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.