Does the internet transcend capitalism?

August 8, 2018 by

This article is part of Fightback’s “What is Capitalism” series, to be collected in an upcoming magazine issue. To support our work, consider subscribing to our e-publication ($20 annually) or magazine ($60 annually). You can subscribe with PayPal or credit card here.

In 2015, a breathless, widely circulated Guardian article by somebody called Paul Mason declared that the internet is fostering ‘postcapitalism.’1 Mason argued that the old forms, such as the political party, have been transcended (ironically, not long after, Mason endorsed Syriza,2 a political party).

In theory, Mason’s argument for online ‘postcapitalism’ is understandable: the internet suggests post-scarcity. However, this is a case of the “forces of production” (new technology which enables new possibilities) clashing with the “relations of production” (who has the power and resources, and why they might prevent change). The possibility of post-scarcity – endless free copies of the same content – is prevented by corporate dominance.

Potentially infinite newspaper articles or academic pdfs are held behind paywalls; music and television are restricted to paid streaming services, or regionally restricted; cash-poor media addicts end up on piracy websites riddled with sleazy spambots (perhaps not the greatest injustice of capitalism). In a particularly ironic example, publisher Lawrence and Wishart demanded that the free-to-all website Marxists.org take down the largest English language collection of Marx & Engels’ writing available: two writers who are both long dead, and dedicated their lives to eradicating private property.

Although technically nobody ‘owns the internet’, most users’ experiences are shaped by corporate domination. Most of our time online is spent on corporate-owned websites like Twitter and Facebook, who have the right to censor any content they consider unsavoury (note: this is not necessarily such a terrible thing, as with the censorship of fascist accounts, but giving corporations the right to determine who speaks publicly sets a dangerous precedent). Controversy about Facebook’s data mining shows how corporations continue to surveil our lives, albeit in innovative new ways. Returning to Paul Mason, he advocates breaking up Facebook and other monopolies, whereas fellow ‘postcapitalism’ theorist Nick Srnicek advocates nationalisation of Facebook and similar platforms.

Communist Jodi Dean argues that the internet is a new ‘zero level’ of social life,3 a fundamental background that frames our whole existence. While some treat interactions on the internet as irrelevant to ‘real life’, they in fact frame everyday social life. Ordinary conversations often refer to the latest online controversy, in the same way ‘water cooler conversations’ used to refer to the latest on television. Dean further argues that the internet favours contestation over consensus. The spread of ‘Fake News’ propagated by the crypto-fascist alt-right may have helped swing an election in the most powerful nation on earth. We cannot be too complacent about similar movements in Aotearoa or Australia, even if they are currently marginal. It’s equally self-defeating to either confine our radical practice to the internet, or dismiss ‘internet politics’ as irrelevant.

The internet is the real world, integral to everyday life. However, rather than the internet transcending power struggles, power struggles transcend the internet. Communication technologies mediate a wider social world. The old war continues, but the terrain has changed.

3Jodi Dean, Why the Net is not a Public Sphere, University of Oregon website http://pages.uoregon.edu/koopman/courses_readings/phil123-net/intro/dean_net_publicsphere.pdf

Filed Under: Capitalism, Science & Technology

Capitalism is not a Jewish conspiracy

August 1, 2018 by

This article is part of Fightback’s “What is Capitalism” series, to be collected in an upcoming magazine issue. To support our work, consider subscribing to our e-publication ($20 annually) or magazine ($60 annually). You can subscribe with PayPal or credit card here.

Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before. In a 2012 Facebook post, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn defended a mural by New York artist Mear One. The mural depicted a cabal of bankers ruling the world. More recently in 2018, the post was dredged up to prove Corbyn’s anti-Semitism. He quickly apologised, saying he had not paid the mural close enough attention.

What is notable here is not the original event itself, nor Corbyn’s personal views. The issue is the failure of many on the left to detect anti-Semitic tropes. During the controversy, Corbynistas took to Facebook in droves to argue the mural was in fact legitimate anti-capitalism.

Corbyn’s defenders argued that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism. However, the mural had no references to either Palestine or Israel – the only useful definition of modern political ‘Zionism’ refers to the state of Israel, not Jewish people in general. Equating Jewish people with Israel is the preferred method of two counterposed groups: Zionists and anti-Semites. Many Jewish people do not support the actions of the Israeli state. The Palestinian cause, like the socialist cause, is discredited by any association with anti-Semitism. There is no good reason to bring up Israel when discussing Mear One’s mural.

