At the end of 2024 I got together with some like-minded people to brainstorm some ways to influence the conversation around opposition to the Regulatory Standards Bill. The bill had been workshopped by free-market thinktankers the New Zealand Initiative and business interests over decades and resurrected by the coalition government. I was a relative newcomer to Aotearoa and asked whether a message of class war might resonate with people. The response was that no, people in New Zealand are just not that confrontational, and open class-war rhetoric would probably turn people off.

Looking around today, a year and a half later, and taking the political temperature, I feel more strongly now what I felt then. Political rhetoric has gotten much more explicitly confrontational and flatly ideological. Furthermore, New Zealand’s own political history makes it clear that a class-war strategy, whether political or otherwise, is the only way that material gains have been won by the working class.

Share

Subscribe now

Class struggle in New Zealand

Aotearoa’s working and ruling classes were forged against the backdrop of a settler-colonial society of landed gentry formed by the expropriation and dispossession of land from Māori. These gentry then explicitly sought to replicate the societal conditions in Britain by forcing into wage labour settlers who were priced out of the land market. Later, land reforms broke up the large estates and encouraged smaller-scale farming and commodity production, again at the expense of further expropriation from and marginalising of Māori.

The unions during this time ranged from simple trade and craft advocacy to militant, class-based, explicitly socialist industrial action. The New Zealand Federation of Labour—the “Red Feds”—moved to organise all of the country’s workers with the goal of toppling the capitalist order itself. Several political parties rose to and fell from prominence during this period, including the Liberal Party, which put in place the country’s first labour arbitration system, and the Reform Party, which came to power on the back of an explicit anti-working-class agenda and a coalition of small farmers and large landholders. The Reform government joined the employers to crush the industrial union movement, thus consolidating both New Zealand’s working and ruling classes.

The outcome of this period of labour militancy saw the formation of the Labour Party in 1916. The party was formed in response to the crushing strike defeats of 1912 and 1913 and the resulting realisation that any serious class struggle and workers’ movement would fail without a political strategy. Many of the party’s early leaders were militant socialists, a number of whom had been imprisoned by the government during the strikes and anti-military protests a few years earlier. When the First Labour Government won power in 1935, following the hardship of the Great Depression, which saw much public unrest, including riots, Michael Joseph Savage became Prime Minister. He is still Aotearoa’s most beloved Prime Minister to this day.

Savage had called for capitalism’s overthrow as a member of the Red Feds, but had to settle for reforming it instead. Nevertheless, his government’s reforms were substantial, and created the welfare state in New Zealand along with compulsory unionism. Workers traded their militancy for better wages and more security. Capitalists settled for some curbing of their market freedoms and profits in return for a less militant workforce and a wealthier customer base, resulting from the growing middle class. Industrialisation and fewer opportunities for rural work saw many Māori move to the urban centres and forced into wage labour, along with an inflow of immigrants. Thus, there was a significant and powerful industrial working class, although class consciousness and solidarity were compromised by the increasingly intersectional nature of its composition.

The National Party was formed in 1936 through an amalgamation of the Reform and United parties, who had for several years worked in a government coalition with an explicitly anti-labour agenda. Following Labour’s win in 1935, the National Party combined United’s urban middle class with Reform’s rural farming voter base in a move to counter Labour’s rise and the increased power and influence of the working class. National won power under Sidney Holland in 1949 and consolidated it after a snap election two years later on the back of his government’s successful role in the smashing of the 1951 Waterfront Dispute.

Despite its own fiery rhetoric against Labour’s “socialist” policies, National was unable to undo Labour’s welfare state and labour reforms due to their immense popularity. For the next 20 years, both Labour and National governments largely supported Keynesian interventionist state economic policies, and the country experienced economic productivity and growth, rising wages, and full employment, buoyed by favourable international conditions. The class compromise appeared to be holding.

When capitalism experienced its global crisis in the 1970s, the uneasy truce between workers and capitalists collapsed. Unwilling to suffer the loss of profit, capitalists fought against increasing wages and the guarantee of full employment, and unions responded by ramping up strike action and pressure. Given the cratering of Aotearoa’s export prospects during these years, the interventionist strategies by the National government were unable to stabilise the economy or promote economic growth.

When the Fourth Labour Government won power in 1984, no one could have predicted just how drastic their reforms would be. The neoliberal reforms of this era, the most sweeping of any country in the world, can be understood as a backlash by the ruling class against the growing power and militancy of the working class and the labour movement. This backlash found a sympathetic ear with bureaucrats and ideologues in government. Led by finance minister Roger Douglas, the reforms deregulated capital markets, privatised and corporatised state enterprises, and instituted a monetary policy based strictly around control of inflation. When the rapidity and ferocity of these reforms were rebuked by the public and Labour lost power to National, instead of undoing the reforms, National went further, deregulating the labour market and restructuring welfare and public spending, ushering in austerity logic, legislative codification and informal pressure to centre debt-reduction as the primary metric of government success.

Share Free Market Moralism

Modern parties take shape

The results of this neoliberal agenda have been well-documented and catastrophic. Inequality has exploded; workers’ rights, protections, wages, and livelihoods have been steadily eroded. The once-formidable labour movement is a shell of its former self. The public sector has been hollowed out, the crown jewel of the Savage government, the welfare state, now broken and limping, stretched nearly to the breaking point.

Despite it being hugely unpopular, the neoliberal agenda has been largely pursued and maintained by both Labour and National governments, with both parties making overtures towards the working class but never threatening the ruling class. The forms this agenda has taken have splintered and fractured both parties. New Zealand First was formed in 1993 by National turncoat Winston Peters, ostensibly in a rejection of National’s neoliberal policies. From its outset the party has harnessed a populist energy combined with inflaming racial tensions and bigotry and culture war issues, carving out a space in the reactionary right that Peters has relished in and played to significant governing power. ACT (Association of Consumers and Taxpayers) was co-founded by Labour minister Roger Douglas on the belief that his neoliberal reforms had not been taken far enough. ACT bills itself as a classically liberal party but is in reality an orthodox libertarian party that uses liberal rhetoric to mask an explicitly corporate and anti-labour agenda. Both NZ First and ACT gain most of their support from disillusioned National voters, although NZ First cuts into Labour’s voting base with their populist rhetoric and sometimes protectionist policy agenda.

On the left, the Greens broke out of the leftwing coalition Alliance party in 1997, and have since been a strong voice for environmental and social justice issues, having been both included and excluded by Labour in several governments since forming, and increasingly offering pragmatic and evidence-based economic policy. Te Pati Māori (the Māori party) was formed in 2004 in response to Helen Clark’s Labour government’s legislation that transferred ownership of the foreshore and seabed to state control. This move angered many Māori who had historically depended on their ties to these areas and considered ownership a right guaranteed by Te Tiriti o Waitangi (the treaty of Waitangi). The legislation quashed several ongoing court cases related to Māori ownership claims and sparked off huge protests and a hikoi (procession) to parliament. TPM has provided reliable votes on leftwing policy agendas even as it is a harsh critic of Labour to its left.

The MMP nature of parliament, in which coalitions are required to form governments, has meant that each party has carved out its own particular niche in the electoral space, with National and ACT firmly on the right in support of the capitalists, Labour in the centre, Greens and TPM on the left, and NZ First moving either with National or Labour depending on which way the populist wind is blowing. What this has meant in practice is that National and Labour fight over the centre left and right vote, Greens and TPM criticise other parties from their left, and NZ First and ACT trade in culture wars and outright bigotry and racism, although National has made a habit of dogwhistling louder and louder in a bid to appeal to the reactionary vote. Furthermore, the thoroughly neoliberal political and rhetorical climate prevailing in the country and the commanding control of business interests mean that media routinely amplifies rightwing slander of Labour, TPM, and the Greens, with the Greens slandered as socialists and TPM explicitly caricatured with racist fearmongering. As such, any leftwing party has an uphill battle to break through the spin.

Leave a comment

A new front in the class war

The result, whether intentionally pursued by political parties or not, is that the ruling class’s war on the working class has been fought and won outside of public consciousness for at least 40 years. This is unavoidable within liberal democracy. The status quo of liberal democracy is that it protects the interests of the ruling class. Any rights or gains by the working class have to be won through struggle. New Zealand’s own history proves this. The conditions of this struggle and the terrain on which it is contested are largely dictated by political activity and the legislative backdrop. The policy agenda towards workers over the last 40 years has hollowed out unions. Aotearoa’s current labour movement is anemic and largely symbolic. Unions hold little real political power in contrast to their formidable stature in previous decades. This is evidenced by the current government’s announcement and passage of the most explicitly anti-worker agenda since the initial neoliberal reforms this term without engaging with the labour movement (they refused to even meet with the unions for the first year in office), a sure sign of the labour movement’s inability or unwillingness to apply or follow through on any substantive political pressure. The fact that the government’s hugely unpopular agenda has been rammed through with little fear of political or material reprisal is a testament to the weakness of the working-class movement and the lack of class consciousness. Labour’s sometimes explicitly neoliberal, but more often rudderless and uninspiring political program since the 1980s, far from its militant socialist roots—despite Jacinda Ardern’s laudable handling of several crises during her tenure—has seen them shed support to both the left and right and contributed to the disillusionment and lack of political participation of hundreds of thousands of voters, nearly one million at the last election.

The eroded economic conditions and livelihoods of the majority of the public as a result of the neoliberal reforms begun over 40 years ago have left them bitter, precarious, and untrusting of government. The coalition government has passed over half of their bills using urgency, thereby avoiding public scrutiny or criticism. Unemployment is at its highest level in decades, public jobs and services are being cut to the bone and National is campaigning on more privatisations.

There is a pervasive feeling that something is wrong and that the government is not going to fix it. Fewer and fewer people consider it useful to participate in politics and many of those that do do so only to keep the other side from winning. No message of hope or solidarity appears able to unify those left behind by capital’s voracious expansion. No party has earned the confidence and trust of the working class, thereby able to take a vanguard role in the class war. And until the class war is made explicit and fought on both the political front and through a militant socialist labour movement we will continue to cede ground to those who would divide us based on prejudice and hate. The rise of the right globally indicates that people are looking for reasons why, try as they might, they can’t get ahead. The capitalist class and its lackeys are more than happy to give them someone to hate rather than have them realise it is the system that is rigged against them.

What is to be done? We need to make explicit the failures and internal contradictions of capitalism and show people why its reforms never last for long. The ruling class always comes back for those gains made by workers once profits fall. Liberal democracy is always eventually captured by the ruling class. All political struggles are connected. Our job is to understand the changing class composition and consciousness in Aotearoa and to use yesterday and today’s failures to lay the groundwork for tomorrow’s successes. Economic struggle is crucial, but cannot be the end. Any successful long-term strategy requires the building and wielding of political power.

We need to connect theoretical insights and historical lessons with practical political strategy and struggle. In particular, the connections between the austerity agenda, the gutting of the welfare state, the rollback of workers’ rights, the cancellation of pay equity, the repeated assaults on Māori and the privatisation of public lands need to be made clear not as a scattered and haphazard policy agenda, but rather as a coherent, tried-and-true capitalist strategy to establish and maintain the conditions for a steady supply of exploitable labour and extraction of resources. Connecting these political moves and agitating against the entire capitalist political program will build solidarity, strengthen class consciousness, and provide crucial political and practical education through real-life struggle while revealing the specific and unique chinks in Aotearoa’s capitalist armour and the connections with and chokepoints to the global capitalist network. Only in this way can we begin to turn the tide.

The public is searching for answers. These answers are found and the revolutionary tools forged and sharpened through class analysis and struggle. A better world is possible. The class war never ended. Are we ready to fight it?

This year’s National Business Review rich list shows that the 150 richest people in Aotearoa New Zealand own as much as the bottom 50%. This coming on the heels of Elon Musk completing his public listing of Space X, making him the world’s first trillionaire, a grotesque accomplishment if ever there was one. RNZ noted dryly that Musk now owns marginally less than the entire country of New Zealand. Isn’t that funny? Or horrific. Or both.

Many people, given that it is an election year, are calling for making billionaires pay their fair share. These developments and headlines give even more urgency to these progressive platforms. Our own Nick Rockel has a piece called “Time for a Wealth Tax” that goes into the NBR rich list. After discussing some of the top rich listers and their questionable (to say the least) politics and business practices, he states

I’m not advocating communism or the guillotine, but rather that those with immense wealth pay a reasonable amount in tax while remaining incredibly wealthy, so society can benefit. It’s not that much to ask, is it? If you’ve got more than you could ever need, why would you not want to help those who lack what they need?

People like Nick want to make sure that we know they aren’t advocating for anything too extreme. They feel like a wealth tax or a capital gains tax is just common sense. And to some extent, it is. After all, why wouldn’t we want to pursue a political program that will redistribute the massive amount of wealth that these few people have hoarded to people who can’t even put three meals a day on the table?

My question is, what then? So you make some political reforms, you make things marginally, or even substantively better for people. What happens next? I’ll tell you what happens. The rich always regroup. They’ve got the money. They’ve got the networks, they’ve got the influence, and they’ve got the time. When the US government moved to regulate and tax corporations during the New Deal, the rich formulated a program to reverse the legislative agenda with an explicit public propaganda agenda, a subversive agenda to take over the judiciary, and a lobbying effort to explicitly purchase politicians and subvert any conditions or laws that were unfavorable to corporate interests.

And what has been the result? Looking around the US today, many of the hard won reforms have been reversed. Even civil rights have been gutted. And it’s not difficult to see why. They stood in the way of exploitation and extraction by the ruling class. And so we have a judiciary beholden to libertarian, dogmatic interpretations of law. A political class bought and paid for by corporations, and a public that has so little class consciousness and is so obsessed with consumerism and mindless pageantry that they will literally celebrate the men and women who are killing them.

Here in New Zealand, the most substantive policy changes were carried out by a Labour party that gave up on its socialist dreams of overthrowing capitalism and carried out a public mandate for reforms. But the ruling class regrouped, the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s and 90s gutted the welfare state, hobbled unions, and shredded the conditions for working-class solidarity. The last four decades have seen those reforms championed by the Labour of yesteryear steadily eroded. The current Coalition Government seems ready and willing to finish the job begun by Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson. Sorry that poverty, homelessness, and unemployment are at their highest levels in decades. We just don’t have the money to help you. Can you at least die quietly? Have some dignity for those of us who are making the tough sacrifices.

But still, people will agitate for and campaign on liberal democratic reforms. And at some stage, you just have ask yourself what is the point? Because even if by some act of god we end up getting a somewhat progressive government elected, history has taught us that any reforms will be short-lived before they are reversed. And our current political climate as well as history has shown that when capital and the ruling class feel threatened they will turn to fascism, while liberals nod their heads and dutifully discuss whether it’s actually fascism or merely authoritarianism.

And so where are we? As Lenin poignantly asked “What Is To Be Done”? Those who would advocate for reforms fail to realize that the gains made are short-lived and becoming even shorter-lived. You may get some relief from the ruling class’s rapacious onslaught for a few years or decades, but they will come for any reforms. They always do. The next generations will be the next victims. You may think you are making a better world for your children and their children but if you are advocating for reforms, you are selling future generations out. You are killing them. And we will continue signing that future death certificate until we realize and act like reforming cannot and will not change the death spiral we are in.

But advocating for revolution is scary, and it’s not as tidy and easily done as campaigning for progressive reforms. It’s difficult to stop thinking in election cycles and trying to elect progressive politicians that will distribute the spoils of empire to the working class in our own states, rather than work to dismantle the system that requires immiseration of so many to prop up our standard of living. It’s hard to consider how to organize and put in place alternative power structures and forms of mutual assistance outside of capitalism’s logic and grasp. It’s difficult to contemplate what we would do if we had to stare down a police officer and put ourselves in harm’s way at a barricade. It’s scary to consider whether we would participate in sabotage of a weapons manufacturing company to perhaps slow down the imperial death machine. It’s hard to consider ways to frame our arguments so that we can be understood by more people. It’s difficult to know how to connect all of the political struggles back to capitalism and its contradictions. It’s a challenge to think about how to build solidarity without compromising correct political principles and lines.

These are the hard questions that we need to start really asking ourselves. And the hardest thing to come to grips with is just how far we’ve gone backwards in terms of establishing and maintaining the conditions for any serious resistance or strategic political attack on the ruling class. The class consciousness in the West has been utterly shattered by decades of propaganda and relatively easy living on the backs of the imperial periphery. Establishing it will take patient work. Doggedly determined work. Lenin wrote What Is To Be Done? in 1901. By then there were already many decades of revolutionary struggle and lessons from which to learn. The Russian Revolution finally won power in 1917. The revolutionary movement had been building for nearly a century.

As for the question of communism or guillotines, I’ll pose it in a slightly different way. What would you be willing to do to curb the malign and destructive influence of the ruling class? The rich will kill you to maintain their profits without a second thought. Half a million Palestinians are a testament to the brutal ends imperial capitalist hegemony will resort to to maintain itself. Indigenous people are being evicted from their ancestral homes to make way for mining. No choice. Clear out or be forcibly displaced. It won’t stop until we stop it. And when we stop it we need to be sure it cannot regroup and come back. Ever again. They know the backlash is coming. They’re buying private islands and reinforced bunkers.

We need to be in this for the long haul. And nothing but the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of socialism will guarantee a future for those that come after us. Nothing we win through reform will be permanent. Only continuing revolution can guarantee long-term change. We may not live to see it. Our children may not live to see it. But it is worth fighting for.

Imagine you’re Benjamin Netanyahu. You’ve been conducting a genocide of Palestinians since October 2023. Your genocide has been documented online on Instagram and TikTok and other platforms for that entire time, with daily videos showing all of the atrocities and cruelty that your soldiers and settlers gleefully inflict on the Palestinians. This has resulted in a global outcry. While Western imperial powers have cracked down on dissent and support of the Palestinian liberation struggle, the result has been that public opinion of Israel has tanked. It has dropped to the lowest levels seen in decades. A Pew Research poll conducted in June 2025 saw a median disapproval of 62% across 24 surveyed countries. The most recent poll released in June 2026 found this disapproval increased to 67%, with 92% of the 36 surveyed countries having a negative view of Israel.

Of most concern, the country that you rely on for military and material aid—indeed, without the support of which your settler colony would cease to exist—has witnessed a steep decline in support for you. Since 2022, the percentage of US citizens with an unfavorable view of Israel has increased nearly 20 percentage points (7 points in the past year alone), with a full 60% having an unfavorable view of Israel according to an April 2026 Pew Research poll. The rock-solid bipartisan support for Israel that has been a given for decades is fraying, with even some Republican members of Congress now openly calling for cutting off aid to Israel.

The writing is on the wall. There simply is no way for a modern-day settler colony to conduct ethnic cleansing and genocide on the scale with which they were conducted at the beginning of the modern Western colonial imperial era without political and material repercussions. The brutality is far too visible these days.

But how can you guarantee US military and material support for Israel in a climate of overwhelming resistance to monetary aid? The key is to shift the nature of the relationship. Monetary aid is conditional on congressional approval. But that’s no longer guaranteed because representatives, although they can ignore their constituents up to a point, will not vote for aid to Israel if it is overwhelmingly unpopular. What you need is a way to guarantee the military relationship without the requirement of congressional approval. In other words, you need to be able to bypass democracy and hide the relationship from public scrutiny to ensure continued US support for the Israeli settler project.

Subscribe now

Share

Share Free Market Moralism

This is precisely the scenario that Israel and Netanyahu find themselves in and the details of the workaround are starting to emerge. As is usually the case, you have to look beyond mainstream US media to see what’s really going on. Indeed, an article published June 4 by Jeff Bezos’s propaganda rag the Washington Post makes it sound like the most significant aspect of all of this is that Republicans in Congress are signaling an intention to draw down the financial aid that the US provides to Israel. Surprisingly for the Post, Netanyahu agrees with this course of action.

The article, written by Natalie Allison, is focused on the military financial aid angle, and barely mentions the new, alternative arrangement that is being pursued with much less fanfare. This is unsurprising given the Post’s penchant for genocide laundering and Israeli hasbara over the past two years. And while the story is focused on the House resolution that was introduced to Congress by Rep Marlin Stutzman (R-Indiana), and delivered to Netanyahu last week in a showy ceremony in Jerusalem, the real story is only hinted at.

The resolution is in an effort to develop a memorandum of understanding between the US and Israel

The resolution itself is full of all of the sycophantic rhetoric one would expect from a Zionist politician as well as the mischaracterization of the Iranian government and its global position as the “leading state sponsor of terrorism” as well as a dramatic condemnation of the rise of antisemitism in the world and an insistence on Israel’s right to exist. And the Post article focuses on the aspect of the resolution that indicates that Netanyahu himself suggested a move “to reduce Israeli reliance on the financial component of United States military assistance to 0 over the next 10 years, stating that ‘‘I don’t want to wait for the next Congress’’, and that ‘‘I want to start now’’. And when you consider that the US gives $3.8 billion in aid to Israel every year, this sounds like a huge development. And I think this is what the architects of this takeover are banking on. That the American public will view this as a way of eliminating military aid to Israel and so will support it.

But towards the beginning of the resolution, there is a statement that gives away Israel’s endgame and indicates that this endgame has been explicitly developed and proposed by Netanyahu and his allies. And it’s not obvious, but for those who are aware of Israel’s moves in the defense tech and cybersecurity sector over the past couple of decades, it should send alarm bells ringing to anyone who is interested in weakening the foothold of US imperialism, and by extension, the power and influence of the Jewish settler colony in the Middle East.

The resolution calls for 1) a reaffirmation of the special relationship between Israel and the US, based on shared democratic values, mutual security interests, and deep bonds of friendship, 2) a commendation of Netanyahu for his “bold proposal” to move the US-Israel relationship away from traditional financial aid, 3) strong support of the development of a new memorandum of understanding for joint military partnership, 4) expression of gratitude for Netanyahu for his partnership in the war against Iran, and 5) condemnation of antisemitism in all its forms.

Share Free Market Moralism

The resolution itself is nonbinding and would be nothing more than a performative exercise in political posturing if it were to pass. But draft legislation that has been quietly inserted into the National Defense Authorization Act for the 2027 fiscal year (H.R. 8800; a mammoth 500 page “must-pass” bill authorizing defense expenditures for the coming year) would codify the defense partnership. And while the dry language might read as a run-of-the-mill military partnership to the average reader (most will not even read any of the bill), Section 224 (beginning on page 42 of the bill), entitled “United States-Israel Defense Cooperation Initiative” is anything but. Indeed, this section, if passed into law, would all but guarantee an unlimited stream of funding, contracts, and support for Israeli defense tech, which would be used by Israel for its continued genocide and settler-colonial project and by the US in the service of its imperial interests, both foreign and domestic. Furthermore, it would embed Israeli tech into US military programs in such a way that it would be nearly impossible to extract it in the future.

This is, of course, exactly what Netanyahu and his supporters in the US government want. Netanyahu is no fool. He would not have made such a public showing about getting rid of his financial lifeline without ensuring that the lifeline remained intact in another way. This is exactly what Section 224 accomplishes. It allows the US to continue its support of its imperial junior partner while wholly bypassing public scrutiny and accountability. It also allows the US to benefit from military tech that has been workshopped and tested in the Palestinian genocide laboratory.

The main mechanism by which the bill does this is by requiring the Secretary of Defense to designate an executive agent with the express purpose of “synchronizing cooperative efforts between the United States and Israel, to expand and accelerate bilateral defense technology research, development, testing, evaluation, integration, and industrial cooperation by…”

Subscribe now

Thus, the entire focus of the executive agent would be to facilitate US-Israel defense tech partnerships and integrate US and Israeli defense tech as much as possible. Furthermore, because this partnership is conducted under the auspices of the Department of Defense, any and all information deemed to pertain to “national security” can be refused to be provided to the public. This means that all details of government, private, and academic partnerships and contracts can be conducted largely in secret, with no public knowledge, scrutiny, or accountability. Furthermore, there is no statutory limit on the amount of funding that can be allocated to specific executive agent missions within the Department of Defense. This means that the funding available for Israeli defense tech—which is always developed and used for its settler-colonial project—would be virtually unlimited, able to tap into the roughly $1 trillion annual Pentagon budget allocation. Thus, while the current annual allocation for defense funding for Israel is roughly $3.8 billion, this new partnership would mean that the actual funding available for Israel would dwarf that amount and would be in all material respects unlimited.

And while the actual details of the projects would be withheld from the public, the section goes on to give some idea of some of the areas that could be developed in the partnership, including

This non-exhaustive list indicates that nearly every type of defense tech is within scope of this partnership. Any applications of possibilities will be vigorously identified and pursued by the executive agent, who has a mandate to action these partnerships and integrations. Over time, this would see Israeli tech thoroughly embedded within US military infrastructure. The more the US and Israel become entwined in this joint military coitus, the harder it will be for the US to extract itself from Israeli influence and financial obligation.

