Cybernetic People's Polis

Our goal is redeeming the labor of the dead.

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An Overview of Theories of Unequal Exchange

Originally posted on Anti-Imperialist.net Preface: the following article began as an informal report to my supervisor explaining different theories of trade imperialism that were to be mentioned in a dissertation on the history of New Zealand trading relationships. I decided to clean up that report into this article after a friend noted that it may be helpful to readers who are unsure about the distinctions between several quite different theories going by the same name: unequal exchange.[1]

The following is a critical review of the different interpretations of unequal exchange including:

Unequal exchange due to differences in OCC.

Unequal exchange due to monopoly rents.

Unequal exchange due to differences in productivity.

Heterodox theories, value transfer, and superexploitation.

Unequal exchange due to differences in wages.

Unequal exchange caused by differences in Organic Compositions of Capital (OCC).

Unequal exchange, in its original “narrow” meaning, refers to exchanges in the context of a distortion of prices by wage disparities. Some authors instead use unequal exchange in reference to exchanges in the context of any distortion of prices. Other authors use it in a very “broad” sense to mean any exchange wherein prices are different to values, sometimes called nonequivalent exchange.[2]

This is the view of unequal exchange advocated by Michael Roberts, Guglielmo Carchedi, Murray Smith and various other orthodox Marxian economists, based on an interpretation of Marx popularised by Henryk Grossman. They argue that the predominant form of unequal exchange is that described by Marx in part II of Capital vol. III. That is the preponderance of different individual rates of profit in different branches of production that, in the process of being equalised, shift prices away from values in such a way that the most competitive branches benefit at the expense of less competitive branches (indeed according to these authors there is a transfer of value between them). This is best explained in reference to the tables used by various authors to explain the formation of “prices of production” (prices around which market values fluctuate, equivalent to total cost-price plus profit), and since I’m too lazy to type out my own tables, let’s take some from Marx:

Here we see that unequal rates of profit have formed between different branches of production with different organic compositions of capital (c/v ratios). If the capitalist didn’t have to take account of competitive pressures and was only concerned with realising the maximum amount of value, then each branch would sell at their commodity value (c+v+s). But these branches are in fact in competition with one another, and as a result the entire sector will arrive at prices that strike a balance between maximising profits while undercutting competitors. After some jockeying and shifts in investment patterns, each branch arrives at a rate of profit equivalent to total surplus value divided by total capital invested (22%, in our example). So long as total capital investments are the same, the final prices realised will be the result of a completely even apportionment of the total surplus value produced in this sector, with each capitalist receiving 22 money-units:[3]

Here is the same sector after an average ROP has formed. Some branches have benefited from competition while others have not. The most capital-intensive have achieved prices higher than the value of their commodities. That is, they started out with a lower individual rate of profit due to the lower labour content of their goods, but through competition they have benefited from the higher sectoral rate. By contrast, all of the uncompetitive capitals had to lower their prices below their commodity values in order to maintain their profit rate. This doesn’t mean that these uncompetitive capitals are going to bankrupt themselves, on the contrary, they still have exactly the same profits as their competitors relative to their capital advanced. What makes them uncompetitive is not a difference in profitability, so much as a reduced market share resulting from their higher prices.[4]

Regardless of whether we agree that capital III is “transferring value” to capital V, there is a clear winner and loser in this arrangement, when we compare real profits to those of a hypothetical scenario without competition. Capital V is the biggest “winner” and will go on to have the largest market share while this situation holds.[5]

But it will not hold indefinitely. Over time competitive pressures will force the uncompetitive branches like capital III to raise their rate of exploitation, or invest in more cost-saving machinery where possible. They may be aided in this endeavor by investors able to see the potential increase in market share that would result. So there’s an overall tendency for more uncompetitive capitals to accumulate investments in productive machinery to offset their wage costs, although there are plenty of countervailing factors (greenfield investment costs, a smaller initial mass of profit, etc.). This is allowed by the mobility of capital – it will leave uncompetitive branches for competitive ones (if the competitive branches’ market is not already saturated, that is), or else it will make uncompetitive branches competitive over time. Capitalists are also generally aware of sectoral norms and will take steps to bring their enterprise in line. So in addition to the short-term transformation of unequal individual rates of profit into equalised sectoral rates through competition, there’s also a long-term, secular tendency towards the equalisation of those individual, pre-competitive rates of profit, derived from organic composition.

When we are talking about the equalisation of rates of profit going forward, I’m referring to the short term phenomena. The longer term trend has taken place over a matter of decades or even centuries, whereas the shorter term trend occurs wherever capital’s movement is not restricted, and branches are in competition with one another. Recent rate of profit data suggests that the average, country-wide ROP in peripheral countries has taken a very long time to match the same rates in core countries.[6] On the other hand, the rate of profit for specific goods in competition with one another suggests a much smaller difference in ROP. It stands to reason that both are in fact true: average, country-wide ROP takes a longer time to equalise because not every sector is engaged in international competition at any given time. Only those branches engaged in highly competitive, international free trade will find their individual rates of profit evening out to a global average. Another complicating factor is the almost certain possibility that there are a significant number of peripheral sectors (perhaps in the most specialised or competitive sectors) where the local rate of profit is lower than the global average.

If that is the case, then there’s not much reason to follow authors like Roberts, Carchedi, and Smith in ascribing all of the effects of unequal exchange (structural iniquities in trade between rich and poor nations) to unequal OCC. There are clearly some cases where this kind of nonequivalence might take place with dramatic effects, such as when previously protected uncompetitive branches of production are opened up to free trade, but on a global scale this is less of a unidirectional exploitative factor than a relatively mundane, persistent and omnidirectional force governing capital mobility.[7] Unless additional factors are incorporated into our analysis, the overall tendency of this kind of nonequivalence would be towards the erosion of differences in development, making for a very benign theory of global trade.

It’s also worth noting that this is the only form of unequal exchange that is inherent to free, competitive, factor-mobile capitalism, without any extra-economic influences or distorting factors. In a sense it’s not really a separate phenomenon, it’s just capitalism working in accordance with its natural laws of motion in order to form prices of production, that is to say prices that are more equal than they otherwise would be. As such I agree with those authors who describe this exchange as “nonequivalent” rather than “unequal”, instead reserving that term for cases where the prices of production are themselves distorted in some way.

Unequal exchange due to monopoly rents

This was a school of thought I initially approached with some suspicion, since I’m wary of a certain tendency for Marxists to say of any severe problem “a monopoly did it.” This is how Emmanuel treats this school (see his dismissive account in section 2.2 of “Unequal Exchange Revisited”). But I have also been swayed by arguments that there’s more to this line of thought than just “a monopoly made it so.”

