called the ‘Third World’, the ‘developing’ world, the ‘formerly colonised’ world, the ‘postcolonial’ world, the ‘Global South’, etc. Benita Parry critiqued theories of ‘colonialism’ in postcolonial studies for becoming singularly focused on “the exorbitation of discourse and a related incuriosity about the enabling socio-economic and political institutions and other forms of social praxis”. Neil Lazarus threatened to rewrite the entire field of postcolonial studies in the view of world-systems theory a la Immanuel Wallerstein, Fredric Jameson and the Marxist theorists and historians of imperialism. He lamented the area’s theoretical preoccupation with reductive readings of a limited pool of texts using relatively simple concepts such as ‘hybridity’, ‘master narratives’, ‘multiculturalism’, ‘diaspora’, and letting things explain themselves, while neglecting the role of class in the postcolonial world. Terry Eagleton and Slavoj Žižek were even more trenchant. For them, postcolonial studies precisely did not talk about class because the field itself was an argument for class mobility, for academics outside the European metropole to be included within it and supported by it.

Postcolonial criticism lives on, but has not significantly drifted from the themes for which it has been criticised. It still, as Terry Eagleton argues, ‘inflates the significance of cultural factors in human affairs’. It is a brand of ‘culturalism’ – which since the 1970s has gradually become the dominant mode of thinking in academic study, and it is culturalism that I define myself and my own position against. This talk, then, is chiefly about how culturalism in one particular mode has been able to sustain itself. It ignores the increasing velocity of criticism by redefining thinkers as precedents or precursors to itself, grafting itself onto new disciplines or areas of study, creating new discourses that merely repeat or superficially revise the theoretical tropes of previous iterations. Ironically, considering postcolonial theory in particular made much of the supposed ‘European’ penchant for thinking in binary oppositions, culturalism has encouraged thinking in the most simplistic binaries of all: universality/particularity, dominant/marginalised, power/resistance, strong/weak, abstraction/culture, with the latter terms in each pair favoured.

What has been labelled by sociologist Jeffrey Alexander as the ‘cultural turn’ produced interesting work in its inception, but has been nothing short of theoretically devastating for the social sciences and humanities. With the influence of poststructuralism and postmodernism, culture became redefined in infinitely malleable terms as signifiers, symbols, language, meaning. But that inadequate definition has slowly fallen away with the sudden demise of the postmodernist way of speaking – which, in keeping with my argument, merely forwards its theoretical antecedents in new guises. Culture in academic study has reverted back to a definition more in line with the 1930s anthropology of Franz Boas. Culture is pluralised and rendered static in our ahistorical times. Each ‘culture’ is incommensurable with any other, and unable to be understood by any other. Some culturalists believe that culture and thus worldview is determined by language, the so-called ‘Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’ that was part of the same era of anthropological study as Franz Boas. In other words, our theoretical understanding of the world has retreated to discredited ideas that are 90 years old.

The cultural turn, of course, has throughout its ascendancy relied on social constructivism in its different forms as its overarching ontology and epistemology. This paradigm has allowed the theoretical denaturalisation of both ideological and actually-existing reality, as it redefines what exists in terms of language: how things are thought and defined. Through this, ideological reality supervenes over actually-existing reality to bring forth for us a relativist universe of competing definitions of reality without foundation or means of verifiability. This has produced a great litany of what one of constructivism’s proponents, Sally Haslanger, usefully for me describes as ‘debunking’ approaches to thinking about ideas and the world. The theory thus presupposes what it seeks to reveal: that idea X is socially constructed, which means that idea X is arbitrary, which means that idea X should be discarded. ‘Debunking’ approaches have stretched this basic movement to gradually deny the unicity of human nature, the universalities in human understanding, the idea of cross-cultural fertilisation and translatability, and finally, the idea that an external reality that we are all able to perceive in some way actually exists. It supposedly reveals that what we think are common projections of that world are coming from a particular ‘standpoint’ or ‘voice’.

Now, this is not to say that such ‘debunking’ is not reflective of some of what I myself have already said. After all, Marxists engage in such a movement when they describe the ‘critique of ideology’, which social constructivism basically borrows from. I have just reflected criticisms of postcolonial theory as having stemmed from a particular class position, for example, hence why they do not mention class in any serious or rigorous manner. But what a materialist critique of ideology approach has that a naïve ‘debunking’ approach does not is the anchoring of such a critique in the material world.  It describes and evaluates with reference to real structures, processes and schematics as opposed to things that, and we should be honest with ourselves here, are hypothesised notions about the way others think and represent the world, such as symbologies, subjectivities and the ethereality of ‘standpoints’ or ‘voices’. In an ironic sense, postmodernism encouraged academics to be austere about such notions, with the threat of ‘essentialism’ lurking behind every claim to a definitive substance in these areas. But now that postmodernist vocabulary has performed a disappearing act, this discourse has given up such austerities.  

