Session from Fightback Conference 2015.

With the housing bubble set to burst (when rather than if), the National government selling state housing, and homelessness on the rise, housing and homelessness are key concerns for anyone concerned with social and economic justice. A discussion facilitated by Fightback.

Joel Cosgrove (Fightback) spoke on the political economy of the housing crisis.

Steve Flude from The Soup Kitchen provided an outline of the Te Mahana, Wellingtons collaborative approach to homelessness and the prevention of homelessness.

Audio:

Session from Fightback Conference 2015.

A look at tertiary education, capitalism and resistance. What is the purpose of education? What needs to change? How can we get there?

Speakers:
Sandra Grey, Tertiary Education Union President
Ian Anderson, VUW student and communist

Trigger warning: Contains mentions of depression and suicidal ideation.

Audio:

Text of Ian’s contribution:

Since Sandra’s speaking as a unionist and a professor, I thought it might be useful to focus on the role of students, in the university and society more broadly.

Just to give a bit of background, I’ve studied on and off at Victoria University since 2006. I joined Fightback on campus, the socialist group which is hosting this conference. Also over that time, one of my majors was threatened with closure, and another was cut entirely, under the neoliberal funding model introduced by the last Labour government. I’ve completed a BA Honours, and I’m moving onto Masters.

So, I am one of the dreaded long-term Humanities students, all going according to plan I’ll be at university til death do us part. This talk will draw from my experiences on and off campus, aswell as wider research and analysis.

Today I’d like to talk about how we might view students in relation to radical transformation more broadly. To start with, ‘student’ is quite a generalised term. It doesn’t specify gender, race, class, or even educational attainment. For the purposes of this talk, ‘student’ will refer largely to university students in Aotearoa / New Zealand, though sometimes to a more general archetype of the university student in modern history.

So if we’re talking about university students, it might first help to outline what purpose the university serves. First of all I’d like to address one common myth. The notion of the university as the critic and conscience of society, a sanctified space, a ring-fence around critical thought. Although I understand the tactic of using powerful myths against the powerful, left-wing sanctification of universities is also misleading and dangerous in some respects.

If we seek radical social transformation, that means there are no sanctified spaces for critical thought. A shoe factory, a McDonald’s outlet, a corporate office, a WINZ branch must all be spaces for critical thought and action, there are no special sanctified spaces.

That said, for radicals on campus, it’s worth investigating what leeway does exist, and how we might use that leeway in supporting wider transformation. In a way the advantages of universities for radical organising are more straightforward; they’re large worksites with lots of young people. So in Wellington, VUW and the hospital are two of the largest single worksites.

Universities have been described as knowledge factories. So if universities are factories, should we consider students as workers? I’d like to discuss four main accounts of studenthood; students as workers, students as bludgers, students as future managers, and at the risk of tautology, students as students. I’ll then discuss possibilities for radical student action.

Students as workers

This account has some appeal for marxists, partly because the majority of students are workers. A 2014 NZUSA survey found that:

• 63% of students are in some form of regular paid work (down from 90% in 2007).

• The average number of weeks a fulltime student works has increased from 21 to 25 weeks since 2010.

• The average number of hours worked has increased from 12 to 14.

• The hourly rate students are receiving has increased just 50 cents in four years.

So in summary, less students are working then before, but students are working longer hours, for poverty wages. In my own experience, the longest paid job I’ve ever had was frying chicken, and this experience of short-term service work anecdotally seems like a pretty common student experience.

If we think of students as workers, in relation to the rest of the workforce, it probably makes the most sense to see us an underemployed reserve army. Like reserves in a sports team, a reserve army of labour can be deployed when needed. The capitalist class uses this threat of replacement to drive down conditions.

Low wage casualised jobs and poorly maintained flats are often described as transitional steps for students. Whether or not this justifies students’ living conditions, it ignores that most people living in these conditions are not students.

So, because students in principle will take any job and any flat, we become an excuse for poor conditions generally. One way to address this is to organise students as workers, through workers’ organisations, but it’s probably also worth dealing with the student dimension atleast ideologically, since it’s used to undermine the class as a whole.

Students as bludgers

Like any reserve army, students are cast as bludgers. Although the demonisation isn’t remotely as sharp as that faced by beneficiaries, particularly brown beneficiaries and solo mothers, students still catch some flak for being unproductive and wasteful. Discussing expat graduates who refuse to pay their Student Loans, Herald columnist Kerre McIvor argued:

“Those who are refusing to repay their loans are bludgers, pure and simple, and I see no reason why they shouldn’t be treated the same as any other bludger.”

So, just as those on welfare must be rigorously assessed and punished, students should face the same treatment. These attitudes concerning productivity and laziness, reward and punishment, are often internalised, so to quote a piece posted on US website Ritual Mag:

“University life becomes a daily stream of anxiety, depression, suicidal feelings, alienation, and other forms of discontent. However, often this discontent is not recognized as a symptom of being a student but instead is viewed masochistically as not “studying” or “working” enough. A student is simply supposed to appreciate the privilege of studying in a University.”