Barry Finger argues that the means by which monopolies set prices is a bit more complicated than that they simply take hold of a resource and force everyone to accept their prices via state collusion and price fixing.[8] Instead, after taking hold of a sector, monopolies create artificial scarcity by letting quantities of surplus labour go unrealised as value. This might take the form of limited releases, dumping, planned obsolescence and more. By doing so the monopolised sector effectively creates a second set of prices of production, above the standard price.

From here, in addition to the monopoly gaining a greater mass of profit via higher prices, it’s also free to profit from exploiting the unequal exchange between monopoly prices and standard prices. The non-monopoly sectors are forced to accept higher prices for monopolised goods, which are exchanged for comparatively cheap elements of constant capital. This analysis also underlines how monopolies benefit from thoroughly inefficient practices, over and above the normal inefficiencies of the anarchy of production. The monopoly limits the degree to which the capitalist system expands by appropriating part of the surplus product and then underutilising it.

While I’m not convinced that monopolies account for all or even many of the effects of unequal exchange, I can see no reason why they aren’t an additional factor distorting prices.

Unequal exchange caused by differences in productivity.

There have been multiple attempts to explain the effects of unequal exchange through reference to supposed “productivity” differentials between working classes. One version of this explanation comes from the East German Economist Gunther Kohlmey, later taken up by Ernst Mandel. Workers in developed countries are simply more productive of use values (this is true enough of some industries but not others), and the value of commodities produced is inversely related to labour productivity. The world is thus split into less productive nations with a high level of value, and more productive nations with a low level of value. When goods are traded, they exchange somewhere in-between the two values, at an international rate. When the more productive country trades its goods, it gains in value the difference between its national value and the international rate. The less productive country loses in value the difference between its national value and the international rate. There’s little more to this theory than a childishly simplified version of the “UE is all about differences in OCC” theory, so I’ll move on.

Another version of this account is that given by such authors as Michael Kidron and Charles Bettelheim. Their argument is that the average worker in the core is vastly more “exploited” than those in the periphery, not in the technical sense of the word but rather in the sense that the gross money-value of the commodities produced by core workers are higher due to an enormous variable capital cost. Unlike the typical argument about OCC differentials, their argument is that core production actually has an extremely low organic composition, and the amount of variable capital invested is extremely high compared to constant capital consumed. Bettelheim’s example of a core capital is 100c, 1440v, 200s, while peripheral production is 900c, 260v, 200s. The output per worker in money-value is $17.4 and $0.5 respectively. Interestingly the actual rates of exploitation (assuming all surplus labour is realised) in this example suggest the opposite to Bettelheim’s conclusion: the rate of surplus value for core workers would be 13.8%, and for peripheral workers, 76.9%. This accidentally reveals an interesting point: under many conditions there’s a negative correlation between degree of exploitation and value produced per worker. On the other hand, Bettelheim is correct that there’s usually some positive relationship between variable capital cost and total value realised, something that, as we will see, other authors struggle with.

Kidron and Bettelheim should be recognised for at least attempting to reckon with the enormous differences in wages common in the global economy, even if their account is not particularly believable due to unsupportable claims about constant capital cost. But this whole line of thinking is still caught up in questions of who transfers value to whom, questions that I think are misstated. Even if Bettelheim’s example – which seems ludicrously exaggerated and divorced from reality to me – were true, he didn’t demonstrate that the core transfers value to the periphery.

Heterodox value transfer and superexploitation theories

“Value transfer” and superexploitation theories of unequal exchange are most commonly advocated by the recent “heterodox” school including John Smith, Zak Cope, Jason Hickel, and (to an extent) the late Donald Clelland.[9] I have referred to this school as heterodox or eclectic because it tends to mix aspects of the monopoly school with aspects of Emmanuel, Marx, Ricardo and others, in a somewhat freeform manner.

A typical heterodox argument goes like this: first we assume that the quantity of labour performed around the world is relatively equal (concrete? abstract? often it’s unclear), and so is the contribution of labour power to value realised. But because of the unequal development of political struggle, wages have become utterly detached from the real amounts of labour being performed: peripheral workers can be paid $1 to create the same quantity of value as a core worker paid $25 (unions were simply more successful among working classes that didn’t have to contend with colonial repression, imperialist wars, or racial violence). As such the labour-values imputed into a traded commodity bear little relation to the variable capital cost. The contribution of peripheral workers to the global economy in labour hours is very high compared to their wage cost, while the wages gained by core workers are actually greater than the money-value of the labour hours contributed. The different wage costs have an effect on pricing due to unequal exchange, with the higher wage cost leading to higher prices of production in core countries, and lower wage costs to lower prices of production in the periphery (this is the main aspect these heterodox theories share with Emmanuel). When the commodities produced by these two very different working classes are exchanged (their values piggybacking on them as they cross oceans), the set of goods produced in the high-waged country has a price much higher than the money-value of its labour content, while the set of goods produced in the low-waged country has a price much lower than the money-value of its labour content. And so there’s an enormous transfer of labour hours from low to high-waged countries at bargain prices. This can then be quantified in various ways, usually by measuring against a counterfactual world of equal exchange, and so we arrive at a final figure for “values transferred” somewhere in the trillions per year.[10]

Note also that the above account has certain implications for the rate of exploitation (which normally refers to the ratio of surplus labour contributed to variable capital advanced, but in these heterodox accounts seems to be treated as identical to the rate of surplus value, the ratio of surplus value realised to variable capital advanced). If core workers are contributing very few labour hours relative to their wage, then their rate of exploitation is very low, or even (Cope’s words) “a negative rate of exploitation”. Conversely peripheral workers are contributing many labour hours relative to their wage, meaning their rate of exploitation is very high, and their wages are lower than some (independently determined) reproduction cost. Thus we can employ the term “superexploitation” to describe their situation. And so the world is divided in a new way, between the underexploited and superexploited working class. John Smith’s work in particular emphasises this aspect of superexploitation.

Barry Finger and Michael Roberts have argued against the value transfer and superexploitation interpretations of unequal exchange, and I agree with parts of their assessment. However these criticisms clearly don’t disprove all wage-based theories of unequal exchange, as I will show.

The common criticism of value transfer and superexploitation theories runs like this:

Many of these writers don’t seem to understand the process by which concrete labour is reduced into abstract labour hours, meaning they fail to understand how physiologically equal (or dimensionally incomparable) forms of labour can lead to different masses of surplus labour through a social process of mobility and competition.

They furthermore treat capitalists as individuals who seek to realise the maximum amount of surplus labour, rather than individuals who wish to meet a price of production while minimising cost. In real life considerable amounts of surplus labour goes unrealised, sitting in warehouses as excess inventory or dumped, in order to meet price objectives.