As poststructuralism and postmodernism has broken down, so too has postcolonial studies, but the idealism of ‘debunking’ that underwrites it has not changed. It is the same idealism that powers much of ‘critical race theory’ and now, the new ‘decolonial theory’ that has emerged from Latin America, introduced by scholars such as Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, and Anibal Quijano. The latter approach, as far as I can see, is now being taken up by a global cadre of scholars and is assuming the mantle left unattended by postcolonial theory’s apparent departure from centre-stage, yet I am unsure that many who work in this field are working from a consistent body of ideas and concepts. Decolonial theory scholars have done a lot of work canonising their influences and inspirations, but it is unclear how any of these supposed ‘influences’ have truly shaped the final product we have before us today. They have gone so far as to claim the work of C.L.R. James as not just an inspiration, but in fact, rather hubristically in my view, as the historical moment their theoretical approach began. Walter Mignolo, one of decolonial theory’s founders, describes C.L.R. James as the first in “a long tradition of decolonial thought”. This is because they read C.L.R. James not as a Marxist first and foremost, which all his writings were influenced by, but as a generic critic of colonialism. In any case, this anachronistic redefinition of James’ work is reflective of what I have said is culturalism’s conversion of everything that pre-existed it into something that can be consumed within its own image, its own simplistic narrative of intellectual history. I am using the contemporary treatment of C.L.R James by this group and groups adjacent to it as an ironic exemplar for why culturalism, a mode of thought that has progressively lost its foundations, is condemned to perform such infinite instances of shapeshifting and the continual ‘rebirth’ of timeworn ideas.

Decolonial theory is at pains with itself to repudiate the postcolonial theory that pre-existed it, while at the same time worsening all the serious problems the latter faced. The common refrain used by proponents of decolonial theory is that ‘”decoloniality” is not “postcoloniality”’. Walter Mignolo’s problem with postcolonial studies is, again, stated in rather hubristic tones. He says, without a trace of irony: “The de-colonial shift, in other words, is a project of de-linking while post-colonial criticism and theory is a project of scholarly transformation within the academy”. The term ‘de-linking’ is made with reference to the Third Worldist Marxism of Samir Amin but bears no conceptual relationship. It is defined, like colonialism itself, in epistemic terms. The main punchline of decolonial theory is to produce an ‘epistemic shift’ – to shift to ‘other’ principles of knowledge and understanding – that is, against those of ‘Western civilisation’ – a monolith that Mignolo uses unapologetically, such as in his book Local Histories/Global Designs. This epistemic shift, supposedly, will bring about ‘other’ forms of economy, politics and ethics while conveniently avoiding the difficult labour of political struggle. Decolonial theory’s reduction of the entire course of history and its future to a battle of epistemology, of minds, of knowledges – produces a degree of idealistic entrapment postcolonial studies could only have dreamed of. Yet we have been here before. Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘discourse’, defined as narratives that form a ‘will to truth’ or contribute to a ‘regime of truth’, is a constitutive feature of postcolonial studies itself, and with that comes Foucault’s setting up of the battle between dominant discourses and so-called ‘marginalised knowledges’. In short, decolonial theory is doing nothing postcolonial studies, and indeed postmodernism, has not already canvassed.

Although decolonial theory claims C.L.R. James as a theoretical resource, the proponents of this theory basically imply that his work was inadequate in bringing about the desired ‘epistemic shift’. This is because decolonial theory’s referent is not ‘decolonisation’ – the reversal of administrative colonialism that has already taken place in most parts of the colonised world – but ‘decoloniality’, something much different. ‘Decoloniality’ is defined against a ‘coloniality’, sometimes called a ‘coloniality of power’. How does this ‘coloniality’ differ from ‘colonialism’? Again, the difference is made with reference to epistemic terms. Anibal Quijano defines coloniality as the “colonization of the imagination of the dominated”. This is because the Europeans stole the precolonial knowledge from non-European people that was valuable to them, while suppressing it under their administration, which everyone knows to be true. But it is still unclear from this explanation how an “epistemic shift” will happen under these circumstances, or indeed more fundamentally, what it actually is and why it is necessary beyond mere sloganeering. Quijano goes on to define coloniality in terms of the invention of ‘race’ to divide populations in the colonial period, but bizarrely uses this known fact to describe what happened both before and after colonialism in the economic sphere. Apparently, it is race and not the continual reconfigurations of the world-system of capitalism that have produced the current settings in the international division of labour.