Much of the criticism of this partnership has been focused on how it may compromise the security and independence of the US military. My concern is not for the potential negative consequences on the US military (the more the better) but for the catastrophic consequences for occupied Palestine, the rest of the Middle East that is subject to Israeli wars of aggression, and other countries and peoples that are the target of US imperialism. To understand the clear and present danger that this partnership poses to these people, we have to examine the Israeli military-to-tech pipeline.

Share

Unit 8200 is the intelligence division of the IDF. As our investigation of Palo Alto Networks published in April 2026 details, it is an elite division that is

Unit 8200 members hone their tech skills on the brutalized bodies of Palestinians, and are heavily recruited by tech companies the world over. In addition, many veterans start their own tech companies, as was the case with Palo Alto founder Nir Zuk. In fact, Unit 8200 alumni have founded hundreds of tech startups, many with explicit military applications. The founders of these companies and the companies themselves are ardently Zionist, and their loyalty to Israel and to its mission is explicit. Any tech they develop is fed back into the military machine. While formerly identifying itself as the “start-up nation” Israel has more recently made the military purpose of its tech ventures explicit with “Defense Ministry Director Amir Baram describing the transition of Israel from a “cyber-nation into a true defense tech nation” indicating Israel’s economy is becoming more and more reliant on its development, deployment, and sale of military tech via its military-to-tech pipeline.

It should be clear here that any defense tech that is exported from Israel has been developed and tested on Palestinians and other victims of Israel’s genocidal settler colony. Furthermore, any funding or results from military partnerships will eventually be directed back into the genocidal project. Finally, if US military capacity is entwined with Israeli tech in such a way that it is reliant on it for basic operationality and function, it will be impossible for the US to extricate itself from the financial and material obligations which underlie the dependence on this relationship, and even more difficult to separate its own security interests from those of Israel. Already there are hundreds of former spies within the tech sector. Their loyalty is to Israel, and they funnel any information which may be useful back to the military. It is increasingly difficult to protect against, or even to fully appreciate, the infiltration of Israeli military interests within the tech sector. Though in some ways this proposed partnership makes explicit an integration that has been happening more and more already in the tech sector, it does so at a time and in a manner that the public opposition to funding and support for Israel can be skirted and the wishes of the public ignored. Israel will thus have a guaranteed supply of funding and support for its genocidal project, and the US will have no option but to keep maintaining the partnership. The result will be an acceleration and continuation of violence in occupied Palestine.

As is already being demonstrated, as conditions in the US deteriorate further and protest increases, the government will deploy military tech in the surveillance and brutalization of its own citizens. This partnership will guarantee a steady stream of battle tested Israeli tech for use by the government to subdue and crush any organized dissent, making material change in the US even more difficult to achieve. Finally, as the US feels its imperial hegemony slipping, it will deploy more and more military efforts, both unilaterally and through covert support of repressive regimes, to solidify its hold on global markets and dominance. Its junior partners and comprador governments will benefit from this partnership as the tech is supplied to them for the purpose of repressing their own people in the service of US imperialism and the profits of the military-industrial complex.

You can locate and contact your congressional representative to ask them to oppose and remove Section 224 from the NDAA 2027 here.

Frank Knight had a problem. As an economist in the early 1900s, he had inherited a rich neoclassical tradition that had demonstrated that under conditions of perfect competition, supply and demand reach a point of equilibrium. The conditions necessary for such competition had been extensively theorized and debated. Under these conditions, the money spent by businesses would equal the money taken in.

In the real world, however, there was the nagging issue of profits. In a situation of perfect competition, there should be no profits. But Knight and other economists were well aware that businesses make profits. In fact, capitalism as a system depends on making profit in order to expand and survive. If it stops expanding it collapses. But neoclassical economists chafed at the notion of profit resulting from exploitation of labor or appropriation of surplus value suggested by classical and Marxist economics. They instead envisioned economics as a system of free buyers and sellers on the market, where everyone traded commodities and labor according to the laws of supply and demand. Their frameworks, however, had no way to account for profit under conditions of equilibrium. At best, they suggested that profits were a product of disequilibrium, but the source of profit was unclear.

Share

Subscribe now

Uncertainty and the neoliberal imagination

What Knight set about to do was to formulate a solution to the problem of profit under conditions of equilibrium. For Knight, the entrepreneur has to deal with both risk and uncertainty in their business. Risk occurs when you don’t know what will happen for sure, but the mathematical odds of something occurring can be calculated. An example here is the classic marble jar problem. Given a jar with 50 red and 50 black marbles, your chance of drawing a marble of either color is 50%. Even though you don’t know what color marble you will draw, you can predict the odds based on probability.

Knight suggested that, contrary to risk, true uncertainty is when you do not know the chance of something happening and the probability cannot be calculated. This represents a situation of pure uncertainty. Using the marble example, this is akin to being told that there are 100 marbles in a jar, some are red and some are black. Here you cannot know the chance of pulling a red or black marble and you cannot calculate the probability either because the number of red and black marbles is unknown.

For Knight, the entrepreneur can calculate and insure against risk, but they cannot calculate, plan for, or insure against uncertainty. The fluctuation of profits and losses, therefore, even under conditions of perfect competition, is due to the presence of uncertainty.

Knight’s formulation became a mainstay of neoclassical economic theory, and while he derived it from considering the behavior of entrepreneurs, his analysis applies equally to economic behavior generally. Because of the uncertainty associated with dynamic market forces, any economic behavior is based on an estimate, or best guess, about future outcomes. This means that all economic behavior is based on an imagined future. We engage in activity based on the way we think or imagine the world to be. We speculate. Our behavior is often controlled to a greater extent by this imagination than the actual material outcomes we experience. This leads to the often inexplicable result that people who are most hurt by capitalism are often its most full-throated supporters.

Share Free Market Moralism

A perfect example of this can be found in the neoliberal era where the corporate program of restructuring the state to encase capitalist power and market dominance from democratic interference has led to huge wealth inequality, job loss, unionbusting, and immiseration on a large scale. And yet though the program of privatization, deregulation, and austerity is pursued over and over by corporate-aligned governments, the public has been told a much different story about the market reforms. The capitalist imaginary that has been developed and force-fed to the public through an explicit corporate and government propaganda campaign, predominantly in the United States but in different iterations all over the Western world, has co-opted both patriotic zeal for freedom and Christian moralism with the resulting belief that freedom is synonymous with free markets, and that those who succeed under free markets do so by their own efforts and ambition and those who fail deserve to fail because of their weak moral character and lack of drive.

This capitalist imaginary provides the perfect cover for a rapacious program of extraction where those who are extracting are lauded for their entrepreneurship (they nobly take on uninsurable risks, to use a Knightian framing that is ubiquitous in today’s economic discourse) while those who are extracted from and tossed aside blame themselves and their fellows for their own moral failings. In this imaginary, those who participate in the market, as is their moral duty, will be rewarded with success, or at least with economic stability. Those who refuse to participate are made to by the private enclosure of other means of subsistence. The future, for those that work hard, is guaranteed. Thus, planning for the certain future means working hard in the present.

The speculative imagination

But neoliberalism unwittingly unlocked another capitalist imaginary. The deregulation and trade liberalization inherent to the neoliberal political program has brought with it an explosion of financialization, or an increase in the role that investments and direct market actors play in the overall economy. With fewer demands to invest in industrial production and decreased regulation of risky investments, financialization has become the largest contributor to the economy. Financial assets are traded on markets where uncertainty about future market movements and price volatility contributes to both the risk of loss, and the chance at a huge profit.

Thus, the underlying logic of the contemporary capitalist system is speculation. Not only this, but the increased financialization of the economy means that financial activity is based on assets which correspond less and less to any underlying material reality (“fictitious capital”, according to Marx), allowing prices to fluctuate wildly and markets to seesaw unpredictably. With this market uncertainty comes an increasingly unknowable future, and so current capitalist speculation is not based on planning for the future, it is wholly concerned with wagering in the present. Market reforms and financialization have made precarity the reality for most. Under such conditions, planning for the future makes no sense.

Based on Knight’s analysis of uncertainty, it could be argued that the underlying logic of capitalism has always been speculation. Markets are inherently unpredictable. Economists, despite their self-assumed pedigree as experts, are notoriously bad at predicting market outcomes, let alone the boom and bust cycles and periodic crises of capitalist social and economic systems. This unpredictability is amplified hugely by today’s increasingly financialized economies.

But people crave certainty. We crave stability. And an economy based solely on speculation does not provide the certainty either for business or for members of society. This is partially why rampant speculation and betting on price movements in the “bucket shops” of the late 19th century was curbed. It was one thing for wealthy industrialists and financiers to trade derivatives on a market, quite another for common folk to bet on prices in a bucket shop in a corner store. Although the action was the same, the capitalists considered themselves the only ones capable of “responsible” speculation. The common folk simply did not possess the integrity or responsibility to be trusted to play the markets. And so the access to financial markets by the poor was largely cut off. The rich continued to speculate, while the mantra of economic responsibility and hard work was rhetorically and politically drilled into the working class over generations.

Share

With neoliberalism, however, the speculative nature and uncertainty of capitalism came roaring back. Moreover, the material effects of this speculation have been in direct opposition to the story told about neoliberalism for the vast majority of of people in the Global North (to say nothing of the material reality without the comfort of a free-market fable in the Global South). This disconnect was made explicit for many during the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, when the housing bubble that had been propped up by financial speculation collapsed. In response the US government allocated $700 billion to bailout the institutions responsible for the collapse, while millions of US citizens lost their homes to foreclosure and had their savings and livelihoods wiped out. The capitalist imaginary, the neoliberal economic fairy tale, was revealed to be a lie. The jarring disconnect between the neoliberal imagination and the material reality of capitalist precarity was too great. Something had to give. The speculative imagination, long asleep under the narcotic haze of freedom and responsibility, was awoken.

Speculative communities

The newly awake speculative imagination has been reinforced by modern capitalism’s drive to commodify and extract profit from everything it can in the last few decades. At the extreme end of this are betting apps like Kalshi and Polymarket, where the stated goal is to turn every difference of opinion into a tradeable financial asset. And so we had people betting on who will win the Super Bowl and on whether Donald Trump would drop a nuclear bomb on Iran on the same app.

Moreover, the nature of financialization of all digital platforms and the algorithmic nature of social media means that these forums are designed and constantly updated to keep us always and forever engaged. Always and forever living in the present. Scrolling endlessly with no thought for anything but what is on our screens at the present moment. Social media and dating and hookup apps require us to present ourselves as currency or commodity, our lives, interests, kinks, and pursuits now packaged as a tradeable sexual or social asset. The uncertainty and unpredictability built into these interactions increases the hold that the speculative imagination has on us as it knits us together in communities based on shared precarity and uncertainty.

The nature of these speculative communities is such that now the digital platforms through which we are commodified are themselves used as a means to spread the speculative imagination and to help others realize the true nature of the capitalist system. This can potentially produce a solidarity that transcends the artificiality of digital social relationship into something with real potential. I don’t want to jump the gun here, because it seems clear that most of us are still engaged on our screens, and only on our screens. However, it also seems clear that the acceptance of the neoliberal imagination is well and truly over. The younger generations in particular do not even pretend to believe the myth of capitalist meritocracy. Can these digital communities, so enmeshed in the speculation and financialization of modern capitalism, turn capital’s speculative logic against it? Can the communities which form around these speculative technologies band together in real-life solidarity and learn and realize our power? The possibility is there.

The speculative imagination seems unlikely to be put back to sleep any time soon. This provides an opening through which to help others see that far from being just another phase of capitalism, the uncertainty and precarity of the present era are inherent to the system as a whole. When only the rich can hedge against future losses, the rest of us are left with nothing to do but to play the present moment against the uncertainty of the future. And in the end, that’s a loss for us all.

Modern-day capitalists have fully embraced speculation with no care for the consequences on those who always stand to lose the most and to gain the least. Corporations routinely post record profits which are immediately channeled back into stock buybacks while workers struggle to qualify for government assistance under increasingly cruel means-testing. Openly corrupt market manipulation and insider trading is now a daily occurrence. The speculative, uncertain core of capitalism has been unleashed and given voracious free rein. It will not self-correct. It will only become more unpredictable and volatile, with the disastrous consequences visited upon more and more while the massive profits get sucked up by fewer and fewer.

Speculation and uncertainty cannot support life. Capitalism is inherently speculative and uncertain. This inherent speculative nature of capitalism cannot be overcome. We must turn its inherent contradictions against it, enabling a reimagining and building of a society where mutual care and support provide a certain future for all. This time of increased precarity and hardship provides a real opening to break the capitalist imaginary for good, to remold a new imagination of the future, and to envision and pursue concrete strategies towards it in the present.1

Every once in a while I come across a post on here or other social media where someone says something to the effect of “Marx was wrong” or “Here’s why Marxism is wrong” or “Marx didn’t understand economics” or “Marx and socialism envision a utopia that isn’t possible” or… I could just keep going with these wrongheaded and completely ignorant criticisms of Marx and Marxism leveled by people who have clearly not read Marx or have not understood him.

I usually don’t reply to these, but every so often they catch me at a particular moment or mood and I reply, or try to engage, only to find out that indeed the person who has “owned” Karl Marx and Marxists with their impeccable logic has indeed either not read, has misunderstood or misrepresented him and his work based on taking what someone else said at face value—even if that person claimed to be a Marxist—instead of actually engaging with Marx.

Subscribe now

Share

One particularly annoying example came across my feed this morning. In response to a restack of a very insightful article by about why Marxism is full of childish wonder and possibility, someone left this comment:

Read the whole comment if you want. I’m not going to respond to each and every point here. I’m tired of doing that. That’s how I used to engage these kinds of diatribes. In fact, I did that in another post about a year ago if you want to read that (I will say that soon after I posted this article, the person deleted their Substack account so you can’t read all of their original posts).

What I want to do here is to address one of the most pervasive criticisms in these types of attacks, one that is present in the most recent comment I received and in many other critiques (I won’t even bother to address the absurdity that Marxism is a utopian ideal). That is that Marxism is a dogmatic ideology that refuses to admit its own historical economic context and demands to be applied wholesale to every situation and context.

Anyone who is serious about Marx and Marxism knows that this is not the case. But you don’t have to take my word for it. You can ask Marx himself. In fact, on very many occasions during his life, Marx expressed concern and discouragement with the way his work was being used and interpreted by his followers, quipping to Engels on one occasion that he, himself, was not a Marxist.

Share Free Market Moralism

For Marx, his method of historical materialism was never meant to be used to justify a dogmatic ideology. He viewed his contribution as providing a way to analyze the concrete material conditions of society to discern the class relations and antagonisms under capitalism. Marx was not interested in formulating utopian ideals or prescriptions for an ideal society, and neither was he interested in developing constructs or theoretical generalities to be applied without further analysis to any other situation or context. He was determined that his analysis not be idealistic in the abstract way of much of philosophy, but based on concrete material realities. He made this clear in The German Ideology

The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way.

Marx therefore left us with a concrete method of analysis that can be applied to any historical or economic context. You start with the real individuals and their material conditions and work your way up from there. Crucially, as Marx noted here, these conditions, or the starting premises of your analysis, can be verified empirically. This is what is meant when his method is called scientific. Also crucially, Marx’s method of analysis means that Marx himself could be proven wrong (and he admitted when his conclusions were imprecise or needed updating). His conclusions were never meant to be the final say on the matter. Rather, they were meant to be one datapoint in an ongoing dialectical process which constantly changed and updated with more data. The empirical nature that underpinned his project will be clear to anyone who has tried to sift through the mountains of tables and data presented in his works (and those of Lenin and Luxemburg to name just a couple others). His understanding was constantly being tested against and refined by new datapoints. Perhaps this is one reason why he found it so hard to finish writing and editing his work during his life. He was constantly, relentlessly, searching for and incorporating more data into his descriptions and theorizing.

Share

Marx’s own willingness to modify his conclusions in the face of additional data and understanding is demonstrated clearly in a series of letters from 1881. Marx had received a letter from Russian revolutionary, Vera Zasulich. The reason for her inquiry was to ask Marx to clarify a point he had made in Capital, the first edition of which had been published in 1867. She writes

You are not unaware that your Capital enjoys great popularity in Russia… What you probably do not realise is the role which your Capital plays in our discussions on the agrarian question in Russia and our rural commune. You know better than anyone how urgent this question is in Russia… But in my view, it is a life-and-death question above all for our socialist party. In one way or another, even the personal fate of our revolutionary socialists depends upon your answer to the question. For there are only two possibilities. Either the rural commune… is capable of developing in a socialist direction, that is, gradually organising its production and distribution on a collectivist basis. In that case, the revolutionary socialist must devote all his strength to the liberation and development of the commune.

If, however, the commune is destined to perish, all that remains for the socialist… will then be to conduct propaganda solely among the urban workers, while these workers will be continually drowned in the peasant mass which, following the dissolution of the commune, will be thrown on to the streets of the large towns in search of a wage.

Nowadays, we often hear it said that the rural commune is an archaic form condemned to perish by history, scientific socialism and, in short, everything above debate. Those who preach such a view call themselves your disciples par excellence: ‘Marksists’. Their strongest argument is often: ‘Marx said so.’…

So you will understand, Citizen, how interested we are in Your opinion. You would be doing us a very great favour if you were to set forth Your ideas on the possible fate of our rural commune, and on the theory that it is historically necessary for every country in the world to pass through all the phases of capitalist production.

In the name of my friends, I take the liberty to ask You, Citizen, to do us this favour.

Here Zasulich asks Marx whether the rural communes, a staple of Russian peasant economy and society, were fated to undergo the same transition as had happened in Western Europe, where commons had been enclosed, peasants evicted and forced into wage labor as a precursor to the development of the capitalist mode of production. She indicates that this question is not merely one of historical curiosity, but rather of existential importance to the socialist movement in Russia. If the communes are guaranteed the same fate as the commons in Europe, then the socialist organizations have no reason to fight to preserve and develop them and should instead engage in propaganda amongst the urban workers, basically biding their time until the collapse of the communes and the proletarianization of the peasants. If however, the communes are not to fall, then she indicates that the revolutionary socialist movement must focus all efforts on protecting and developing them.

Moreover, she informs Marx that many so-called “Marksists” have taken Marx’s pronouncements about the development of capitalism in Western Europe as edicts about the process of the development of capitalism and then socialism everywhere. These “disciples” have elevated Marx’s work in Capital to a dogma, and Zasulich asks that he clarifies the matter for her and her comrades.

What follows are no less than five drafts of Marx’s response to Zasulich in which he labors intensively to explain why his views and pronouncements are being misconstrued and misinterpreted. His first draft is 4500 words and the next two sit at 2000 words. In them he goes into detail about the differences in the historical material conditions between Western Europe and Russia. His final draft and reply to her, sent a little less than a month after her letter, is only 350 words. In it, he omits his historical analysis and says only that his analysis in Capital was based on data and the historical trajectory of Western Europe. As such,

The ‘historical inevitability’ of this course is therefore expressly restricted to the countries of Western Europe…

The analysis in Capital therefore provides no reasons either for or against the vitality of the Russian commune. But the special study I have made of it, including a search for original source­ material [which he goes into great detail in his earlier drafts], has convinced me that the commune is the fulcrum for social regeneration in Russia. But in order that it might function as such, the harmful influences assailing it on all sides must first be eliminated, and it must then be assured the normal conditions for spontaneous development.

Here Marx emphasizes that his analysis only applies to the historical trajectory of Western Europe. By extension then, those so-called Marksists (who he says he has no dealings with in a previous draft) are wrong. They have misinterpreted his work and have elevated his conclusions to an idealist dogma. They have failed to understand the nature of his method and the way that it necessarily circumscribes general conclusions.

Share Free Market Moralism

The lesson contained in this exchange of letters is no less important for the present day. People who claim that Marx made absolute pronouncements and predictions, whether these people are opponents of Marxism or call themselves Marxists, are simply wrong. Any serious engagement with Marx and Marxism would prove this beyond doubt.

But another lesson is perhaps even more important. Vera Zasulich wrote to Marx because she believed in his method. And more than that, she believed that it was an empirical and scientific way to approach societal transformation. Marx’s answer to her letter would dictate the course of revolutionary socialist praxis in Russia. The stakes could not have been higher for the peasants and workers. This is why it was so crucial for Zasulich to get it right. Marx must have felt this pressure and it must have contributed to his perfectionism and his voracious data-gathering, which in his last years included analysis of the historical economic and social development of many countries outside of Western Europe.

This is why it is so irritating when arguments about Marx focus on things that he neither said nor advocated for, rather than on the real application of his method to our present historical and material conditions. The delay caused by both rightwing and leftwing reactionaries—who both hold to a dogmatic view of Marxism albeit focused on different aspects—to an actual revolutionary praxis is so frustrating and the time spent arguing is wasted time. There are serious questions to be debated and much to be learned from application of theory in our individual circumstances to the particular conditions in our home countries and communities. These questions and answers will dictate the course of our revolutionary movements and the strategies we take to organize towards alternative infrastructures and supports and political action. The stakes are just as high as they were in Marx’s day. The method remains the same, as do the reactionary elements that bastardize and slander it. It is left to us to help others see through the clouds of obfuscation to cultivate and grow a revolutionary movement capable of bringing about socialism.

On January 9, 2026, the US Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, stopped by Rocket Lab’s Engine Development Complex in Long Beach, California. The stop was part of his “Arsenal of Freedom Tour” which took him across the US to a number of military-industrial manufacturing locations. Hegseth articulated his goals for the tour in his speech to the workers at the facility.

The mission has three core components, three pillars that we’ve stood on from day one. First is we’re reviving the warrior ethos within our fighting force, reminding warriors and everyone involved, our sole purpose is to be the most lethal fighting force on the planet, full stop.

Second, we’re rebuilding our military. We must and we are ensuring that the best equipment and leadership are in the hands of our war fighters, and that our war fighters are never in a fair fight.

[T]hird, we are also reestablishing deterrence, deterrence that is so absolute and so unquestioned that America's enemies shall not, should not, will not want to test us.

Hegseth’s comments came after a tour of Rocket Lab’s manufacturing facilities given by CEO Peter Beck. Beck also spoke before Hegseth, introducing him and making some of his own remarks. Tellingly, video of Beck’s full remarks does not seem to exist online, but portions of his speech were quoted in media coverage of the event.

“I’ve had the privilege to show the secretary around… He is leading the charge to reinvigorate the national industrial base and create a more effective Department of War, one that goes faster and leans on commercial companies just like ours.”

“Your efforts are the backbone to America’s national security and the space program… and I’m thrilled that the secretary has been able to see all your work first-hand and up close, so congratulations.”

After the visit, Beck posted a picture of himself and Hegseth during the tour and added “Building at speed and at scale is what we do at Rocket Lab. Great to have @SecWar come visit and see.” Rocket Lab’s official account also posted a highlight reel of Hegseth’s visit, adding: “Thanks for stopping by on the Arsenal of Freedom tour, @SecWar. We’re proud to be manufacturing innovative space technology at speed and scale in support of critical national security programs.”

A couple of months later, in March, Rocket Lab announced it had been awarded its largest contract yet, a $190 million contract with the US Department of War. Speaking of the contract in a press release, Beck said

“Our expanded partnership with MACH-TB and the Department of War strengthens America’s national security and delivers reliable, modern hypersonic capabilities with speed and affordability. Our advanced technology, responsive launch schedules, and mass production of our HASTE hypersonic rockets are enabling faster progress across a range of hypersonic experiments by our government and industry partners, and this latest contract is another proud moment for the team that builds the strength and resiliency of the United States’ aerospace efforts.”

Subscribe now

Share

Rocket Lab was founded in June 2006 in Aotearoa New Zealand by Peter Beck after a trip to the US. Beck had had an interest in rockets for years before he left his hometown of Invercargill at 17 and moved to Dunedin, where he tinkered with his own rocket-engine prototypes for a few years in the workshop of his employer Fisher & Paykel. Following his trip to the US, where his wife was working as an engineer, he returned home and took the plunge, founding his own company with the seed capital of investor Mark Rocket (birth name Stevens).

Rocket Lab’s mission at its founding, as stated on its website, was “To provide innovative low-cost solutions that enable public access to space and develop a space industry within New Zealand.”

Three years later Rocket Lab became the first private company in the Southern Hemisphere to successfully reach space following the launch of its Ātea-1 sounding rocket from Sir Michael Fay’s private island. Four years after that, in 2013, Rocket Lab became a US company, establishing its headquarters in Huntington Beach, CA before relocating to Long Beach in 2020. The company raised money through a number of venture capital funds, including Khosla Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, New Zealand based K1W1, Data Collective, and Promus Ventures. The company also received a strategic investment from Lockheed Martin and an injection of $15 million from the New Zealand government’s Callahan Innovation to build its own orbital rocket, Electron, which reached space on its first launch in 2017 and orbit on its second flight a year later. The company went public on August 25, 2021 through a merger with special acquisition company Vector Acquisition Corporation. It was valued at $4.1 billion at the time of its public listing. The company has a current market capitalization of $46.05 billion.