Since they see the value and price of labour power as diverging from one another wildly, they can make correspondingly wild claims about the rate of exploitation. According to Finger and Roberts, there aren’t many global patterns that can be unproblematically determined about ROE. Furthermore if the entire periphery were uniformly subjected to superexploitation (wages below reproduction cost) then we wouldn’t only see a stagnation of living standards but instead a total reversal, combined with constant mass starvation, and eventually a total failure of peripheral industry.

Finally, even though there is an unequal exchange taking place in trade, it doesn’t constitute a “value transfer” unless we are both substantialists and confused about what value is. Surely what is being transferred in trade is, on a material level, use values, and on an immaterial level, as yet unrealised quantities of surplus labour. The only place where “value transfer” happens in an economy is in the case of tertiary factors of production taking their rewards (indirect taxation, rents, interest etc.).

These are all supportable arguments aside from certain points about the rate of exploitation. While critics of the heterodox theorists are correct that it would be ridiculous to propose two poles containing totally unexploited and uniformly superexploited working classes, they overcorrect insofar as they deny any possibility that there are distinct global patterns in the rate of surplus value. We know that there’s an enormous global differential in variable capital cost – this is undeniable – but this doesn’t necessarily imply a differential in the rate of surplus value so long as we hold that there’s also a proportional (or greater than proportional) differential in surplus value produced. This would be the case only if changes in the wage corresponded exactly to changes in the value-adding capacity of labour power, and the cost of maintaining that capacity. But there are two good reasons to think that this is not the case: first, when looking at countries with very high and very low wages, it’s clear that wage differentials don’t correspond perfectly to differentials in skill or average education (although this clearly accounts for some of the disparity), and second, it’s clear that there are differences in the mode of consumption between countries. In chapter 6 of Capital vol. I Marx speaks of a “historical and moral element” of the value of labour power, which roughly corresponds to the need to maintain a “standard of living” appropriate to the culture and status of the worker in question. It would be pointless, not to mention moralistic, to divide wage goods into “economically necessary” and “luxury” groupings – leisure is itself reproductive in nature, and the contribution of the capitalist to this cost represents a real need to retain the worker in the face of competitive and moral pressures. But as the wage grows, such as when one national working class gains a significant victory, there enters a possibility that the wage can grow out of proportion with the cost of reproduction – this is the case in any “exogenous” wage increase, that is to say one not initiated by the capitalist in response to some need of his. The end result would be a decrease in the rate of surplus value without any of the changes to the organisation of production this would normally require. Of course it is also the case that certain countries have better labour laws that would themselves change the rate of surplus value by placing limits on the working day and intensity of production. But whatever the real reason, the end result is the possibility that some countries, and not others, can experience a general rise in wages without a corresponding rise in surplus value, and this possibility has extreme consequences explored in the next section.

What I think the heterodox theorists of unequal exchange are very effective at conveying is an emotional truth about unequal exchange. They find it morally horrific that wage increases in one place can lead to misery in another. This is the reaction of any compassionate person. But their economic arguments are then subordinated to their moral concerns, and distorted to suit them. This is why they call upon so many disparate concepts, from mutually opposed schools of thought, to construct arguments like a house of cards.

Unequal exchange due to differences in wages.

While many authors are critical of this or that aspect of unequal exchange, I don’t think any have come close to challenging the central theorem of unequal exchange in the “narrow” sense, given most clearly by Emmanuel in section 2.4 of “Unequal Exchange Revisited”:

“If the wage is exogenous (institutional, independent variable), and if a tendency exists for the formation of a general International rate of profit, then any autonomous variation in the wage-rate in one branch or in one country will entail a variation in the same direction of the respective price of production and a variation in the opposite direction of the general rate of profit.”

This is somewhat similar to what Marx tells us about overall wage increases in chapter 11 of Capital vol. III:

“if wages are raised 25%:

1) the price of production of the commodities of a capital of average social composition does not change;

2) the price of production of the commodities of a capital of lower composition rises, but not in proportion to the fall in profit;

3) the price of production of the commodities of a capital of higher composition falls, but also not in the same proportion as profit.”

The difference is that we aren’t raising the general rate of wages. In Marx’s day there was less reason to assume that the struggle over surplus value would achieve such uneven success. Wages between British and Indian workers were roughly comparable, with the exception of a small British labour aristocracy, and it was only in the post World War II period that wage disparities assumed their present day form of an enormous difference in the wages of whole national working classes.

Emmanuel’s theorem instead applies to a general rise in the wage rate of one country, unmatched by another. It’s easiest to see this theory in action in the context of a Marxian prices of production table such as that I included earlier:[11]

Then we apply an “autonomous variation in the wage-rate” (for example a rise in unionisation in one country, unmatched in the other) in this case an increase of 33% in country A, as well as a reduction in the rate of surplus value to 50%. In such a case the composition of that country would be 240c, 80v, 40s. Country A would result in a price of 384, while country B’s would be 216. This is a 2.4% rise in the prices achieved by country A, while country B sees a 4.16% decrease in local prices. In both countries, the deviation of prices from values increases from 15 to 24. As a secondary effect, the average rate of profit is lowered, and while in the case of a general increase in wages this would negate any benefit to the capitalist in country A, in the case of unequal wage rises these negatives are compensated by changes in the terms of trade and other factors. To be clear, this arrangement is worse for the capitalist class as a whole in terms of absolute profit, but it is not intolerable due to the many compensatory advantages gained by the capitalists of high-waged countries.

This is only possible in a global context where labour is less mobile than capital, since the rate of wages could equalise in much the same way as the rate of profit if there was perfect global factor mobility. In my opinion these assumptions correspond well to a world of increasingly severe immigration controls, and a difference in real wages between core and peripheral countries less like 33%, and more like 1000%.[12]

Note also how an increase in variable capital without a corresponding increase in surplus value must imply a decrease in the rate of surplus value. Unequal exchange in a narrow sense is therefore necessarily an argument that the rate of surplus value, and consequently the pressure to increase the rate of exploitation, is lower in richer countries. But this doesn’t require us to argue that increases in variable capital, as well as various secondary factors associated with institutions of the working class over the last century, have not increased the average skill and efficiency of workers in high-waged countries, only that any resulting increase in surplus value contributed is not exactly proportional to the increase in wages since the postwar period.

Note that there’s nothing here about value transfer, negative exploitation, or who deserves what. The majority of the critics of unequal exchange have been so preoccupied with countering secondary claims about political consciousness and economic justice that Emmanuel’s central claim has been buried under a lot of discourse that has little to do with it. This is not to say that Emmanuel doesn’t make such secondary claims, but these aren’t the aspect of his thought I find interesting.