All of this has absolutely nothing to do with the so-called “tradition” that began with thinkers like C.L.R. James. For James, such a revisionist view of history that bears no meaningful sign whatsoever of the political and economic dimensions of colonialism, together with a completely back-to-front view of the present day, simply could not be countenanced. In a 1960 lecture James gave in Trinidad, he said: ‘The twentieth century has seen such a decay and degeneration in modern society that now the idea of progress, except among the Marxists, is in decay; it is sneered at and denounced by many excellent people.’ Neil Lazarus said the following about postcolonial studies: “the category of class is seldom afforded sustained or specific attention in mainstream postcolonial criticism. […] Even on the best postcolonialist accounts, […] ‘imperialism’ is typically cast as a political dispensation and referred, in civilizational terms, to ‘the West’ rather than to capitalism.” What we now know from the multipolar arrangement of international politics is that imperialism has been in the past, and can be in the future, conducted at the behest of non-European or non-Western powers. This is because – back to Lazarus here – ‘it centrally involves the imposition of a particular mode or modes of production and specific regimes of accumulation, expropriation, exploitation in the form of the extraction of surplus value, and so on’ that are in Karl Marx’s Capital the necessary conditions for capitalism to territorially expand. The fact these criticisms were made about a book by Edward Said written 25 years ago shows not only how little this genre has moved in the face of criticism and recalibration. It also shows what African-American historian Adolph Reed Jr. says about antiracist discourses more generally: that in the 21^st century they have assumed a form that is ahistoricised and itself remains “impervious to historical circumstances”.

These problems with postcolonial studies are all exacerbated by decolonial theory in its attempt to revise history in the most simplistic narratives of civilizational ascendancy perhaps even more heady and confident than a Samuel Huntington or a Niall Ferguson, as when Walter Mignolo makes such grandiose statements as ‘During the period 1500 to 2000, one local history, that of Western civilisation, built itself as the point of arrival and owner of human history’. This inattention to detail extends to the co-optation of thinkers vastly unlike them as their own. C.L.R. James’ The Black Jacobin is claimed by George Ciccariello-Maher as the central influence on his book Decolonizing Dialectics. Yet Ciccariello-Maher’s book is riddled with inaccurate reflections of James’ own text, not least of which in his position on the Haitian Revolution which is the exact opposite of James’ as fleshed out in The Black Jacobins, and this is perhaps revealing of the dilettantish way this group sees politics in view of history. Ciccariello-Maher is critical of the way James lavishes praise on Toussaint L’Ouverture, the man responsible for transforming the Haitian slave insurgency into a movement capable of usurping the French colonial administration. Indeed, in the preface to The Black Jacobins, James claims that ‘the individual leadership responsible for this unique achievement was almost entirely the work of a single man [L’Ouverture]’. This was a man who desired, regularly spoke of, and fought for ‘liberty for all the blacks’ of Haiti; however, the portrait James paints of L’Ouverture is critical and perhaps even tragic, something Ciccariello-Maher fails to appreciate. Moreover, Ciccariello-Maher attempts to canonise Jean-Jacques Dessalines as a hero of Haiti. We may recall that Dessalines was in part responsible for the betrayal and imprisonment of Toussaint L’Ouverture, and who eventually became the ruler of an independent Haiti. Dessalines proceeded to run Haiti as a labour dictatorship, essentially re-enslaving black people as they faced their destiny of either returning to the plantations or becoming soldiers, and committed genocide against the remaining French people to ensure the cementation of this dictatorship. Contrast Ciccariello-Maher’s despicable public comments that the massacre of whites after the Haitians became independent “was a good thing indeed” to James’ much more nuanced view that act of pure vengeance compounded the socioeconomic difficulties the new Haitian nation faced.