Moreover, the mural deployed uncomfortable anti-Semitic tropes. The artist presents a circle of large-nosed financiers, conspiring to rule the world, with an Illuminati symbol in the background. Before analysing this image, it’s worth noting some tropes of anti-Semitism: Jewish people are often depicted with big noses, and as a financial elite conspiring to rule the world.

The use of an Illuminati pyramid is the first obvious clue, reflecting a conspiracy theorist mindset. The noses of the conspirators are also larger than life. The six historical figures sitting around the table are an “elite banker cartel” in the artist’s words, but there are no capitalists from other industries – factory owners, or farmers, tend to get a free pass in the conspiracy theorist mindset – whereas finance capitalists are depicted as a separate race of leeches preying on the productive national economy. The artist includes Baron Rothschild, a significant dog-whistle, representing a Jewish family whose influence in the 21st century is wildly overstated by conspiracy theorists.1 To simplify, compare Mear One’s mural with the Polish Nazi poster below: six large-nosed figures framed by a Star of David, sitting around a table which crushes the global majority (Polish text translates to ‘Soviet Pyramid’). This is not, to put it lightly, an artistic legacy anyone should want to be associated with.

Mear One mural

anti semitic

Australasia’s political culture isn’t immune to these memes. New Zealand’s former Prime Minister John Key, who had a Jewish background, was repeatedly caricatured with a large nose in political cartoons. Dumping the subtlety, some charming individual decided to graffiti the word “Lying Jew Motherfucker” on a Key billboard. There are many good reasons to dislike John Key – his Jewish background is not one.

Although Aotearoa’s billboard defacement is a particularly overt example, subtler forms of anti-Semitism pervade conspiracy theorist accounts of capitalism. If you will forgive an extended quote, Matt Bolton and Frederick Harry Pitts explain the problem with conspiracy theorist anti-Semitism well:

[A] critique of capitalism which focuses only on the machinations of the “1 per cent” fails to understand how fundamentally capitalist social relations shape the way in which we live – capitalists and bankers included. It does not grasp the extent to which “real” industrious production and intangible “abstract” finance are inextricably entwined. The pursuit of profit is not a choice in capitalism, but a compulsion. Failing to do so leads to bankruptcy, starvation and death. Nor are banks and the international financial sector an unproductive parasitical outgrowth undermining the vitality of the “real” national economy. They are that economy’s precondition.

The results of this incessant pursuit of profit, facilitated by the global movement of money, are by no means equal, and to that extent Corbyn and his supporters are right to highlight the widespread economic disparities in society. Indeed, the danger of conspiratorial thinking on the left is that it does in some ways “reflect a critical impulse”, a suspicion about the world and its forms of power.

It is also why, as the sociologist David Hirsh has argued, anti-Semitism can present itself as a progressive and emancipatory force, a valiant attempt to rid the world of the evils dragging it down. It replicates the way that anti-migrant racism has become a sign of one’s commitment to a downtrodden “white working class” in the aftermath of Brexit.

Therefore to dismiss the existence of anti-Semitism on the left as a minor problem compared with that of the right is to fail to heed the risks that the two forms can, on occasion, complement each other. A critique of capitalism based on the need to eradicate “globalism” is politically ambiguous at best, able to be utilised by the far-right as easily as the left.

What this lapse from critical to conspiracy theory suggests is that the anti-Semitic tropes which pervade the Corbyn-supporting “alt-media” and activist base, as well as Corbyn’s own dubious brand of “anti-Zionism” and “anti-imperialism”, are not mere contingencies, but the logical outcome of the movement’s morally-charged, personalised critique of capitalism as conspiracy.

This has implications for how Labour addresses the current crisis. The specificity of left anti-Semitism arises partly from a foreshortened critical impulse imbued with a racism that punches upward, rather than down. Building an alternative therefore requires much more than expulsions of “pockets” within the Labour Party.