To accept the central theorem brings several implications for the study of historical development. While Emmanuel didn’t think that unequal exchange was necessary for development (most of the material benefit goes towards inefficient consumption), he did think that wage differentials created enormous supplementary benefits for capitalists. Constant wage growth creates expanding markets, more investment opportunities, and an overall expansion in the mass of profit in overdeveloped areas. Other economists like Hartmut Elsenhans further developed the idea of wages as a factor of development. If the assumptions of the central theorem correspond to reality, then we would expect to see cheapened elements of constant capital, more investment opportunities, a greater mass of profit, and further benefits.

Where to from here.

I hope that this short account has clarified why I think it’s necessary for Marxist economists to reconsider Emmanuel’s original theory of unequal exchange and the way it applies to the present day. It’s necessary to do this without confusing Emmanuel’s central theorem with other authors’ versions of unequal exchange, although other concepts going by the same name are clearly worthy of investigation. It’s also necessary to consider it separately to various secondary claims to which it’s frequently attached: I don’t think that to accept this theorem means we must also accept that there’s a “value transfer” in trade, uniformly different organic compositions, or notions of negative exploitation. I certainly don’t think that unequal exchange should be used to derive moral claims about who “deserves” rewards for labour – this kind of thinking belongs to pre-Marxian socialism. That being said, it’s only right to be appalled by global inequalities which have created exploitable opportunities to hoard benefits at one pole at the expense of another. A sober analysis of the contradictory determinations of these inequalities is necessary for practice to begin to resolve them. Footnotes

I’m not immune to this confusion, as anyone who’s read any of my previous articles on the subject would agree. ↑

That is to say, pretty much all exchanges outside of the quite unlikely case of two capitals with exactly the same organic composition and rate of turnover, see Morishima (1973, chapter 7) for discussion of this special case. ↑

This might be called the “pigs at a trough” theory of profit – the trough is as long as the market for a commodity is large, and despite some initial jockeying to get a place at the trough (which might involve certain inequalities in effort expended by the pigs), each pig gets their share once their position is secure. ↑

In practice efforts will be made to reduce the price difference further, but without a more fundamental change in composition this cannot be done without sacrificing profit. ↑

Note also that these prices of production assume, quite unrealistically, that all surplus labour hours are realised. The only thing stopping Capital V from gaining additional money-units per commodity (beyond a certain point it would become less competitive than Capital IV) by not bringing its full inventory to market is the question of demand. ↑

Maito’s study is not the most up-to-date, but it most clearly shows differences in national averages which are slowly equalising. ↑

That is not to say that this special case doesn’t ever result in the immiseration of whole areas. An example close to home was the highly protected dairy industry in Northland that benefited from government price controls until the 1980s. Once those protections were lifted and the area was made to compete on global markets, there was an extreme case of capital flight. The transitional period would have been marked by this form of “unequal exchange” due to competitive differences, and the region has been considerably poorer in relative terms ever since. ↑

This seems to be what Walter Rodney and some other Monthly Review-inspired authors thought, and I’m not saying this doesn’t ever happen, but without a change in the volume of goods brought to market this would still result in additional problems for the monopoly company, such as market oversaturation. ↑

Clelland doesn’t entirely deserve to be grouped here. His theory of “dark value” transfer is clearly conceptually distinct from other “value transfer” theories and has some heuristic value not otherwise discussed in this article. Nonetheless he was influential among these authors. ↑

Cope says $2.8 trillion per year (mostly using 2013 data), based on measurement against a counterfactual where everyone is paid the median wage. Hickel et. al., using a similar method but measuring against a counterfactual where the prices of production are everywhere equivalent to that of the core, reach the figure of $152 trillion transferred from 1960-2021. The Hickel method is a bit sillier than the Cope one, because whereas in Cope’s counterfactual it’s at least feasible that equal wage rates (imposed by some alien invasion force that also wishes the world to retain a capitalist mode of production) would result in global conditions of equal exchange, there’s no universe in which the entire world’s commodities would exchange at an inflated price of production for any reason. ↑

This table is based on one in Emmanuel (1972, p. 55). As Emmanuel notes it is simplified and has some unrealistic assumptions about cost price (which would be lower if we separated the constant capital actually used from the totals invested), but the effects of unequal exchange are exactly the same as in more complex tables. ↑

More still if we exclude the rise in Chinese wages. However the “real wage”, even if it does adjust for purchasing power, also doesn’t tell the whole story, as in high-waged countries certain reproduction costs (such as housing) rise out of proportion with others. ↑

[cyberneticpeoplespolis]

There's no "Professional-Managerial Class" in NZ

I’m usually a fan of opinion writers attempting to explain a complex term to their audience, especially when it’s as well-written as Danyl Mclauchlan’s “In a captured state,” written for the Spinoff  on Saturday. Ideas shouldn’t be cloistered away in academia, especially when they’re concepts that get people thinking critically about the society they live in and the conditions that underpin it. Mclauchlan has produced something quite unique: an original take on New Zealand class society, appearing in a fairly mainstream outlet. But for every good point that Mclauchlan raises there is one that seems overstated, under-investigated, or simply baffling.

What is the article about? Ostensibly the so-called “Professional Managerial Class,” or PMC, but this is really just a jumping-off point for a much broader discussion. Mclauchlan covers everything from New Zealand’s atrocious housing market, to its self-perpetuating state bureaucracies, to the hopelessness that comes with realising that well-meaning leftist ideas can be co-opted by self-serving liberals or re-territorialised by capital. If nothing else, it conveys the psychic landscape faced by New Zealand’s centre-left: every party seems a different kind of poison, no alternative seems to exist, and the political imagination required to overcome the problems faced seems out of reach. 

I don’t have the time, energy, or space to dissect everything that Mclauchlan says, suffice to say that it’s about half worthwhile and compelling, and half nonsense. The compelling parts actually make the nonsense parts go down a bit too smoothly. 

What is the PMC?

The Professional Managerial Class thesis was first put forward by John and Barbara Ehrenreich in the 70s as part of the “Boundary Debate”, wherein Marxists questioned the boundaries between classes. Key among these debates were attempts to explain the distinct “middle class” of technical workers that had developed in many Western societies. The PMC theory was hardly the only worthwhile theory from this series of debates, and it wasn’t the first time similar ideas had been suggested, indeed the PMC thesis bears a striking similarity to Jurgen Habermas’ idea of “reflexive labourers”. But of all these theories the PMC thesis would become the most influential, perhaps because of the Ehrenreichs’ influence within the Democratic Socialists of America, or perhaps because “PMC” made for a punchier epithet than the other theories. 

The PMC are “salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.” The  PMC thesis suggested that educated, left-liberal elites constitute a kind of upper-middle strata, with control over key institutions of politics, media and education.