In keeping with a reductive view of class politics, some marxists join in on this student-bashing. One view holds that, because study is paid through working-class exploitation, in other words through taxes on income, students must earn the right to free education by supporting workers’ struggles.

This argument contains some interesting assumptions. Hospitals are also paid for through working-class exploitation. Benefits are paid through working-class exploitation. None of the above take up as much taxes as pensions, at around 50% of social spending. Not many marxists would argue that beneficiaries, hospital patients, or even pensioners should only be supported if they actively fight for the rest of the class. The assumption then is that, unlike beneficiaries, hospital patients, and pensioners, students are not part of the working class.

Though it’s definitely true that students must stand with all oppressed and exploited, this critique leads us back to asking what university education is for. We may, for example, see university as a training ground for future managers.

Students as future managers

The current National government has a view in line with neoliberal logic; education is at worst a needless expense, at best a commodity, which tertiary consumers buy to gain competitive advantage in the job market. This allows for all sorts of firm quantitative measures, and I’m going to focus on one in particular.

In 2013, the National government released a study entitled Moving on up: What young people earn after their tertiary education. This compared the earning potential of a number of tertiary degrees. Minister of Education Stephen Joyce explained:

“What I think it will do is you will see a move away from fine arts and performing arts in to a stronger demand for more career-oriented areas.”

So this is a fairly explicit articulation of why students supposedly study; to further their careers. The study found that five years after finishing study, the median annual earning of young people who complete a bachelors degree is 53% above the national median earning. Of course, as mentioned by VUWSA and others at the time, the report doesn’t mention the debt students face.

Ranking courses individually, a bachelors degree in Health was the highest earning, with a median annual earning of over $60k five years after study. The top five also included Engineering, Information Technology, Management and Commerce, and Architecture, all earning an average of more than $50k per year.

Unsurprisingly, at the bottom of the spectrum were Arts graduates, earning around $42k a year. This is still over the national average, which is around $35k.

While it’s not surprising, based on stereotypes, that Arts students are at the bottom of the graduate earnings list, it may help explain the apparent correlation between Arts students and involvement in radical politics. You could argue it’s more in the interests of Arts students, who expect to earn less, to see a society in which people generally earn more. You could also say that this is a crude economist argument and correlation is not causality. I imagine some Arts students would say their decisions have nothing to do with economic incentives, and we can take or leave that claim.

Income doesn’t tell you everything about class, so the numbers don’t necessarily confirm the ‘students as future managers’ thesis. Comfortable earnings might be a sign you’re an electrician, an IT worker, a middle-tier civil servant, or a business owner. These figures also mask further disparities, for example between men and women who graduate, or Maori, Pacific and Pakeha graduates.

However, the figures do indicate that overall, universities remain a space of social mobility. This is both more and less true under neoliberalism, which has seen an expansion of access to university, and a generation likely to earn less than our parents. For some, universities may operate as a space of upward social mobility, for others they may operate as a space of downward social mobility, or class tourism.

Students as students

I suggest that rather than trying to fix students in relation to production – as capitalists, as workers, as unemployed workers – we should see students as students. This might sound like a needless tautology, ‘a rose is a rose is a rose,’ but I think it allows us to break from polarised, dichotomous class conceptions of studenthood. Students are often workers, often unemployed, often potential capitalists, and in general studenthood is a transitional space, a space between class positions, enabled largely by the state.

If we see studenthood as a transitory space, something contingent rather than fixed, we might stop asking “what are students,” and instead we might ask, “What do they stand for? What do they stand against? Who do they stand with?”

Radical minority

If we ask what students stand for, we can immediately see internal contradictions. Students are generally socially liberal. My own students’ association VUWSA recently endorsed both marriage equality and the right to abortion by popular vote at General Meetings. When it comes to fundamental socio-economic transformation, or militant tactics, the outlook is more divided.

Any attempt to apply critical thinking outside the confines of a classroom or an essay is not only punished by the university administration and the state, but scorned by more conservative or liberal students. This is particularly obvious in the current period, however there was never a heyday when all students were radical. A Salient poll during the 1981 Springbok tour, which saw the student movement taking a leading role against apartheid tours, found students split about 50-50 on the anti-tour movement.

Organisational form

So if a radical student minority – with emphasis on the minority – emerges historically, what organisational form might this radical minority take? Looking over recent years at Vic, after the introduction of Voluntary Student Membership (VSM), there’s a few formal groups for politically engaged students.

There are the Students’ Associations, which are often compared with workers’ unions. This comparison is true to a point, and I’d say any radical on campus should join their Students Association. But there’s a fundamental difference between most contemporary workers’ unions and Students Associations under VSM; whereas Students Associations are financially dependant on the university, unions are financially dependant on their members.