What is needed is a commitment to education and consciousness-raising capable of replacing bad critiques with good – and Corbyn showed yesterday that he might be prepared to lead from the front. The work of [Jewish Marxist theorist Moishe Postone] would be an excellent place to begin. What it shows is that, if Corbyn is as serious as he says he is about militant opposition to anti-Semitism, his worldview as it is may not survive intact. Rather, it must be radically revised and rethought.2

At a glance, Mear One’s mural could be mistaken for anti-capitalism, and that is precisely the problem. Most capitalists are not Jewish, and most Jewish people are not capitalists: fixation on a minority of Jewish bankers is a dangerous diversion. In a NZ context, locally owned ‘productive’ agricultural companies Talley’s and Fonterra are as craven as any finance company, so the focus on ‘international bankers’ would be a diversion even without the dog-whistle. As socialists, we need to be able to clearly identify and distance ourselves from anti-Semitic tropes, especially those in ‘left’ garb. Perhaps anti-Semites are just bad apples, but the origin of that metaphor goes: one bad apple spoils the bunch.

Those who followed the Corbyn anti-Semitism row are likely aware of the happy ending (well, it never ends). Corbyn attended a seder held by Jewdas, a Jewish radical group. As far-right rag the Daily Mail3 reported in shocked tones, those in attendance held beetroots in the air and cried:

“FUCK CAPITALISM!”4

1Brian Dunning, Deconstructing the Rothschild Conspiracy, Skeptoid https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4311

2 Matt Bolton and Frederick Harry Pitts, To combat left anti-semitism Corbynism must change the way it sees the world, NewStatesman https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2018/03/combat-left-anti-semitism-corbynism-must-change-way-it-sees-world

3A publication which literally endorsed the Nazis in the 1930s.

4Andrew Pierce, They raised a beetroot in the year and shouted f*** capitalism…, Daily Mail https://donotlink.it/jl1N

Filed Under: Anti-Semitism, Capitalism, Racism Tagged With:

Is slavery essential to capitalism?

July 25, 2018 by
tubman

US slavery abolitionist Harriet Tubman

This article is part of Fightback’s “What is Capitalism” series, to be collected in an upcoming magazine issue. To support our work, consider subscribing to our e-publication ($20 annually) or magazine ($60 annually). You can subscribe with PayPal or credit card here.

African American slavery is indisputably an ugly stain on history. It was also necessary to the establishment of modern capitalism.

Until about the mid-1970s, historians treated American slavery as a pre-capitalist institution. Now, scholars increasingly highlight that Southern slavery was a key to establishing the US position in the world economy. More than half of US exports in the early 19th century consisted of raw cotton, extracted on slave plantations; slaves were employed in many more industries than cotton-picking; the Northern economy relied in part on the Southern; and many former slave owners would become established in ‘post-slavery’ capitalist institutions.

Although Northern capitalism had its advantages over Southern slavery (for example, wage labourers must not be housed by their employers), the system died because the abolitionist movement killed it:

Slavery did not die because it was unproductive or unprofitable, as some earlier historians have argued. Slavery was not some feudal remnant on the way to extinction. It died because of violent struggle, because enslaved workers continually challenged the people who held them in bondage… and because a courageous group of abolitionists struggled against some of the dominant economic interests of their time.1

So now, has slavery been abolished? Sadly, no. Instead, it has been outsourced: through the prison system (exempted from the abolition of slavery in the US constitution), and through border regimes. In 2013 the United Nations estimated that roughly 27 to 30 million individuals are currently caught in the slave trade industry.2

A report on labour conditions in NZ waters found that fishermen worked 15 to even 53 hours, for as little as 49 cents an hour.3 Many ships fly under ‘flags of convenience’, flags of countries without shipping regulations, despite the owners and crews not coming from those countries. Banning ‘flags of convenience’ would make legal abuses easier to solve, and is a key demand of maritime unions internationally.

Laws and regulations can in some cases protect these workers. In Aotearoa, the International Transport Federation hires an inspector to examine ships in New Zealand ports for compliance with labour laws. Let me repeat that, however: one inspector. Attempting to overcome modern slavery in shipping is like attempting to stop a tsunami with a plunger.

It comes down to the bottom line. Corporations will do anything to extract profit and cut wages, below $1 an hour if possible. This can be stopped in various places and times, through both laws and collective action, but while profiteers run labour processes in general, they will always utilise slavery where they can get away with it.