As much as their definition started with a relationship to the means of production, it’s also not really a theory of economic class. The Ehrenreichs were thoroughly influenced by the “humanist” theory of class put forward by E.P. Thompson, who in The Making of the English Working Class would state:

“[C]lass is not this or that part of the machine, but the way the machine works once it is set in motion—not this and that interest, but the friction of interests—the movement itself, the heat, the thundering noise. Class is a social and cultural formation (often finding institutional expression) which cannot be defined abstractly, or in isolation, but only in terms of relationship with other classes; and, ultimately, the definition can only be made in the medium of time—that is, action and reaction, change and conflict. When we speak of a class we are thinking of a very loosely defined body of people who share the same congeries of interests, social experiences, traditions and value-system, who have a disposition to behave as a class, to define themselves in their actions and in their consciousness in relation to other groups of people in class ways. But class itself is not a thing, it is a happening.”

The influence of Thompson’s humanist class analysis is evident in Barbara Ehrenreich’s discussion of the origins of the PMC theory. This origin was not in any study of the relations of production – any mention of that only came later – the real roots were in her observation that educated members of the New American Movement acted antagonistically towards more traditional workers. This was Thompson’s “friction of interests” – if there was a clear consciousness that had developed in opposition to the “real” workers then that would imply a new class. The professor and his wife in the NAM meeting who acted rudely to their worker comrades were actually acting out an antagonistic class relation. A more cynical person might point out that by this logic, every group of people that finds itself opposed to a particular class interest in a unique way would be a class in itself, but that’s beside the point. 

By throwing out the Marxist view of class as relations of production, instead saying that class could also be “actual relations between groups of people, not formal relations between people and objects,” the Ehrenreichs were free to see these “actual relations” in any relationship between more educated and less educated workers. The PMC is a descriptive rather than analytic category; it is not a “class” in the usual sense, rather a social phenomenon. 

Perhaps because of this malleability, the PMC thesis is one of the most controversial theories of class, proving easily co-opted into culture wars and inane political bickering. It offered an easy way for both right and left wingers to agree that virtue-signalling politically-correct liberal yuppies secretly control all of our cultural and educational institutions. The political conclusion of PMC theory often seems to be some sort of cross-class alliance against annoying liberals.

Catherine Liu’s Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional-Managerial Class is the clearest example of this, presenting both Bernie Sanders’ and Donald Trump’s voters as opponents and victims of the PMC, and Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren as their political champions. It’s a largely “vibes”-based critique: in reality Trump’s voters were largely professionals and small business owners, while the real political divide between Sanders and Warren was infinitesimal. Opposing the PMC’s “cultural war against the real working class” seems to amount to a battle waged by the rude against the fake-nice. 

The PMC is also a favourite bugbear of everyone from a recent collective of disaffected Zer0 books writers, to anti-intersectional messiah Adolph Reed, to New Zealand’s rose-tinted classist Chris Trotter. It’s probably unfair to group all these people together, but it really is impressive how often the PMC thesis pops up among anyone situated in the murky zone between social democracy and social conservatism. It’s an easy justification for the old tailist line: “anything [we imagine] workers believe is a working class consciousness” and anything beyond that is PMC virtue signalling, or whatever.

Mclauchlan’s PMC

And Mclauchlan is keen to distance himself from these takes. He’s careful to couch his claims within an acknowledgement that:

“Some people take these critiques – that there’s a “PMC” that appropriates left-wing causes to promote themselves or their own material interests – and then they disappear down a weird rabbit hole of anti-wokeness.”

In contrast to those who use the PMC as a bludgeon against anyone they see as virtue signalling, Mclauchlan turns the thesis on its head: the PMC is not only the “ruling class”, this is “(a) obviously true and (b) mostly a good thing.” Each of these points is deeply strange. Imagining up a new theory of one’s own is fine, but Mclauchlan implies that this is the PMC thesis, when really it’s his own strange creature.

As you might have gathered by now, I’m not the Ehrenreichs’ biggest fan, but in their words PMC theory at least makes some sense. In the decades since they first put their theory forward, they’ve constantly updated it, most recently with 2013’s “Death of a Yuppie-Dream.” The key word here is “death”: the Ehrenreichs now believe the PMC is an increasingly nonexistent entity, in the process of being reabsorbed into the working class through the proliferation of degree mill universities, and the end of state education subsidies. 

This maps onto reality well. As any graduate will tell you, a degree doesn’t automatically confer a nice public sector job any more, in fact a degree is now a minimum expectation for entry-level positions rather than a ticket into middle management. You wouldn’t know this from most present-day treatments of the PMC though – the Ehrenreichs’ recent work gets in the way of a good story about educated liberals being their own special class. If Mclauchlan had read what the Ehrenreichs, or the late David Graeber, had written on modern universities and the PMC, he might have avoided the plainly ludicrous statement that “The university is the apex of a gigantic sorting mechanism to sift those who are economically productive from those who aren’t.” What Mclauchlan means by “economically productive” is uncertain here, but whichever way you slice it, it seems like an ignorant or offensive statement: university grads won’t earn much higher wages than many tradies, and they certainly won’t produce more surplus value. If another of Graeber’s theories is to be believed, the opposite is probably true, and many university grads end up stuck in bullshit jobs producing nothing of societal value.

The Ehrenreichs were also self-described democratic socialists: their theory didn’t suggest that dentists and lawyers are a “ruling class” that has replaced the big capitalists. Instead the PMC is, in their words “between labor and capital,” a mediating class of intellectual and ideological labourers with little economic power of their own, but a great ability to wage cultural battles on behalf of other classes. 

But even if the PMC somehow constituted a ruling class, would this be a good thing? After all, as Mclauchlan notes “[t]here’s nothing wrong with having a society that’s run by smart, hard-working, educated people.” This is the strangest aspect of his article: not only are we living in a political system captured by a hopelessly out-of-touch technocratic elite, this is a good thing so long as that class can “see itself.”

I’m hardly the first to note this, but it’s interesting that many of those advocating for the idea of a PMC think of themselves as part of it. The aforementioned Catherine Liu thinks of herself as a class traitor to the PMC, while the Ehrenreichs associate the PMC with their own party. As a Spinoff writer, Mclauchlan would certainly fit into the PMC’s cultural milieu (as would I, for that matter). While it’s usually an excuse for some very protestant middle class guilt, Mclauchlan embraces the PMC, suggesting that what it needs is a kind of class consciousness! If only the PMC was more self-aware, they could correct their errors, and more effectively embrace their role as our social leaders.

PMC or Contradictory Class Locations?