Rocket Lab’s improbable journey from a small upstart to one of the prime contractors for the US government’s military space operations corresponds with an equally stark shift in the attitude of its founder towards using his company in the service of explicit, or even probable, military purposes. It would have been unthinkable for the Peter Beck who founded Rocket Lab to host the US Secretary of War in an explicit show of industrial capability for the US’s ongoing wars of aggression and imperial ambitions. In an interview with Beck and Rocket published April, 2, 2008 by Metro journalist Frances Walsh, Beck was adamant that Rocket Lab would not participate in military activities.

Are there payloads Rocket Lab wouldn’t carry?

Beck: Of course… we said right from the beginning if it’s involved in the military we don’t want anything to do with it. The military can be quite a tempting cherry because a lot of money gets poured into it but we’re about science, we’re not about killing people.

Rocket: Yeah, I guess the military one is a difficult one and we’ve talked about this at length. Certainly if it involves something that’s going to harm people then were not really interested at all but there are kind of borderline science projects that can be military and government funded and it’s very hard when you say, ‘Oh, this is what I’m going to do’ to always stay, there’s a lot of grey and, ah, so it’s hard to not be involved with the military in any kind of way but certainly we don’t want to be involved with any kind of missile programmes or anything to do with armaments.

Beck: No. No weapons.

Beck’s public positions and antimilitarism was a crucial factor for the early embrace of Rocket Lab within his home country of New Zealand and his ability to secure his permanent launch site at the Māhia Peninsula in the Hawke's Bay in 2015 (it opened in 2016; the company has another launch site in Virginia, USA). But the public face concealed the fact that beginning a few years after its founding, right after its first successful launch, Rocket Lab began taking military contracts and producing products with military applications and usage. Rocket left the company in 2011 and remained tight-lipped about his reasons, but it seemed he was uncomfortable with some of the work the company was taking on. Journalist Ollie Neas sheds light on those secretive early years in a 2021 piece.

Starting in 2010, Rocket Lab began a series of contracts for US military agencies — especially for the Defense Advanced Research Agency, or DARPA, the Pentagon agency tasked with developing technologies that “maintain and advance the capabilities and technical superiority of the United States military”. In 2012, Rocket Lab produced a special rocket fuel for DARPA. Its intended uses, according to a patent filed by the company, include acting as a propellant for sub-orbital airborne missiles. That same year, a heat-protective material that Rocket Lab supplied to defence firm Lockheed Martin was approved for use on Patriot missiles — the surface-to-air missile system used by the US, Israeli and Saudi militaries, including in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. (Rocket Lab says the material was “evaluated and qualified” for use on “anti-missile systems” but that less than 20 kilograms of material was produced for this purpose.)

By 2016, Lockheed Martin had come on board as an investor, prompted by demand from the US government. So, too, did the CIA’s venture capital firm In-Q-Tel, whose investments offer useful clues to how America’s intelligence community sees the future of espionage. In recent years, that has seen In-Q-Tel spend big on social media data mining, artificial intelligence — and space.

None of these contracts were discussed with locals in the lead-up to the company’s securing of the launch pad site at Māhia in 2015. In February of 2016, Beck was a speaker at a summit for “chief executives of companies associated with In-Q-Tel” and Rocket Lab was included in a list of the fund’s portfolio companies. The company refuses to disclose the nature or timeframe of its relationship, the amount of funding it received, or the type of work it engaged in for In-Q-Tel. In the leadup to securing the launch site at Māhia, the company gave a public forum and discussed with locals, stressing the environmental, commercial, and scientific benefits of its work. There were whisperings of military work, but no one was sure so no one said anything. After a phone call to the mayor, Beck secured the permits for the build in only seven days. While winning over the public with its stated benevolent mission, in the years since it set up shop at Māhia, Rocket Lab has launched dozens of satellites into space, many with either explicit or probable military applications.

In December 2018, Rocket Lab launched what it described as an “educational” mission for NASA. At the time, I found a diagram of the satellite labelled “DARPA”. The US Defense Department confirmed to me that the satellite was in fact a DARPA project intended to improve a radar system whose uses include detecting missiles and stealth aircraft. The resulting story in The Spinoff was the first time New Zealanders learned that Rocket Lab was launching US military payloads from our soil.

And that was just the beginning. To date, seven missions from Mahia have carried 13 payloads for US military or intelligence agencies. They range from US Special Operations Command, which conducts covert operations around the world, to the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), a little-known but major spy agency that collects and intercepts data from its fleet of satellites and ground-stations to feed to other military and intelligence agencies. Rocket Lab’s launch for the NRO in January 2020 was the first for the agency from outside the US in its entire 60-year history; more are scheduled for this year.

Most of these payloads have been designed to improve the complex space infrastructure that enables modern military activity, from communicating with troops, to gathering intelligence to targeting missiles. But official briefings show the government expects to approve “operational” satellites, too. And the purpose and capabilities of four classified satellites launched last year for the NRO remain secret.

In the last five years, Rocket Lab has conducted at least ten military launches for the US government, and this is not counting other launches that may have been classified or “dual-use”. These are satellites that are contracted by commercial companies but used by the military once they reach space. For example, in 2023 the company HawkEye 360 contracted Rocket Lab to launch 15 satellites. These satellites are used by the military for geolocation, intelligence, and strategic operations which can be used for targeting and surveillance. Rocket Lab does not differentiate publicly between commercial and military use of the payloads it launches, so aside from direct military contracts, there are likely many more of these dual-use cases. It is impossible to know because more and more of the company’s launch logs are described as being for a “confidential commercial customer.” The company’s most recent large-dollar contracts (the HASTE missions) are to test hypersonic technology for the US military. Unlike former contracts, these will see Rocket Lab build military satellites before launching them, a so called end-to-end approach. It is also clear from Rocket Lab’s growing list of acquisitions that its goal in the short term is to become a prime defense contractor for the US government. A useful summary, although admittedly crude, of Rocket Lab’s increasing number of US military contracts, can be seen from looking at their government contracts through 2025 in the publicly-available database at USAspending.gov.

Share Free Market Moralism

The years since its founding have seen Rocket Lab engage in a calculated narrative in its public statements that contrasts with its increasing comfort with securing work that either is directly contracted by the US military or can be actively leveraged for military purposes. The evolution in the openness to military applications can be seen in a pair of videos, the first of which is of Peter Beck’s public appearance at an Auckland museum from October 29, 2008 where he talks about Rocket Lab’s mission of giving scientists and the public access to space.

Contrast this with an interview conducted last May in which Beck, now “Sir” Peter Beck, having been knighted in 2024, is explicitly asked by New Zealand business journalist Madison Malone about his “unapologetic” embrace of military applications (discussed euphemistically as “national security”). The exchange shows Beck awkwardly fumbling around for an answer, well aware of the minefield he is trudging into (the exchange begins at around 18:50).

Madison: I want to talk to you about defense. It’s something that we haven’t gone too deep on yet, but it seems like this is something that you’re more open about unapologetically now. In the most recent earnings, you cited an expanding national security focus… It’s no secret that there’s been defense applications and use cases for Rocket Lab, but I wonder what’s changed in your mind to be, I guess, unapologetic about it. Is it the state of the world? Are there things that you’re concerned about that make you feel that the mission is more critical than ever?

Peter: Um, no, but I would say our national security division and, you know, national security projects have continued to grow and grow and grow. Um, and I think I think yeah, I think everybody understands we live in a in a much more unstable world right now. And national security conversations are dinner time conversations. Um, so so, it’s kind of, you know, from a New Zealand audience perspective, it’s kind of demystified a little bit. Um, but um, but you know, it’s it’s it’s a it’s a really important and growing part of um our business and and you know like I say there’s plenty going on in the world that that uh point to you know importance of national security.

It’s clear from this interaction that Beck is treading very carefully. He knows that his New Zealand audience is likely uncomfortable with naked military applications and ambitions, especially given the involvement of the US in the Palestinian genocide at the time of this interview. He displays none of this hesitation or hedging, however, in his quarterly earnings calls with investors a few months later.

Being able to quickly build and deploy entire satellite systems is the cornerstone of the future U.S. defense strategy… If there's one thing to take away from this deal, it's adding payloads on top of launch and spacecraft really cements our status as a one-stop shop for national security. We are in a great position to capitalize on opportunities here as strategic investment.

We've already won more than a $0.5 billion contract with the Space Development Agency to build and operate a significant piece of their Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture network. There is a golden opportunity to build upon that here with our existing capability… To meet the administration's urgent timeline, it needs agility and innovation, vertical integration, and on-time delivery and execution.

Here Beck enthusiastically discusses the accomplishments and future plans for military involvement with none of the reservations or hesitation he formerly displayed. These sentiments were echoed in a public statement he made after Rocket Lab was chosen by the US Space Force to compete for contracts under the Department of Defense’s National Security Space Launch program.

Supporting assured access to space for the nation’s most important missions has always been the goal with our Neutron rocket, and we’re incredibly proud to selected by the U.S. Space Force to demonstrate this commitment for the NSSL… We can’t wait to showcase Neutron as the important platform it will become for the Department of Defense.

Share

Notwithstanding Rocket Lab’s assurances that all work is above the board, the public has grown increasingly uneasy with the company’s expanding military footprint. The government passed legislation that increased the allowed number of launches from 100 to 1000, meaning the launch site is used more and more frequently, restricting access to ancestral lands and coastlines which provide some locals their livelihoods. The public has become more vocal in its opposition as the ramifications of the military uses of the satellites that Rocket Lab sends into space have become more clear and horrifying over the last 2 1/2 years. Questions about the use of its payloads have become more explicit. Opponents point out that with military uses for its activities, the launch site is in potential danger of becoming a military target.

A news report that came out last year indicated that Space Minister Judith Collins was advised after the genocide began in Gaza in 2023 that the Gen-3 BlackSky satellites that Rocket Lab were planning on launching could be used by the Israeli military. The company has known links to the Israeli Ministry of Defense. The satellites are described by the company as providing “very-high resolution imagery and AI-enabled outputs delivered at unmatched speed, detail and agility, giving defense and intelligence organizations the power to observe, react and adapt in near-real-time.” The potential risks were dismissed on account of there being

“[N[o United Nations Security Council sanctions on Israel, and New Zealand does not implement autonomous sanctions outside the context of the conflict in Ukraine… There are also no policy restrictions on New Zealand’s trading relationship with Israel.”

Collins approved the permit and Rocket Lab began launching the satellites last year under a mission entitled “Insight At Speed Is A Friend Indeed.”

There have been increasing concerns from peace activists that Rocket Lab’s military launches may breach New Zealand law, particularly around nuclear weapons. An open letter signed by 17 peace groups to Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in 2021 ahead of Rocket Lab’s “Gunsmoke J” launch warned that “US military strategy was increasingly using satellite systems to control and direct nuclear, as well as non-nuclear, weapons, as it was “extremely difficult” to determine whether any given satellite was contributing to supporting this weapons system.” It later came out that Ardern had been warned on at least two occasions in 2020 that the payloads could break New Zealand’s nuclear free law due to their potential use for targeting nuclear weapons.

Gunsmoke J was launched on March 22, 2021 as part of the “They Go Up So Fast” mission. Rocket Lab’s launch was the second of three Gunsmoke J satellites. After the third was sent to space about a month later, an article from defense news website C4ISRNET excitedly proclaimed “With all three Gunsmoke-J satellites on orbit, the Army is ready to test space-based targeting.”

The company has not only pursued military contracts more openly and vigorously, they have also sought to silence criticism. In 2024, when a Massey University professor who had served on the government’s Public Advisory Committee on Disarmament and Arms during Ardern’s government and warned the Prime Minister about Rocket Lab’s military payloads made media comments about how its launches potentially violated New Zealand’s nuclear free laws, the company forced a retraction and threatened a defamation lawsuit, claiming “these comments appear designed to damage the reputation of Rocket Lab in the marketplace and divert business away from Rocket Lab rather than have any factual basis.”

This accelerating military use has left some in Māhia feeling betrayed. The company was supposed to be a bright light in their community, but it feels more like a dirty secret, or worse, a lie from the beginning.

Protests have become commonplace at the launch site in Māhia and at Rocket Lab’s production sites in Auckland. For some, protest does not seem enough. Rocket Lab Watch, a group that monitors the company’s activities, staged a protest outside of the NZ Aerospace Summit in 2023 and released a statement which said

The [Rocket Lab Māhia] launch pad and control centre in Auckland are essentially military installations, and if the Government won’t restrict their activities, then it is up to citizens to do so… Throughout recent history, it is when citizens start damaging property that elected representatives start taking the issues seriously. This time seems to have arrived.

No property destruction occurred.

In a period of 20 years, Rocket Lab has gone from a small company that swore it would never participate in military applications to the world’s leader in rapid, cheap space deployment of small satellites. Along with this success has come increased interest by the US military, and Rocket Lab has enthusiastically reciprocated. With its increasing pursuit of contracts from the US military, as well as its acquisitions of companies in a bid to become a one-stop-shop for military applications, production, and deployment, it is clear that whatever compunction Peter Beck once had about engaging in military activities is long gone. Beck and the company are not even trying to hide their active involvement any longer, but are proudly touting their use by the US military.

As evidenced by the recent hosting and tour of Pete Hegseth and the company’s massive new contracts, Rocket Lab is all in on the military industrial complex. As such, the company is an enemy, and must be treated as such. All political methods available should be used to put pressure on them to either cease their military launches, or leave Aotearoa New Zealand. Where political methods fail, serious consideration should be given to strategies for slowing and stopping their production work related to military applications. If Rocket Lab’s naked exposure of themselves as a willing cog in the US military machine has a positive aspect, it is the knowledge that when a cog has been revealed, it can be smashed.

This week Palantir CEO Alex Karp set off a firestorm when he released his tech manifesto on Twitter. The post was actually a 22-point summary of his book from last year entitled The Technological Republic. I haven’t read Karp’s book. I may get around to it. I don’t have much time to hate-read stuff these days.

There have been plenty of tech billionaires who have posted some sort of manifesto. Before Karp, the most recent one that made a bit of a splash was from Marc Andreessen. These things are usually taken much more seriously than they should be, as is everything said by tech billionaires. They are usually a blend of transhumanism mixed with either allusions to, or outright lionizing of historical fascists and a healthy helping of libertarian moralism. It’s too bad that we live in a world where the mostly junior high Reddit-level ramblings of these guys has to be taken seriously. What all of this stuff amounts to, in the end, is an attempt to dress up a ruthless capitalist system in some sort of philosophical and moral justification.

Like clockwork, people started dissecting Karp’s manifesto. The pieces on Substack and in the media have been flowing. I’m not really interested in dissecting or trying to trace the philosophical or sociological underpinnings of Karp’s manifesto or the psychological schemas that make him the way he is. I think has the most useful diagnostic analysis of the bigger picture meaning of Karp’s manifesto here.

Share

Subscribe now

My position is that Karp represents a particularly dangerous brand of fascism. Not because of his ideas, because his ideas are a dime a dozen for any tech bro that considers themselves deep a.k.a. Curtis Yarvin. No, Karp is dangerous because he represents true fascism, which is the fusion of corporate and state power in the service of capital. Most discussions of fascism, especially in recent years, have focused on whether Trump or some other rightwing politician like Nigel Farage are actually fascists or just authoritarians. These discussions focus on ideological definitions of fascism. Nationalism, racism, Christian fundamentalism, and others are thought to be important ingredients in the recipe. And if one or more is missing, well then we just aren’t looking at fascism folks.

But these discussions miss the point. Of course fascism looks different in different places. But the thread that runs through all brands of it is the fusion of state and corporate power in the service of propping up the ruling class during periods of unrest. As an instrument of class rule, the state will always turn to fascism when the ruling class is threatened, and corporations will lend their assistance to preserve their profits and freedom to exploit. Fascism is less an ideological stance than a functional strategy taken when capitalism is in crisis.

So Karp is a fascist, but his manifesto comes at a time where his company has been integrated into large sections of the US federal government. This reality makes his ramblings about fighting to preserve the West and making sure that American hard power is superior in the world all the more terrifying. In short, Karp finds himself in the position which most tech billionaire fascists want to be in, which is on the verge of having the means to make his vision a reality.

Share Free Market Moralism

To understand just how enmeshed Palantir is in the US government, we can take a look at their contracts. Lots of media stories have covered this over the years, especially since the beginning of the second Trump administration which saw a flurry of contracts with the company. Much of this coverage has been on the surveillance capabilities that Palantir offers to the government. The company specializes in developing software that collates and aggregates data across a large number of sources into a single, useable interface for making decisions and executing (often literally) them. So by that rubric, it’s not just the fact that Palantir software is being used by a lot of departments within the federal government that should be of concern, but how that data will be aggregated and manipulated and for what purpose.

And this purpose can be pretty much summed up under the umbrella “the worst shit imaginable”. If you don’t know the kind of stuff Palantir is being used for you’ve probably been living under a rock. There’s oodles out there on this, I covered a bit of its more insidious military applications recently in this post. I’m not going to discuss it any more here.

What I want to do here is to give a quick and dirty rundown of just how embedded Palantir is in the US government. Luckily for us, all US government contracts are public and searchable on USAspending.gov. A search for Palantir brings up two entities, Palantir Technologies Inc and Palantir USG Inc. Palantir Technologies Inc is the parent company, and Palantir USG Inc is a subsidiary that was created to specifically handle business with the US government. This is a common practice by companies that transact a significant amount of business with the government and allows them more legal flexibility and opportunity to secure contracts through both companies.

A search for all contracts since 2008, the earliest date available, indicates that there are a total of 392 contracts. Palantir Technologies Inc has had a total of 146 contracts worth $338.3 million while Palantir USG has had 140 contracts worth $866.5 million. The two figures below show both the dollar amount and the number of new contracts each year for both entities. The top figure shows the data from Palantir Technologies Inc and the bottom shows the data from Palantir USG Inc.

What is immediately obvious is the difference in the distributions of both the dollar amounts (bars) and the new contracts (lines; keep in mind that FY 2026 is not complete, so we can ignore those data). Palantir Technologies has had a rise in new contracts up until 2015, after which there was a drop, followed by a rise again since 2021. The dollar amounts for contracts has been on a steady increase since 2008. Contrast this to the data from Palantir USG. This company had very few contracts until 2020, after which there was a slight bump, followed by a large increase over the next four years with the number of new contracts doubling each year from 2022 to 2025.

Share

As I said above, Palantir Tech is the parent company, and Palantir USG is the subsidiary set up for US government contracts. What is also clear is that Palantir USG also handles significantly more high-dollar business with the government than Palantir Tech, more than doubling the dollar amount of the contracts. When you look a bit further into who in the government is doing business with both entities, we can start to make sense of where the money is going.

The following tables show the contracting department, the dollar amount, and the percentage of total spending for each Palantir entity. Again, top is for Palantir Technologies and bottom for Palantir USG.

For Palantir Tech, the number one contractor is the Department of Agriculture, at 28.84% and $97.58 million, with the Department of Homeland Security second at 24.1% and $81.54 million. For Palantir USG 92.8% of the entire contract amount at $804.11 million was spent by the Department of Defense, with the second department, the Department of State, at only 6.05% and $52.41 million.

Those interested can comb through the individual contracts for details, but suffice it to say that Palantir is well and truly embedded within the US government. Altogether, business with the US government accounted for around 41% of the company’s annual revenue of $4.475 billion in 2025.

Even the dollar amounts and number of contracts do not totally do justice to the scale of the involvement that Palantir now has across branches of government. The company’s involvement in US government is to break down the barriers between data use and transfer between government agencies, eventually consolidating data from all branches of government into a single analyzable and actionable platform. Their involvement has corresponded with Executive Order 14243 signed by Trump on March 20, 2025 entitled “Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos.” This order is framed as being to stop wasteful government spending and bureaucracy but in reality what it will do is to force data sharing across government departments and even from state databases to the federal government. Palantir programs like Gotham and Foundry can then be used to aggregate, synthesize, visualize, and action government priorities in close to real time.

Share Free Market Moralism

So what does Karp’s manifesto actually mean? In style and substance, it is not too dissimilar to those that have come before. The difference here is that Karp is actively calling on tech companies to help the US government in their project of imperial hegemony. And this call is not coming from someone outside of the machine of government. Rather, this is a statement of purpose and strategy from a company that on a very real level has provided the tech that the government runs on. And the tech itself isn’t the problem. The problem is the people who are using it. And Palantir represents the fusion of corporate and government power in the service of the ruling class in a way and with a sophistication that we haven’t seen before. That’s the real danger.

The only way to fight effectively is to organize alternative systems and structures of power outside of those that are subject to Palantir’s ever-expanding gaze and to participate in politics that push for a toppling of the capitalist system, rather than advocating for a more humane capitalism. The ruling class is continually showing us that they are willing to sacrifice us all for their accumulation of profit. Karp and his technofascist friends are both a symptom of this system and the machinery that makes its continuation possible. We know what to do with capitalist machinery.

Mary Doria Russell’s masterful novel “The Sparrow” tells the story of an ill-fated mission to establish alien contact after scientists intercept a radio transmission from another planet. The content of the transmission? Music. But not just music. Music unlike any they have ever heard. So strange, so foreign, and yet so moving and beautiful, the mission is spearheaded by a religious organization on the assumption that any species that creates such music must have an understanding of and relationship with deity from which man could, and must, be enlightened.

I’ve never heard alien music, but I have a guess at what it might be like. Music that stirs the soul, enlarges horizons, and broadens the perspective and experience of beauty in such a complete, profound, and almost spiritual way that it’s clear that it could not be created or even approximated on this planet. I can only imagine the first experience with alien music would be awe-inspiring. For those of us wanting to catch a glimpse of what it might be like, we have Sigur Rós’s stunning masterpiece Ágaetis Byrjun.

Sigur Rós (“Victory Rose”; named after vocalist and guitarist Jón (Jónsi) Þór Birgisson’s younger sister) are an Icelandic post-rock band. Their first album, Von, was released in 1997, a pleasant, if somewhat formless collection of dreamy, sometimes odd ambient soundscapes. Relatively well-received in Iceland, the album failed to be noticed outside their home country.

They recruited a fourth band member, and went into the studio to record their second album. The process took nearly a year, eight months longer than scheduled. They emerged in 1999 with Ágaetis Byrjun, a colossal album, the scope and grandeur of which were not even hinted at by their debut. Abandoning the ambient soundscapes and somewhat tinny production of that record, Ágaetis Byrjun is 72 minutes of densely layered, lushly orchestrated, and challenging blends of ambient, classical, rock, jazz, electronic, and choral music. Staggering in its beauty, epic in scope, and profoundly moving in a nearly religious way, the album is a peerless and pristine testament to the transcendent and enthralling power of music.

Released to little fanfare in Iceland, Ágaetis Byrjun slowly but steadily climbed the charts. Word of mouth got around that Sigur Rós had crafted something truly special, and by 2001 the record had a rapt worldwide audience. No one had heard anything remotely like it before. Although numerous musical influences were apparent (Spacemen 3, Spiritualized, Talk Talk, Mogwai, Pink Floyd, Radiohead), Sigur Rós’s unique vision and flawless execution rendered the music as alien as the striking extraterrestrial fetus on the cover.

The album is comprised of 10 suite-like songs, some stretching to over 10 minutes in length. The patient, measured pace of the music, combined with the warm, gauzy, and enfolding production, creates an almost womb-like effect. This is an album to live inside.

The music consists of organs, keyboards, drums, guitars, electronic flourishes, stunning orchestral arrangements (a string octet and full brass section were employed in the recording), and myriad instrumental and sonic accoutrements. The strings (arranged personally by the band) accentuate the music perfectly without being heavy handed or overwrought. Beautiful with a hint of menace, often devolving into atonality or failing to resolve cleanly, they contribute immensely to the feel and tone of the album. The brass were instructed to improvise according to the mood of each piece, lending the compositions a looseness and refreshing spontaneity that encourages and rewards careful and repeated listening.

The last crucial musical ingredient is the judicious deployment of guitar feedback. Not pummelling, or abrasive feedback. Played with a cello bow, the guitar produces slowed, gargantuan, deeply melodic feedback, almost like whalesong. Over this musical backdrop Jónsi intones in Icelandic (and an invented language, Hopelandic) in a childlike, fragile, and androgynous tenor, which when combined with the slow build and cathartic explosion of the music, results in some truly breathtaking moments.

The album begins with “Intro”, backmasked piano and guitar playing underneath while multi-tracked vocals breathe out strange whisperings. The vocals and backing track fade to silence. A sonar-like ping, echoed and heavily reverbed, sounds in the darkness. Once, twice, three, four times it sounds, until mournful hammond organ ushers in “Svefn-g-englar”, the sonar pings keeping time with the organ, sketches of guitar feedback echoing somewhere along the periphery. All at once the tranquillity is swallowed by awe-inspiring, cavernous feedback. It dwarfs everything before abruptly receding. The song twists and turns, ebbs and flows, in an echoing, glacial, submerged march until fading away amid gentle white noise and skittering electronic beats.