Although many unions are conservative and bureaucratic, there is more capacity for independent class action in a workers’ union than a Students Association. There are a lot of sincere people doing good work in Students Associations, but under VSM, they’re basically the equivalent of a bosses’ union. Any attempt to develop transformative politics on campus requires independent organising, that isn’t beholden to university funding.

Affiliated to Students Associations, you also have political clubs – parliamentary party wings, so Young National has been pretty active in recent years, Young Labour in previous years. You have non-parliamentary political or activist groups – socialist groups, NGOs like Amnesty International. You have sectoral groups affiliated to the Students Association – the Women’s Group, UniQ which provides a space for queers on campus. There are what might be called non-political clubs; games clubs or sports clubs. These various groups may cycle through people, but generally remain relatively continuous. Most of these groups contain currents that would be significant in any radical upsurge.

In contrast, recent years have seen short-term, fluctuating student groups organised on a broadly anti-neoliberal platform; historically the Education Action Group, or more recently We Are The University (or WATU) which sprung up in 2011, and last year Reclaim Vic. These short-term formations are often more willing to take militant action for students’ interests, for example occupying management buildings.

I’d suggest a large part of getting radical politics right is mediating this tension between short-term outbursts of struggle, which in a healthy moment exceed formally existing groups, and longer-term organisation, so you don’t just have valiant losses. Marxist groups like Fightback aim to act as a kind of memory of the class.

Students are generally more able to take risks than tertiary staff, and this is a strength. I’ll give an example from my own experience, apologies to anyone implicated in the story. The university planned to slash a department. Students circulated a statement with prominent names supporting the department, and escalated to occupying a management building. This attention temporarily averted the closure of the department, however management gradually whittled away at the department over the next couple of years, intimidating staff and cutting resources. To be frank, when I heard a leading student organiser say that they were talking to staff and had decided to keep opposition to submissions, I knew we were fucked. Submissions on their own would not stop management’s plans. The department was finally killed that year.

This is a negative example, and I’ve certainly seen more positive examples of staff coming in behind student organising. It’s actually my impression that in a period where the Students Associations are becoming more conservative, the Tertiary Education Union is heading to the left, with its move to represent General Staff not just academic staff, taking up the Living Wage campaign – which again is more relevant to General Staff, and actively supporting what little remains of a radical student movement.

At the same time, I think we need to be very conscious that university staff are under constant scrutiny, and micro-management of resistance can often be more effective than direct repression. It makes sense for students and staff to organise independently, taking joint action and separate action as necessary.

Programme

The most powerful student upsurges – Paris in May ’68, Tiananmen Square in 1989 – were powerful partly because the most militant sections of the workers’ and students movements joined forces. The role of workers’ organisations in these struggles is often forgotten.

As radical students then, we aim to join a broader historic bloc. We aim to forge alliances on the basis of common goals, not just our identity as students. We might say that all struggles are student struggles, atleast in principle.

At the same time, radical students need to kill the missionary in our heads. An underlying missionary logic – the notion of radical students and intellectuals ‘saving’ the oppressed – was used in the past to justify failed ‘turns to industry,’ where graduates who might normally go into white collar work went to organise in factories.

There’s an old Marx line that it’s “essential to educate the educator,” and Mandel added that this line means exactly what it says. This applies as much to students as paid teachers, often when students discover radical ideas for the first time they can become arrogant and alienating. This heady moment can be valuable, but needs to be brought back to earth. Rather than acting on behalf of the oppressed, acting for others, students need to emancipate ourselves, so we can effectively stand in solidarity with others.

So, some kind of programme for the university is needed. I don’t think radical students should have any misconceptions about representing all students, but we need a broad accessible programme that addresses people’s needs. You shouldn’t need to read Marx to gain admission, but it’s also not a politics-free or value-neutral zone.

Last year Reclaim Vic endorsed the following programme. We demanded:

• Fully funded public education

• A Universal Student Allowance, cancellation of all existing student debt

• Bridging courses and support for people entering tertiary education

• A Living Wage for all staff

• Student and staff representation in planning education policy, education run by students and staff

• A move away from funding purely targeted towards marketable research, towards funding all socially valuable forms of education and research.

I don’t think demands should be limited to just these, however I think a commitment to fighting for public, democratically run education should be the minimum basis for political unity on campus. I’d like to open the floor to discussion of what might be the next be next steps in executing these sorts of ideas.

Session from Fightback Conference 2015.

Public pressure in the wake of the Roastbusters case resulted in some small concessions – reallocation of funding to sexual violence support services, advice that schools should include consent education. This is far from enough. Sexual violence prevention and support initiatives continue to be dangerously underfunded, and consent education in schools is not compulsory or consistent. How can we address gendered violence and implement a consent-based approach in our communities? What are the barriers to transformation?