The problem with the PMC theory is, and always has been, the word “class.” Whereas earlier theories of a middle-strata in society, from Marx’s petty-bourgeoisie, to Lenin’s “labour aristocrats”, to Habermas’ “reflexive labourers” were always careful to situate themselves in a theory of value and production. The PMC (as it is popularly understood anyway), is typically associated with some loose educational standards and cultural norms. When does a person become integrated into the PMC? When they graduate from uni? When they get a nice office job? When they follow Chlöe Swarbrick on instagram? This is not to say that class is all about simple economics: education, race, gender, cultural values – these have always been essential in creating the social conditions for the development and reproduction of economic classes. But in terms of explaining what certain figures’ long term economic interests are, and how they will allocate their effort and resources, it can often be worth asking a simple question: do they work for a living, or do they own things for a living? 

Government housing policy is one thing Mclauchlan seems to think can be explained by a PMC, but this makes little sense unless we are using PMC to mean “landlords,” something that would seem to contradict the Ehrenreich’s definition. Before the last election it was reported that the average MP had stakes in four different properties, with National MPs collectively holding stakes in 292 properties, and Labour MPs in 130. It’s probably oversimplifying things to say that all MPs vote with their own property values in mind, but considering that most of their colleagues are also property owners, as well as parliament’s notorious bullying culture, it isn’t hard to see why the 34% of New Zealanders who rent didn’t exactly have their interests represented over the last term. While many of these MPs were professionals prior to entering parliament, their voting behaviour on issues like property values or taxes for businesses can’t really be explained by having once been a lawyer or teacher. While making money through property ownership confers shared financial and political interests, there just aren’t any shared interests among professionals that aren’t also shared with other workers, or other owners.

This is because class isn’t an “either-or” question. A person is quite capable of being a worker who earns most of their income through wages, while also owning capital in the form of shares and other assets. Erik Ollin Wright called these “contradictory class locations,” and it seems like the theory of PMCs, as well as various other theories of a “middle class” that exists outside the binary of workers and owners, are really just describing people with complicated relationships to class. 

This makes a lot of sense in a society like New Zealand, where so many of us are fundamentally workers, but some have other aspects complicating that relationship. There are workers who rent out rooms, workers with shares, and most of us have some small connection to finance capital via kiwisaver. A low-waged care worker who owns an inherited family home is going to act with a contradictory kind of class solidarity: she will join a union and fight for higher wages for her fellow employees, yet at the same time might vote for parties that raise property values – and her co-workers rent with them. The idea of contradictory class locations explains why the highest paid workers and the smaller capitalists can often seem fused together as a “middle-class”, with ideas and interests that are a mish-mash of those of workers and bosses.

The PMC as a false consciousness

Gabriel Winant makes a notable defense of the PMC idea against Wright’s contradictory class locations. With reference to Thompson, he argues that whether or not the PMC maps onto any abstract relationship to the means of production, it exists as a distinct entity as a kind of shared consciousness, morals, and ideology among professionals. This is an uncontroversial claim, but it doesn’t follow that simply because a formation of consciousness exists, that it is rooted in anything real. Marxists have an (admittedly overused) word for these kinds of ideology that don’t correlate with a groups’ relationship to the means of production: false consciousness. Professionals have deluded themselves into thinking they are a class above other workers (a delusion reinforced by the PMC thesis), and this represents a real barrier to their solidarity with other workers, with very real consequences. 

Mclauchlan talks about a lot of very real phenomena in his article. The growth of professional and managerial work over the course of the 20th century is undeniable, and much of it really does have to do with self-replicating bureaucracies like he suggests, not just in the public sector, but in the private sector as well. As Graeber tells it, the history of management is largely one of productivity experts hiring new productivity experts to measure one anothers’ productivity. But this wasn’t just something contained to a distinct “class” of managers. Most workers are increasingly spending more time forced to measure or improve their own productivity than actually working. 

As western companies went through the process of offshoring much of their manufacturing industry to pursue cheaper wage costs, western economies increasingly reoriented around bloated information and finance sectors. The old social-democratic economic model of increasing aggregate demand through big state sectors and welfare was partly replaced by corporate job creation programmes. The kinds of professional work this created often centered on shifting around debt, working solely to fix someone else’s mistakes, or seeking to produce value by improving someone else’s productivity, something that is economically impossible. 

As manufacturing and primary industry economies gave way to finance and service economies, the nature of work began to change. Education – or more importantly, degrees – became the number one quality sought after by employers. At first, high demand for educated workers meant a degree was a surefire path to the highest paid jobs, but after a while the market evened out and supply caught up with demand thanks to mass education. Highly educated workers might have been a privileged strata for a time, but now they are increasingly the norm. Are these people a class “unable to see itself?” Absolutely. But not because they’re PMC or any other special class for the very smart. Many educated workers are unable to see themselves as they really are because they’ve been told they’re “white collar”, “professionals” or “middle-class” when really they’re not any better off than other workers. For all their education and left-liberal values, most are still politically and economically disempowered, and increasingly so as their market value declines.

For all my disagreements with Mclauchlan, I’m glad we can have articles pointing out that we live in a “captured state.” I just wish we could agree that to live in a captured state isn’t really a good thing, and I also wish we could agree on who did the capturing. Mclauchlan has managed to compress every class that isn’t the “uneducated” working class into a “PMC,” but your average dentist or teacher doesn’t own 70 times more assets than the average person. The people for whom laws are written can usually afford to be above them.

[cyberneticpeoplespolis]

How Should Socialists Approach Nationality? Pt. 1: “Left” National Chauvinism

This article was originally posted in Peace, Land, and Bread’s blog as part of a series about socialist approaches to nationalism. Check it out for a full list of references etc. I will be posting parts 2 and 3 in the coming weeks.  I have been inspired to write the following series by Christian Noakes’ short article “On the Problem of Red US Patriotism” which recently appeared in Peace, Land, and Bread. [1] I wanted to commend him for tackling this problem, but also to go further, and ask how socialists should approach nationalism in the 21st century? Out of what contradictions within the socialist movement has “red” US patriotism arisen? Will similar movements emerge across the world? Have they already done so?

While many discussions of “red” patriotism have thus far centered on figures in the United States, I have seen similar ideas to “Red” patriotism expressed in Aotearoa, [2] and the phenomenon is worth investigating across borders. We share a settler-colonial context, and a marginal socialist movement split into sects, and so I am interested to see whether any of the ideas expressed here find resonance with US comrades. I am also interested in starting a dialogue on questions of nationalism within Peace, Land, and Bread, and strongly encourage replies to address the faults in this series.