Gentle strings and twinkling piano introduce “Starálfur”. Strings and vocals coalesce into a hymn-like moment before fading away to the sounds of a softly strummed acoustic guitar. Drums rumble, the strings build along with a brass fanfare and then weep, alone, in a palindromic Barber-esque climax before fading out again to the hushed acoustic guitar refrain. “Flugufrelsarinn” builds gently to its crescendo of gleaming keyboards and bright guitar arpeggios. “Ný batterí’s” spare brass meanderings turn sinister and dissonant amid electronic noise and crashing drums.

Album highlight “Hjartað hamast” begins with hammond organ and bluesy harmonica before being sawn asunder by feedback which recedes into a throbbing bass and jazzy organ and drum verse that explodes into a sublime chorus of feedback, piercing strings, arpeggiated harp, mournful piano and keys all building to a fever pitch, Jónsi’s yearning vocal spiralling heavenward, until the whole is swallowed up in white noise. On the gorgeous Viðrar vel til loftárása, Sigur Rós perfect the type of pensive-to-anthemic ballad that spawned a legion of heart-on-sleeve imitators, building from quiet piano and slide guitar to a jawdropping climax of moaning feedback and swirling strings.

There is a fine line between earnestness and maudlin overemoting, and only once do Sigur Rós cross over (“Olsen Olsen”), going a little too far into the mawkish, overly jubilant choral pageantry they would become mired in on later albums, complete with a jaunty little flute solo echoed later by a full choir. The slip up, however is minor and easily forgiven on an album of such astounding quality.

The name of the album, Ágaetis Byrjun, translates to “a good beginning”. The band, even after arranging, recording, and mixing the album for nearly a year, were still not totally satisfied with the final product. Their ceaseless ambition is revealed in the translation of a lyric from the title track, a tranquil lullaby with a music-box like quality that recalls Radiohead’s “No Surprises”: “við munum gera betur næst / þetta er ágætis byrjun (we will do better next time / this is a good beginning)”.

As the last song (not counting the wordless ambient outro “Avalon”, an alternative take of “Starálfur” slowed to a quarter of normal speed) on an album of such superb and timeless quality, the sentiment is almost laughable in its modesty. Ágaetis Byrjun, Sigur Rós’s “good beginning”, is their masterpiece, the true impact of which can be found in another statement made by the band on their website around the time of the record: “we are simply gonna change music forever”. They weren’t wrong. Alien composers, be forewarned. You have your work cut out for you.

“The glory of God is the poor person who lives.” -Oscar Romero

“I was in prison and you beat me and left me to die, homeless and you told me to move on, carer to one with disability and you cut support funding. I was a child playing in the street and you drone-striked me, a son desperate for a bag of flour and you shot me in the groin, a family who you buried in the rubble of an apartment building.”

“I was tens of thousands of children, women, and first responders who you bombed to pieces in double-tap strikes, an old woman harvesting olives who you bashed unconscious, a woman whose pay equity was gutted to save the budget, a worker who struck for wages that kept pace with inflation who you punished by changing the law. I was in prison and you raped me to death and were acquitted, a diabetic who died in a stairwell due to cuts in health funding, a patient on a ventilator who died when the power was cut from an oil blockade, a person who starved while you disposed of excess food to keep demand high, a child whose limbs were amputated without anaesthesia.”

“I was a family who returned from the market to find my home occupied, my belongings thrown in the street, a family whose home was demolished by bulldozers for “permit infractions” while soldiers stood guard. I was a family burned alive in a bombed out tent after being displaced to a “safe” place, a person shot and killed for being black, a mother torn from her children and detained by ICE, a child trafficked to politicians.”

“I was the millions of species who you drove to extinction to increase and multiply your fossil fuel profits, the millions displaced by sinking islands from rising oceans, the child hungry and cold and living in a car, the mother swallowed up in the unaffordable cost of living, the next AI-selected missile target.”

Horrified, they asked “when saw us you in prison and beat you to death and left you to die, homeless and told you to move on, as a carer to one with disability and cut support funding. When saw you as a child playing in the street and drone-striked you, a son desperate for a bag of flour and shot you in the groin, a family and buried you in the rubble of an apartment building.”

“When saw we you as tens of thousands of children, women, and first responders and bombed you to pieces in double-tap strikes, an old woman harvesting olives and bashed you unconscious, a woman whose pay equity was gutted to save the budget, a worker who struck for wages that kept pace with inflation who we punished by changing the law. When raped you to death in prison and were acquitted, a diabetic who died in a stairwell due to cuts in health funding, a patient on a ventilator who died when the power was cut from an oil blockade, a person who starved while we disposed of excess food to keep demand high, a child whose limbs were amputated without anaesthesia.”

“When saw we you as a family who returned from the market to find your home occupied, your belongings thrown in the street, a family whose home was demolished by bulldozers for “permit infractions” while soldiers stood guard. When saw we you as a family burned alive in a bombed out tent after being displaced to a “safe” place, a person shot and killed for being black, a mother torn from her children and detained by ICE, a child trafficked to politicians.”

“How were you the millions of species who we drove to extinction to increase and multiply our fossil fuel profits, the millions displaced by sinking islands from rising oceans, the child hungry and cold and living in a car, the mother swallowed up in the unaffordable cost of living, the next AI-selected missile target.”

“Truly I say unto you, inasmuch as you have done it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you have done it unto me…”

We’re in the aftermath of another No Kings protest weekend. This was the third one. By all accounts, it was the most successful. Estimates are over 8 million people attended rallies on Saturday. The largest turnout in No Kings history. As is typical following these protests, the media and Substack has been flooded with articles and think pieces, both those praising the success of the protests and those criticizing them. My purpose here is not to summarize these arguments for and against the utility of the No Kings protests. Other authors have done good work on this front. I’ve made my position clear on the ineffectual nature of these modern protest movements in this post:

Regardless of your personal feelings on the No Kings or other modern protest movements, the facts are that their track record of success in producing any effectual political change is abysmal. Those who hope to leverage protest or organizing movements into actual political change cannot dispute these facts. To do so is to deny material reality. The only thing left to do is to analyze why these movements have failed so we do not continue to repeat past mistakes.

While most leftist critique has focused on the lack of any real substantive organization beyond the day of protests and the lack of practical effect of the movement in terms of having any demands or exerting any real pressure, what hasn’t really been explored is the political and ideological ecosystem in which these protests are taking place. For many leftists it’s yet another example of dumb liberals being dumb again or being taken advantage of by duplicitous Democratic actors to funnel militancy and anger into electoral politics. Same old story, just a new protest movement. Indeed, the explanation of these protest movements is that they have moved away from grassroots organizing to top-down managed affairs with the explicit purpose of controlling the militancy of protestors and channeling anger into more manageable pathways that aren’t a threat to the establishment.

On some level this is no doubt true. But I suggest that there are larger ideological forces at play here that act to constrain the imagination and strategy of modern protest movements. To understand, we have to shift gears and discuss neoclassical economic theory.

Share

Subscribe now

The protest marketplace

Neoclassical economic theory replaced classical ideas about political economy with the general idea that all people are individual economic actors striving to maximize their own personal benefit. By exchanging commodities on the market, which is assumed to exist in a perfect, idealized state outside of any state interference, individuals can maximize their utility. Moreover, all individuals acting to maximize their own personal benefit will result in the best possible state of affairs for everyone in society.

While this is an oversimplification of the complexity of modern economic theory, in principle this is the kernel that drives it. More importantly for our purposes, this is the widely-held public understanding of the way economics works. In the modern conception of neoclassical economics, the role of government is to establish conditions in which the free and unfettered market can work its magic. For the most hard core libertarians, that means the government should just get out of the way altogether but most agree that the government has a role to play, however small. Once such conditions are established, the immutable laws of supply and demand take over.

These assumptions of modern economics have rooted themselves deep in the consciousness of modern capitalist society. In addition to the precarity introduced and sustained by modern capitalism which necessitates dedication of nearly all of our efforts to merely surviving, leaving little time for social relationships and community building, this individualistic economic framework ensures that we view—whether consciously or not—our existence and that of others within the rubric of individual maximization of benefit. And with the intrusion of market logic into all areas of life with neoliberalism, it is more and more common for all of our social relations to be organized and constrained by market logic.

This neoclassical logic can be clearly seen in the No Kings protest movement, both at the level of the organizational structure and the individual protest participants. At the level of organization, the No Kings movement involves over 200 progressive organizations, with the major organizers being the Indivisible and 50501 movements. Indivisible was founded in 2016 as a way to provide support for resisting the Trump agenda and the executive branch’s move to the right. Their webpage states their purpose is “organizing against this fascistic clown show of a regime the only way that actually works: with on-the-ground, volunteer-led, communities of people power.” 50501, which stands for 50 protests, 50 states, 1 movement, was founded specifically to organize anti-Trump protests.

The overall goal of the No Kings protests appears to be to encourage a “big tent” coalition of people who are broadly against Trump and his policies. Aside from that, there appears to be little coherence to the movement and it invites anyone with a broad grievance against the current administration to join. As a result, the reasons for participation are as varied as individual participants, as demonstrated by a recent article in The Guardian.

While it is clear from the article that there are some commonalities among the reasons for participation, with fear for democracy, ICE, economic factors, Epstein files, among others, mentioned repeatedly, what is equally clear is the extent to which people are participating for their own reasons. There is no unifying cause or purpose for participation. To use our neoclassical analogy, all individuals are participating in their own self interest.

Now, I want to be clear to not press the analogy too far, so I will say that many appear to be participating out of genuine concern for their friends and neighbors and the general safety of society. But where the analogy holds I think is that everyone has their own reasons, and these reasons are very individualized even when they share common themes. This is very much not a case of a protest movement with clearly articulated goals that is capturing a self-selected group of people who share those goals. Thus, the No Kings protests constitute an arranged market of liberal and progressive motivations and ideals being pursued by individuals on their own terms. Neoclassical logic holds that this arrangement should be guided by the “invisible hand” towards the best outcome for everyone, in this case a successful protest movement culminating in the removal of Trump from power or, in the short term, Democrats winning the midterms.

In some ways, this is what a “big tent” movement has to do by necessity. In order to assemble a broad enough coalition, you can’t be too specific about the goals or positions you take on certain issues or you will alienate some people. But this is also where things break down in terms of effectiveness, because without clearly articulated goals, there is nothing specific to work towards after the protest. This is clearly a concern of the organizers and followers of the protest, with many in the media asking the question of what comes next and how do we keep this momentum going?

Share Free Market Moralism

No Kings and the invisible hand

The organizers held a call today online addressing “What’s Next after No Kings 3?” I tuned in to the call with about 20,000 others. For those expecting a series of concrete steps, you will be disappointed. This seems to be less of a function of the lack of actual organizational pedigree of the organizers than of the diffuse and unfocused nature of the No Kings movement itself. How can you provide concrete practical actions for the myriad motivations and goals that individual participants in your movement have? It’s not possible.

And so we were left with some exuberant praise of protest participants, assuring them that they really are part of something big and earth-shattering, lofty rhetoric about authoritarianism, tyranny, democracy, organizing, voting rights, and other general topics which cover the gamut of reasons for individual participation in the protest. But not a lot of concrete next steps or goals.

The general takeaway is that the only way to keep the momentum going is to organize in our own communities. What we organize for is left up to us. Sure there are suggestions by speakers about what might be most important. On the top of the list is finding ways to combat ICE and to secure voting rights, but the last word from the emcee is to just get involved somehow. Do something. Pursue any course of action that you are passionate about. Anything at all. In other words, having now organized a space for individuals to participate in the exchange of motivations and ideals, they now invite you to take the next step and participate in your own individual organizational efforts in the organizational marketplace.

There’s even a toolkit to help you get started with the goal of having some sort of organizational meeting between March 29 and April 12 and getting ready to participate in the nationwide strike on May 1. But aside from these general goals, no guidance is given regarding where efforts should be focused or what is most likely to lead to success in the short or long term. The overall goal seems to just be to get more people involved. Getting enough people involved will presumably lead to a tipping point (the 3.5% figure was mentioned by at least one presenter) where fascism and authoritarianism will just buckle under the pressure of the protests and the disparate organizing.

This is neoclassical economic protest movement logic. If enough people are active in the protest and organizing economy pursuing their own individual organizational goals and strategies, the end result will be a greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts movement success. No Kings represents the full takeover of grassroots protest organizing characterized by clearly-articulated goals and strategies by a blind faith in the invisible hand of protest movement guidance.

Share

Revolutionary education and political economy

Here’s the thing though. It doesn’t work in real economics and it doesn’t work in protest movements. Economics has always been driven by social relations. The relationship between workers and bosses is characterized by class antagonism. Choices about economics have always been political, that’s why it used to be called political economy before the neoclassicists did away with the term to give their discipline an air of scientific rigor. Political choices about economics have always been driven by what is prioritized by society, and that has always in the end been the wealth and profits of capitalists. Neoclassical economics slap a seemingly-objective veneer on what is a wholly subjective, social process.

In like manner, protest movements have traditionally been characterized by very specific goals. Strategies, while varied and improvisational at times, are all pursued with the goal in mind. In other words, protest movements also have a concrete social and political character. But what dictates the social and political goals of a protest movement? And how do we know whether our goals will lead to the long-term, sustainable political changes we want?

This has been the key question of all revolutionary movements. There are many worthwhile goals and strategies which might be pursued. There are many good things that can be done in our communities and neighborhoods. So how do we know which ones to do and what organizations to participate in?

A full exploration of this topic is beyond the scope of this discussion, but a documented discussion between some community organizers and the Chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers, Fred Hampton, illustrates the point clearly and forcefully. In the video, Hampton is approached by some men who would like to support some of the Black Panthers’ programs.

The two men present Hampton with a brief proposal and discuss some of the key items. Hampton questions them on where their educational program is. The men say that there would clearly be an educational program, but they couldn’t include everything in the proposal. They then call his attention to a credit union in their proposal, “owned by the people, run for the people and by the people.” Hampton asks them what types of things the credit union would provide money for and they answer that whatever the people decide that’s what they will do.

Clearly getting frustrated Hampton illustrates what he means by education by calling their attention to the revolutionary movements of Jomo Kenyatta and “Papa Doc” (François Duvalier), both of whom led successful revolutions but then turned into brutal dictators. Hampton’s point here is that without proper education, a people’s movement will fracture and splinter and be unable to stay the course for a successful revolution and will instead lead to revolutionaries becoming the new oppressor in place of their old thrown-off oppressors. So important is this political education that Hampton says that anyone who wishes to become a member of the Black Panther party has to undergo a six-week educational course in order to understand the foundations and goals of the revolutionary movement:

if they don’t have education, they’re nowhere, cause they don’t even know why they’re doing what they’re doing… you might get people caught up cause they’re poor and they want something, and then if they’re not educated they want more and before you know it there’ll be capitalism and before you know it we’d have negro imperialism.

Hampton stresses here that they key to a successful movement is education, by which he means revolutionary Marxist education. To the men’s suggestion that it is enough to organize to do good things, he asks why they are doing the things they are doing. The why here is crucial because the why dictates the best how to engage in to accomplish the goal. His language here echoes that in another speech he gave in 1969, when he said

We’ve got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don’t fight racism with racism—we’re gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don’t fight capitalism with no black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism… we’re gonna organize and dedicate ourselves to revolutionary political power and teach ourselves the specific needs of resisting the power structure, arm ourselves, and we’re gonna fight reactionary pigs with INTERNATIONAL PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION. That’s what it has to be. The people have to have the power—it belongs to the people.

Notice that Hampton didn’t say that a massive popular movement is the goal. He said that a movement that is educated in its goals provides the power and focus that the people need to engage in successful revolution. In other words, popular practical action is given purpose and focus through revolutionary education. Without this, there can be no focused movement and no success.

No Kings’ neoclassical fallacy

Looking at the No Kings protest movement, we can see why it has an uphill battle before it establishes itself as a formidable political movement. As mentioned above, in the first place, it is not a grassroots movement dedicated to clearly-articulated goals, but rather a top-down organizational movement that has a broad and vague goal and motive in order to capture as many people as possible. Second, there is no educational program given to or required by anyone in the movement and therefore the goals of all of those who participate are different and varied. Thirdly, there does not seem to be any real concrete plan for translating the massive popular participation into any real kind of political power. This is in part due to the fact that the movement itself is not well-defined but also comes back to the fact that without revolutionary education, at best the goal can be a vague reformism, as indicated by the increasing focus on getting people involved in the upcoming midterms. Right now, as evidenced by the call from today, there doesn’t even appear to be that much focus, but rather a general admonition to “do good things in your community.”

And I’m not faulting the organizers for advocating for increased community participation. But like Hampton asked the men who proposed the credit union, where is your educational plan? How are you planning on translating public enthusiasm into real political power? At this stage there seems to be little concrete strategy and even less education. The organizers, whether willingly or not, find themselves in the realm of neoclassical economic fantasy, where the hope that providing a free marketplace will result in overall success merely by individuals pursuing their own goals. But unfortunately for No Kings and other managed resistance movements, as material history has shown, as in social and economic life, so in protest: The invisible hand does not exist.

Yesterday I really messed up my lecture. I’ve been teaching about hypothesis testing for the last two weeks and yesterday was supposed to be the culmination. After having talked about the normal distribution and all of its useful properties that allow us to make conclusions about the nature of the data from any sample yesterday was the discussion where everything was supposed to come together.

We were discussing Type I and Type II errors. I sat there for 50 minutes trying to explain, using figures, examples, and graphics, about why it’s important to think about and plan for these errors when you design an experiment. It’s meant to tie together everything we’ve discussed, but sitting there in front of the class, I just felt a bit lost. It’s a bit of a tough lecture to deliver. The content is a bit abstract. You have to talk about the null and alternate distribution like they are sitting side by side when in reality only one of them exists. It’s just a rough lecture on the best of days.

I asked a group of students who I’ve become friendly with how I did at the end. “It was the most confusing lecture of the semester so far,” they said.

Damn.

I was a bit out of it yesterday. I didn’t sleep well the night before. My son, who has epilepsy, came out into the living room at around 9:30 and we could tell he was about to have a seizure. He hadn’t really had a serious one in over a year and we thought that this was going to be no problem.

We laid him down on the couch and he started to do that thing he does where he’s there but not really there. He slurs his words and drools and we wait it out for a few minutes. But then his thumb started twitching, then his whole arm, then his face, then he was vomiting and his breathing was getting irregular.

So we called the ambulance. Thank god we live in New Zealand so we didn’t have to worry about bankrupting ourselves over an ambulance ride. I stayed on the phone with the operator while they drove to our place. Right after I called them he started to come out of it, and I wondered whether we would need them after all. But he was still out of it even though the twitching stopped.

About 5 mins before they arrived his face started twitching again and he vomited again. Then his breathing slowed down and we were trying to get him to respond to us. He couldn’t. And then he started getting this glassy look in his eyes, and he started staring past us and I thought to myself “holy shit, we’re losing him.” It was the most scared I’ve ever been. Don’t go. Please don’t go.

The paramedics got there and he was settled down a bit and perked up. They took him to the hospital and he and my wife spent the night at the hospital just to be sure. The next day he was back to his normal cheerful self, running around, bugging his sister, obsessed with Lego.

But I sort of walked around yesterday on the verge of tears. Thinking to myself how close I had come to losing my boy, at least I thought I had.

And then with events in the world being what they are I thought about all of the other parents in the world who have come close to losing their kids, and all of those who have lost them, and continue to lose them to American and Israeli bombs. I couldn’t help but think of all the videos that are filling up my feed about all the kids who are killed and all the parents who are mourning the loss. It made me unbelievably sad and heavy.

But then I had to go lecture about Type I and Type II errors. And it all felt so pointless. Everything these days kind of does. I meet with students. I’ve got to audit my drug safe next week. My rats will be nearly old enough to start the experiment soon. I’ve got to read those protocols for that ethics meeting next week. I write papers. I put together my materials for my application for promotion to Associate Professor. Trying to make a compelling case for sustained outstanding competence. I send emails. Would you consider being a referee for my application? I think that our shared research interests will position you well to comment on my research career. I finish writing a chapter. Just a few more finishing touches here. Then I need to write an abstract. These results show that recording LFPs in awake, behaving animals provides a powerful method to uncover the neural circuitry involved in cognition-motivation interactions.

Who actually cares? Does any of this matter when a few days ago the oil embargo in Cuba meant that the power in the hospital was cut overnight and everyone on a ventilator died? Or that the hospital workers have to pump ventilators by hand to keep newborn babies from dying? Here I am going about my life while thousands of lives are ended all over the world.

I want to scream. I want to do something, anything. I want to go and try to blow up or set fire to a weapons manufacturing plant somewhere. I thought for a second on my way to work about whether setting myself on fire would actually accomplish anything. I wasn’t seriously considering it but I wondered about how it might be covered in the news, whether it would move the dial at all in terms of any kind of reaction or political impact. Whether it would press the government to take a different position on the Iran aggression. Or the Palestinian genocide.

Otago academic self-immolates.

Who cares?

Dozens of people are killed each day, much of it is live streamed for us to see. But these people are brown. They are Muslims. They are members of a terrorist regime. They are enemies of Christians everywhere.

There’s a terrible feeling in my gut when I am forced to just live my life normally when that very life enables the suffering and death of so many others. This is the reality of living in the imperial core. It feels hopeless. Every day, more bombs. More death. More of the worst people in the world lying on camera, spending more money on bombs and killing. And no one does anything to stop it. Can anyone do anything to stop it? I feel numb all of the time.

A Type I error is when you reject the null hypothesis when it is true. A Type II error is when you retain the null hypothesis when it is false.

Who cares? None of it matters right now.

What matters is my kids. My boy. When I saw that glassy stare I realized that that is what matters. And it kills me that so many people are having to look at their loved ones who look back at them with that glassy stare. And then they are gone. Or they don’t even have the closure of seeing that last moment because their loved ones are ripped apart by bombs or buried under rubble or collapsed apartment buildings.

I’m trying to become more involved in things that matter. I’m reaching out to organizations and trying to find ways to do things that actually work to fight imperialism here in my own country. In my own neighborhood. But it feels pointless when the bombs are falling and the children are dying. I know it’s not, but it’s how I feel.

So I write this as a way of processing stuff. I put it out there in hopes it might help some others feel less alone in this shit-show of a world. I wonder if my boy will have another seizure tonight. I wonder whether the US will invade Kharg Island this weekend. Or Cuba. How many parents will look into their child’s eyes for the last time tonight? Or tomorrow. Or the next day.

I have a mid-term test next week on Thursday. I’m lecturing about t-tests on Monday.

In Orson Scott Card’s 1985 sci-fi novel Ender’s Game (major spoilers follow), humanity finds itself at a loss as to how to beat a race of aliens that think and act like insects (nicknamed buggers). The buggers behave and act according to a hive-mind mentality. Behavior is dictated by the queen and all members of the species act in the interest of the species as a whole, thinking nothing of their individual lives.

The issue for humanity is that the buggers are vastly more scientifically and technologically advanced than the people of earth. This and their ability to think and act as a unit gives them a significant military advantage over humans, who are selfish and experience communication breakdowns during battle, leading to losses and strategic mistakes. At the beginning of the book, the humans have repelled two bugger invasions, but are worried that they will be unable to repel a third and have therefore set up a space military training school, which recruits and trains promising students. Ender Wiggin is recruited based on a preliminary analysis of his psychological profile.

The book follows Ender through his training at battle school, where he learns rapidly and quickly becomes the best student, being given command of increasingly more and more advanced and challenging missions and larger teams in the battle simulators. Ender eventually graduates from one-on-one battles to large-scale simulations of entire star fleets and spacecraft battles against the buggers, culminating in a final scenario where he commands the entire human fleet in a final showdown in which he abandons many of his ships and sacrifices countless small fighters to pursue the single-minded goal of winning at all costs in such a way that the buggers can never win again. This final victory is achieved when Ender annihilates the bugger’s home planet, wiping out the entire species.

His celebration turns to horror when he realizes that the simulation was actually not a game, but a real battle and that he has in fact, committed xenocide. His superiors have been lying to him, and all of the major star fleet simulations have been real battles, battles in which he has callously sacrificed the lives of millions pursuing victory at all costs. His superiors explain that had he known the true nature of the war games, he wouldn’t have behaved the way he needed to to win. The natural human empathy he displayed in identifying with and trying to understand the buggers had been turned against them and his lack of real-life experience with war and conflict had made him reckless in a way that no experienced veteran could have been.

"Of course we tricked you into it. That's the whole point… It had to be a trick or you couldn't have done it. It's the bind we were in. We had to have a commander with so much empathy that he would think like the buggers, understand them and anticipate them. So much compassion that he could win the love of his underlings and work with them like a perfect machine, as perfect as the buggers. But somebody with that much compassion could never be the killer we needed. Could never go into battle willing to win at all costs. If you knew, you couldn't do it. If you were the kind of person who would do it even if you knew, you could never have understood the buggers well enough."

"And it had to be a child, Ender… Any decent person who knows what warfare is can never go into battle with a whole heart. But you didn't know. We made sure you didn't know. You were reckless and brilliant and young. It's what you were born for."