Upon further scrutiny of the use of the term ‘decolonisation’ in decolonial theory, it becomes apparent that is at best muddled with itself and at worst entirely meaningless. In Ramon Grosfoguel’s article ‘The Epistemic Decolonial Turn’, he argues that “decolonization of knowledge would require to take seriously the epistemic perspective/cosmologies/insights of critical thinkers from the Global South thinking from and with subalternized racial/ethnic/sexual spaces and bodies.” The perspectival thinking common of the identity politics approaches that dominated the late period of the New Left can be seen here; supposedly, someone’s geographic location and ‘subalternity’ means that they are bestowed with the destiny to ‘decolonise’ knowledge, and it is never made clear what exactly that means. Yet Grosfoguel also remarks that postcolonial studies must be ‘decolonised’, as if it is in fact currently itself colonised. It is never elaborated by Grosfoguel on how or why postcolonial studies could be said to be colonised. And, in yet another sign of the absolute hubris of this theoretical approach, he remarks that the entire discipline of political economy must be ‘decolonised’ because it “conceptualize[s] capitalism as a global or world-system”. This astonishingly uninformed statement, attempting to refute a basic fact, would have come as news to C.L.R. James, who speaks repeatedly of ‘world capitalism’, its crises and counter-revolutions. Clearly he and his works are also a prime candidate for ‘decolonisation’.

Postcolonial studies will do itself no favours by getting itself involved in the conceptual confusion and soupy, overly self-satisfied prose of decolonial theory. Decolonial theory should serve as a sorry lesson on what happens when theorists become complacent and insulated from social, political and economic realities, and dismissive of hundreds of years of philosophical and political literature where not even an attempt at understanding it on its own terms has been undertaken. These people claim C.L.R. James as an influence where no meaningful link exists. In fact, postcolonial studies has a lot to learn from James. Noel Ignatiev writes in the introduction to the PM Press reprint of James’ Modern Politics lectures of 1960 that “Cultures are not products of regions isolated from each other… Everything created by human beings anywhere is and ought to be the property of human beings everywhere.” This explains James’ interests being as diverse as the Russian Revolution, anti-Stalinism, pan-Africanism and the liberation movements of the African diaspora, Yugoslavia, Shakespeare, Rousseau, Hegelian dialectic, feminism, Charlie Chaplin, Picasso, the Enlightenment, and, of course, cricket. One does not to have agree with James’ politics, but it is surely the case that without this long-run view of world history, and a keen awareness of today’s vastly different political and economic context, the legacy and relevance of colonialism cannot be fully understood.

This is the left's chance to take charge of free speech - but we will probably waste it

The ACT Party’s latest attempt to save itself from oblivion could pay off more than it yet knows. At a much-touted, media-saturated ‘rebrand’ press conference for the party, David Seymour remarked that people were “looking for something more”. He said “National are voting with the Government almost half the time. People are saying we need some real opposition”. This is true because in the main the Ardern-led, Greens-backed Labour-NZ First coalition government is largely sticking to the policy agenda set down by the previous National government, with the exception of some flagship policies like the ‘Families Package’ and KiwiBuild. While Simon Bridges flops in desperation and continues to be outshone by Paula Bennett as Opposition Leader, there does indeed appear to be no real attacking force against the government. There are no left parties outside the government as there have been previously in MMP cycles. ACT wishes to rebrand itself as the political opposition to Jacinda Ardern.

How will it do this? If I was particularly churlish and narcissistic, I would say David Seymour appears to be taking notice of my warnings to the left.  He has opted for a right-wing spin on my critique of the ‘liberal left’ (he uses this exact label to describe his enemy), highlighting the very real threats it now poses to freedom of speech and from censorship in our country.

After the disturbing and heart-shattering Christchurch terrorist attack that killed 51 Muslim New Zealanders at prayer, Prime Minister Ardern decided that speeding up the corporate-led programme of Internet censorship was the solution du jour, which went virtually unopposed in the media and political commentariat. Ardern went to visit French President Emmanuel Macron to lead the summit. Of course, the floundering French Government is attempting – with little success – to silence the gilets jaunes movement which is now in its 37^th consecutive week of protest. Ardern’s government banned the publication of the fascist terrorist’s manifesto under a law the party theoretically did not support (the ‘Objectionable Publications Act’ – but, in typical Labour style, despite not agreeing with the thrust of the bill they voted in support of it anyway when it came to crunch-time). Media are censoring the terrorist’s statements, which will of course nicely cover up his stated support for the police and military apparatuses. It is hard to see how anything Labour has done since has aided the situation and it is incredibly naïve to think fascist thought will be eliminated by imposing such ridiculous measures.  Not only that, but as we, of course, later found out, Ardern’s strategy of blaming the Internet was a fig leaf that covered her government’s security services’ complicity in the attacks even taking place. While they were busily surveilling harmless Greenpeace activists and members of leftist protest groups, a fascist with a plot known to Australian intelligence was able to enter the country without so much as a squeak.