There is a problem inherent in viewing “red” patriotism as a phenomenon unique to the United States in recent years. [3] Nationalism has always been a uniquely international phenomenon, particularly sensitive to changes in the global economy. Surges in nationalist sentiment are rarely contained to one country—often they occur in great waves of national uprisings, and while each individual movement is responding to internal problems within their respective borders, the timing and overall character of the broader nationalist shift usually says something about changes in the world-economy, or in other words, the general form which imperialist relations take with each successive era. [4]

“Red” patriotism is quite clearly, even self-consciously, [5] a reaction to a global rise in indigenous and anticolonial nationalisms, especially within the settler-colonies. It is a reaction to movements for the return of land, for reparations, and for counter-sovereignty.

Crucially, “Red” patriotism is not the only reaction to this: it is just one part of a broader push from within progressive movements to distance leftism from forms of struggle which proponents see as distractions from core economic concerns. [6] In this worldview, indigeneity is another “false consciousness” [7] promoted by shady cultural elites as a sideshow for the workers within the settler-colonial nation, who would otherwise be united in organising to combat their true class enemies.

Interestingly, a very similar argument is made by many antinationalists concerning both nationalism in the west, and various revolutionary nationalisms around the world. Nationalism to them is the king of “false consciousness,” a deep-seated irrational tribalism that distracts workers from their world-historic task of organising along international class lines, forming a global proletarian consciousness to fight for their shared economic concerns. Sub-state or counter-sovereign nationalisms are particularly insidious, as they serve to further divide an already hopelessly atomised global class. [8]

In practice, “Red” patriotism is just one of many political forces opposed to indigenous and anticolonial nationalisms in the developed countries. What then might be gained by looking at these forces as one category? Perhaps by looking at both left-nationalism and left-antinationalism in the west, we can find a common point of origin for opposition to indigenous and anticolonial sub-state nationalisms.

“Left-Wing” Nationalism in the West

There are two broad kinds of national chauvinism on the left in most developed countries: those who say that all forms of nationalism can be expressed in a useful, progressive manner regardless of world-economic context, and those who say that all forms of nationalism are ultimately reactionary, regardless of world-economic context. From these two broad kinds, there are further subtypes worth discussing in-detail. We will start by looking at the first broad kind of national chauvinism.

In many countries it is common enough to find left-liberals who believe in a “left-wing patriotism.” Left-liberals and social-democrats will often respond to accusations by the right of being unpatriotic by saying: “of course we are patriotic, we believe in the betterment of our nation, but through welfare policies and other progressive means.” In saying this, the left-liberal hopes to prevent further accusations that they are subverting this or that aspect of state power or national identity. In this they usually fail, and are accused anyway, but the exchange is nonetheless revealing: many progressives have a genuine belief in “left-wing patriotism.”

Patriotism is—make no mistake—just nationalism by a different name, designed to appeal to a more educated, liberal strata.

To many, “patriotism” connotes a kind of progressive, non-interventionist, civic nationalism, [10] whereas “nationalism” carries with it images of ethnonationalism—of blood feuds, genocide, and balkanisation. While patriotism has different cultural connotations to English-speakers, it is identical in function to nationalism, and nationalism scholars do not meaningfully differentiate between the two.

Even if this patriotism is simply a kind of nationalism, this is not enough to denounce it: after all there are many genuinely progressive nationalisms in this world. But “progressive” patriotism in the west generally fails to investigate three fundamental assumptions:

By saying that the progressive patriot seeks to “better” their country through progressive means, they fail to investigate whether the development of one area is possible without the relative immiseration of another. Since the 1950s, Marxist theorists of imperialism and economic geographers have demonstrated that mutually-beneficial development between rich and poor countries is largely an illusion, and that development is often a zero-sum game. [11] The primary mechanism by which developed nations have “bettered” themselves is through exploitation, and even progressive policies within rich countries can serve to deepen this divide if they are not matched by redistributive policies.[12]

By referring to the betterment of their nation, progressive patriots treat the nation as a reified whole without investigating the role of classes, social strata, and political forces within. In other words, by talking of “national” betterment, they sidestep any discussion of internal class conflict or redistribution. A truly progressive project would instead benefit some classes, social strata, and political forces at the relative expense of others

Finally the progressive patriot fails to investigate the wider context of their patriotism. Should we focus on the betterment of the richest states at all? Or does their role in the world-economy and interstate system necessarily prevent the development of other nations? The progressive patriot does not consider whether the abolition of their nation and state may be the best thing for the peoples of the world, especially in settler-colonial contexts where state sovereignty necessarily prevents the existence of national projects among colonised peoples.

In addition to left-liberal patriotism, there is another kind of “left-wing” nationalism in the settler-colonies and developed nations of the world. This is the kind ably criticised by Christian Noakes: “red” patriotism, and other ostensibly “Marxist” expressions of nationalism in the west. This is a much less common phenomenon than left-liberal patriotism, but it is all the more disturbing for its appropriation and subversion of the rhetoric of socialism.

In addition to sharing the same under-investigated assumptions as the left-liberal patriot, the red patriot adds a set of assumptions about the nature of the working class, and purports to act in our interest. The red patriot assumes that working class people are stupid, and as fundamentally stupid and uneducated people, we are incapable of understanding politics beyond base emotional appeals, and our most immediate economic interests. We cannot possibly understand solidarity beyond jingoistic appeals to unity and shared identities, and we cannot understand that our short-term economic interests as individuals might contradict our long-term economic interests as a class. Since they see proletarian cultures as inherently static, the red patriot cannot imagine a transformation of those cultures through education and discussion.

On this basis, the “red” patriot denounces decolonisation: “working class people couldn’t possibly understand that! What if they think they’ll be deported?” Likewise they denounce any form of internationalism which goes beyond non-interventionism: “but working class people care about problems here most of all.” Any talk of abolishing the official nationalism of the colonial or colonising state is unthinkable: “you are alienating the real workers.” The red patriot imagines themselves to be an interpreter of the real needs of the working class, counterposed against a horde of unrealistic, out-of-touch, academic, or activist leftists, when in actual fact their “real working class” doesn’t exist. They have invented a conservative-minded, middle-aged white man in a high visibility vest, who is also inexplicably open to talk of socialism. Having invented this real worker, they become his servant, and seek his approval.