Subscribe now

Share

I couldn’t help thinking about Ender’s Game over the past couple of days when I thought about a post that came across my feed detailing the horrific new levels of technical sophistication that companies like Palantir are bringing to the battlefield.

The video from the post is from a conference hosted by Palantir last week in Kent Island, Maryland. The conference, AIPCon 9, was a platform for the tech company to showcase how their new generation of software and AI can revolutionize everything from war to mortgage management to healthcare to energy. CEO Alex Karp’s opening remarks stated that the company was

built to give our warfighters and people supporting warfighters all over the US government and allied governments what we politely now say an unfair advantage… and whatever side you’re, whatever your beliefs, those people on the battlefield are the reason every business in this country gets away with winning abroad.

Here Karp says the quiet part out loud. The reason for US economic and corporate hegemony is US military hegemony. Without the ability to force open and stabilize global markets, US influence would not be what it is. Karp makes clear that the conference and the future of what Palantir does as a company is to demonstrate how tech that was developed with the battlefield and military in mind can be deployed commercially to add value to any number of business cases. He stresses that historically much of the commercial sector was developed first for the military before being made publicly available. His vision for Palantir is to follow that recipe.

Karp suggests that the logic of the battlefield applies to any number of business cases, and that viewing problems through this lens reveals the opportunities to translate battlefield software solutions—increasingly harnessing the power of AI—to commercial and business problems. His ethos is summarized in his 2 February letter to his shareholders which is posted on the conference website

Our collective temptation to cast our antagonists, geopolitical and otherwise, as narrow caricatures, refusing to acknowledge their strengths and advantages, will only diminish our ability to prevail over them in the long term.

A maniacal obsession with one’s own virtuousness, and the insidiousness of one’s enemies, can indeed be blinding.

In an interview last year, the dean of postwar comedy Lorne Michaels suggested to Maureen Dowd that the most effective and withering caricatures of seemingly distasteful personalities are the ones that find “a drop of humanity” in them.

The same could be said of skirmishes and antagonisms in business and indeed on the world stage.

A degree of humility, and finding that drop of humanity in one’s opponent, can be a lethal advantage.

Thus, Karp views his company’s role as being to frame all social and business relations in terms of battlefield logic and to deploy AI to learn about and ruthlessly exploit the weaknesses of perceived enemies, either in war or business, to destroy them and add value and profit to his company and to those that invest in it or use its tech applications in their own businesses.

Share Free Market Moralism

In Ender’s Game, Ender’s superiors exploit his empathy for and understanding of the alien species in order to destroy them while ensuring Ender keeps a safe psychological distance away from the actual acts of killing so he is able to be as ruthless and calculating as he needs to be. What they have done is to harness the beneficial aspects of Ender’s humanity without subjecting him to the moral quandary of the weight of responsibility for the life and death of others. They have utilized his superior facility for problem solving in the service of what appears to him as an amoral objective—there is nothing morally problematic about succeeding in a war game simulation—notwithstanding the actual consequences being of the gravest moral import. The result is the elimination of an entire species through what appears to Ender as little more than a technocratic exercise.

As is clear to Ender’s superiors and to Karp from his opening remarks, understanding an enemy requires empathizing with them to some degree. You have to understand why they do the things they do in order to predict what they will do next. You have to study them, to learn from them, in some ways to identify with them.

But identifying too much with our enemies is also dangerous because then we might not be as willing to kill as we need to be to satisfy the needs of our superiors. There must be a degree of separation between the one killing and the one being killed.

The modern “warfighter”, as Palantir calls them, is left with a conundrum. That is, how do they understand their enemies in their human condition and learn from them in order to kill them while detaching themselves from the act of killing in order to be most efficient?

Watching the showcase of Palantir’s targeting software Maven at AIPCon 9 demonstrated the way that the modern military attempts to deal with both of these problems. Developed over 7 years, the software is a terrifying fusion of big data processing and visualization with AI decision making. In the video, Cameron Stanley, Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer at the US Department of War, calmly explains the problems and attempted solutions that Palantir went through to deliver the project. The biggest problem was how to aggregate the data that people needed in the way that they needed it and then facilitate decision making at the scale and speed needed in modern warfare.

This discussion is dry and corporate, but serves as a crucial pretext for the demonstration that begins at about 6:30 into the video. Stanley informs the crowd that Maven is being deployed across the entire Department of War and then goes through a simulation that begins with high-resolution satellite images and ends with an explosion and a confirmed closure of a “kill chain.”

Share

There are two things that are immediately clear from the video. First, any moral evaluation that might modulate strategy here is totally removed. This is simply a computer exercise. The human element of learning about and understanding has been replaced by satellite feeds, images, and data visualization. The decision making has been outsourced to AI, while still allowing some human input into strategic priorities. It very much looks and feels like a video game. Even the required click sequence—Left click right click left click—to get from the visualization to the targeting workflow smacks of the old Nintendo cheat codes. In those old Konami games, you could use the cheat code to begin the game with 30 lives. Now the kill code on the Palantir game can be used to end at least that many. In both cases, time is of the essence. The cheat code had to be entered once you saw the title screen begin to scroll in from the right. Up up down down left right left right B A start. The kill code has to be entered once you want to “move from a detection into a targeting workflow”. And once AI selects the target and lets the missile fly, you can’t hold off if a friendly or non-combatant wanders into the picture.

So Maven solves the problem of identifying and learning about your enemy through the application of big data and AI while completely removing the empathetic and moral human qualities from the process, while the whole interface serves the function of detaching those making the kill decisions from those being killed. The whole process has been abstracted into a technocratic exercise where the final priority is to destroy infrastructure or kill people, yet the end result feels like little more than a blip on a screen, far removed from the people blown to bits by the bombs deployed with the click of a button. For a generation brought up on combat video games, this will feel no different.

Of course, technocrats have been killing people for a long time, this is only the latest, most explicit example. Historically, technocratic fixes have been sought when the needs and interests of the proletariat have conflicted with those of the ruling class. When material and political desires differ, the solution is to impose class rule by means of “apolitical” decisions made by an intellectual elite. We can see this in the invention of austerity, which served to crush militant workers and prop up the capitalist order in the wake of the economic and political crisis that followed the First World War. It did so by establishing politically-independent bodies to control monetary policy, always with the result that assets and wealth were transferred upwards. Similar domestic and international technocratic regimes have enforced class rule during the last 50 years of the neoliberal era, holding neoclassical economic dogma as common sense and prying open markets in developing countries or privatizing public goods, all under the guise of expert advice or opinion. The result has been widespread misery and death which continues to accelerate as capitalism cannibalizes the social and material supports it needs to sustain itself, left with no choice but to expand via imperialism and wars.

Which brings us back to Palantir. This is a company that seems uniquely focused on transforming the worst aspects of domination and destruction by the ruling class into detached technocratic exercises ready to be completed by someone with even the most rudimentary training. In the limit, it’s not difficult to see the human decision-making element being removed from the equation altogether, and Karp’s intimation that Palantir is already involved in more applications that aren’t in the public space strongly suggests that we have only begun to see the many ways that AI can be applied to any number of domestic and international projects, at great cost to the lives and livelihoods of people throughout the world, but predominantly those in the imperial periphery who resist US hegemony. The fact that Palantir’s software and AI decision making is already used extensively by Israel in its ongoing genocide of Palestinians and its use by ICE in the US during its anti-immigration raids is proof enough of the destruction and death the company enables, all with the click of a button. While greatly overused and often used in the service of propping up liberalism and demonizing communism—as is most of her work—Hannah Arendt’s quote regarding the “banality of evil” absolutely applies here. This is a company that desires to reduce the killing of unknown numbers of people, anyone the US government designates an enemy, to a simple, boring technocratic exercise. The damage, both targeted and collateral, will be catastrophic.

Subscribe now

In the 1983 movie War Games, military intelligence and commanders at NORAD decide to outsource the human component of decision making to a computer (Joshua) in the event of a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. Having experienced the reticence of human actors to press the button in a military exercise, they decide not to take that chance in the case of an actual nuclear emergency. Joshua has been programmed to win the game of nuclear war and conducts a series of simulations which lead the military to confuse simulated with real nuclear threats and raise the alert level. Having been given control of the nuclear launch, Joshua prepares to launch real nuclear weapons in response to the simulated threats. In a desperate last attempt to stop the launch, programmers have Joshua play tic-tac-toe against itself, where it learns that there is no winning strategy. After this, Joshua conducts a rapid series of simulations of nuclear war where regardless of the moves by the US and the Soviet Union, the result is the destruction of the entire planet. Having learned that no winner is possible in global thermonuclear war, Joshua shuts down the launch, stating that nuclear war is “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”

Humanity stands on the brink of a precipice. The fusion of for-profit tech companies with the imperialist military industrial complex has resulted in a state of perpetual war and that war is being waged with unprecedented barbarity. The outsourcing of any moral decision-making to AI and the streamlining of life-and-death decisions to a simple technocratic exercise has led to a new reality where death is dispassionately dealt at a scale and with a callousness that can rapidly escalate like never before. As evidenced by Alex Karp’s remarks at AIPCon 9, those responsible for these tech innovations and widescale carnage are “proud” of what they’ve accomplished. In the name of chasing value and profits, they’ve equipped the imperialist juggernaut on a scale and with a lethality that is staggering and terrifying.

And yet, try as they might, they cannot remove the human element completely. Even AIs need to be trained up on data that has been generated by humans. Bombs and missiles need to be loaded into planes and drones by people. For all its sophistication, Palantir’s project and the war machine it supports still runs on the labor of people. And what runs on the labor of people can be brought to a standstill by those same people.

Ironically, what Palantir has attempted to strip out of the technocratic process provides the leverage to bring down the whole enterprise. This is the natural empathy and identification with others that is part of being human. This is not some appeal to better angels or some abstract notion of humanity, but rather a material analysis of the social system that Palantir and all other such corporations are built on and subscribe to. Capitalism is built on a fundamental separation of humans from the product of their labor. While this sounds clinical and abstract, it is anything but. The ability of humans to work and transform the world around them is an essential part of what it means to be human. The conscious decisions and freedom to make them in the course of our labor and to dictate how the product of our labor is used is, according to Marx, what constitutes our “species-being” or the essence of being human. In the world envisioned by Palantir and other tech giants, humans are reduced to being a cog in a production machine or replaced altogether. They have no creative input and do not dictate how the product of their labor is used. Thus, in a very real way, capitalism and the social relations it produces, alienate us from the very thing that makes us human.

Everyone who lives in modern capitalist society understands this to some degree, but we’re so steeped in the conventions and routines of life under late-stage capitalism that many can’t quite put their finger on it. Helping others understand and realize this is a crucial goal of organization and education. We strive for more than just a more democratic and equal distribution of resources that have been expropriated from the periphery within the imperial core. We strive for nothing less than the overturning of the system that strips us of our humanity. This is a system that feeds on the lives and bodies of the people that Palantir targets and kills. The expression of capitalist alienation finds its most forceful and apocalyptic manifestation in the technocratic ease with which entire families and bloodlines are erased. If this is a game, as envisioned by Karp and those at Palantir, it is a hellish one. This is a game with no winners. As evidenced by the continual resistance to imperialism which, phoenix-like, rises from the ashes and blood of the victims of the missiles and bombs, any victory by empire is only temporary.

In the face of technological capability that all but assures ongoing mutual destruction and death, there are only two realistic scenarios. Either we keep killing one another until no one is left, or we overthrow the social and economic order that produces the very alienation that results in and propagates the violence. In other words, we all lose, or we stop playing the game.

Iranians have been under an unprovoked imperial assault from the US and Israel for over a week now. Those of you who read my stuff know my position on the matter. My goal here is not to discuss why I think that the only correct moral and political line is unyielding anti-imperialism. There are lots of pieces making that argument and I don’t think I can add much of substance to these arguments.

What I want to try to do is to examine reasons for another phenomenon that has become apparent in the leadup to the US/Israeli aggression and that has been amplified—at least by my algorithms—since the bombing started. This would be the dancing Iranian diasporans. You’ve seen these videos, Iranian people who don’t live in Iran dancing with monarchist, Israeli, or American flags as a way of showing just how happy they are that their country is being liberated by Israeli and American bombs.

There are also plenty of videos of angry Iranians scolding leftists and activists who dare to show solidarity with Iran over being carpet bombed by Western imperialists. How dare they? Do they not care about real Iranian voices? How can people who have never lived in Iran and suffered under the brutality of the theocratic regime even understand what it is like? We in the West have no idea how bad things have to be in order to cause someone to pray for American bombs. Similar conversations are occurring regarding Cuba and Venezuela, with the most glaring example being María Corina Machado, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for continually calling for the US to bomb her country over the years, only to be kicked aside by Trump and dismissed as a possible leader after his kidnapping of Maduro at the beginning of the year.

One response to this line of thinking is to say that these people are just buying into American propaganda. After all, the mainstream media feeds a constant narrative of American exceptionalism and the abject and self-evident evil of countries that the US sanctions or is at war or hoping to go to war with. So Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, North Korea, China, and others are de-facto portrayed as criminal enterprises, socialist or communist or theocratic regime hellscapes. Demonized wholesale.

Subscribe now

Share

So on the one hand, the country stands in as a monolithic idea of everything bad and threatening about an enemy of the US. But on the other, as demonstrated by the dancing diasporans and those who demand we “listen to the people”, certain individuals are given credibility as authentic and authoritative voices from the country. These “voices of the people” are then juxtaposed with the position of “the regime” to convince us that the “real” Iranians are against the regime and that if we would only listen to these real Iranians we would understand why all the real Iranians are celebrating being carpet bombed. Of course, all of the videos of dancing diasporans are shown by Western media, while the millions of people who mourned the Ayatollah’s death and the deaths of the schoolgirls killed in a double-tap strike are not shown. And if they are shown or acknowledged, we are told we can be sure that there are many millions more Iranians who are celebrating the American bombs in the privacy of their homes, afraid to do so openly because of the regime that killed tens of thousands of their own people last month.

I suggest that this conflicted stance on the issue, taken predominantly by Western commentators and members of the Iranian diaspora, reflects the convergence of two ideological pillars of modern society: capitalist individualism and liberal idealism. Both of these ideologies, while being held up as the paragon of recognition of the rights and dignity of all humanity, in reality constitute a double erasure of people whose rights and dignity are most at risk or actively being violated. The most visible current victims of this erasure are the Iranian people inside the country who are in support of their country’s resistance to US imperialism.

Capitalist individualism

Capitalist individualism is the idea that we are all just independent economic agents who seek to maximize our own benefits. This idea is ubiquitous in society. It is codified in our economics. This individualism emerged historically along theological developments that said that individuals had to pay for their own sins (I’ve written at length about this theological shift here). Before that, the sin of humanity was considered as a total debt that needed to be paid to God, but Protestant theology said that Jesus paid not only the price for all of our sins collectively, but individually, so people started to consider themselves apart from their social relations for really the first time in history.

It is also not surprising that these changes in theology were accompanied by development of the capitalist mode of production. This mode of production, among other things, led to the majority of the public being forced into wage labor to survive and workers being separated from the product of their labor, paid only enough to sustain their own lives while the rest of their labor generated profit for the capitalists. The end result of the labor process, the commodity, hid the social process—the labor—that went into it.

As capitalists and rent-seekers expanded into more and more areas of our lives, more and more things became just another means to turn a profit. Thus, more and more of our lives became commodified. This was ramped up into overdrive during the last 50 years of the neoliberal era where anything that differentiates us from others is turned into a marketable asset or something to be commodified and profited from. In our struggle to differentiate ourselves from others, to cultivate our own unique brand in order to accumulate more money or social capital, we unwillingly or willingly commodify our identities.

Share Free Market Moralism

This commodification of our identity has led to the current quagmire of liberal identity politics. Anything that differentiates us from others, any intersectional identity, is held up as proof that our lived experience of oppression is totally different and not understandable to anyone who does not share our particular constellation of identities. If you are a man, you can’t possibly understand the struggles of a woman. If you are a white woman, you can’t possibly understand the struggles of a black woman. If you are a black straight woman, you can’t possibly understand the struggles of a black LGBTQ woman. If you are a black LGBTQ neurotypical woman, you can’t possibly understand the struggles of a black LGBTQ woman with ADHD…

These identities can be amplified ad finitum. In many ways, our society encourages this type of differentiation, as we have to demonstrate what our individual contribution will bring to a given situation—what value will you add to this company? To be clear, this is not a diatribe against wokeness, and it is absolutely true that different identities lead to different experiences of deprivation and suffering under capitalism. But as should be obvious, the end result of this obsession with identity is that solidarity becomes impossible. So capitalist individualism, rather than providing us with the opportunity to realize and be our best selves—a realization that can only come as we work out our selves in relation with others—cuts us off from meaningful social relationships. The only thing that is left is a black hole of ever-increasing differentiation. In this, however, the unique and individual combination of our identities is lost and we become a tick mark on a list depending on which identity is required. The sum total of our identities, and so the whole individual, which can only be understood in reference to our social relations, disappears, or, we might say, is erased. We are so invested in rejecting similar identities, in differentiating ourselves from those around us, that we, like same-charged atomic particles, repel one another in perpetuity. At best we can coalesce around a shared identity for a while, but soon enough, we feel the urge to differentiate ourselves further.

This is not merely a conscious choice on our part or an indication of selfishness. The capitalist system selects and chooses which identities will generate social capital and the identities that are fit for purpose change as the needs of the system requires. The system provides the imperative to amplify certain identities over others. And only certain combinations will do. This is why in the current imperialist moment only the dancing diasporans are acceptable, while those mourning the Ayatollah are not. Only the Western Iranians are acceptable, with their botoxed lips and shiny hair and short skirts, while those in the full burka are unacceptable and victims of a totalitarian theocracy. Only those cheering for the bombs are acceptable, while those ripped apart by them or smothered by noxious clouds or poisoned rain are hidden behind the dancing smiles. Thus, identities that correspond to the Western imperialist narrative of liberation of the oppressed and repressed Iranian people—particularly women—are selected and amplified, erasing the millions of Iranians who stand for the revolution and against US imperialism.

Liberal idealism

If capitalist idealism constitutes one method of erasure, liberal idealism is the other. Liberal idealism here refers to the abstraction of real lives and material conditions behind the lofty rhetoric of freedom, democracy, human rights on the one hand and totalitarianism, theocracy, terrorist state, etc… on the other. Both of these strategies have the effect of flattening the real lives and livelihoods of people into faceless mirrors that reflect whatever the observer already believes. This is the way that societies differentiate between “us” and “them”. The abstractions serve a useful purpose because they can be molded to fit whatever definitions are most useful to the state at a given time. For this reason the amorphous nonspecificity of liberal ideals are a feature, not a bug. Most in the West will have been conditioned to believe that the ideal social order is a liberal democratic capitalist one. Only this order can provide humans with freedom. Everything else is unacceptable or is only a transitory phase in the eventual adoption of democracy. It is simply unthinkable that given the choice, everyone would not adopt a liberal, Western-style democracy. Whether or not a given democracy actually upholds the ideals of freedom and liberty is beside the point. The ideal is what is important.

Negative ideals are just as powerful. In the case of the current situation in Iran, Westerners, having spent at least the last almost 50 years being told about how Iran was evil and an enemy to the West and repressed and brutalized its own citizens—particularly women—and was trying to develop a nuclear weapon so it could kill all Americans, have a hard-to-shake idealized version of Iranians in mind already. This no doubt is why even the most well-intentioned critics of the current US imperial aggression often feel the need to caveat their condemnation of the bombings with a criticism of the Iranian government. To be clear, the Iranian state, like any other state, is not above criticism, but the criticism must not succumb to liberal idealism. Critiques often focus on human rights issues that are amplified by imperial propaganda while failing to acknowledge the positive aspects of the revolution. Conditions of instability and deprivation are blamed on the government rather than the imperial sanctions and blockades. The imbalanced use of the word “regime” to refer to the Iranian government while never being used to refer to any government in the West is a prime example of the type of abstraction I’m referring to here.

This type of idealism, then, has a twofold erasing effect. On the one hand the image of an oppressed people struggling to free themselves from a totalitarian regime evokes both the democratic ideals of freedom and liberty and so automatically privileges the Iranian diasporan voices that are amplifying the imperialist propaganda. On the other this framing excludes voices that are supportive of the Iranian state’s resistance to imperial aggression, demonizing them as anti-American, extremist, or communist. The overall effect is to erase the voices of Iranians inside the country that are rejecting US imperialism.

Share

Beyond the reflection

The historical trajectory of Iran, particularly since the beginning of the 20th century, has followed two major trends. First, when the Iranian government is favorable to Western corporate interests, the West supports them. This is regardless of the government’s record on human rights. When the Iranian government threatens Western corporate interests, the West does not support them (and overthrew their government). This lack of support is often framed in the language of being concerned with human rights or democracy. But the lack of concern for human rights that the US actually has is evident in them turning a blind eye to even the grossest human rights violations, state repression and violence, or lack of liberal democracy in countries with which they have a cozy corporate relationship.

This admittedly cursory material analysis should at least help us move past any of the liberal idealism that is currently being applied to the situation. History teaches us that the primary reason that the US engages in foreign policy and imperialist aggression is to protect its corporate interests. This fact must be the underlying truth behind all analyses of the US’s actions in the world. We cannot get sucked into the talk of liberation, freedom, democracy, and human rights. We cannot buy into and amplify the propaganda about totalitarian and repressive regimes that gives imperialists license to kill. The time for criticizing the government of a country under imperialist assault is not when the bombs are falling. Treating American bombs as an act of liberation flies in the face of every single historical example. American imperialists care nothing for the lives of the people in the countries they bomb. They care only for the markets and resources. Of this we can be absolutely sure. Centuries of evidence and hundreds of millions of lives testify. Life will not get better for Iranians under a dictatorship of American capital.

For these reasons we must reject and push back against the imperial propaganda that is being fed to us. That is erasing Iranians. We should realize that the identity markers of the people whose voices are being amplified by the Western media have been selected by a capitalist machine that cares only for reproducing itself through imperialism. These dancing diasporans do not speak for the majority of Iranians, and their calls for more bombs should be treated with the contempt they deserve. Supporting the proletariat of Iran right now means amplifying anti-imperialist voices and fighting against imperialism and its supports in our own countries. We must look beyond the reflection of liberal idealism into the faces of the people behind the platitudes and abstractions. We must amplify their voices. And we must support their continuing revolution.

Rally today. Hands off Iran. Hands off Palestine. Scoop shake sip. Electro-lites made easy. Life’s better hydrated. A woman was hung up with iron chains. You’ve listened to what Iranian voices for freedom have to say. Now show your support. 15% off student dental discount. She ripped my uniform and screamed “You’re nothing!” in a packed luxury restaurant. The evidence is mounting that the United States is outright lying about losses inflicted by Iran’s mostly low-tech drone warfare. Long lasting lubrication for dry and irritated eyes. The B-2 paid a visit to Tehran last night. This is not a bomber. It is a key. The Iran war is America’s answer to nearly half a century of hostility from the Islamic Republic. The hot cross buns you’ve been waiting for… Keir Starmer accused of mimicking Trump with Middle East crisis TikTok post. Winning is back. America is back. And we’re just getting started. Bale wrap for NZ farms. Nihal, Child of the Moon: How she lives with extreme UV sensitivity. Which sane shipowner would put his vessel in harm’s way by sailing through the Strait of Hormuz? Calling all Pokémon collectors! Hobbycon Auckland. The year is 2001, you’re a US American citizen and cannot believe the dumbest man in the world is taking you to war in the Middle East. Hey, I don’t like it when you ignore me. I need your full attention. Connect with the New Zealand College of Business. The Israeli government may wish to hide the extent of damage their cities have sustained as a result of Iranian strikes… We are grateful to be hosting the White Elephant stall at the Macandrew Bay School Fair 2026. Shabbat e Bahar: A night of light and return. Twirl-worthy pasta. US citizens are trapped in the Middle East with no clear information and no way out. Iranians come to Israeli consulate in Toronto to say thank you to Israel. Think Merino—but warmer, softer, tougher. Biden’s policies drove oil to $135pb and he Dems, and the mainstream media blamed Putin. As seen on Seven Sharp and Stuff our mushroom grow kits are fast, easy, and delicious. I’m sure this will really bring grocery prices down. There’s a critical shortage of Ayatollahs in Iran. They’re going to need to tap into their strategic ayatollah reserve pretty soon. Want to dine out more in Otago? Vote them out New Zealand. President Trump is making Memphis safe again. Cracking open an amethyst geode to reveal millions of years of hidden beauty. National sinks to 28% in coming Taxpayers Union Curia poll. Iran posts clips of video games claiming it’s them shooting down our shit. The most creative role play I’ve experienced as a manager of a legal brothel. I cut off my best friend for cheating on her husband. Forget stressing while you’re dressing. Goddam this president sucks ass. I mean Happy Birthday. I’m Muslim, of course I’m Zionist. Girl’s are always like, I showered and shaved and got everything prepped… Be in to win flights to Aussie. I’m amazed how many armchair experts have suddenly discovered submarines this week. Mass stranding of whales on Scottish beach caused by loyalty to their pod, report finds. I can’t believe I was in Iran a year ago, blissfully unaware what would happen next. Innocent face but what about the body? Ditch sweaty shoes. POV: Your girl almost caught you. If National MPs want to roll Luxon, there is one big hurdle in the way. Ilhan, just for your information we Iranians don’t give a shit about Ramadan. Reality TV show where 20 intensely transphobic women are put in a house together and told one of them is trans. I truly feel fucking sorry for guys that have never received head roll. If you send video of destruction in Dubai you could be fined $30k. This generation is cooked chat… Friday’s here, responsibility can wait. Lung cancer may be difficult to recognize in its early stages. Planting onions in 100 egg cartons along my fence line. Big win for American workers and consumers. Hurry up I can literally see someone behind the other side of the car. Study like top physicians. Find your A players. A one star review for an LDS temple or meeting house. How does the owner address this? Of course it’s in the best interest of the US for Iran to no longer be led by a radical terrorist regime that chants “Death to America.” You cannot subsidize irresponsibility and expect people to be responsible. Antizionists will demolish entire moral, intellectual, and legal systems in their quest to libel and kill Jews. Did you know the sun can destroy your pool chlorine…

Share

Subscribe now

There are certain bands that capture the feeling of a particular time in our lives perfectly. Their music seems to encapsulate our thoughts, feelings, and emotions, and project them onto a widescreen, effortlessly and completely expressing our thoughts and feelings as a whole, even as we struggle unsuccessfully to articulate and understand tiny slivers and fragments of our experience.