Sandra Dickson is a Pakeha feminist who has worked to end gendered violence for more than two decades. She will talk about what research tells us works to prevent sexual violence, and why working in schools could be the best chance we have to change rape culture in New Zealand – if we get it right.

Audio:

Slides: Consent Education July 4 2015

Opening session of Fightback Conference 2015.

In the wake of another crushing electoral defeat for the left, in a period with record-low strikes and record-low voter turnout, how do we begin again? Where next for the Left? A discussion facilitated by Fightback.

Daphne Lawless is an indexer, translator, editor, electronic musician and goalkeeper based in Auckland. She is a ten-year veteran of the radical left and co-editor of Fightback’s regular magazine.

Giovanni Tiso is a writer, blogger and translator based in Wellington. His main area of activism is around disability and school inclusion.

Audio recording of Giovanni’s contribution and discussion from floor:

Text of Daphne’s contribution:

1. What is the Left, anyway?

Where do we draw the line?

Sue Bradford did some work on this in her think-tank thesis, but it is a question that has a political rather than a dictionary answer. It depends on the kind of future society we want to build. On one hand, there are good arguments to be made that – for example – a populist-nationalist party which explicitly rejects Maori sovereignty like NZ First is not part of the left as the people in this room would understand it. But what happens when we´re working on the same campaigns as them, for example, on the TPPA?

On the other hand, for a lot of people “the Left” just means people like them, and what they’re used to; they are seeing the “Left” as a cultural category, rather than a political category. And that means they automatically reject any new thing as “not Left” because it didn’t come from them. To some degree, MANA got this in its early years.

For another example, when I was involved in the Residents’ Action Movement project ten years ago – which, while it ended disastrously, was a real broad radical movement at Auckland local level one point, which changed the debate on rates and got a regional councillor elected – we got that “you’re not really Left” thing all the time. I felt the real reason was that it was an excuse not to get involved, because they didn’t trust the group I was in, nor its leadership. Which was, let’s face it, a reasonable stand to take! But it’s significant that they couldn’t outright SAY that. More on that kind of passive-aggressive behaviour later.

The question of who is the Left can only be answered, for the likes of us here today, in the concrete sense of building an ALTERNATIVE: a concrete, “counterhegemonic” political, ideological and economic force to neoliberalism – which we can define as the push to extend market relationships to ALL segments of society, beyond even the traditional reach of capitalism. This definition of the Left, of course, excludes most of Labour and the Greens – anyone who accepts the logic that the market is an ideal for, or the underlying reality of, all human behaviour.

I will also want to make the argument later that a deep commitment to tino rangatiratanga in particular, and the struggle of all oppressed and exploited layers of society, is absolutely vital for a Left which has any future in Aotearoa/New Zealand. We all know that prior generations of social democrats took the white industrial worker in a heterosexual family as somehow “normative”. We can’t spare any thought to those who want to return to those days; we must put feminist, queer and trans struggles at the heart of our practice; we must deal with new forms of precarious labour, in services, in hospitality, and in information, that actually-existing working people get into.

I still think Gramsci’s analysis, building on Marx, that the solution is a “historic bloc” of all the oppressed and exploited with the organised urban working masses as its spearhead, is the best one I’ve ever heard. And the last thing we want to do is to shift the privileged subject to the “overeducated Pākehā from a middle-class background” stereotype. Speaking of which..

2. The Pākehā Left as a social milieu

Some people think I’ve become a big of a broken-record on the subject of what is wrong with what we might call the “Pakeha left” or the “Pakeha radical milieu”. Well, as the Roman said, Carthage must be destroyed, and I’m going to keep saying it over and over again until someone listens.

The short version is: my belief is that most of the radical left in the Anglophone capitalist democracies – i.e. the left which considers itself anticapitalist – has been operating on autopilot since 1975 or so, after the run of victories for Our Side that began in 1968 petered out as did the long post-war Keynesian boom. These groups adopted a lot of quite toxic behaviours to survive, which over the years become accepted as “normal”. Not only do these behaviours adversely impact our political effectiveness; they bear a heavy psychological burden on activists and discourage ordinary people from becoming involved. This is not a matter of good groups and bad groups – these behaviours are our collective legacy from the past, we have ALL adopted them to some degree of others. And, like sexist or homophobic ideas, we must consciously reject them and seek alternatives.

1. Degeneration of the small-group left

Briefly, what happened was that there was no successor to the 1968 generation in the radical groups. The long series of defeats and increasing isolation – which went along with the shift from Fordist modernist state-directed capitalism to post-modern, globalised, neoliberal capitalism worldwide – meant that what cadre were recruited in the 80s and 90s were simply not up to taking leadership over from the 68ers. So the groups were forced into a kind of “holding pattern” – if they didn’t dissolve completely.