I have been covering for some time now the self-destructive attempts of the liberal left to rid itself of the latest wave of fascistic sentiment through state- and corporate-led censorship. This is highly embarrassing considering the entire history of the socialist left has been a fight to secure the freedom of speech, and is first in line to be censored by parties who seek to suppress or re-channel worker uprising (this includes the ‘Labour’ Party). The radicals of today do not seem to realise that the ‘House Un-American Activities Committee’ – now known as the ‘McCarthyite era’ – began with a wipeout of fascism, before it then moved on to a more pressing target - leftists. They need to be aware that if they actually want to get serious with their politics beyond carping from the sidelines and being perennially disappointed, Labour and the Greens will not protect them from future censorship encroachments.

On social issues, it seems even some of the most committed of socialists are in lockstep with liberals. A huge fraction of socialists continue to advance a ‘movementist’ politics based on postmodernism – Ernesto Laclau’s ‘chain of equivalences’ – an idea which is over forty years old and whose real-world materialisations have largely failed. Although there continues to be an academic wing of the left that reliably produces lucid and provocative analyses of the world and the problems it faces, this does not translate into any real new or refreshing political ideas. It has been marginalised in comparison to an explosive force in humanities academia whose primary goal is to constantly regurgitate and reiterate the narcissistic discourses of identity politics. Although some dents have been made in this vacuous machine, with genuinely interesting and profoundly intelligent figures like Akala assuming the position of the radical, socialist pop-writer, identity politics is too producing its drab, uninteresting ultraliberal spokespeople such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Afua Hirsch, who see the world through the singular prism of ‘race’ (i.e. an ideological worldview). The mainstream left has focused more on filtering bizarre and patently wrong ideas from ‘culturalism’ into everyday language than it has even merely trying to answer a growing wall of working-class resentment beyond lip service.

As a left-wing defender of free speech, it is hard not to feel cynical amidst a tide of liberal-left support for censorship, backed up of course by much of the global mainstream centre-right. History will probably repeat itself – except, of course, without the part where the left actually posed a threat to capitalist society, as it did during the time of the ‘House Un-American Activities Committee’. Instead, the mainstream left is more likely to be seen upholding the current state of society implicitly, running to the arms of the state for shelter. This signals nothing but total estrangement from the world with the problems it once held at its centre.

As for the ACT Party, they are now starting to attack laws protecting people that actually codify violating speech – the right not to bully or publicly verbally abuse people, or incite violence. This is incredibly dangerous and one should not underestimate ACT’s ability to pull National onto its side to do this in any future coalition government. But the fact that such laws already exist may surprise people who bother to listen to the Greens on this issue, who have made a lot of noise about the need to widen existing hate speech laws but have remained coy on how this might be done – which will only work to their detriment.

What will the worrying signs be if the left does not take action? The ACT Party re-emerging to become a legitimate force in politics in this country is just one scenario that may occur – ACT may find it can never recover from its wily brand, tainted by personalities who infamously fell from grace like John Banks and Donna Awatere Huata, as well as David Garrett, who once stole the identity of a dead baby boy to forge a passport application. We may chuckle now at the stupidity of such a party continuing to exist. But this does not stop a future extreme-right party emerging in its place. With no left alternative on the horizon to a censorious Labour-Green alliance, we may soon find ourselves unable to laugh.   

A theory of 'left culturalism': What is it and why should it be opposed?

In the 1970s the ‘New Right’ emerged as a Western political force. They argued as a collective that up until that time, Western immigration policies had been assimilationist in nature and led to a ‘deculturation’ of non-Western peoples. What was required, then, was what Alain de Benoist called a ‘respect for difference’. This ‘respect’ entailed immigrants being returned to their country of origin so they could live in piece among their ‘own kind’. Implied within this was a framework, frozen in time, whereby the global distribution of the population was understood as groups belonging to different ‘cultures’. By ‘culture’ they did not mean the general production of human creativity, symbology and systems of meaning. Instead they simply meant ethnicity, ethnic groups or ‘races’, merely translating the supposedly outmoded and discredited language of ‘race’ into bywords for ‘ethnicity’. These ‘cultures’ the New Right spoke of were all radically different and so required separate quarters, so assimilation and cultural marginalisation could not occur.