For me, that time was my teenage years, and that band was The Cure. The Cure’s music seemed to convey so well the changing floods of emotion that I experienced as a teenage boy. The wide-eyed amazement and giddy feeling of a girl I liked liking me back, the blissful time we spent together, and the crushing despair of that relationship unraveling.

Looking back on those years, it’s easy to see how my concerns were insubstantial, and how the events that seemed to rock the very foundation of my world have had little impact on my post-adolescent life. But there is no way to see how insubstantial it all is when you are in the thick of it. Because when you are in the middle of it, nothing else matters. And The Cure made me feel like it did matter, that my teenage joys and fears were important, and that my disappointments were legitimate and worth being disappointed about.

That’s why I loved them, and still do. Their unparalleled ability to capture and complement the entirety of life’s emotional experience has not diminished with time or age. So many bands try so hard to convey a specific type of feeling, but just end up peddling hamfisted melodrama that feels calculated and insincere. The Cure’s music is more impressionistic, painting the outlines of an emotional portrait, both lyrically and musically, with broad strokes that the listener can fill in with their own experience, can make their own. The album that demonstrates this mastery most completely, and that is the absolute zenith of their career, is their towering, undisputed masterpiece, Disintegration.

Formed in 1976 in Crawley, West Sussex, England, The Cure consists of Robert Smith (songwriter, guitarist, and vocalist) and a changing lineup of other musicians. Disintegration was the eighth studio album by the band. It was recorded on the heels of 1987s Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, their most commercially successful album to date. Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me saw the band perfecting the pop songcraft they had begun to explore more often during the mid ‘80s, and mixing it with the dark psychedelia of their earlier records. The resulting album was huge and varied, and showcased a little of everything The Cure did well. Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me turned them into worldwide stars, and the tour in support of the album sold out.

Smith, however, was uncomfortable with his band’s newly achieved popularity and fame. He feared the band would be perceived as meaningless and unenduring and began writing new music, making a conscious effort to return to the dark and funereal sound of the band’s earlier records, Seventeen Seconds, Faith, and Pornography. Smith’s deepening depression, drug use (he tried to stave off depression by self-medicating with LSD), and feelings of inadequacy and terror at growing older (he would soon turn 30 and was convinced that all great albums had been written before musicians reached that age) resulted in a record that was dark, gloomy, and despondent, as he deliberately tried to recreate the sound and feeling of his own downward spiral. Although their record label considered the album commercial suicide, Disintegration was wildly successful and critically praised upon its release in 1989 (one month after Smith turned 30), and remains the best-selling album of The Cure’s career.

Following twenty five seconds of tinkling wind chimes, album opener “Plainsong” explodes outward with what sounds like a shattering chandelier into gorgeous, oceanic synth washes and cavernous drums. A minute later, an elegiac, guitar line traces itself over the synth and drums before the arrival of Smith’s gentle, mournful vocals “’I think it’s dark and it looks like rain’ you said/ ‘And the wind is blowing like it’s the end of the world’ you said/ ‘And it’s so cold it’s like the cold if you were dead’/ And you smiled for a second/ ‘I think I’m old and I’m feeling in pain’ you said/ ‘And it’s all running out like it’s the end of the world’ you said/ ‘And it’s so cold it’s like the cold if you were dead’/ And then you smiled for a second/ Sometimes you make me feel like I’m living at the edge of the world/ ‘It’s just the way I smile’ you said.” It’s epic, cinematic, and cathartic in a way that few songs are, and feels like watching the birth, death, and rebirth of the world in slow motion.

“Plainsong” perfectly illustrates what The Cure excel at throughout Disintegration, blurring the lines between near crushing despair and bleakness, and transcendent, inspiring, and uplifting beauty and hope. Most of the songs consist of long intros which paint a musical tapestry from layers of atmospheric synths and organs, heavily reverbed and fluid guitars, and simple bass lines and drums into which Smith weaves abstract, but poignant lyrics, his unmistakable voice moving from mournful resignation and regret (“Pictures Of You”) to quiet devotion (“Lovesong”) to whispered terror (“Lullaby”) to snarling indignation (“Disintegration”). He absolutely gives his all here, inhabiting the songs so completely that it is impossible not to feel what he is feeling. Smith has admitted in interviews that his emotions were so close to the surface that at times he would break down and weep during the recording. Listening to these moments is incredibly moving as he wrings himself out in sobbing, yearning desperation.

Yet even amid the bleakness, there’s peace and calm. After the despair and self-loathing of “Prayers For Rain” with Smith spitting imagery of being shattered and fractured, suffocation, and hopelessness, respite comes with “Same Deep Water As You”. Here, Smith and the band capitalize on the feeling of sinking and drowning produced by “Prayers For Rain”, but instead of pushing us further under, with its recorded thunderstorms, slow, insistent drumming, plaintive guitar figure, and eerie synths, the song moves us past the violence of drowning to the calm, resigned moment when we no longer struggle for air, but slip away, peaceful and serene.

Smith wisely tempers the more dark, somber numbers with relatively more upbeat songs. Chief among these is “Lovesong” which most have probably heard via Adele’s overwrought lounge interpretation (and let’s not even mention 311’s abomination of a cover). Dedicated to his wife, the song contains some of Smith’s most transparent, tender lyrics (“I will always love you”) as cheerful organ, strident drums, and sparkling guitars twirl around him. “Lullaby” uses insistent stabs of guitar, staccato drums, and anxious synths and strings to tell the tale of Smith being swallowed alive by some nightmarish spider man. “Fascination Street” takes a sinister baseline and gloriously rides it as far as it can go, Smith singing of the self-destruction and debauchery that await those who enter the titular avenue. “Pictures Of You” starts with another simple but gorgeous bass and drum line, soon joined by a beautiful guitar progression. The guitar doubles, then triples, majestically spiralling around the unchanging drums, bass, and ethereal synths, until finally Smith joins and sings a regretful, beautiful memoir of a love lost and mourned.

Then there’s “Disintegration”, the spectacular, bruising, lumbering beast of a title track. Beginning with the sound of shattering glass, it’s all forward momentum as it charges towards the inevitable climax. A galloping drumbeat underpins the song, as organs and synths swirl, Smith and Porl Thompson trading slashing guitars and delicate arpeggios amid minor-key descending piano lines and nervous keyboard jitters. Smith begins the song resigned, the intensity and mania of his vocal performance rising with each verse, until by the end he is almost screaming, his voice multitracked, warped, and distorted to match the terror of the surreal imagery he uses to portray the anguish and fury of betrayal and abandonment, “Dropping through sky through the glass of the roof through the roof of your mouth through the mouth of your eye through the eye of the needle/ It’s easier for me to get closer to heaven than ever feel whole again/ I never said I would stay to the end/ I knew I would leave you with babies and everything/ Screaming like this in the hole of sincerity/ Screaming over and over and over/ I leave you with photographs/ Pictures of trickery/ Stains on the carpet and stains on the memory/ Songs about happiness/ Murmured in dreams/ When we both of us knew/ How the end always is”. The end comes abruptly with more shattering glass and a single sustained, haunting chord.

As the final, chiming guitars of “Untitled” fade out, Smith and company have taken us on a tour de force of inspiring, shimmering peaks and crushing, bleak valleys. The juxtaposition is critical; the lowness of the valleys crucially contrasts and emphasizes the glorious heights of the peaks.

After Disintegration, Smith’s fears about turning 30 became a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. The band had one more great album in them, 1992’s Wish, but were never again able to capture what they had done so flawlessly on Disintegration. The perfect emotional and psychological storm that led to the creation of Smith’s masterpiece could not be repeated. Disintegration remains a singular achievement, a testament to the ability of a brilliant artist to turn something incredibly difficult, dark, and ugly into something deeply moving and beautiful.

This is Part 3 of the history of militant industrial labour movements in Aotearoa New Zealand. Read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

After the Maritime Strike of 1890 was smashed, unions were scattered and weak. As a result, when the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act 1894 was passed into law, this represented a bettering of unions’ position as the Act forced employers to the bargaining table. For a number of years the Act resulted in increased wages and working conditions for union members. The decisions, or awards, by the Arbitration Court were legally binding on both workers and employers, and so there was a stability to the employer/worker relationship. This, of course, favored mostly employers, who did not have to worry about the possibility of workers striking or otherwise withdrawing their labour.

When the Red Feds began to pursue an aggressive strategy of industrial unionism with the goal of unionising all workers in Aotearoa under one federation, the employers rightly saw how this would tip the balance of power away from them and towards the workers. With the weakness of the enforcement mechanisms within the Act having been made apparent following the Blackball Strike, it became clear that there was no legal recourse to quell the increasing militant socialist union fervor that had gripped the country’s workers in the years leading up to and following the formation of the Red Feds. It became more and more clear to the employers, who after the Maritime Strike had formed their own federations in an attempt to consolidate their power, that the only real option was to take on the unions directly on the industrial battlefield. They feared a real socialist revolution would be the result if the militant union movement was not crushed.

This inevitable showdown between unions and employers would culminate in two of the most violent years of strikes in the country’s history. Unlike the Maritime Strike, these strikes were characterized by explicit support for employers from a government openly hostile to industrial unions and use of military and police forces against the strikers. The result was a fundamental shift in the way that workers and unions envisioned the possibilities for revolutionary change and the methods by which it could be realised.

If the Maritime Strike constituted the crucible in which the New Zealand working class was made, the strikes of 1912 and 1913 represent a hard-learned lesson about the reality and significance of political power wielded by and on behalf of employers. This was not something that could be defeated by an industrial unionist strategy in isolation, despite the opposition to politics from the syndicalist wing of the movement. The state simply had too much power to bring to bear on the issue to be ignored. The consequences of this lesson have shaped the ground on which political battles between workers and employers are waged and the contours of the conflict to the present day.

Share

Subscribe now

Heading for a showdown

Prior to the advent of the wildfire of revolutionary industrial unionism, unions in New Zealand were mostly organised around crafts and trades. These were specialist unions designed to advocate for better wages and working conditions for skilled workers. These unions existed across the country with no real unifying organisation. The Arbitration Act further encouraged the competition and lack of solidarity across the working class by providing awards to individual unions. As has been noted, the fundamental ideological split within the Federation was whether to engage in political action or not. While many within the Red Feds had rigid and strong opinions on the matter, the executive leadership seems to have been less ideologically than practically aligned on the issue. Pat Hickey explains

Politically, we were inclined, if the truth must be told, to sit on the fence. Our policy in this connection was never very clearly defined…

It is true, of course, that most of us were members of the N.Z. Socialist Party, and that the members of that party, generally speaking, accorded us their support; but even that party we eyed with some suspicion when it came to contesting Parliamentary seats.

Political parties and politicians we frankly regarded as rather spineless organisations and individuals who were so amendable to pressure that the reforms desired could be wrung from them quite as easily as from some more definitely Labour group.1

An overlapping and equally consequential split within the working class generally was the foundational difference between craft and industrial unionism. Traditionally craft unionists had considered themselves skilled workers, while the coal miners, watersiders, and flax farmers, and others were considered unskilled workers. It was these “unskilled” workers who took most readily to industrial unionism, for they had born the brunt of the exploitation and unsafe work conditions that refused to be remedied by the Arbitration Court. Craft union members enjoyed an elevated and respected status among workers and had been quite successful in gaining accommodations under the Arbitration Act. They were therefore reluctant to join an industrial union movement with unskilled workers. The Red Feds, although varying considerably ideologically within the organisation, nevertheless agreed on certain fundamental principles

These can briefly be described as our insistence upon the failure of craft unionism; our insistence that compulsory arbitration was a crippling influence, and must be destroyed; and our general emphasising of the fact that the future of the working-class was wrapped up in themselves—that it was from them and them alone that any real advance could come.2

The reluctance of craft unionists to unite with the Federation, and their continued support for compulsory arbitration resulted in them being excoriated by the Red Feds in print and speeches around the country. The gap widened and the antagonism and animosity grew.3

It was this split between craft and industrial unionists that would be leveraged by employers and the government during the Waihi Strike of 1912.

The strike when considered in isolation would have been a minor labour dispute. The fact that over the preceding years the Red Feds had gone from strength to strength in terms of their ability to force employers to bargain and in many cases won concessions for workers greatly heightened the stakes of this particular strike. This, combined with the increasing dissatisfaction of the militant wing of the Federation with what they viewed as an executive structure and function that reinforced, rather than abandoned the supremacy of the crafts and trades union movement, made the Waihi strike a make-or-break moment.4

Reading through histories of the labour movement during this time, one is struck with the disconnect between the propaganda arm of the Federation and the more workmanlike function of the executive. This highlights a tension between revolutionary rhetoric and the practical organisation of worker power. The Federation’s executive board in their public speeches and the official paper of the Red Feds, the Maoriland Worker, were brash and loud in their support of an open class war. As Hickey recalls, “The class war was recognised as no intangible thing to be only referred to in whispers and among friends. We proclaimed it from the house-tops.”5

This class-war rhetoric resonated strongly with the exploited workers. The more militant faction associated increasingly with the American Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) who explicitly rejected political action and focused on direct action. They championed “revolutionary industrial unionism, distrusted organizations and leaders, rejected all politics, and had a profound faith in rank-and-file spontaneity.”6 This meant wildcat strikes. The executive of the Federation found themselves increasingly unable to contain the revolutionary militant fervour inspired by their rhetoric. Their unwillingness to commit to and back spontaneous strike action (though they did so on several occasions) outraged the militant faction and led increasingly to criticism and open opposition.

Although the rhetoric was of forming an industrial union, the Federation executive found themselves increasingly embroiled in local union struggles and disputes throughout the country. Many of these were successful in increasing wages and bettering conditions, but the operation of the Federation was a far cry from its revolutionary rhetoric of One Big Union and the militant faction grew increasingly dissatisfied with what they felt was craft unionism in practice if not intention.

The IWW faction found its criticisms vindicated in the aftermath of the first real industrial defeat the Federation had suffered since its founding. This defeat occurred after the Auckland General Labourer’s Union (AGLU) won concessions from the Drainage Board after a wildcat strike was backed by the Federation. The AGLU, having recently deregistered under the Arbitration Act and feeling very confident given the success of their direct action, sent a letter to the owners of “all scoria pits and quarries with new proposals for an agreement (to supersede the old award).”7

None of the employers responded to their letter. Nor did they respond to follow-up attempts. The employer’s association indicated that any employment arrangements would have to be made on an individual basis. All of the city’s contractors refused to recognise the AGLU.

The union placed the dispute in the Federation’s hands. The employer’s association was informed by the city council that by deregistering from the Arbitration Act, the union had dissolved itself as a legal entity. The ensuing conflict saw the Federation use fiery rhetoric and threats of strike action to placate the workers, but unwilling to commit to any serious disruption in practice. A new union was registered under the Arbitration Act, and quickly gained a number of members willing to work for just a small increase in wages. This, combined with political embarrassment in a failed attempt to unseat a particularly anti-union city councilor as revenge for the union’s failure, put a sizeable dent in the Federation’s reputation and further added fuel to the fire of dissension in the ranks.8 Many of the IWW called for abolishment of the executive and a reformation along explicitly IWW lines. The Wobblies (IWW enthusiasts) fanned the flames of revolution and the executive, already stretched thin by the rapid rise and popularity of the Federation, became increasingly unable to control the rank-and-file. The employers, having inflicted a major reputational wound and humiliated the Federation, circled around to finish the job.

Share Free Market Moralism

The 1912 Waihi Strike

It was in this heightened atmosphere of tension within the ranks of the Federation and the employers’ determination to crush them that the Waihi strike occurred. The strike itself came on the heels of another Red Fed victory, this time with the tramway workers of Wellington. The tramway workers had asked for the removal of a city councilman who they claimed had reported union members without cause. The City Council refused their request. The union took several strike ballots with the majority voting to strike. This action was dismissed by the press and the City Council until Pat Hickey, acting according to his recollection without official authority, issued a statement that indicated that the Federation would back the tramway worker’s union if they went on strike. The City Council still refused their requests, and the workers stepped off their trams two days later to attend a stop work meeting to discuss the situation. The members of the union voted overwhelmingly to not return to work until their demands were met. Negotiations with the City Council failed, and the combined unions declared that unless their demands were met, a general strike would occur in Wellington. The City Council capitulated.9

A few months later in May of 1912 a number of engine drivers (operators of engines that power and control the hoists that transport miners and equipment) at the Waihi gold mine formed a union and registered under the Arbitration Act. This union was separate from the miner’s union which was a member of the Federation. Though the exact circumstances around the formation of this engine-drivers’ union are unclear, there is evidence to suggest that the mining company encouraged and even engineered the formation of the union as a direct broadside against the Federation.10 The formation of this “scab” union imperiled all of the gains that had been made by the Waihi workers over the years because the Arbitration Act stipulated that any award made to a union of at least fifteen members was legally-binding on all workers in the industry represented by that union. Thus, a small breakaway union threatened the dissolution of the body that represented the majority of the workers at Waihi. The miners, recognising the threat, assembled and passed the following resolution:

That the mining companies be informed that the members of this Union have ceased work until such time as the new Engine-drivers' Union disbands, and that all engine- drivers and firemen employed on the field be compelled to become members of our Union.11

The strike was declared, followed by statements of support from other unions and protests by workers. At Reefton, miners also downed their tools, and the company locked them out. The strike committee dispatched speakers to all corners of New Zealand and even Australia, sending amongst others Pat Hickey to ask for financial contributions.

The money poured in. The strike dragged on for weeks, then months. It became clear to the employers that the old tactic of starving the strikers back to work was not going to be successful this time. There was too much solidarity.

Great, indeed, then was the chagrin of the exploiters when they found that the starvation plan was not to work, when they read week by week of the money that was flowing in in thousands of pounds from the coalminers, the waterside workers, the general laborers, and other workers of New Zealand and, despite the advice of the Labor Party and its Trades and Labor Council affiliations, from the Arbitration unions of Australia.12

Furthermore, the strikers and their families gave the authorities no reason to intervene, as they behaved themselves in a manner that “presented a record unique in strike annals for orderliness. Not a single individual had appeared before the police court on any charge whatever.”13

A fateful shift in the employers’ favour came in July, when the newly-elected Reform Government came to power and William Massey was sworn in as Prime Minister. Massey had built his successful voting base in part by campaigning to allow small farmers to purchase and own their land outright (freehold) as opposed to leasing it in perpetuity from the state (leasehold), a practice that had allowed the landed gentry to trade and speculate in land while the farmers and rural workers were blocked from this privilege and the wealth and status it afforded.14 In addition, Massey had stoked the fears of the urban and rural property holders that the success of revolutionary unionism and the socialism that often accompanied it threatened their livelihoods.15 Rural conservative patriotic citizens did not appreciate the virulent anti-militarism and criticism of Christianity that often accompanied the socialism of the urban workers. They viewed them with suspicion and hostility. As a result, Massey stoked a rural/urban split that saw a coalition of small farmers and the wealthy ones who exploited them aligned against the urban workers. Given the ambivalence of the Red Fed leadership towards politics, and the outright rejection of them by the syndicalist IWW, neither the leadership of the Federation nor the IWW wing appreciated the ramifications of the new Massey government until it was far too late.16

While specific statements from Massey are infrequent, it is clear from the actions of his government that he supported the breaking of the strike and was intent on breaking the Federationist unions. A statement attributed to him has him declaring his desire to “crush the enemies of order.” Shortly after Massey was sworn in, police commissioner John Cullen wrote to the local inspector of the Waihi region, informing him that “Information has reached here that the Waihi strikers are likely to cut up rough and resort to intimidation and lawlessness at an early date” and that precautions should be taken against such action, including if necessary mounted constables called to special duty who should “bring their revolvers and batons with them but not to display them in any way.”17 The inspector wrote back and informed him that

I have closely watched events at Waihi and up to the present time I am pleased to say not one act of lawlessness of any kind has been committed, and so far as can be judged at present there is no reason to expect anything of the kind in the immediate future… The feeling is of course somewhat intense but as long as the Mine owners do not attempt to open the mines with new hands I see no more reason to expect violence now than during the past eleven weeks.18

Despite this reassurance, over the next few weeks at least 80 police constables were sent to Waihi, a number that constituted 10% of the active police force in the country. This greatly elevated tensions, and the police routinely harassed strikers and their supporters and arrested a number of them, which led to protests in Auckland. The next couple of months were characterised by increasing harassment and persecution of the strikers by police and strikebreakers, with more arrested, accompanied by the recruitment of scab labour. The town’s women formed the vanguard of resistance to the strikebreakers and scabs, as police violence was less likely to be targeted at them than the men. Crowds of women and girls followed scabs throughout town, taunting and swearing at them, throwing eggs and stones. More than a few scuffles ensued, and hat and rosette pins were used to good effect in the close quarters.19

Things came to a head on 2 October, when the mine opened for work again using scab labour under police protection. Throughout the next month, tensions rose further as scab workers, strikebreakers, strikers, and police were involved in confrontations and clashes in the streets. In early November Commissioner Cullen arrived in Waihi. Following fighting in the streets on 11 November which saw several scabs carrying and brandishing guns, Cullen went to the union headquarters and demanded they remove their pickets for 24 hours. Later that day the scab workers and their supporters paraded down the main street of the town under police protection and sang and jeered as they passed the union hall.20

The next day a mob of scabs and strikebreakers under police guard marched towards the union hall, which was only occupied by a few strikers given the picket withdrawal ordered by Cullen the day before. The mob charged the door and somewhere in the ensuing confrontation, a shot rang out, hitting a police officer. One of the strikers, Fred Evans, was knocked down by a blow from a police baton, after which he was violently set upon by strikebreakers before being thrown, untreated and unconscious, into a police cell. He died later that day.21 The strikebreakers and scabs ransacked the hall, broke open the safe, and stole the Federation’s sensitive documents. In the ensuing days, thugs and strikebreakers accosted unionists and their families in their homes, threatening to beat them and burn their houses, with them inside, if they did not leave town. Hundreds were chased out of town by the violence.

The Waihi strike defeat was the largest loss suffered by the Federation since its formation, but it was only successful due to the collusion of the government, police, and mine owners. While most of the public in the country were aware to some extent of the ongoings at Waihi, most were unaware of the explicit role that Massey’s government had played. This role was brought to harsh and unforgiving light in a book published by the presses of the Maoriland Worker several weeks after the strike ended. The book, The Tragic Story of the Waihi Strike, co-written by Harry Holland and several members of the editorial staff of the Worker, was electrifying in its effect on the public consciousness. It was published by the thousands and widely circulated throughout the country.