I want to argue that the consequence was a degeneration in radical left organisation and practice over those years. However, more recently, the new wave of activists which washed up from the Battle for Seattle and the consequent anticapitalist and antiwar movements have been fighting back against this degeneration. This has led to the dissolution, splits and fusions currently endemic all over the Anglophone radical left, as the old way of doing things struggles with the new.

Karl Marx defined “sectarianism” as putting the needs of the group before the needs of the movement. But it’s crucial to remember that it’s impossible to avoid this altogether in any real group. Everyone who joins a radical political group, does so partly out of their own emotional and/or psychological needs, as well as agreement with the politics. Capitalist alienation sets up a contradiction between “common sense” (ideology) and “good sense” (real experience) which sets up psychic conflicts. Everyone who feels radical dissatisfaction with capitalism is a bit crazy, to be blunt – in other words, their internal world and their external reality don’t match up. Len Parker, my friend and a veteran Auckland comrade, says that in the 60s many mentally distressed joined the CPNZ because it was the only place they weren’t cast out of, so this is nothing new.

A good group of any description, let alone a political one, does help look after its members’ social/psychic needs. That’s called solidarity. But you can find that in a soccer club or a pigeon fancier’s guild. But the real problem comes when, under the pressure of events, scratching the psychological itches of its members becomes the only purpose of the group. This is a kind of giving up on politics itself while still using political symbols and language.

Long before the 70s, the Trotskyist movement had fallen prey to some nasty sectarian tendencies, due to its isolation and persecution from both capitalist and Stalinist forces. And of course, the mainstream communist movement – in Stalinist and Maoist formats – had totally succumbed to the Cult of Personality.

But what you had increasingly since the 1970s was an increasingly isolated radical left adapting to conditions of marginalisation. The political perspectives of the groups fell flat and a new one was not visible which didn’t contradict some of the groups’ cherished beliefs. And believe you me, “we are the vanguard of the new world order” is a pretty cherished belief. You really don’t want to give that up, especially if you’ve sunk decades into making it a reality.

This is what happens when you lose faith in the actually existing struggle of the working masses – you fall back on the psychic consolation that “the Big Other” (the great leader, or the workings of objective history, or a revolution happening somewhere else) is the only thing that can save you, and you end up with magical thinking about how to make this secular Second Coming happen by performing certain rituals and affirming certain beliefs.

The groups often justified this to themselves as “preserving the party for future days when it’ll be needed”. But political leadership doesn’t work like that. If Lenin himself was Frankensteined to life again, like Captain America, there’s no reason why his political skills would even be relevant to today’s climate. And ideologies and programmes have exactly the same problem. You can’t keep them in the freezer.

2. Faith groups and the activist lifestyle

So the groups became their own justification, with no real connections to the outside world. There were two equal and opposite forms this could take. One is to become a kind of “political faith group”. Here’s a quote from a recent article by a Swedish comrade who was pulling out of his “left communist” group:

… once you embrace it, makes perfect sense and has an answer to an every question. On the other hand, it is a very closed and dogmatic system based upon that is increasing its hostility towards the rest of the left and every class action with every minute. It is a system that is based on ideal conceptions of everything; from ideal class action, to ideal intervention, to ideal organisation, to ideal discussion, but it offers very little experience in actual practice.

A socialist group which has become more like a religious group, or a bad role-playing game (the two are similar), than politics, isn’t necessarily a cult like Scientology or the LaRouche movement (although the latter did start as a socialist group). But “cultism” is a spectrum, like autism. I think every single group existing today – including Fightback – can be put along a spectrum based on how it operates politically, and to how much it relies on dogma or on a cult of personality – those being the two warning signs of that a political group is becoming faith-based rather than politics based.

Rosa Luxemburg talked about “bringing workers and science together”, but the groups I’m thinking of tend to act like missionaries. Replace Marx with Christ or Capital with the Qur’an, and if the discourse still makes sense it IS a religious one. As is the attitude of prioritising learning the details of “our politics” (read: our beliefs, or our dogma) over getting involved in the here-and-now. Because for these groups politics is a set of “We believe…”s which must be defended and passed on to the kids, or at least the first-year students .

I remember talking to a socialist once about a rival group which was attempting to find a new audience. His dismissive comment was “they’re liquidating their politics”. But, I enquired, you OPPOSE their politics! Isn’t that a good thing? What he was really saying that while their what a socialist group should be doing. And that group was spoiling things by making the role-playing-game universe of tadpole-sized political faith groups smaller.

But as the Swedish comrade said, there is no point in being right against the real world. A British socialist on Facebook said this about the people who are criticising Greece’s SYRIZA government from the left: “The reality is that those who are formally correct on this have no social base at all.” If you don’t have skin in the game, you can’t win.