There is now a ‘left’ grouping that accepts and implies in all its analyses the major tenets of this ‘New Right’ ideology, although they appear not to know it as they wrongly believe themselves to be the most vocal enemies of such an ideology. We can call this grouping the ‘liberal left’, following scholars who have named or discussed such a grouping, e.g. Karl Polanyi, Alvin Gouldner, Jonathan Friedman and Frank Parkin. The liberal left takes its ideological pillars from a confluence of poststructural, postmodern and ‘indigenous theory’ influences, despite the fact that these are often in contradiction with one another. From poststructuralism and postmodernism, the liberal left takes an ‘anti-universality’ stance. All narratives of supposed ‘universality’ are to be rejected. This includes virtually any political economy stance, Marxism, and humanism, all of which insist on the unicity of human nature and the universals that underwrite human being. Additionally, from ‘indigenous theories’ – a moniker which signals nothing about their content other than the standpoint from which they are written – along with other race-based prisms of looking at the world, the liberal left takes what appears to be common to each of them: the belief in a static world of groups called ‘cultures’ that are all different and incommensurable, but simultaneously relativized, subjectivised and with no ‘culture’ able to be understood by its outsiders. The biggest problem is they cling to this incorrect belief whilst simultaneously lending lip service to some kind of liberal programme of universal political rights and freedoms.

Together, these left and right versions of the same ideology equal ‘culturalism’ – the stitching together of ‘politics’ and ‘culture’ whereby all politics becomes ‘cultural’. Critical theorist Seyla Benhabib noticed this equation of left and right culturalism (calling them the ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’ position respectively) almost twenty years ago. She describes culturalist positions as comprising a “reductionist sociology” and carrying with them “faulty epistemic assumptions” about the boundedness of ‘cultures’ and their congruence with population groups. But Benhabib is only furthering a theoretical problematisation of this thinking that existed even earlier. Ernest Gellner said in the 1980s that the ‘national’ character of modernity would lead to the proliferation of culturalism in politics. Additionally, in as early as 1989, Loren Goldner referred to a “currently dominant culturalism” that “is so pervasive that it does not even know its own name”. Russell Jacoby warned that the left’s adoption of culturalist ideology is part of its gradual relinquishment of power to liberals, who have themselves lost any idea of what they are supposed to represent.  Jacoby’s writing is provocative and despairing: “Stripped of a radical idiom, robbed of a utopian hope, liberals and leftists retreat in the name of progress to celebrate diversity. With few ideas on how a future should be shaped, they embrace all ideas. Pluralism becomes the catch-all, the alpha and omega of political thinking.” Jacoby ultimately concludes that the liberal left’s obsession with multiculturalism above all other concerns represents “the exhaustion of political thinking” among the left of centre. Chillingly, culturalism “spells the demise of utopia.”

Culturalism has also swept into a dominant, orthodox position in academia in recent times. Recent theoretical approaches in the social sciences and humanities, such as decolonial theory, critical race theory, and practically any discussion in anthropology departments today, are re-fashioned instances of what Sally Haslanger has described as ‘debunking’ approaches. These approaches are ‘idealist’ in that they deny the objectivity of the external world (the world for-itself or the world of objects that we can all commonly perceive). The ‘debunking’ function is to reveal that what we thought were common projections of that external world were actually coming from a particular standpoint or ‘voice’. The effect of the ‘debunking’ position has been to render the social sciences and humanities critically useless through new forms of subjectivism relying on unsubstantiated grievance, supplanting the genuine analysis of social problems for statements of personally located belief and emotional outburst. This movement to a new round of subjectivism is not an alternative to postmodernism, as was once claimed by optimistic academics, but has in fact merely replaced postmodernism as the new sophistic, relativizing tendency in academia.