The book is roughly split between retellings of the events of the strike and sworn affidavits by strikers and their families from Waihi. While it was most definitely a piece of propaganda that stressed and highlighted the righteousness of the strikers and the abject brutality and cruelty of the strikebreakers, police, and scabs, its political effect in bringing sympathy and support to the unionists and the Federation was mammoth. Harry Holland’s biographer, James Robb, argues that it “was, and remains, one of the most influential political documents published in New Zealand since Te Tiriti o Waitaingi.”22

The dramatic events at Waihi were new—and deeply shocking—to many workers in New Zealand. This was the first time in New Zealand’s history that a strike had been defeated chiefly by the actions of armed thugs, the first time such scabs had received the open and active support of the police, the first time loyal unionists had been run out of town by a mob of scabs threatening their lives, the first time a striker had been beaten to death in the course of a strike. Public indignation at the anti-union bias of the police and civic authorities… mounted as the true union-busting character of the conflict at Waihi became clear to many for the first time.23

The book also situated the strike within the larger context of the labour movement, bringing to light the social and historical context that few in the public understood. It highlighted the atrocious and dangerous working conditions of the miners, the failures of the Arbitration Court to remedy them, the callousness of the employers, the failure of the Trades and Labour Councils and the arbitrationist unions to stand in solidarity with their fellow workers, and their collusion with the employers to try to break the strike and willingness to assist in recruiting scab labour. In short, Holland left no enemy of the Federation untouched, and the political effect was devastating.24

Thus, the Federation turned an industrial rout into a political victory without precedent in the history of the labour movement. This new atmosphere of public contempt for the arbitrationist unions was likely a large contributor to many of them agreeing to participate in a conference the following January initiated by the Federation in order to consider a strategy for unifying all unions under one organisation. The Federation leadership recognised the political power the state had exercised in breaking the strike, but more important for the overall defeat they felt was the lack of unity of the workers to stand in solidarity with the miners at Waihi. For the first time, the significance of both industrial solidarity and working-class political action began to be impressed on the minds of the Federation.

Share

The 1913 Great Strike

The leaders of the unions met together in a conference in January 1913 to hammer out conditions on which they could agree to a unified labour federation. The conference was volatile, with strong opinions and personalities clashing on the appropriate character of the union organisation, with the Red Feds stressing the importance of an industrial organisation. Also addressed was the importance of some form of political action. Although the crafts and trades unions differed considerably in their opinions from the Federationists, the desire for unity was strong after the defeat at Waihi and the public evisceration the arbitrationist unions had undergone in the aftermath of the strike. Tentative terms of unity were agreed upon, and the conference adjourned after about six days of discussion and debate. A further conference was arranged for July, where the final organisation and inauguration of a single United Federation of Labour, patterned closely on the IWW, would take place, and a Social Democratic political party would also be formed.25

The July conference brought together over 400 delegates, representing over 50,000 workers and 250 unions. The proceedings of the conference resulted in a single industrial union, the United Federation of Labour, to be formed. The goal of the organisation was to eventually become “progressively transformed from a federation of craft and industrial unions into one big industrial union.”26 In addition, a Social Democratic Party was formed to represent the political interests of the workers. While this conference represented a watershed moment in New Zealand labour history, the particular character of the organisation and political party was rather unformed and fluid due to the differences of opinion that prevailed within the different segments of the labour movement. Even so, this represented a true attempt at unity, the lack of which had plagued the union movement throughout its history. In addition, the broad coalition of industrial and craft unions, skilled and unskilled workers, and urban and rural segments provided a real opening to nurture a broad political coalition that could appeal to large swathes of the voting public.

The Massey government, having played such a pivotal role in breaking the Waihi Strike, moved now to finish the militant union movement once and for all. Massey had already curried political favour with farmers by his campaign for instituting freehold land tenure, which he now pursued vigorously, winning more small farmers to his side. In addition, he passed amendments to the Arbitration Act designed to even further kneecap workers’ ability to strike or aid a union that was striking. These amendments included harsh penalties, including deregistration (legal dissolution) for any unions that aided an “illegal” strike, in addition to the requirement that a strike planned by unions of ten or more workers had to first be made known to the Minister of Labour and the union had to participate in any mediation arranged by the minister before striking.27

With these two union-busting planks securely fastened, Massey’s government openly encouraged employers to take on the newly-minted United Federation of Labour (UFL), and employers willingly obliged.28 The opening salvo occurred in October 1913 when miners at Huntley were sacked, a scab union was formed by the company, and the rest of the miners went on strike. In Wellington, shipwrights who had voted to deregister from the Arbitration Act and join a Red Fed aligned union went on strike and were supported in this action by other watersiders, who held a stop work meeting to discuss the situation. When they returned from their meeting they found their jobs gone, having been taken by other workers. In response, 1500 Wellington watersiders walked out and resolved not to return until the workers were given their jobs back. The Shipowners’ Federation refused to deal with the watersiders unless they formed a new union and registered under the Arbitration Act.29

Workers throughout the country were furious at the escalation of demands from the employers. Within days, workers and supporters in Wellington held rallies and meetings, which continued for several weeks. Workers occupied the wharves in Wellington with pickets and barricades.

Across the country, in solidarity with the Huntley miners, coal shipments were declared black. Watersiders in Auckland, and both watersiders and miners on the West Coast, decided to strike until both the Huntley and Wellington disputes had been settled. The UFL called out all watersiders nationwide at the end of October; all four main ports and most of the minor ones were shut down.30

Massey and the employers associations, having engineered these provocations, were ready. Massey was already exploring the use of the military to back up the police, but his main tool was the use of special constables. These were deputised men, mostly from the rural farming communities whom Massey had won over politically. These small farmers were rallied to the employers’ and governments’ cause by scaremongering about the produce of their farms spoiling on the wharves in the event of a prolonged strike. Strikebreakers and mounted “specials” arrived in droves. These were dubbed “Massey’s Cossacks” by the Maoriland Worker. They were recruited beginning the end of October on order from Commissioner Cullen. And they just kept coming; “By 4 November there were more than one thousand mounted specials encamped in Wellington, plus another 500 “foot specials.”31 More specials were sent to Auckland, Dunedin, Christchurch, and other cities, where they occupied ports.

With more and more specials arriving daily, the employers sensed the tide was shifting in their favour. They broke off negotiations and retrenched in their demand that they would deal with no workers who were not organised in an arbitrationist union. The police and specials clashed with strikers in the streets. Protestors threw stones at mounted specials, who many times rode down strikers and used their horses to break picket lines. Following a fierce streetfight between strikers, police, and mounted specials on Featherston Street, where strikers threw stones at specials and tram drivers tried to ram mounted constables, the specials charged the strikers and broke through. Police and scabs drove picketers off the wharves and occupied them, allowing scab labour to load the ships.32 Gunboats docked in Wellington harbour, military machine guns were trained on marching protestors, and soldiers drilled with bayonets. Military was deployed under pressure from the government to help break the strike, but their involvement was concealed and kept from the public.33

In Auckland, hundreds of specials and police occupied the wharf and broke into and ransacked a union headquarters. Fourteen unions, representing some 2000 workers, struck in protest. In all, some 8000 workers were either on strike or couldn’t work due to the strikes, while 2000 specials were encamped in the Auckland Domain. The UFL called for a general strike in Auckland and the call was extended nationwide, but the response was tepid. The leaders of the UFL were arrested and jailed on sedition charges for their public speeches. With the ports running again with scab labour, and the number of specials and police encamped in the cities able to control any protests or action from the strikers, it was clear that it was only a matter of time until the strike was broken. By the end of December, the UFL had called off the miners’ strike and the Wellington watersiders were back at work. The strike had been broken.

Share

Aftermath

As with the strike at Waihi, the defeat in the Great Strike had unforeseen political ramifications. Ironically, although the Red Feds ambivalence towards politics had led to them being unable to anticipate the scale of the Massey government’s strikebreaking effort, the publicity of the government’s involvement in defeating the strike turned into a huge political victory. The government’s use of specials and the military with the express purpose of crushing the workers made them hugely unpopular with the majority of workers throughout the country, and many pursued the defeat of Massey with singular purpose. The activity of the Red Feds had completely discredited the Liberal Party as being capable of speaking for and addressing the concerns of the workers. Never again would they have power. The feeling of unity among workers was palpable. Their defeat forged solidarity in a way that success hadn’t.

The defeats of 1912 and 1913 solidified the need for political action in the minds of the Red Fed leaders. Over the next few years, they contested several elections via their Social Democratic Party. As with their ultimate bid for unity across union lines, the need for political unity across workers became apparent. In 1916, the Labour Party was formed via a merger of several political organisations together with the Social Democratic Party. The unity that was so desired was achieved around a program of opposing the government’s moves to impose conscription during the First World War. In this, the militant socialist bent of the revolutionary unionists found common cause with the more radical liberals opposed to Massey’s government. It took nearly 20 years, a world war, and a depression for the Labour government to win power and effect the legislative and social changes that ushered in New Zealand’s welfare state. Many of the ministers in that first Labour government were leaders of the Red Feds.

The lessons of Aotearoa New Zealand’s period of revolutionary industrial unionism are many. The most important is the absolute need for unity among workers. The divisions between craft and trade unions and the Red Feds, the disagreements over a syndicalist vs a political strategy, all meant that the workers were not sufficiently united. When the time came to test their solidarity, they fragmented.

For all the talk of revolutionary action and overthrow of capitalism, the Federation did not have the organisation, particularly the political organisation, necessary to translate a labour movement into a political revolution. The labour battles of 1912 and 1913 were the culmination of a shift in the political and class structure of New Zealand, in which the political allegiances of large and small property holders aligned around, among other things, a hostility towards organised labour and socialism. This class alignment took place against the backdrop of a rapid period of democratisation of political power. Thus, the political alliance between large and small property holders was in an effort to combat the influence, indeed any representation, of or by the working class, whom they considered unworthy of any role in government.34 When the Red Feds began to test whether power by predominantly unskilled workers could be wielded outside of Parliament, the merger of the petite bourgeoisie against the working class was solidified and the class war accelerated. Thus, if the Maritime Strike of 1890 constituted the making of New Zealand’s working class, the strikes of 1912 and 1913 constituted the solidifying of New Zealand’s ruling class.

The strike of 1913 arrived directly on the heels of the Red Feds’ turn to unity, both in politics and industrial union organisation. This was by design, as Massey and the employers wanted to crush the UFL before it could gain any strength. It is interesting to consider what may have happened had the UFL and the Social Democratic Party been able to consolidate and grow their strength before being tested in such a frontal assault. As evidenced by the failure of the call for a general strike, the unity and organisation, though agreed upon formally, was not a reality in the relations and consciousness of the workers. A more disciplined approach may have been able to turn the tide against the employers, though the government’s deployment of specials and the military make victory by the strikers unlikely in the long term.

In the end, the proactive nature of the confrontation initiated by the employers along with the explicit support of the government combined with the lack of unity and organisation to doom the strikes. It is impossible to determine to what extent the outcome would have changed had conditions been different, but the lessons regarding the successes and failures of this particular strike and the industrial unionist movement are critical to learn from for any revolutionary unionist movement if they are to bring about conditions for success. The major lesson in this regard can be summed up by the following:

In fact one of the profound lessons that would be drawn from the strike was… that the conditions for a successful general strike were the conditions for a successful revolution. Success required virtually the complete unity of the revolutionary class—the working class in this case, and the neutrality or indifference of other major classes within society. And that, of course, was not the case in 1913.35

Onwards in solidarity, with gratitude for those who have gone before.

I’m not sure whether I can handle this current election cycle. It seems that every day there are more and more things to get angry and obsess over. There are the constant polls, always on a knife edge, more often than not returning the Coalition to power. Then there are the media articles and reports. Always giving the right wing much more space and favorable coverage than anyone on the left. Always trashing Labour, the Greens, and TPM. Always slagging off Hipkins and whatever Green or TPM MP needs to be scapegoated this week. Always giving Willis the benefit of the doubt, despite the fact that she is literally a lifetime corporate asset who knows shit about anything having to do with being the finance minister.

Like clockwork, the coverage of Hipkins’ State of the Nation address yesterday followed this same trend. From National, ACT, and NZ First we had accusations of lack of substance or immaturity or fanciful thinking, amplified by RNZ and other outlets. None of these reports did any analysis, they only regurgitated the spin and slander of the Coalition government. Have we all forgotten what a nothingburger Luxon’s speech was, or Seymour’s? None of this is important to a media who thrives on outrage and clickbait. Hipkins just isn’t up to the task. Labour has no plan. Why can’t they release policy now? Why won’t they debate Willis?

Subscribe now

Share

Dutifully our own political commentariat began to spin out their knee-jerk analysis of the situation, with Bryce Edwards, fresh off his amplification of an ACT-affiliated lie and slander of Tamatha Paul and the Moa Point disaster, pulling together whatever available media opinions were out there and weighing in with the most predictable opinion ever. Hipkins’ speech wasn’t progressive enough. A lot of slogans but not enough substance. Nothing new to see here. Hipkins doesn’t have a plan. A reasonable position, but also a convenient one. Hipkins and Labour won’t be drawn into identity politics. Rhetoric without policy is not vision. Is this a new Labour? We’ll have to wait and see.

Edwards excels at synthesizing available opinions and passing it off as analysis. I was kind of shocked, but not really, at how quickly his piece came out after Hipkins’ speech. Throw a bunch of cliches into a lotto ball and see what comes out. So now the line on the Left seems to be that Hipkins and Labour aren’t progressive, and that they are just idiots and completely unfit for government or are communist plants who want to turn Aotearoa into socialist Russia, depending on who you are listening to on the Right.

This seems to be the tenor of the political discourse for election year, and it’s all a bit tiresome. The reason is that no one really wants to talk about the elephant in the room, which is that Labour and the Coalition government are operating within the confines of a liberal capitalist democracy that will not allow the type of progressive reforms that many are clamoring for. That’s it. That’s the whole picture. So when people say that Hipkins’ speech wasn’t progressive enough, what they are failing to take into account is the fact that he delivered the speech to a room full of businessmen and wealthy investors who were using the speech as a barometer to test whether to donate to or support Labour’s election campaign. As I wrote yesterday in a brief note after the speech, all those who are faulting Hipkins for failing to be a brave little progressive, have you forgotten the context in which the speech was given?

Share Free Market Moralism

So now we have analysis that will no doubt focus on Hipkins’ failure to grasp the moment of economic malaise and distress in order to promise progressive reforms that would materially benefit the many people who have been screwed over by the Coalition government. Surely if Hipkins could just promise those reforms, people would vote for Labour? Maybe even the 1 million people who sat out the election last time on account of looking at both National and Labour and seeing nothing appealing to vote for.

These analyses miss the point because they are assuming that whatever policy or program Labour might announce can be implemented in a vacuum where the capitalist interests will just stand aside and allow Labour to decimate their wealth. This, as I’ve hammered on here time and time again, is the underlying structural hurdle to any substantial and lasting progressive agenda. Analyses that focus on Hipkins’ personality, or on Labour’s lack of progressive agenda, do not take this into account, and so are non starters. Analyses that focus on structural bureaucratic and institutional hurdles to enacting policy get closer to being valuable, but in the end stumble as well because they take for granted that the liberal democratic paradigm is the political goal and best starting point for governance. As has been demonstrated time and time and time and time again throughout history, any progressive reforms within a liberal democracy will be reversed with time because they constitute an existential threat to the capitalist class’s ability to maximize profit and hoard wealth. Because of this material fact, the only viable long-term political strategy for human flourishing is to replace liberal capitalist democracy with true democracy, which is socialism.

So when you see analyses focused on the personalities or policies or political acumen of various politicians and parties, pay them no mind, and especially don’t pay attention to people on the nominal Left who criticize Labour for not being progressive enough. Think of the political conditions in which the modern Labour party operates. They are very different than the ones in which it was formed and took power. Workers are immiserated and the public is suffering, but the original Labour party leadership consisted of workers and union organizers, many of whom explicitly identified as socialist and had the goal of transforming government and kneecapping capitalism. As they found out shortly into their first government, capitalism is not easily kneecapped.

Share

Those material conditions are a far cry from the conditions today. The neoliberal era of the last 50 years has immiserated workers but has also propagandized them with the help of billions of dollars from wealthy interests, into believing that they, and they alone, are responsible for their misery. That capitalism is synonymous with freedom. That socialism is evil, to say nothing of communism. They have been trained to believe that National and other conservative parties are just more economically responsible against all evidence. That government debt functions the same as household debt. And so much more.

Aside from all of this, the business interests and government-corporate dependencies have sunk their tentacles deep into society. No government can stand if it seriously challenges capital. Asking Labour to reclaim their revolutionary socialist roots is quite literally asking them to commit suicide. The kind of Labour party, hell, even the kind of Green party that progressives want is simply not possible within a liberal democratic political system.

So what do we do? In the short term, we elect a Labour, Greens, and TPM coalition government because that is the only way to stave off some of the worst harms of a capitalist-libertarian ideological capture that has been forced upon New Zealand in the past two years. I’ve been called a Greens stan before and I may as well be called a Labour stan now but let me be clear. Labour must be elected this year, and analyses by those on the nominal Left criticizing Hipkins for not being progressive enough are not helpful in the short or long term. We should show some solidarity around this fact because god knows the Right do. At the end of the day, criticizing Labour for not being progressive enough is like criticizing a goldfish for not breathing outside of its bowl.

In the long term, we have to topple the capitalist system. This starts by organizing the proletariat (people who have to work to live) in such a way that they can seriously take on the capitalists. Our union organizing ability has been gutted and is continuing to be under attack. We have to help people see through the lies that they have been taught about the reasons why so many of them are miserable. We have to connect the dots between capitalism and all of society’s problems. We have to show people that organizing helps us utilize and focus our collective strength, and we have to show them where that collective strength needs to be focused. And we have to build a political party that is explicit and vocal in its goals of overthrowing the capitalist system. If enough of us support these organizational goals, it will result in a two-pronged strategy by which we can eventually take power and transform the system.

I’m not rosy-eyed enough to think that this is right around the corner, and it is possible that it won’t happen in my lifetime or yours, but this has to be the goal. If not, we continue down a path that may quite literally lead to the extinction of the human race not to mention the ongoing and eventual extinction of countless other plant and animal lives. While that will probably on balance be good for the planet, it will suck for those who are extinguished. Capitalism and the instability it produces both on a societal and planetary level is becoming increasingly volatile and this provides the opportunity for us to reveal the true nature of it to those who are worst impacted by its contradictions and exploitation. That, above all, must be our goal, for only when people see are they willing to join in the revolution.

Yesterday David Seymour gave his State of the Nation 2026 speech to a roomful of party faithful in Christchurch. For those who are familiar with Seymour’s brand of free-market jargon mixed with a dash of racism but cloaked in the language of equality, there will really be nothing new in this speech. Here it is in case you’d like to watch:

Subscribe now

Share

What is really striking about the speech is how reserved and safe it feels. Seymour is not known for his fiery rhetoric, but even by his standards this is a boring speech. And it’s easy to see why when you consider the context in which he’s giving it.

We are nine months from an election. The Coalition Government has really done nothing they can point to in terms of driving any kind of positive economic or social change in the country. Sure, they’ve rammed through a lot of policy, but in terms of tackling what the majority of voters say is the critical issue—cost of living—the government impact has been woefully lacking.

So when Seymour starts his list of accomplishments, anyone who is not already drinking the ACT Kool Aid will fail to connect the dots between ACT’s policy “accomplishments” and anything substantive in their lives. School lunches, reform of the pay equity legislation, and the Regulatory Standards Bill, not to mention the Treaty Principles Bill, have been huge public disasters. Most will fail to see the relevance in their lives of faster consent times for overseas investments, or enshrining property rights in law for the first time (weren’t they already?), or the war on landlords being over, or a massive deregulatory agenda, or shrinking the size of government. These are not things that voters can put a tangible, material finger on.

This is, of course, not a surprise. Because Seymour has always been concerned with smoothing the road for corporate interests, not your average citizen. He throws a few bones to the plebes here and there but his real goal has always been to enhance the ability of corporations to extract profit from Aotearoa without any roadblocks. This is a largely technocratic exercise. The law changes and policy advancements appear opaque and boring to the average citizen, but Seymour, having been well-trained by corporate think tanks, knows that this approach will be successful in opening up the country to corporate exploitation. Because of its naked corporate nature, as I detailed last year, this agenda will not gain popular support and so must be dressed up in the euphemistic language of freedom and equal rights. This is something that free-market ideologues have been doing for 100 years.

But talk of freedom and equal rights can only hold for so long if people don’t see real material improvements in their lives. And that is where we are in the current election cycle. Unemployment has hit its highest level in fifteen years, inflation is ticking back up, cost of living is still very high and a huge burden for the majority of New Zealanders, and record numbers of people are leaving the country. And Seymour says that the highest priority we should have is to keep Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori out of power. His political attacks focus on vaguely identified fears like “taxes” or “special treatment based on ancestry” but most of his speech still spins the platitudes of freedom, equality, and providing opportunity. He sings the praises of liberal democracy and laments the spread of autocracy in the world. Typical libertarian fare.

Problem is, the public no longer appear to be buying it. Since January of last year, ACT’s polling has been going steadily down, with a latest poll showing them at 6.7%, their lowest result in years. What is going on here?

Share Free Market Moralism

Last May I argued that Seymour may have been sensing his window of influence drawing to a close. The giant public backlash to his Treaty Principles Bill and Regulatory Standards Bill, along with the disaster of the school lunches and the catastrophic fallout of the pay equity legislation changes, I suggested have sapped some of his political capital. I argued that Seymour’s success depends on him being able to control the narrative around his political actions, and that he was beginning to lose control of that narrative. If that happened, given the explicitly corporate nature of his agenda, he was sunk. One way in which the narrative can spin out of control is if rhetoric doesn’t match with material outcomes.

Looking back on this post last night, I was struck by how things have played out since then. The main issues that have been highlighted by the turn to full-on election mode are summarized in this passage

As the leader of a small party, [Seymour] hasn’t ever faced the same pressure as National. He doesn’t have to worry about taking a more palatable position on anything to court the center right because he’s only worried about peeling off National voters who don’t think they are extreme enough and his position is more ideological/corporate-aligned and less populist so he isn’t likely to be as successful at courting the racists and bigots as NZ First. His agenda for this term has always been to try to ram through as much as he can, because this might be it for him and his party…

First, ACT’s entire existence is predicated on the fact that National was not willing to continue the free-market reforms initiated by Labour’s Roger Douglas. In other words, National wasn’t extreme enough. Enter the libertarian thoroughbreds. Though it seems clear that ACT is in the driver’s seat for a lot of policy this government term, what is equally as clear is the extent to which National is willing to pursue a hard right, free-market policy agenda. From Willis’s austerity budget to Stanford’s curriculum overhaul and golden investor visa to Brown’s health privatization to Bishop’s gutting of public housing and selling off public lands and retooling of the Resource Management Act and more, this is a government that is willing and able to move fast to continue and accelerate free-market reforms. Luxon has publicly stated that he will view an election win as a mandate to undertake massive privatization of the public sphere in his next term.

With National demonstrating and signaling its willingness to aggressively pursue these types of neoliberal reforms, ACT appears to be being pushed further and further out of a lane that it alone has occupied since its formation. To use words that ACT might appreciate, what value do they add for voters that they aren’t already getting from the new National?

Share

Which leaves Seymour and his party with a tough question to answer: How can they change to make themselves relevant? And here is where their public face under Seymour has become a liability instead of a position of strength. ACT’s preference has always been to cast themselves as the only adult in the room. If you subscribe to their newsletters you know what I’m talking about. They frame the other parties as out of touch with the average kiwi and themselves as the only ones who actually talk to the common man and busy themselves with just getting down to business and sorting out the things that matter. There is plenty of scaremongering about Labour, the Greens, and TPM, but Seymour and his party rarely go into the sort of bald-faced racism that you will see from, for example, the Taxpayer’s Union or Hobson’s Pledge. This is to be expected, as the neoliberal line has always been to cast policies in terms of concern for democracy and humanity generally, rather than to get mired in culture wars and identity politics, however much individual politicians may dabble in them. This then will allow neoliberal parties to get down to the business of technocratic governance. Those boring details and changes that chip away at regulations and barriers to corporate extraction.

Ironically, it is this preference to play the only adults in the room and to not pursue an explicit culture war that has kneecapped Seymour and ACT’s ability to pivot at this critical juncture. For as is apparent from the figure above, ACT’s decline has been accompanied by a meteoric rise from NZ First, with their latest result on 10.5%.

The reason here is obvious. Winston Peters and NZ First have never shied away from engaging in explicit culture wars, while ACT have preferred to make veiled references but never get down and dirty. This is obvious in their respective political ads and platforms, with NZ First now explicitly campaigning on a public referendum on Māori seats and an anti-immigration stance while ACT seems intent on asking voters to stay the course, look forward to more government cuts and deregulation, and to be afraid of Labour, the Greens, and TPM. In addition, National seem intent on running a campaign blaming Labour for the current state of things in the country, notwithstanding National having power for two years and having done nothing to better the lives of New Zealanders in that time. This is a cynical ploy that doesn’t appear to be going well for National. But ACT is not pulling in these former National voters like they have in the past.

And with the cost of living still a problem, inflation increasing, and no real relief in sight despite affirmations of an economy that has turned the corner, politics in Aotearoa are getting even more reactionary. When things are bad, people want someone to blame, and whoever gives them that someone will get the votes. And unfortunately, the most tried and true right-wing populist strategy is to inflame racism and anti-immigration sentiment. And Winston Peters, ever the opportunist, has embraced this reactionary populism with gusto.

With National taking up the right-wing lane on corporate delivery and NZ First, as I said before, mopping up the racists and bigots, ACT finds itself consigned increasingly to irrelevance. Seymour may find himself having been outfoxed by Peters, and the result may be electoral wipeout and I don’t see Seymour sticking around to try to build the party up again.