1Sven Beckert, Slavery and Capitalism, The Chronicle of Higher Education https://www.chronicle.com/article/SlaveryCapitalism/150787

2 Lauren Bradford, Modern day slavery in Southeast Asia: Thailand and Cambodia, Inside Investor https://web.archive.org/web/20150323032459/http:/investvine.com/modern-day-slavery-in-southeast-asia-thailand-and-cambodia/

3Tess McClure, Slavery on NZ seas: rape, bonded labour and abuse widespread on fishing boats, Stuff Business Day

https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/68739974/slavery-on-nz-seas-rape-bonded-labour-and-abuse-widespread-on-fishing-boats

150507223900-thailand-fishing-boats-2-super-169

Filed Under: Capitalism

Where does profit come from?

July 18, 2018 by

This article is part of Fightback’s “What is Capitalism” series, to be collected in our next magazine issue. To subscribe to our e-publication ($20 annually) or physical magazine ($60 annually) please click here.

Take a KFC store, rented from the corporation by a franchisee. How does the store produce profit? It’s just a building.

For Marxists, the “material elements of capital” are “man [people] and Nature.”1 Take the window of a KFC drive-through, an element of the ‘capital’ that is the KFC store. The window’s glass began as sand; miners extracted the sand from an open pit; transport workers moved the sand into massive silos; through a complex scientific process in a factory, workers heated the sand, transformed it into liquid glass, flattened it with tin, cooled and solidified it, resulting in glass as we know it; workers cut, transported and installed the glass in the store window; a KFC worker now slides the window open, and hands over a delicious Zinger Burger. At every step of the way, workers transformed and re-transformed natural elements for human need. This is what the capitalists profits from; the transformation of ‘natural’ elements by workers.

So, there is no productive capital without labour (or Nature). By contrast, labour (not to mention Nature!) without a capitalist is possible. In the Argentinian occupied factory movement, workers took over factories and ran them democratically, instead of accepting redundancies. While these factories still operate within a capitalist market, their victory demonstrates how workers can operate without capitalists – whereas the opposite is not true.

But if workers are not reliant on capitalists, where do wages come from? Let us return to KFC. Max Caulfield makes 50 burgers in one hour. Each burger is sold for $5. She is paid $15 an hour. In other words, her first 3 burgers have already covered an hour’s wages in the first 10 minutes. 7 more burgers cover the price of ingredients, and a share of the store’s fixed costs. The remaining 40 burgers in the hour make $200. Stretch that out to 8 hours, and she will be paid $120, while the company will make $1,600 out of her labour. Max was not paid out of profits: rather, the profits were the surplus of the value of produced by her work. (Of course, other steps in the supply chain – the slaughter of chickens, the sale of the burger – also cost and reproduce capital, but the worker is essential at each step).

What about investment? Isn’t the investor also essential to the process? Doesn’t the investor take the risk? To get into this question, I’m going to go into a bit of detail about corporate structure and culture – if you get bored, the short version is that capitalism still sucks. So, investment requires prior capital. Capital may be inherited, as with Trump. It may be reinvested from a prior business: Warren Buffet serves as the entrepreneurial ideal, the teenager who brought a pinball machine for $25, brought more pinball machines out of the profit from that, and so on.2 For a KFC store, a franchisee must hire the real estate to run the restaurant – KFC’s owner Yum Brands don’t so much run restaurants as hire large amounts of real estate to franchisees. Setup costs are substantial,3 so the franchisee is likely to be independently wealthy. Franchisee average profits aren’t publicly available, but we can safely bet they’re better off than their employees, and inconsequential compared to the CEO or owners. The franchisee may be a tyrant, they may be perfectly lovable, but their job is essentially to ensure the corporate machine continues unhindered. Yum Brands are very restrictive about how KFC stores must be run, down to minute details like how often you shake the chicken after taking it out of the brine (7 times): they must protect the brand, and ‘product quality’ factors into that. Occasionally stores go through periods of laxness, followed by tight clampdowns. Like many companies, Yum Brands is financed through debt. They have $2.5billion of long-term debt,4 which sounds like a lot to me, but they haven’t gone bankrupt so obviously they’re getting some money back too (meanwhile McDonalds has 24.4billion dollars in long-term debt, economics is counterintuitive). In 2016, Yum Brands was on the market selling $2bn of bonds5 – a bond is basically selling your debt. Why would you buy debt? Apparently, bond buyers make money from the interest on the debt, or from random fluctuations in the market which bond buyers pretend they can predict.6 So, here we have our investor, let’s call him Guy White: he just brought Yum Brands bonds on his laptop. Now let’s rewind the corporate chain: he’s earning interest on the capital loaned to a company for selling real estate to a franchisee who employs people to sell food. This brings us back to Max, who has just made her 400th burger for the day, and just before she clocks off, been asked to clean up urine in the bathroom (not in her job description). Guy is now considering whether to invest in Lockheed Martin. The gap between Max and Guy is significant, metaphorically and literally. Of course, Guy is only one of many investors, one beneficiary of the vortex that is Yum Brands, with CEO Greg Creed earning a $15.3 million salary in 2016, not to mention the profit extracted by owners.7 The most tangible, beneficial human service in this whole psychodrama, and KFC’s most visible commodity, is the service of food. But the distribution of rewards for actually making and selling food is shaped like an inverted pyramid, or a tornado: the rewards get bigger the further up the vortex you go from the actual work of making food. And we don’t need this destructive, exploitative structure to make food.

