The recent apology by the Stuff media group for its history of reportage that had a strong racist bias towards Maori, has won the praise of many as a major step towards a non-racist media in Aotearoa. Marxists however, see this mea culpa as part of an international move by liberal media to identify racism as a cultural problem to cover-up the deeper causes of racism inherent in global capitalism, to buy-off the rising threat of a united working class capable of uniting anti-racism and anti-capitalism as a revolutionary threat to the capitalist system.
The problem is that dissing the past from the present also has to be explained and in such a way as its points to the future. All of the reactions to the stuff mea culpa have only pointed to the present utopia of a capitalism that can ride out the storm. More specifically, the “honouring of the Treaty”, when it is evident more than ever that the Treaty was a “fraud”.
Honouring the Treaty takes no account of real history of capitalism nor its terminal crisis that makes this utopia reactionary today and in the future. The European global conquest continues today but is now confronted by its nemesis, the rise of imperialist China that turns that history on its head. The world is headed for counter-revolution, war and extinction of humanity, or, if we can make it in time, socialism and liberation.
Dying capitalism leaves no room for honouring treaties with indigenous peoples. Quite the reverse. They continue to be murdered, locked up and their lands stolen and destroyed from Asia, Africa to the Americas. What happens to Maori in NZ is part of that history. What happens to the mainstream media treatment of Maori is complicit in that history.
The Liberal story of Honouring the Treaty
Facing this grim prospect, Stuff’s superficial revision of history, and the emotional chorus that welcomed it from John Tamihere to Anne Salmond misunderstands imperialism in its age of decline and fall by dissolving everything into an ahistorical chaos of postmodern celebration of nothingness. Stuff owns up to its historic racism. But it does not dig deeper into the cause of racism then or now. The result is tokenism and the reproduction under the guise of anti-racism of the roots of not only racist oppression but class exploitation that underlies it.
Let’s summarise Stuffs revision and its welcoming committee. It catches up with the liberal story of NZ that wrongs were done, but doesn’t say why, or why the wrongs continue today. It didn’t acknowledge until recently the crusading journalism, of say Dick Scott on Parihaka or Rawiri Taonui writing as a Stuff columnist for the Maori cause, that goes to the heart of NZ’s colonial history. It’s mea culpa that remains token as a parochial scoop so trivial that it ignores the documented causes of colonialism that drove the racism that remains not only intact but embedded in today’s ‘culture wars’.
Why liberal revisionism now and why the pomo supporters’ club?
The second question Stuff does not address is why, other than invoke ‘institutional racism’, it could not make this mea culpa until now. But that leaves the “why” of institutional racism unexplained. It’s not as if Maori haven’t been raking over the causes or racism for generations, from the land wars and Parihaka, to the revival of the Sovereignty movement in the 1970s. The deepest critique over that period was the resistance to colonisation of Te Whiti O Rongomai who understood that the evil of the capitalist market would destroy Maori society.
Donna Awatere’s Maori Sovereignty published in 1981 was the product of the Treaty protests at Waitangi, the Land March, Bastion Point, and the Springbok Tour. Awatere flirted with Marxism briefly before putting out the challenge to the system to recognise Maori sovereignty within the framework of capitalism. Other land struggles followed notably at Pakaitore and the Foreshore and Seabed in 2004 and Ihumatao today.
The Maori and Pakeha revolutionary left in NZ has also taken a stand on colonialization, notably Marxists who have critiqued the causes of racism and recognised Maori have the right to self-determination up to and including secession from New Zealand. Marx showed in his critique of E.G Wakefield, “The Modern Theory of Colonisation” that settler colonisation meant the dispossession of land, the creation of a landless labour force, obliged to work for capitalists to create value and hence profits. This was the beginning of the story of the development of capitalism in NZ
The subordination of Maori society to colonial rule by capital was justified by racism. The Treaty was always a fraud. To eliminate the virus of racism, the Maori right to their land has to be restored through their own act of political self-determination. For Marxists that is not possible unless in a future socialist society where all peoples are free to determine their future.
The media serves to mystify the real cause of racism
The answer to the question “why now” is not parochial but global: Black Lives Matter and its global repercussions goes to the roots of colonial dispossession and slavery. BLM has challenged the ruling classes around the world to face up to the rise of a united working class which joins up the struggles of race, gender and class.
The challenge for the ruling class is to co-opt and isolate these struggles. To contain and diffuse the merging of struggles, the ruling class uses its media to divert attention to its common cause – capitalism, and to seek token solutions to buy-off the leaderships.
This is why the liberal media at this time is reviewing its past through the late-capitalist post-modern lens to minimize these struggles as merely ‘cultural wars’, buy-off its leaders into liberal politics and so keep the working class divided. Just in case that fails, the struggle must be kept within the sphere of culture which allows for reconciliation and ‘inclusion’ within the state institutions of capitalism.
If the race wars are merely cultural, peace can be declared in ignorance of the deeper class forces that are dividing society. In Aotearoa, Stuff’s revision, merges imperceptibly with Labour’s sleepwalking cultural ‘transformation’ with the ‘team of 5 million’ dreaming of a classless, peaceful world riding out the storms ahead.
Marxism on the roots of racism and the seeds of liberation
Marxism, born of the bourgeoisie, is a world view that originates as a critique of the dark history of capitalism, understanding the necessity of its revolutionary origins and eventual limits, having formed within it the embryo of the commune that will return humanity to nature in the future.
Therefore, we don’t look to the role of those caught up in capitalisms rise and fall, the actors good, bad and ugly, or the media that mediates the ideology of capitalism, for answers to our current predicament, but rather to the scientific critique of the class contradictions that drove and continue to drive that history.