The other kind of distorted left group would be what I would call an “activist lifestyle group”. This is the opposite of the political faith group – the group is based on activity above all else, and quite often has a contempt for theory, and leadership tends to be based on a “dictatorship of the doers”, rather than the academic selection you get in the political faith groups. “Activism” as a good in itself, rather than as a means to an end. It’s all fun and games until someone loses their ability to deal with the real world.

I remember hearing a comrade talking about “wanting to get into activism” – as if it were a lifestyle choice. Some French libertarian communists in the 1970s called “militancy” of this nature “the highest form of alienation” – and, in practice, groups which are all activism might look down on the theory-based political faith groups, but they are but two sides of the same coin. The group and its activities (theoretical or on the streets) is all – actual work to building a political counter-hegemony is nothing.

3. Politics as ritual

These two kinds of distorted group actually have a lot in common. For example, they tend to act in a ritualistic manner – we do this (paper sales, demos, organising campaigns) because “that’s what we do”, that it “gives the group a routine”. They don’t EXPECT results any more. They don’t expect other groups, let alone the broad movement, to read and debate their paper. The paper is made for the benefit of the group itself, and maybe for a bit of funding.

Any group which becomes its own end, rather than a means to an end, is a dead end. A small group of alienated intellectuals can’t bear the flame of revolutionary practice – only a mass movement can do that. So why do people keep getting involved in such groups? As we mentioned above: for psychological or psychic, rather than political, ends.

Simply, on one level, this kind of thing is FUN. It gives you something to do, and for some people that’s better than doing nothing, whatever it is. It allows you to play make-believe – by misapplying Lenin and Luxemburg’s advice for revolutionary workers to organise separately, either a political faith group or an activist-lifestyle group can separate off as “the revolutionaries” organisationally from other and hence lesser activists, puffing itself up with bloated rhetoric about its own historical uniqueness and mission. It’s a kind of 1917 cosplay.

But on another, more toxic level, the personalised politics of the radical left milieu become a psychic substitute for class conflict, a way for us to “scratch our itches” by taking it out on one another.

What we have had increasingly in the Anglophone far left is that increasingly, for the members of far-left groups – struggling with an increasingly out-of-control environment for which their political ideas or ritual activities serve as an “opiate”, or painkiller, rather than a tool for action – the group itself, and the radical left milieu, becomes a kind of stage or arena for playing out psychic conflicts in a kind of “Live Action Psychodrama” with other people. If you can’t actually fight global capitalism, you can fight that guy over there. I’ll talk more about this later.

3. Cheap Holidays in Other People’s Oppression

So, how do we break out of this? How can we reject toxic behaviour patterns which have been part of the very definition of what it means to be the radical left for decades? Here are my half-baked suggestions.

a) Self-radicalisation

One distressing legacy of the 1968 generation’s model of activism is that the struggle is always something happening to someone else, somewhere else. Socially privileged (Pākehā) activists making a big noise on behalf of the oppressed, the downtrodden, the “working classes” where we imagine them living in Mangere, Addington or Athens. This leads to a kind of distressing “missionary” culture in some portions of the Left, which feeds into activist lifestylism. If someone gives up building their own life within capitalism to work for the less fortunate, what does that make them? There are no such thing as declassed, “enlightened” people who’ve taken the red pill. Bourgeois ideology has no outside and we can’t just opt out of it – we have to fight within it, starting from our own subjective base. Anyone who thinks otherwise is playing out a fantasy scenario and calling it politics.

For me, the essence of Marxism is that of the self-activity of the working masses; not on privileged people giving the grateful working masses the leadership they crave. That in itself leads to a toxic group culture, as we see ourselves as do-gooders, social workers or secular priests, and we begin to worry about defending our own self-proclaimed superiority or purity. What happens within our small circle of Chosen Ones becomes more interesting than dealing with common human beings from the real world.

The flipside of this is that increasingly, the overeducated Pākehā left milieu are becoming part of working masses! Maybe some older comrades made wise real estate decisions before the bubble hit and are quite comfy. But most of us are in precarious or low-paid work – sometimes in stuff we are actually qualified for, sometimes just whatever retail or hospo trade will take us. Even a postgraduate degree won’t get you a middle-class lifestyle any more, let alone your own house. Historically, the leading role in the workers’ movement has always been taken by the relatively privileged (and actually, under Marxist economics, more exploited) skilled workers. That is increasingly us now, in the post-modern globalised advanced capitalist countries.