Nor is there an obvious successor for Seymour in the wings. Brooke van Velden, despite Seymour having molded and programmed her to be his protege, has all the charm and charisma of a doorknob, like some kind of Milton Friedman-created AI. Her moves to gut pay equity, refusal to meet with unions, ban harmful processed stone, and more recently her blunder in answering why she wasn’t signing on to the modern-day slavery legislation, have made her a liability and unpopular. She’s young, mostly untested, and prone to PR errors which necessitate Seymour coming in to clean up. It’s unclear how well she would do as leader.

None of the others are really that visible, or have been attached to some pretty dicey policies. For example, Nicole McKee’s alcohol reforms are highly suspect given the information that the alcohol lobby put the breaks on some of the proposals because they would be unfavorable to the industry. National party turncoat Parmjeet Parmar raised eyebrows when she asked about prison sentences for the members of TPM for doing a haka in parliament. Andrew Hoggard didn’t look good when it came out that he only consulted the pork farmers before changing the law and extending cruel pig-farming practices. None of the others have really been associated with anything memorable, save for absolute fuckwit Todd Stephenson, who seems to be in league with Aotearoa’s own Ann Coulter, Ani O’Brien, to harass anyone who even mentions Māori or tikanga or anything having to do with anything other than white Anglo culture by sending them threatening letters and making a big PR fuss about it. He seems most ready to carry on a reactionary racist war, but his capability as a leader is an open question, and that’s putting it nicely.

All this leads me to the conclusion that ACT’s time may be almost up. As I’ve said before, I would never rule Seymour out, but his usual brand of liberal human rights rhetoric and vague platitudes don’t seem to be landing like they used to. Seymour and ACT seem to have been outmaneuvered by both National and NZ First, in which case they may find themselves out of government with no clear path back to power come November, regardless of who wins. It appears Seymour’s libertarian mentors may have failed to cover how to navigate the increasingly reactionary politics that result once life for the majority craters after you give society away to corporations in his free-market course. The giving away seemed the most important part. He should ask for his money back.

It’s election year here in Aotearoa New Zealand. Parties on the left and right are rolling out their political priorities, leveling attacks at their opposition, and revealing election surprises. We can expect many more duplicitous attacks from our current Coalition Government (just check out their disingenuous attacks on social media) and, given the fact that they have nothing good to promote from their time in office, a dirty election campaign full of lies and slanders about Labour, the Greens, and TPM.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that the media will be much help in parsing these lies. They seem to have been captured more and more in recent years, and now spend their time repeating press releases from the Government without much critical analysis or pushback. That’s at best. At worst, they do the Government’s dirty work for them, as in the piece published yesterday by RNZ.

I want to point out a few things about this piece as an example of the way that media framing can guide a reader to a foregone conclusion. This is especially important in an election year because so many news stories are going to come out, and the framing of the story dictates what will be taken away from it by the reader, despite the objective nature of the facts shared in the story. Given that most readers spend between 30 s and 1 min on a page online, the crafting of a story dictates the message that will be taken away.

Subscribe now

RNZ’s piece, while it’s difficult to say whether it is a proactive attempt to launder Nicola Willis’s clearly partisan political move to call a surprise review of the Reserve Bank’s COVID financial policy during the last Labour government, clearly achieves that goal. If it’s not journalistic murder, it’s at least manslaughter. And regardless of the intent, the end result is that someone is dead.

The first thing to notice is the headline. This might seem like not a big deal, but you better believe that media outlets craft these things very carefully. My own brief foray into writing political op-eds taught me this. Anyone who has followed the atrocious genocide laundering of the New York Times over the last two years is also aware of the way that they conceal what is going on with their choice of words. Israelis are killed. Palestinians die. Israelis are shot. Palestinians die when bullets are fired. Hamas are terrorists and not to be trusted while the IDF’s propaganda is repeated without question. You know the drill.

So the headline here reads “Former Reserve Bank Governor supports review into Bank’s decisions during pandemic, but questions timing.” Right away we are lulled into accepting whatever comes next as an authoritative pronouncement about the legitimacy of Willis’s review. Because a former official supports it.

But who does RNZ get to give an opinion on the matter? Don Brash. Mr Hobson’s pledge. The man responsible for stoking Aotearoa’s own Southern Strategy with his racist Orewa Speech and continuing to gin up racist hysteria and fear-mongering ever since. This is the person that they choose to analyze Willis’s decision.

On the face of it, this might seem to undermine Willis a bit, because Brash is a former National party leader and if he criticizes her timing, then maybe that means that even some on Willis’s side are questioning her on this.

But that’s not how it works here. Because as a former National party leader and current supporter of the Coalition Government and racist-in-chief, Brash will spin Willis’s party line even if he critiques her timing a bit. I would not be surprised if Willis and Brash set this up, it works so perfectly. What we get is the facade of criticism with repetition and driving home of all of the points that Willis makes.

Share

Aside from Brash as commentator guaranteeing a favorable reading for Willis, it’s also the structure of the piece that makes sure that what comes through to the reader is exactly what Willis wants to. And we can look to a longstanding psychological phenomenon to see why. Memory researchers have known for many decades that when someone is reading a list of information, they remember the first and last things they read best. The stuff in the middle is not remembered well. This is known as the “serial-position effect”.

What does this mean for our takeaways from the RNZ article? Pay attention to what comes first and what comes last, both in each section and in the article as a whole. The stuff in the middle is likely to be forgotten by a reader. Pay attention also to how things are phrased and who is given credit for saying what. All of this stuff together means the takeaway from the piece is crafted and the reader is guided to a foregone conclusion.

The piece starts out like this:

Former Reserve Bank Governor Don Brash is supportive of the government's decision to review the Bank's decisions during the Covid-19 pandemic, but concerns from the opposition over the review's timing so close to the election are a "fair question", he says.

This first paragraph is not merely a more developed restatement of the title, it actually sets the tone for the whole piece. Brash is an expert. He supports the government’s review. He does say that the opposition’s concerns about timing are a “fair question.”

See what they did there? They did not say that Brash was concerned about the timing. They said that the opposition were and that Brash conceded that they may have a point. Furthermore, the link takes you to an RNZ article which criticizes the Reserve Bank’s COVID response. So already we have the take-home message that Brash supports the government, the opposition questions the timing, and there is already evidence that the COVID response was a problem. This, my friends, is how you launder a partisan political opinion as objective analysis.

Having given Brash first punch, RNZ then repeats Willis’s slander of Labour verbatim for a couple paragraphs

Willis is touting the exercise as a fact-finding, lessons-learned mission.

“This is simply about New Zealand learning the lessons of history. The Reserve Bank, during the response to Covid-19, did a huge amount of money printing,” she said.

“The result, in part due to those decisions, in part due to Labour’s decisions to spend and borrow a huge amount of money, was very high inflation, house prices going up 30 percent in a year, and more than $10 billion of losses after the printing of that money. So it is appropriate for the government to look at, did we get it all right, what could we do better in the future?”

Here we go. We just want to find out how we did during COVID. Just trying to learn from history. Labour printed too much money. They wasted it. They caused too much inflation. Why would we not look at this more carefully?

All this repeats Willis’s debunked narrative about Labour’s spending and sets the reader up further to swallow her story (nevermind that Willis and National were asking for more money to be spent on stimulus during COVID; pesky details). No questions from RNZ. Just dutifully regurgitating Willis’s lies.

Share Free Market Moralism

Then Brash gets some more licks in. This time he’s a bit more technical and the average reader might not understand and certainly won’t question, but pay attention to the first and last things he mentions in this block

Brash, also a former National leader, said the effects of monetary policy were “substantial” during the pandemic, and given the costs to the taxpayer an ex-post review “almost certainly” made sense.

“The Reserve Bank did two main things: they cut the Official Cash Rate to a very low level, 0.25 [percent], and would probably have cut it below that level had they felt the banks were able to handle that,” he said.

“In the end, they didn’t cut it below 0.25, but instead, of course, they bought many billions of dollars of government bonds at low interest rates in an attempt to stimulate the economy, but at a cost to the taxpayer, which was very substantial. So I think it’s worth having a having a good look at that.”

Here we have Brash stating that the costs to the taxpayer of monetary policy during Labour’s government were “substantial”. Then he says a bunch of stuff that most won’t understand. He ends up again saying that the cost to the taxpayer was “substantial.”

Putting aside the fact that monetary policy does not function in the way that Willis, Brash, or anyone else in government says it does, as government spending is not funded by taxpayers, this is a classic serial-position type arrangement. What the reader will take away from this part is that the monetary policy during Labour’s last term was a substantial cost to taxpayers.

Next we get a bit of a weigh in from the new Reserve Bank governor, Anna Breman, who says she “welcomes the review” but also noted that the bank already did an internal review of its monetary policy over that time period and concluded that although the “large scale asset purchase programme was successful in correcting financial market dysfunction and reducing long-term interest rates” the review also found that “in hindsight, earlier, or stronger monetary tightening could have curbed the subsequent hike in inflation."

RNZ is not content to give Breman the last word, notwithstanding this last point is probably precisely the kind of thing that Willis is hoping to find in her review so that she can pin it on Labour, despite the fact that the Reserve Bank is independent of the government’s influence in theory (although we know that Willis muscled the previous Bank governor out because they weren’t playing along the way she wanted him to). No, RNZ has to give Willis another rebuttal here

Willis was not impressed by that previous review.

“The Reserve Bank went through a window-dressing exercise of doing their own review of what they’d done, and gave themselves essentially full marks at the time,” she said.

“In opposition, I was frank. I said they’ve marked their own homework, that’s not good enough. If I was the finance minister, I would commission an independent review, and today that’s what I’ve done.”

So here we’ve had the current Reserve Bank governor say that a review was undertaken, it found that the Bank could have acted differently and sooner, thus providing some of the lessons that Willis supposedly hopes to find from her own review. But Willis is given the last say and lambasts the internal review as partisan and a “window-dressing exercise” thus boosting the credibility of her own “independent” review.

Subscribe now

Next the piece gives Labour and the Greens the chance to criticize the timing of the review. They obviously think that the timing is politically motivated and say as much. Why else would the review be commissioned to come out 6 weeks before election day when the government has had two years to get it done, and could have done so as part of the overall COVID inquiry? Both Hipkins and Swarbrick note that monetary policy on the fly is not always the most efficient, and Swarbrick in particular states that the Greens had issues with the on-the-fly monetary policy without any real change in fiscal policy. This is quite similar to what Willis is saying and so it looks like maybe her accusations are possibly not on as firm a footing as she thinks.

Willis, however, gets the last word here as well, and she is allowed to trash any criticism

Willis has denied the review is timed for the election, and said she had not received advice on its timing.

“I don’t need to have that raised with me. It turns out that it’s quite top of mind that there’s an election in November. I don’t need officials to give me advice on it,” she said.

“The more political question you should all be asking is why are there politicians who are afraid of an independent review of the decisions of the independent Reserve Bank? Riddle me that.”

Nothing to see here folks. No politics here. And anyway, why is Labour afraid of an independent review? Obviously they have something to hide. More spin. RNZ just spins along.

Brash for his part then discusses a review that was commissioned by Labour of the Reserve Bank’s framework with several recommendations at the time. He states that this seemed like a “fair cop” and a reasonable thing to do. The point of this section seems to be to reinforce the notion that an independent review from time to time is a wise thing for government to do, This lends Willis’s review more authority and support although Brash does say it is a “fair question” as to why Willis waited until election year although he could "see some logic" in having it now, rather than earlier, as Willis would have wanted to wait until a new Governor came in.” Recall that Willis pushed the old governor out, so this line of argument doesn’t really hold here, although the average reader may not be familiar with Willis’s duplicity.

The piece concludes with Brash saying he’s not familiar with the head reviewer Athanasios Orphanides but is approving of David Archer.

Right on cue, RNZ gives Willis the last word on the credibility of her reviewers

Willis said the two reviewers were “objectively credible” and had significant experience.

“They are not political figures in any way. And I actually went to great pains to work through with the Treasury who, in a domestic context, would be able to do the review, who wasn’t conflicted by previous statements, and who would be able to give this credibility and weight, so I stand by the decision.”

Far from Willis’s statement that these are not political figures in any way, has revealed that Orphanides is affiliated with a number of rightwing free-market think tanks. This international conglomerate of free-market think tanks was established with the express purpose of advocating for corporate policy and welfare throughout the world. They are supported by a number of neoclassical economists whose views on monetary policy are right in line with Willis’s austerity rhetoric and worldview. I document the history of this movement here.

Share

In short, this is far from a nonpartisan, independent review. The fix is in, and the report, which will no doubt show that Labour presided over a severely negligent Reserve Bank during COVID, will drop 6 weeks before election day and take up much of the news cycle in the lead up to the vote. Despite the release of documents and Willis’s assurance that the timing couldn’t be helped it very much looks like this was a conscious political decision on Willis’s part. And Brash helped reinforce the legitimacy in his RNZ appearance.

The far more frustrating thing is the framing of the whole discussion by RNZ in this piece. By giving Willis the first and last word on every issue they reinforce her viewpoint for readers who probably won’t even read the full article. If they do, however, each section gives Willis final say as well. If she is criticized, they publish her response verbatim. There is no analysis, no factchecking, just Willis lying and smearing her opponents and anyone who disagrees with her perspective.

In the end, due to the framing, whether purposeful or not, Willis reigns supreme. There is nothing in the article, despite the headline stating there is some question about the timing, that really questions or probes Willis in any meaningful way. She is given carte blanche to say whatever she wants, and Brash mops up any further doubts. Hipkins and Swarbrick, even Breman come across looking petty, complaining, and unserious next to Willis, who has all the right answers and seems to bat away their legitimate criticisms with ease. Again, this is all due to RNZ’s framing of the piece.

As I said above, it is critical for the public to be able to dissect this and recognize it when it is happening. Pay attention to the framing, look at who gets the first and last word, look at whether there is any analysis, or if the piece is simply engaging in a “he said, she said” type of story. If we can’t trust our media to actually do any of the hard work of trying to see through politics to the real story, they are just as useless as many think they are. In an election year it’s even more important to not get suckered in by these types of pieces, and to arm those of our friends and acquaintances who still rely on traditional media to spot these train wreck articles and shallow analyses when they see them.

So when I was scanning my bookshelves for something to read a few days ago and my eyes came across Saramago’s novel, I pulled it down. As I’ve been reading the past few days, I’ve found myself amazed, amused, and infuriated with how accurately this dark satire encapsulates the current state of politics in the Western—supposedly democratic—world.

Subscribe now

The book opens on election day. It is a municipal election in the capital city of some unnamed country. It is pouring rain. The leaders of the main parties (the Party on the Right; p.o.t.r, Party in the Middle; p.i.t.m; and Party on the Left; p.o.t.l.) are concerned that the rain might discourage people from voting. After about midday, the rain clears a bit and people start straggling in to cast their votes. By the end of the day, a pretty good turnout of voters has come, and the ballots are tallied.

The result is a negligible percentage of votes for all parties, with 70% of the votes left blank. Just blank. Not ruined or something else. Blank. As is the requirement by law, the election is repeated eight days later. Surely there must have been some anomaly, some mistake. The weather or something else messing with people.

The weather on the next election day is bright and sunny, and even more people show up to vote, casting ballots as if nothing had happened previously. When the results are tallied for the new batch of ballots, 83% of the ballots have been left blank.

Thus begins Saramago’s at times comical, suspenseful, and devastating evisceration of modern democratic governments. The state of emergency this act of democratic defiance precipitates reveals the state government as little more than a calculated democratic facade of iron-fisted rule.

The government is shell-shocked when the results of the election come in. The people have delivered a clear repudiation of not just the current government, but of the entire political enterprise. They’ve refused to play along with the democratic game. Disillusioned, rejected, and tired, they’ve attempted one last method—through the proper democratic channels, as blank votes are perfectly legal—to voice their displeasure with their government’s performance.

Clearly this is a crisis. The government recognizes it as such. But rather than engage in even the slightest bit of self-reflection, the ministers set about trying to figure out what subversion of patriotic feeling could have led so many seemingly normal citizens to shirk their civic duty. Surely there are some nefarious elements at play? Surely the citizens are just ungrateful for the government’s beneficence. How can they be made to see the error of their ways?

In a series of rapid and comic escalations, the government’s final solution is to declare a state of siege on the capital city, removing and relocating the government and all state employees to another city, surrounding the city with barbed wire and military encampments, removing all police and other government presence, and waiting for the city to come to its senses. When it becomes clear that the citizens have no issues with the absence of the government, things escalate further. I won’t spoil anything else. You should read the book right away, it’s great.

Share

What struck me about the story is the utter lack of self-reflection or taking stock by the government. When the citizens exercise their democratic right to cast blank votes, this is viewed not as the rejection of the status quo and a demand for change, but rather as an existential threat to democracy itself. The very fact that the citizens refuse to accept and play by the carefully curated rules of electoral democracy reveals the entire operation for the facade that it is. The government has no intention of doing anything any differently. Indeed, they cannot conceive of a system that operates any differently. The p.o.t.r. and the p.i.t.m. will continue to duke it out for first and second place, with the p.o.t.l. scavenging for the leftover votes.

Even more disturbing is the fact that the citizens do not seem to need them. How horrifying. As stated by the Prime Minister in an emergency cabinet meeting, surely the citizens can be brought to recognize that their anti-patriotic behavior is

propelling them towards the ultimate disaster which would be the possibly definitive collapse of a political system which, without our even noticing the threat, carried within it, right from the start, in its vital nucleus, in the voting process itself, the seeds of its own destruction or, a no less disquieting hypothesis, of a transition to something entirely new and unknown, so different that we would probably have no place in it, raised as we were in the shelter of an electoral routine which, for generations and generations, managed to conceal what we now realize was one of its great trump cards.

These are politicians who are utterly uninterested in governing for the people over whom they have been given stewardship. All they are interested in is maintaining the respectability and viability of the system that has given them power. The book itself never intimates in whose interest the government is governing, but it’s clear from the 83% blank votes that it is not in the interest of the majority of society.

Looking around today, it’s difficult to see anything different than this parable in the major political parties of the Western world. Trump’s Republican party ran on a populist campaign that was abandoned the second he entered office. The Republicans now govern solely for corporate interests and donors, passing hugely unpopular legislation that devastates their voting base while enriching the 1%.

Democrats, on the other hand, refuse to do even the slightest bit of self-reflection on why Kamala Harris, or even Hillary Clinton, lost their respective elections to Trump, preferring to double down on a paternalistic scolding tone of “well we told you this would happen, are you pleased with yourselves now” in an effort to gin up support for a Democratic party that fails to do anything at all to help the majority of the American public. Neither can they be depended on to take even the most obvious moral position on something as clearly demarcated as, say, the genocide in Gaza. Democratic presidential hopefuls Josh Shapiro, Kamala Harris, and Gavin Newsom are, respectively, a former member of the IDF and Zionist, the former vice president who lied repeatedly to the American public about trying to find a solution to the Gaza genocide while doing nothing to stop it, and a performative try-hard who, when he’s not trolling Trump like some edgelord teenager on social media or denying that Gaza is a genocide on Ben Shapiro’s podcast, is outlawing and forcibly evicting homeless people or trying to entice billionaires to stay in California.

These are the people we are supposed to vote for.

Share Free Market Moralism

Here in Aotearoa we have a Coalition Government that has spent its time ramming through a huge legislative agenda that enriches landlords and corporations (including tobacco companies), opened up the country to foreign investors (one of whom purchased the property directly behind my house—say goodbye to the paddock and the natural growth up the ridgeline), passed reforms that open the door to private healthcare companies, private school meal providers, private education curriculum providers, private early education providers, private charter school owners; has gutted public spending, slashed tens of thousands of jobs, killed thousands of businesses; has passed a fast-track framework that allows corporations to bypass scrutiny on environmentally-damaging projects, opened up fishing quotas, limited recording of fishing practices on commercial boats, gutted pay equity legislation, worker’s rights, and workplace safety regulation, cut funding for disability caregivers, cut off funding for thousands of dependent children, enacted legislation that opens the door for companies to be compensated if the government infringes on their property rights for the public good, struck requirements to teach about the history of colonialism in Aotearoa from the education curriculum, and more. In addition, the government’s agenda has been widely recognized as one of the most anti-Māori of the last 50 years.

All of this has been hugely unpopular with the general public. Every bill that has been publicly consulted on has been roundly rejected by the public, with no impact on the legislative process. Public consultation often leads to over 80% of public submissions against the bills. It doesn’t matter. Bills are introduced, public consultation is sought, the public rejects the bill, it gets passed, the government pats itself on the back. Rinse, repeat. The only bill that was rejected by the government was the Treaty Principles Bill, and this was likely only due to the fact that there would in all seriousness probably have been a civil war if it would have proceeded.

My point is that these are people who clearly despise us. It’s not just that they are stupid, although some of them certainly are. It’s that they honestly don’t care about the public. They view us as an obstacle to their agenda to enrich their corporate donors. This is why they’ve passed another—again hugely unpopular—bill which is little more than a naked voter suppression tactic under the guise of trying to improve electoral efficiency. This bill was studied and evaluated by government committees and found that it would do no such thing. They passed it anyway.

Looking to the p.i.t.m. our options are not a whole lot better. There will be many who argue that we should vote for Labour because otherwise the Coalition Government will continue to wreak havoc on Aotearoa. I concur. Vote for Labour, or better yet, for the Greens. Do it for the most marginalized and those hurting most from the government’s policies. But don’t expect anything really substantive to change.

I’ve been seeing a lot of dire prognosticators here on Substack and in the media lately talking about how bad our options are. Neither Chris can lead us because both of them have a warped or outdated vision of government. Why can’t we have a knight in shining armor like Mark Carney who sees things for what they really are? These takes almost universally miss the point. It’s not that neither Labour or National have a realistic vision of what it takes to lead a country. It’s that neither of them can give up their allegiance to corporations and capitalist benefactors. Luxon is a buffoon, but he is part of a coalition and ministerial machine that are very effective in working for their corporate donors. Seymour, Van Velden, Stanford, Willis, Bishop, Brown, all of these people know exactly what they are doing, and it doesn’t matter whether Luxon is dumb as a rock, just a stupid CEO, totally on board with the looting, or something else, the machine moves without him. This is the foregone conclusion of a government and parliamentary system that was set up to protect and increase the property holdings of the already-wealthy. It can only do so at the expense of the general public. From his “wealthy and sorted” comments to his long absences and complete lack of care and concern for victims of disasters and tragedies, Luxon has been utterly transparent about the fact that he does not give two shits about the general public.

Chris Hipkins tries to sound like a radical alternative, but he too, is so beholden to corporate interests and trying to walk the fine line between being the p.i.t.m. and straying too far towards the p.o.t.l. that he ends up not standing for anything. The interviews and statements to the media usually consist of him lambasting something or other Luxon said or a policy that National passed, only to fail to guarantee that Labour will repeal it if elected, on the basis of some sort of “not moving too fast” or “maintaining unity” or some other such twaddle. He’s so concerned with picking off the center-right voters from National that he has failed to recognize that nearly 23% of enrolled voters didn’t vote last election. This is nearly 1 million people that looked at both options and said, yeah nah. The voters are trying to tell you something. Are you listening? Or are you, like the Prime Minister in Saramago’s parable, too blinded by your own certainty that the status quo ante is the only possible reality to hear those who are crying out to you to turn course?

Both Labour and National are facing historic lows in terms of their popularity, failing to break 35% in poll after poll. Many pundits are saying this may be the beginning of the era of the small parties. The Greens, ACT, and NZ First are polling close to or above 10%. TOP is trying to get in the game. The Alliance has announced their re-entry into politics. Yet Labour would rather court the disillusioned center National voters than go for their former own disillusioned voters, who are just waiting to be courted with something other than milquetoast, warmed over neoliberalism and technocratic austerity. Is this the party formed in the wake of the most militant labor movements in the history of this country? Where is the Labour party of Holland and Savage? Where is the Labour that would stare down the British Banks until they flinched? Where is the Labour that risked it all and enacted New Zealand’s modern welfare state?

All signs point to a disappointing election season and a disappointing outcome, regardless. Please don’t take this as an endorsement not to vote. Please vote. It is necessary for us to vote out Luxon’s government. But please don’t just vote. Organize. We need to build actual worker power and we need to build mass political power capable of challenging the National/Labour juggernaut. Luxon has already made it clear that he thinks we’re shit. Whether or not Hipkins does, the system that he represents and bows to is driven by those who would just as soon kill us all as put a dent in their profits. We need to wake up to this reality. Because we are not voting our way out of this. Our only option, like the citizens left besieged by their own government at the beginning of Saramago’s novel, is to realize that

they’ve turned their backs on us and told us we’re nothing but a pile of shit, which, in their opinion, is what we are… they’re not stupid, they can see how easily this can become a fuse, light it here and wait for the explosion over there, but then, if all we are to them is a pile of shit, then let’s be shit all the way, shoulder to shoulder, because they’re bound to get splattered with some of the shit that we supposedly are.