But what is wrong with the ‘left’ form of culturalism if its aims are to support social justice concerns? There are three answers to this question that explain why. The first is evident from what I have just discussed – ‘left’ culturalism has become what I feared it would: completely unable to fight right-wing culturalism as it is basically its mirror image. The second is that ‘left’ culturalism is the apotheosis of – at risk of confusing myself with the language I am using – the gradual move to the right among self-described leftists. This move to the right is symbolised by the deemphasising of class politics and the turn to identity politics, which has no utopian vision and can be serviced for any political ends whatever. No analysis of class can proceed now without some attempt to include concerns about identity even when none are relevant or necessary, or when it is analytically preferable to subsume concerns about identity to concerns about class (which is the majority of instances). As Adolph Reed describes in a new article, ‘anti-racism’ has now become ‘a neoliberal alternative to a left’, having now outlived its usefulness as an organising strategy. Identity politics has in fact supported an entire industry of ‘diversity managers’ who are busy furthering along a process of class recomposition that I have identified in previous articles. The ruling and middle classes are becoming more diverse, which is considered the apex of political understanding to much of the left today, as the working class are written off as unimportant, ignorant, or untrustworthy to make ‘correct’ political decisions, and so on.

The third answer is to turn the question on its head. I argue that left culturalism has done more than any other ideological tendency on the left to damage social cohesion and social justice in the last decade: by throwing the gains of socially liberal movements over the past forty years into serious doubt, as its practitioners further alienate themselves from the working class politically and socially, lend support to the discredited social-democrat parties and their feeble attempts to latch onto and contain the anger of left-populist movements, fill the increasingly compromised trade unions with functionaries of said parties, and by doing so empower the extreme-right as a viable alternative to a do-nothing ‘left’. We are entering into yet another cycle of social-democratic ‘revival’ worldwide and already experiencing the inevitable disappointments and political stagnation that results from being again duped. In Aotearoa this is characterised by capitulation after capitulation from yet another Greens-backed Labour government. The recent election in Finland also is worrying as the social democrats achieved an election win but on the back of a very minimal programme that barely can call itself ‘social reform’, with the right-wing nationalists snapping at their heels.

The second reason I have identified requires more elaboration. The function of anti-racist discourse is, in today’s society, ideological. Its simplicity persists despite a wealth of evidence contradicting it, as African-American scholar Adolph Reed explains.

Antiracist activism and scholarship proceed from the view that statistical disparities in the distribution by race of goods and bads in the society in which blacks appear worse off categorically (e.g. less wealth, higher rates of unemployment, greater incidence of hypertensive and cardiovascular disease) amount to evidence that “race” remains fundamentally determinative of black Americans’ lives. As Merlin Chowkmanyun and I argue, however, disparity is an outcome, not an explanation, and deducing cause simplistically from outcome (e.g. treating racially disparate outcomes as ipso facto evidence of racially invidious causation) seems sufficient only if one has already stacked the interpretive deck in favour of a particular causal account.

How ironic that the subjectivist group of academics who support these kinds of explanations are now the biggest advocates of positivist approaches to social science research, as this is effectively what such research amounts to – nominalist observation with no attempt to make any deep theoretical understanding of the situation. This is a considerable about-turn to make, especially since the very same academics who rely on such explanations are very likely to have supported postmodernism and extreme variants of interpretivism merely ten years ago.

But in a further twist, what is coupled with the positivistic underpinnings of this research is a reliance on primordialised abstractions like ‘white supremacy’ and ‘colonialism’ that are, of course, true in their contexts, but in the new forms of anti-racist ideology are made to assume an ahistorical, totalising form. For example, the statement that we should not care about the Notre Dame cathedral fire in Paris because the church is emblematic of ‘colonialism’ and ‘slavery’ is completely erroneous as the church was built long before European slave economies that exploited African labour, which such an explanation relies on, began to operate. These primordial forces are also ‘impervious to changing historical circumstances’, as Reed describes. For example, despite the fact many formerly colonised countries have become independent, they are still ‘mentally colonised’ and thus white supremacy can still be said to exist. The new, over-hyped ‘decolonial’ theory approach uses this practice of translation to advance an idealist theory that colonisation is in fact the imposition of systems of thinking and cultural ideas, rather than a materialist theory that those ideas were false and used as a proxy to steal resources. What is required by decolonial theory is a retreat from so-called ‘Western epistemologies’ and a return to proper ‘cultural ideas’ – usually defined by particular architects of the decolonial theory itself and justified through esoteric readings of scholars essential to national liberation movements, such as Frantz Fanon.