We have to learn how to analyse our own situation and work for our own liberation. This applies to questions of what creative work or information work means in the era of the Internet, of zero-cost reproduction of digital goods, of a publishing house in every laptop. It means figuring out ways to organise casualised, precarious workers through social media technology, which Unite has made great strides in. It also particularly applies to issues of sex and gender oppression, which arise in all social layers. Only at that point can we offer effective solidarity to other groups of workers and oppressed groups. Plus, when it’s our own liberation on the line in the work – not abstract mutterings about global revolution or faction-fighting against other groups – then we might take it more seriously than as a role-playing game.

b) Less personalism, more politics

The idea of socialist groups as little havens of the enlightened who must bring the light of truth to the befuddled masses also encourages a kind of personalised politics – what Lacan might call “imaginary” relationships, where other people are seen as either Good Comrades/Leaders or emblems of everything bad in the world which must be Cast Out. Class enemies within the workers movement! Or misogynist shitlords on my Tumblr! Weaklings who are ruining my brilliant plan to fight the cops! Or anyone else otherwise ruining your private Lenin cosplay fantasy. Political struggle of this kind is not political at all, but based on a kind of Freudian “projection” onto other individuals – activists or public figures – of what we despise in society as a whole.

Political debate always becomes personalised when what’s important is not what works, but the personal satisfactions of “holding the right political line”, or alternatively, going along with the Exciting New Turn that group leaders are going for. Other human beings become images of all the big psychic forces that we can’t fight directly.

In such an environment, there is no such thing as political debate. What would be the point? It would be like Methodists debating Baptists. No-one’s going to change their mind and anyone who does shift camps will be doing so for personal reasons rather than a conversion experience. We go to each other’s events to be polite, not to push forward the theoretical dialectic.

In fact, when political debate DOES arise – even at the lowest level, when one group or a member thereof does something so awful that the matter has to be fought about as elementary political hygiene – there are so many people who are angry that “the Left is fighting amongst itself rather than uniting against the common enemy”. The survival and cohesion of our private universe where we play out our dramas becomes more important than communist morality and its substrate, elementary human decency. But I refer you to my previous comments about who the Left really is. If we can’t say, no, those kinds of politics are not part of our future, then the Left is nothing. We can’t even summon up the energy to chase actual Nazis away from our demonstrations.

On an inter-group level, sometimes this is conducted in passive-aggressive sniping and gossip behind each other’s backs over beer. Other times, petty differences are blown up into what Freud would call hysterical demands: “Trotsky’s programme!” “veganism!” “complete abolition of gender!” “9/11 truth!” Such people don’t actually think they will win the argument, let alone the war against capitalism, they are appealing to an imaginary audience (history? the ghost of Marx?) who will tell them they are the eternal Good Guys. The point is not to reach a higher stage of truth. The point is to have a fight, because fights are exciting, and to feel good about yourself for winning in this completely artificial arena.

As for struggle within groups, it’s a very tempting short-cut to just destroy someone emotionally if they’re an obstacle to you getting your way within the group, by expressing the “wrong” ideas or not being enthusiastic enough about the “activism” proposed. By the process of natural selection, this means that the people who survive longest in the Left groups are those who are the best at bullying, manipulation, and other big-fish-small-pond tactics.

Let me quote from Byron, our friend in Christchurch, who’s been on the receiving end of this:

“…recently a young woman I know though Occupy got on the wrong side of some activists and after blocking them on social media told me she isn’t going to call herself a feminist anymore because she didn’t want to be associated with people like that. I don’t think this occurrence brought the world any closer to human liberation, it just made a young woman feel awful about herself and alienated from feminism/the left.

I’ve been watching this sort of thing go on for two or three years now and frankly it’s sickening, as I’ve said before I’ve seen no other community where treating each other this way is acceptable, yet on the left it is encouraged and rewarded.”

This “imaginary” politics locates the bad in individual people and their evil deeds. But it’s wrong. The enemy is not the capitalist class, the bourgeoisie, their hangers on. It’s certainly not individual evil people like John Key, that guy in your group who’s always grumpy about the majority decisions, those “sectarians” who “ruin” your activities just by turning up, or, God help us, the Rothschilds.

The enemy is a SOCIAL RELATION which is inherent in EVERYTHING WE DO under capitalism, in our very SOULS to wax dramatic for a moment. And that enemy is AMONG US at every moment when we treat real human beings as stand-in for social forces; when we smile at each other while cutting each other down in private, when we make excuses for abusers because they’re “good comrades”, when we burn comrades as fuel towards our grand but useless schemes, when we act like small dairy owners trying to drive each other out of business or religious groups proclaiming mutual anathemas. THAT is what we must destroy; not each other personally, and not the ruling class personally.

But I think it’s vital that we need a combination of more kindness to each other personally, and more real political debate based on our experiences in the movement, rather than siloing and hypocritical “comradeship”. It is vital that we refuse the temptation to take personal short-cuts to political problems – of protecting our buddies or of ostracising or bullying people we’re having problems with. Only by clearly separating political ideas from the people who might be proposing them can we get a culture of healthy debate.