Of course, Yum Brands is not the only company on the market. Finance traders participate in an impenetrable blood-sport: the trading of debts, packaged into various exotic products, their origins ever more obscure. As we all saw in 2008, this is a house of cards. Even the most successful trader runs the risk of losing big and tragically having to sell his super-yacht. Marx used the term ‘fictitious capital’ for money that represents the promise of more money, rather than having any clear relationship to production.

The production process itself may even be fictitious, as with Enron’s infamous scandal, where some of their power plants weren’t even running in the first place. As Enron encouraged workers to buy shares, when the company collapsed, the loss felt by investors genuinely was unfortunate. David Harvey once observed that while he was excited about Syriza, he was also worried about how their winning would affect his pension (as pensions are increasingly financialised). Not all investors are demons, and capitalism has a way of drawing us all into complicity. But it’s hard to conclude that the global financial market allocates goods and services rationally, or justly.

So what next? What if machines replace our labour? Wouldn’t that mean the worker becomes redundant, and the machine generates the profit? Some in the scientific community believe a ‘Singularity’ of accelerating artificial intelligence will replace human intelligence – essentially robots taking over, but potentially nice ones. That would be one way of transcending capitalism!

However, despite appearances, current trends do not point to an absolute replacement of human labour by machinery. Capitalists make certain jobs redundant through automation, but they also invest in new ones to make more profit. Overall unemployment still appears unaffected by rapid revolutions in technology. Employment growth still closely correlates with GDP growth, an old trend,8 not with technological changes.

If you take a supermarket as an anecdotal example, self-service kiosks mean that customers must now scan and bag their own groceries, but there are still many attendants available to help if anything goes wrong – the nature of the work has changed.

Observably, what technological development means is a rearrangement of the labour market, increasing precarity, underemployment, jobs that don’t last, perpetual restructuring – not the end of work, but the destabilisation of work. For this reason, even many pro-capitalist theorists advocate a Universal Basic Income.

Automation has marched on since the inception of capitalism. Take the infamous 19th century struggle of the Luddites. The Luddites were textile workers who feared their work would be replaced by the new looms, which simplified the process of weaving. Previously a specialised form of labour, it was now becoming industrialised. Luddites sabotaged the looms. In a sense, they were absolutely right – their labour was replaced – however, it was replaced by people operating looms. The labour process is transformed, not entirely discharged.

Perhaps the role of capitalists, and managers, is to coordinate this extraordinarily complex process… by casting formerly valued workers onto the streets and hoping the state will foot the bill (before complaining about the taxes leveraged to do so).

Democratic, non-profit co-ops of workers and consumers would be much better suited to meeting human needs sustainably. As mentioned before, worker-owned factories operate from Argentina to Spain’s Mondragon, with democratic decision-making structures and no need of bosses.

In sum: Capitalists need us, we don’t need them.

1Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1

2Brenton Hayden, Warren Buffet Knows It…, Entrepeneur https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/241196

3Hayley Peterson, Here’s what it costs to open a KFC, Business Insider

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/what-it-costs-to-open-a-kfc-2015-7?r=US&IR=T

5Adam Samson, Yum to offer $2.3bn in new bonds, Financial Times

https://www.ft.com/content/84422df9-004d-3de8-8053-bcf5c52e93d6

6Nickolas Lioudis, How does an investor make money on bonds?, Investopedia https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/how-does-investor-make-money-on-bonds/

7David A Mann, Pay for CEO of leaner Yum Brands more than doubled last year, Louisville Business First

https://www.bizjournals.com/louisville/news/2017/04/10/pay-for-ceo-of-leaner-yum-brands-more-than-doubled.html

8Doug Henwood, Workers: No Longer Needed?, LBO News https://lbo-news.com/2015/07/17/workers-no-longer-needed/

Filed Under: Capitalism, K-Fry

How was capitalism established in Aotearoa and Australia?

July 11, 2018 by

This article is part of Fightback’s “What is Capitalism” series, to be collected in our next magazine issue. To subscribe to our e-publication ($20 annually) or physical magazine ($60 annually) click here.

A state can be defined as a monopoly on violence: “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”1 For Marxist geographer David Harvey, “accumulation by dispossession [is] the hallmark of what capital is really about.”2 Put simply, a ruling class must establish sole control over land and resources.

So what was necessary to establish a capitalist state Australia and Aotearoa?

Firstly, the bloody dispossession of land from indigenous peoples, and secondly the importation of European labourers. While this colonisation by Great Britain is a common thread between Australia and Aotearoa, it also played out differently in each country, so this piece will be broken into two brief sections, before a conclusion.

This article cannot represent the complexity of indigenous knowledge and struggle. This is a tauiwi (non- Māori) perspective, intended to explain the motor of colonisation. If you want to engage with indigenous knowledge and history, scholars such as Moana Jackson, Ani Mikaere, Leonie Pihama, Ranginui Walker, and Gary Foley are recommended.

Aotearoa

In the 19th century, Britain was rent with economic crisis. Colonisation served two useful purposes: claiming new raw materials, and exporting surplus labour (workers without work). This was justified through race theory, which portrayed indigenous people as inferior.

However, direct Crown intervention in Aotearoa was expensive. Until the late 1830s, unofficial actors – missionaries, traders and explorers – moved ahead of the Crown. The Crown only became directly involved when they developed a scheme of selling land in the colonies to prospective settlers, thereby funding colonisation.

To establish capitalism, the Crown had to transform the relationship between people and the land. Whereas iwi and hapu (Māori kinship groups) lived collectively off the land, capitalism required that the majority be separated from the land, forced to live off meagre wages (a process that had first been carried out with the dispossession of European peasants). That required systematically depriving iwi of their land.

Initially, a fraudulent Treaty was intended to establish the basis for Crown and settler ownership (with later struggles demanding that the Treaty be honoured). From 1840 to 1870, the Crown and settlers engaged in “rampant expropriation” of the land, as well as setting up a political infrastructure (with parliament established in 1854 on the British model). This colonisation drive led inevitably to the Land Wars, as iwi were not keen to part with their land.

Māori were initially excluded from production, driven onto ‘unproductive’ land. Wage labour was mainly provided by European settlers, until urbanisation in the 20th century led to more Māori joining the urban workforce – 8% of Māori lived in ‘defined urban areas’ in 1926, compared to 41.1% by 1996.3 By the late 20th century, urban and rural Māori would combine forces in leading a new wave of resistance.

Australia

Infamously, Australia’s colonisation began in 1788 with a penal colony in New South Wales. As with Aotearoa, European labour – in this case, initially, convict labour – was imported. Exploitation of convicts was brutal:

In April 1798 an Irish convict who worked in a gang in Toongabbee threw down his hoe and gave three cheers for liberty. He was rushed off to the magistrate, then tied up in the field where his ‘delusions’ had first overwhelmed him, and flogged so that his fellow-Irishmen might ponder of the consequences of challenging the English supremacy.