Kenan Malik distinguishes between ‘the lived experience of diversity’ – which, in my humanistic tradition I belong to, we are all a part of and I celebrate unwaveringly – and ‘multiculturalism as political process or policy’, which despite its intention has been incredibly damaging to that diversity. It has diluted the critical aims of feminism and anti-racism to irrelevancy and distorted the secularist, atheistic and humanistic critique of the incorporation of religion explicitly into the public sphere by attacking it incoherently as racist (and by doing so has unintendedly found friends in the fundamentalist Christian right, who have been trying to produce a similar silencing outcome for decades). It has also led to self-appointed ‘cultural’ representatives who import themselves into the public space and both public and corporate governance structures, advancing exclusionary ideas about what constitutes being an ‘authentic’ practitioner of one’s ‘identity’. These self-established leaders become functionaries of state policies on diversity and its management and proceed to draw illusionary boundaries and divisions between groups. Through this embedding of cultural divisions, the organisation principle of politics transitions from class to culture and loses its ideological content.

The liberal left has participated in this process at every step and is currently (with Labour in government) the leading political force that continues to advance a politics without ideological content. It is why, for example, despite the ‘left’ in the name, the liberal left in Aotearoa supports and magnifies the political actions of the Iwi Chairs Forum because it is seen to be representative of Māoridom and ‘Māori leadership’. The support is therefore on cultural grounds that aims (and fails) to cut across the inevitable class contradiction that results. The Iwi Chairs Forum is in fact comprised of members who when considered as a bloc privately own and control billions of dollars of assets through trusts and corporate bodies, and has been set up as a means of further privatising resources for the purposes of capital accumulation and valorisation. It is a capitalist bloc that is directly opposed to the interests of the Māori working class, but one that astoundingly continues to enjoy left-wing support.

Many leftists who want to maintain sympathy to such tendencies tend to make the superficial and contentless remark that it’s not about ‘class versus identity’ but ‘class and identity’; identity is meant to ‘mediate’ the lived experience of class. However, it is rarely clear from such comments how this actually works, and almost exclusive reference is made to the very same self-fulfilling identity politics discourses (i.e. the claim is made with reference to other, also unsubstantiated claims from similar discursive bodies – a hermetic circle without evidence), rather than a clear synthesis of social and economic research. For example, it is much easier to explain the relative economic deprivation of non-white people (considering that such social settings can, have and will continue to change and may be more helpfully defined in terms of ‘national economy’ than ‘ethnic group’ in the future, for instance) by referring to the theory of imperialism, ‘so-called primitive accumulation’, and uneven development proffered by Marxists over decades, i.e. economic explanations. Explanations focused on discrimination do indeed mediate and inform class, but, when understood in the generalised sense popularised by liberal-left academia of ‘privilege’ and ‘oppression’ (i.e. all non-white people are inherently ‘oppressed’), leads to serious distortion of the social reality. We can turn to Adolph Reed again to explain why it is not so much that identity mediates class, but identity politics in fact takes the form that it does because of class:

Antiracist politics is a class politics: it is rooted in the social position and worldview, and material interests of the stratum of race relations engineers and administrators who operate in [social-democrat/centrist] party politics and as government functionaries, the punditry and commentariat, education administration and the professoriate, corporate, social service and non-profit sectors, and the multibillion-dollar diversity industry. That stratum comes together around a common-sense commitment to the centrality of race – and other categories of ascriptive identity – as the appropriate discursive framework through which to articulate norms of justice and injustice and through which to formulate remedial responses. It has grown and become deeply embedded institutionally as an entailment of the victories of the 1960s.

He then says, “As the society moves farther away from the regime of subordination and exclusion on explicitly racial terms to which race-reductionist explanations were an immediately plausible response, race has become less potent as the dominant metaphor, or blanket shorthand, through which class hierarchy is lived.” This completely contradicts the discourses of critical race theories, postcolonial and decolonial theory and so on, which steadfastly continue to deny this claim despite the last two or three decades of historical change that have led to class becoming, beyond reasonable doubt, the most important sociological variable of explanation.

The inevitable failure of ‘left culturalism’ is thus shown up for these three reasons: it is a mirror-image of the culturalism of the New Right that has now unfortunately re-emerged as political orthodoxy, it is supported by a ‘liberal left’ that is now embedded in the state as purveyors of a new ideology that entrenches group identity as the primary political means of organisation – which means they actively booster their analytical target of ‘neoliberalism’ and will help along the destruction of public and civic discourse, and by doing so has contributed more than any contemporary left tendency to sow social divisiveness amongst the general population. ‘Left’ culturalism is openly antagonistic to a socialist-humanist view of society that envisages the emancipation of the working class and the freedom from, not the binding to, restrictive identity labels. It must be rejected or the left will be doomed.