4. So what, then?

The fact is: the existing radical left is not healthy, it has got into a lot of bad habits, there is too much ego masquerading as political principle, too many tactics or old ways of acting elevated into principles or ways of life. For me, to pretend that there is a happy club called “the Left” is dishonest and soul-tarnishing. Trotsky was wrong about a hell of a lot, but he was right when he said that looking reality squarely in the face and calling things by their real names was job #1 of a revolutionary.

I get a bit unpopular when I talk like this. But I’m not alone. To quote the British communist blogger Richard Seymour: “The far left’s difficulties will not be overcome until the far left starts to think, and stops allowing its ancient and transparently unavailing dogma to do its thinking for it.” The Left has to be a new way of doing things, of relating to one another, of action to create change, not just the Red Team vs the Blue Team playing the log-rolling, meme-spreading, bandwagoning, click-farming game among passive, docile media consumers. We can’t demolish the Master’s house with the master’s tools.

Sue Bradford’s think-tank project is a way to attempt to get out of that trap on a theoretical level – though people keep trying to drag us back in. Someone on the LTT FB group, for example, tried to get us all to declare our allegiances in advance – Leninist, Maoist, democratic socialist, social democrat, etc… Deciding to divide into petty groupuscles right off the bat almost guarantees that the Left will remain a playground for overeducated Pakeha with delusions of grandeur to engage in recreational warfare on one another. And of course be irrelevant to the broader struggle.

The line of fire rotates 360 degrees here, comrade. These are not issues to which Fightback is immune, let alone to me personally. I know that I am suspicious, that I bear grudges against other activists, that sometimes I act out of egotistic reasons. But in the name of all that we believe in, we all do. And we’ve got to stop acting like that. We need real political debate tied intimately to political praxis on the ground. I fully believe the old model of left politics which we’ve had, not just since 68 but since Stalinisation took hold in the USSR and the Comintern, AT LEAST, has outlived its usefulness. These organisational habits are now PARASITIC on our lives and on our movement.

Fightback is attempting to bring reflexivity to our practice to try to find our own blind spots and publish our findings to help the left. And the biggest step in that must be an attempt to reach out from the current small-group left landscape, and try to bring Rosa Luxemburg’s vision to life: by making Marxist politics relevant, not to an imaginary “proletariat” which hasn’t existed in decades, but to those social forces that are currently in action right now. I’ll quote from the recent decisions of our summer conference in January:

“Fightback is based on a political programme, which is not only a set of goals for social change but a plan of action to bring them around. Fightback seeks alliances with other progressive forces and organisations of the oppressed and working class, to develop and enact this programme. The purpose of Fightback is putting our programme into action in political activism, amending it in line with experience, and training its membership in Marxist theory and practice.”

Our 10-point programme, which you can read on our membership forms which are about the place, is a “first draft” of pushing forward to a concrete answer to the question: what is possible in radical change in the here and now in Aotearoa? And the linked question of: who will be the key segments of the working class and oppressed populations who will lead that struggle? This is the reason why – unlike some other leftists – we have committed to continuing our work within the MANA Movement, which is, despite its election failure, still not only the strongest political movement for tino rangatiratanga, but the strongest political movement of the working class in this country.

I would add that, in the New Zealand case, a basic identification with the struggle for tino rangatiratanga is vital for a successful left. We can think of Lenin’s advice that the revolutionary has to be the tribune of the people for all the oppressed; we can think of Frantz Fanon, a black man from the West Indies, allying himself with the “wretched of the earth”, the Algerian peasantry fighting the French Republic. Of all the oppressed and exploited peoples of Aotearoa, the tangata whenua are the master signifier, the basic “original sin” upon which the rest of the colonial-capitalist state of exploitation and oppression is built.

Another those forces is the feminist or women’s liberation movement, which has leapt to new prominence with the struggles against rape culture, child abuse, and the kind of gender policing which leaves trans women to be abused in men’s prison. As I said before, there is no “outside” to bourgeois culture, the “activist community” is not culturally autonomous, and it really shows in the way in which misogynistic attitudes and outright abuse continue to exist in our organisations. Thus, Fightback has a Safer Spaces policy and a Socialist-Feminist caucus. Within MANA, we have been involved from the begining in the MANA Wahine caucus which aims to set women and gender policies within the kaupapa of MANA.

We have also have reached out with our upcoming “crowdfunded” women/gender minorities issue of our magazine. We have an old saying on the left – the financial question is a political question – or, to put it another way, if you can find your audience your audience can fund you. Our success with gaining the resources required to pay our contributors to this issue from a support base much broader than the usual radical left suspects offers, we imagine, a way forward for left-wing journalism in Aotearoa, and we expect to be able to experiment more with this approach to create a true dialogue between Marxist theory and the actually existing struggle in Aotearoa/NZ.

May we all be brave enough to carry that process to its completion, in a new movement to bring capitalism to an end. Fightback is only a small group which wants to help bring this process around. We can’t do it yourself; but if you agree with our ideas, please join us; and if you don’t agree, please debate with us.