Professor Wayne Hope is one of the last great NZ Public Academics who called the late Bruce Jesson a peer.
Bruce Jesson was the intellectual Godfather of the NZ Left whose piercing brilliance helped unmask how psychopathic NZ Free Market Capitalism truly was.
Professor Hope was a compatriot of Bruce’s and he has continued the Jesson tradition of impeccably researched arguments that are impossible to refute and incapable of countering.
Professor Hope’s latest work is perhaps his greatest to date and as far as I am concerned, you can not claim to be on the Left and engaged on climate change and Capitalism without reading this incredible work.
Wayne’s deep dive into the impact of exploitative fossil fuel capitalism uncovers an economic DNA of commercialisation, finacialisation and globalisation of exploitative fossil fuel infrastructure that is up against the biosphere’s C02 capacity and tipping points that lead to catastrophic climate collapse is a stunning academic achievement.
This book is not for wimps.
It is dense, it takes time to comprehend the true scale of the challenge we find ourselves in especially when Professor Hope adds time and epochs of time into his argument.
We are in a perfect storm of biological time, geological time, speculative time and exploitative fossil fuel time that is bringing costs to the present from the past that dooms the future.
Professor Hope offers hope.
He point to the fundamental way younger generations burned by the inaction of their elders will be forced to drastically change the systems they find themselves in and he points to the importance of Indigenous resistance to climate change.
He argues Indigenous people have a cultural memory of the first wave of settler capitalist exploitation resource taking. He argues they have the flax roots knowledge of what sustainability and environmental protection looks like, and must be part of the resistance.
It is no wonder that international right wing think tanks always aim to attack indigenous rights first to enable the next generation of exploitative resource stripping.
If there is one book you use read this year it is this one. Buy it here.
Professor Wayne Hope blogs occasionally here at The Daily Blog, he is my neighbour and one of the best friends I’ve had for 30 years.
Increasingly having independent opinion in a mainstream media environment which mostly echo one another has become more important than ever, so if you value having an independent voice – please donate here.
“You can’t have an economy without an ecology” – Dr Guy MacPherson
Window of opportunity is closing and when it does it will be too late. Once beyond a certain point the heating of the planet will be locked in. What we are seeing today is the consequence of our actions 30-40 years ago.
Bedtime reading on my way to sleep. This will be such a useful book, meant to wake me up, and it will, but then I will get stressed out further, and doze off. But I will buy it and think of a way to get the words of such a thoughtful semi-saint spreading to the maincredutlous. Better to go down fighting as in the Dylan Thomas poem, and one meets such worthy and ironically humourous people on the way.
https://poets.org/poem/do-not-go-gentle-good-night
Dylan Thomas
1914 –1953
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Bruce Jesson’s summary of NZs tripping the light fantastic.
https://newleftreview.org/issues/i192/articles/bruce-jesson-the-disintegration-of-a-labour-tradition-new-zealand-politics-in-the-1980s
Bruce Jesson
The Disintegration of a Labour Tradition: New Zealand Politics in the 1980s
On 27 October 1990, New Zealand’s Labour government suffered one of the heaviest defeats in the country’s electoral history… Labour lost twenty-seven of its fifty-six seats, and its share of the vote was the lowest since 1931. …
…The most important factor was the severity of the country’s economic troubles. New Zealand in the 1980s was particularly vulnerable, in the main because it lacked the normal developed economy of other Western nations. The country is, in fact, something of a paradox: it has enjoyed a Western-style way of life and standard of living, but with an economic structure possessing definite colonial features. Indeed, one way of interpreting New Zealand’s recent history is that its colonial background has remorselessly asserted itself, as the country settles into a South American condition of economic decline and instability.
The term ‘colonial’ has to be used with reservations in the New Zealand context because most of the population are descended from colonizers, not the colonized. New Zealand was a frontier society in the nineteenth century. Imperial troops and colonial irregulars fought but failed to subdue completely the indigenous Maori. Native forests were felled and burned. The early economy relied on scavenger industries such as whaling, sealing, gold prospecting and gold and coal mining. Subsequently, sheep farming developed as the main rural economic activity. There was some manufacturing in the colony—baking, brewing, newspaper production, clothing—but no heavy industry other than mining.
Although New Zealand was originally colonized as a commercial enterprise—most of the early settlements being founded by companies whose purpose was to speculate in land—the state (the Crown in the colonial context) played a central role in developing an economic infrastructure. It was responsible for land acquisition from the Maori (through warfare and purchase), settlement, immigration, the building of railways and so on. It would be exaggerating to describe the colonization of New Zealand as an exercise in state capitalism; however, the state’s economic role was pivotal, its purpose being to facilitate the formation of a pastoral and commercial bourgeoisie.
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Shouldn’t I have access to this article via my library?
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I/192•Mar/Apr 1992
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