When Marxism becomes once again a common currency of social critique, and postmodernism lost and forgotten among the crap of prehistory, we will see that most commentary about race, class and gender, is scratching around on the surface of things, in ignorance of the deep social forces that drove the past and which also open the road to the future.
Dave Brownz is TDBs guest marxist blogger because every left wing blog needs a Marxist
If the real history of capitalism, and where capitalism is taking us -rapidly towards a severely overheated planet that will be largely or completely uninhabitable- were to be generally known, there would be rioting in the streets within weeks.
Therefore, it is necessary for those who seek short-term rewards (even at the expense of their own progeny) -the politicians, the bureaucrats, the corporations, the money-lenders and the opportunists- to PREVENT the populace from becoming informed and to fill their lives with propaganda and trivial entertainment.
This bizarre set of circumstance will continue until ‘the system’ breaks, not as a consequence of the actions of the ‘proles’ but as a consequence of the inherent flaws and contradictions of the system itself.
During this period of breakdown that we are now enduring, we should expect ‘disaster capitalism’ to play an increasing role -as epitomised by the American ‘healthcare’ system, which is most profitable when people are sick and remain sick for a long time.Covid Is Revealing the Cancerous Underbelly of U.S. Healthcare
December 4, 2020
If you still believe that America’s Sickcare is “the finest in the world” and is endlessly sustainable, please study these three charts and extend the trendlines.
I’ve long been making the distinction between healthcare and sickcare: healthcare is the service provided by frontline operational caregivers (doctors, nurses, aides, technicians, etc.) and sickcare is the financialized system of Big Hospital Corporations, Big Insurers, Big Pharma, etc. and their lobbyists that keep the federal money spigots wide open.
This financialized sickcare system is being consumed by the cancer of greedy profiteering pursued by self-serving insiders. The delivery of healthcare is secondary to maximizing revenues and profits by any means available.’
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogdec20/healthcare-cancer12-20.html
In NZ, thanks to the ‘tyranny of distance’ becoming a benefit, the healthcare system didn’t get overwhelmed by Covid-19. But we do suffer healthcare by rationing. And the government’s commitment to dental care is close to non-existent for adults. You pay or you suffer.
I think that will be the route NZ will follow during this period of collapse: you pay or you suffer. And if you don’t have the money to pay, “Sorry, can’t help you.”
I know of someone who has been unable to get house insurance because here home is regarded as ‘at risk’.
There you are; capitalism at its best. There when you don’t need it and gone when you do.
I might say the same for all the poor people being robbed by Kiwisaver providers; does anyone REALLY expect a 20-something to with a Kiwisaver account invested in [collapsing] capitalism to collect ANYTHING four decades from now? For that matter, can a 55-year-old expect the system to hold together long enough for a positive return on investment?
Don’t hold your breath on any of it.
Capitalism was doomed to collapse from the very beginning. It’s just that has taken about 400 years for it to wreck nature and use up all the easily-extractable resources.
Now that we’re running on fumes….
Those that talk of collapse and the end of civilization as we know it must be youngish and we’re not around in the 90s .The talk then was peak oil and overpopulation and that this would lead to a collapse of the economy and there would be no money for pensions in 20 to,30 years. This made many worried and start to think how m best to safeguard for the future and so many older people started to buy property with the idea of selling it when retired invest the money and live comfortably. Unfortunately for home buyers while the value has climbed the poor interest rates do not give any incentive to sell the property. At the same time we are still well serviced by the pension and no party is talking of put the retirement age up despite the fact that only 40% retire at 65 now .
‘Those that talk of collapse and the end of civilization as we know it must be youngish and we’re not around in the 90s’
Way off the mark, Trevor. In fact your assumption is preposterous.
I am over 70 and was around in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and 2000s, and have a very good basis for comparison, and I had a superb education by present-day standards, which included limits to growth and economics in the late 60s and 1970s.
It is those born into and who grew up in the bullshit system -people such as Jacinda Adern- who are clueless and have no basis for comparison.
And the poorly educated, of course.
Had a look at AMERICA today on the tele all about Democricy and its RIGHT. And yes it is right their starvation of Venazuela, has lead and is still slaughtering humanity, in a land mass of oil and minerals outstanding anywhere on our exploited planet, why is starvation povert health decline your capitalist democracy, why starve our people of the human need of humanity for your weird capitalist structure of fairness.
Interesting that Stuff confesses to having “always taken the side of the Crown” when it supposedly should have taken the side of “Maori”, yet there is nothing to indicate that it now plans to consistently or even occasionally oppose the Crown; that is, to take a revolutionary stance.
The truth is that New Zealand media has been racist on occasion, but not consistently. The general intention has always been to bring Maori into willing subjection to the Crown and thus under the political structures of capitalism. To that end the press has vilified “rebels” and denigrated dissenters but not Maori as such – except on rather rare occasions.
All that Stuff is doing now is bringing itself up to date with the changing state policy on ethnic and cultural diversity. The survival of the colonial regime, and capitalism generally, now depends on bringing as many non-class-based elements of society as possible into the structures of the state. As the state becomes self-consciously less and less representative of “the people”, it seeks to broaden its base in ways that do not threaten its essential capitalist and colonialist character.
The state, Stuff and the media generally continue to walk hand-in-hand along this path to twenty-first century capitalist colonialism. Various minority representatives, including Maori, are being given prominence and privilege under the colonial system.
The trouble for the state, and for Stuff, is that this strategy won’t work for more than a short time. Maori and Pakeha workers will continue to suffer exploitation and dispossession while Maori and Pakeha political activists will continue to work to bring the colonial regime to its final end and I suspect that end is actually much closer than many of us presently realize.
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