This brutally exploitative system lived alongside the collectivist society of the Aborigines for many decades, with tensions often flaring up. Although antipathy grew between Aborigines and settlers, Aborigines expressed sympathy at times with the brutal conditions faced by exploited convicts:

At the same time the Aborigines began to evince disgust and hatred for some features of the white man’s civilisation. When a convict was detected stealing tackle from an Aboriginal women in 1791, Phillip decided to have him flogged in the presence of the Aborigines to prove that the white man’s justice benefited blacks as well as whites. All the Aborigines displayed strong abhorrence of the punishment and sympathy with the sufferer. They shed tears, and one of the picked up a stick and menaced the flagellator.4

In the 1820s and 1830s, Australia began to shift from its origins as a penal colony towards becoming an agricultural hub, with ‘free’ wage labourers increasingly imported from Britain. Throughout the 19th century, the settler population grew, as did appropriation of land – resisted by Aborigines. As in Aotearoa, military conflict was necessary for the Crown to take control, with frontier wars breaking out from first arrival right through to the early 20th century. Estimates indicate at least 20,000 Aborigines were killed in the frontier wars, and about 2,000 settlers. In 1901, Britain’s existing colonies federated into a single capitalist nation-state: the Commonwealth of Australia.

Essentially, the capitalist state was imposed through the barrel of a gun.

Postscript: Is there hope?

This conclusion is focused on Aotearoa, due to my greater familiarity.

Waitangi settlements in total make up about $1.6 billion, compared to about $20 billion annual national income.5 This is woefully inadequate. As private appropriation of land was the basis of colonisation, only a radical redistribution of land and resources can address indigenous dispossession.

Constitutional lawyer Moana Jackson recently led a project consulting Māori on “Constitutional Transformation.” Supported by iwi (Māori kinship groups), but independent of the Crown, the working group conducted 252 hui (discussions) between 2012 and 2015. The report stressed the need for a balance between rangatiratanga (Māori self-governance) and kāwanatanga (Pākehā self-governance).6 However, the report focused on the rangatiratanga side: the question of kāwanatanga (Pākehā governance) remains open. Ultimately, Constitutional Transformation requires that not just Māori but Pākehā take responsibility for transforming society. To quote Donna Awatere’s Māori Sovereignty:

Set against our people has been the united strength of white people. The Māori now seeks to break that unity in the interests of justice for the Māori people… Gramsci’s concept of hegemonic consciousness has relevance to Māori sovereignty. In hegemonic consciousness, a class puts its interests with other classes at a national level and establishes alliances with them. These alliances are necessary because changes cannot occur with the Māori on our own. White people have cut across class barriers to unite on the basis of white hegemony… To overcome this requires a restructuring of the white alliance.

Awatere ultimately despaired of this restructuring of white alliance occurring, advocated withdrawal from Pākehā left spaces, and later joined the political right. As a mainly tauiwi group, Fightback seeks to break the ‘white alliance.’ This is a cross-class alliance that leads white workers to believe they benefit from colonisation. In a sense this is true: Pākehā are less likely to be arrested, less likely to be imprisoned, and likely to be higher paid.

However, by supporting rich right-wing politicians, white workers ultimately vote against their own interests. Infamously, Don Brash’s ‘Orewa speech’ against ‘race-based funding’ saw a surge in polls, particularly pronounced among manual workers. As revealed by Nicky Hager’s Hollow Men, this speech was a cynical ploy by a politician who sought to deepen the neoliberal revolution, which would undermine the conditions of his blue-collar supporters. Whiteness is corrosive to working-class liberation. Standing with Māori for collective self-determination would ultimately free Pākehā workers from a system that exploits all. Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.

To end on an optimistic note. During the Māori renaissance of the 1970s, as Māori resisted attempts to sell Māori-owned land at Bastion Point, the Auckland Trades Council placed a ‘Green Ban’ on construction at Bastion Point. Union members were not to participate in any Crown/settler-led construction on this site. Members of the Communist Party of New Zealand won the Trades Council to this position. Memories like this are the heritage we need to build on.

1Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation

2David Harvey, Private Appropriation and Common Wealth, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism

3Evan Poata-Smith, The Political Economy of Inequality Between Māori and Pakeha, The Political Economy of New Zealand (Brian Roper ed)

4Manning Clark, A Short History of Australia

5Bruce Anderson, Chapter 32: Redistribution, A New Place to Stand https://itstimetojump.com/32-redistribution/

6THE REPORT OF MATIKE MAI AOTEAROA – THE INDEPENDENT WORKING GROUP ON CONSTITUTIONAL TRANSFORMATION, http://www.converge.org.nz/pma/MatikeMaiAotearoaReport.pdf

Filed Under: Capitalism, Colonisation, Racism
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