While left-liberals hide behind the innocuous connotations of civic nationalism, Red patriotism sometimes exists as a pantomime of revolutionary anti-colonial nationalism transplanted onto the bloated form of the settler-colonies. The red patriot will quite happily throw around some out-of-context quote from Fred Hampton or Ho Chi Minh on the validity of revolutionary nationalism, while supporting the official nationalism of the very white supremacist states those revolutionaries struggled to defeat. While red patriots will often ostensibly support colonised peoples, they will only do so insofar as this anti-colonialism does not threaten the foundational assumptions of their own nationalism. For this reason it is common enough for red patriots to support anti-colonial struggles on another continent, but will refuse to support indigenous movements fighting a similar and interconnected struggle a few miles away. [9]

Anti-Nationalist Chauvinism

Given these problems with nationalism in the West, many socialists conclude that nationalism is just one of many artificially constructed ruling class ideologies designed to atomise, distract, or impede working class movements towards truly progressive goals. This is perfectly true in the context of many European and settler-colonial nationalisms. However, there is also a crude antinationalism which takes this argument one step further to claim that all nationalism is fundamentally reactionary, and leads to irrationality, violence, and division. This view is not as mainstream as progressive patriotism, but is very common in academia, western leftist organisations, and progressive civil society.

At first glance it may appear that these antinationalists have nothing in common with “progressive” patriots. After all they stand diametrically opposed to one another on the question of whether nationalism can ever contribute positively to the socialist movement. But below the surface there is a great degree of commonality between many antinationalists and progressive patriots: they both oppose the nationalism of indigenous or colonised peoples, they both hold the European concept of nationhood to be the norm, and they both fail to account for the world-economic context of different nationalisms. In practice, many antinationalists and progressive patriots only disagree on their definition of nationalism: the progressive patriot sees their actions as taking place on a national level, using nationality as a boundaried space for activity, whereas the antinationalist does exactly the same thing but fails to see it for what it is.

A recurrent theme in bourgeois theories of nationalism is the idea of a “good” and “bad” nationalism. “Civic” nationalisms, those commonly promoted by liberal, conditionally multicultural, settler-colonial or colonising states are counterposed against “Ethno” nationalisms: a more barbaric, nonwestern form, based in imagined kinship groups. The same is true of “patriotism” versus “nationalism” generally. To most antinantionalists, nationalism is only ever this latter, “bad” form, and if “good” nationalism does its job, the antinationalist does not see it as nationalism at all. As Michael Billig notes, most western liberal nationalism is “banal,” it consists of consistent, subtle signifiers of identity, peppered throughout everyday life. Just because liberal nationalism is banal does not mean it is benign—this is precisely the activity that allows western populations to explode into “spontaneous” patriotism when called upon—yet most discussions of nationalism place undue emphasis on only the most spectacular and readily apparent nationalism of nonwestern states. [13]

Working class institutions are not immune to this subtle reinforcement of nationhood either. Nearly all progressive or working class institutions around the world take place on a national level, within the boundaries denoted by the interstate system of borders and other limitations upon movement. This is natural, after all, as working across borders is difficult and costly—only capital can freely move around without significant restrictions. [14] Most unions will only organise within the established boundaries of a single state, even as their opponents in the capitalist class become ever more international in scope. Thus even though class oppression takes place on an international scale, working class institutions are usually national in scope, and will tend to reinforce the congruence of national and state boundaries. [15]

Antinationalists thus benefit from wages, institutions, and rights that have been achieved through forms of organisation which reinforce nationalism. It would not be enough to simply point out hypocrisy here—it is perfectly possible to benefit from a system one is criticising without being wrong, but the problem is instead that the dogmatic antinantionalist has benefited from a system wherein nationhood confers legitimacy and economic benefits, and has reached a higher level of development, only to then break the ladder for any who might follow. Many Indigenous and anti-colonial nationalist movements desire recognition of nationhood not out of any irrational or sentimental impulse, but because they realise that there are tangible benefits to nationhood in the current geopolitical system. Nationalist movements are often the only route oppressed cultures have towards achieving a place within international legal and political bodies, sometimes called the interstate system, whereupon they can conduct themselves on an equal legal footing to other world powers.

Revolutionary nationalism is also an important route towards breaking the interstate system that enforces limitations upon a more internationalist mode of organisation. The interstate system is reinforced and presided over by hegemonic powers, always a member of the settler-colonial or colonising powers which first created the world-economy to benefit themselves. This power can be broken, and it is clear that socialist and anti-colonial revolutions, as well as the actions of weaker states propelled forward by modernising nationalisms, have presented the greatest challenge to dominant hegemonies. [16]

By multiplying the contradictions that must be mediated within the interstate system, as well as by pushing forward with nationalisms which multiply contradictions within the dominant powers (such as indigenous nationalisms), there exists a clear path towards eliminating an important obstacle to international class consciousness. Only after this point can nationality truly be abandoned.

This represents one strategic criticism of crude antinationalism, but I do not think it will convince many anti-nationalists, nor do I think it gets to the heart of the problem. The main critique I will provide for the moment is that crude antinationalism and “progressive” patriotism play a similar role in terms of function, if not in intent. They play an identical role in suppressing the aspirations of indigenous nationalisms; they play an identical role in falsely equating European and nonwestern ideas of nationhood and culture [17]; and they play an identical role in causing socialists in the developed world to disregard problems of imperial wealth extraction, underdevelopment, or cultural assimilation. Both progressive patriots and left antinationalists can work together quite well, and agree more often than not on these issues. The question that concerns both groups the most is not whether the left should support nationalism, but rather how nationalism or antinationalism can be used to grant a progressive veneer to the supremacy of their own national group.

I do not want to tar all antinationalists with this brush. I am referring to a very specific expression of antinationalism that has developed in the settler colonies to provide cover for chauvinist attitudes towards the independence of colonised peoples. There are other expressions of antinationalism, such as the Revolutionary Intercommunalism of Huey P. Newton, [18] or the attitudes of many anarcho-communists, [19] which have their basis in different definitions of the nation and state, rather than a fundamentally chauvinist politics. While I have disagreements with some of these approaches, and many contain significant contradictions, [20] many such people support the independence of colonised peoples, even if they use different words to describe their support. There are also many well-developed leftist critiques of nationalism by authors who do not fully discount the liberatory possibilities of certain nationalist movements, such as by Immanuel Wallerstein, Tom Nairn, and Eric Hobsbawm, and I will return to these more considered critiques in parts two and three.

By illustrating some similarities in the functional outcomes of both nationalism and antinationalism in the west, I have not yet gotten to the roots where “left” national chauvinism stems from. It is one thing to illustrate a constellation of similar phenomena, and another thing to demonstrate the laws that govern their formation, development, and function within a broader system. I have not yet shown why present-day national chauvinism was able to develop from within the Marxist movement, as this has its origins in earlier Marxist theories of the nation—something I will discuss in part two. In part three, I will introduce an alternative theory of nationality drawn from both a reading of Hegel through Soviet Activity Theory, and from Wallerstein’s World-Systems Analysis.

Endnotes

[1] Noakes, Christian. “On the Problem of Red US Patriotism.”

[2] Basing progressive arguments in axioms of state sovereignty became common during protests against the Trans Pacific Partnership, for example.

[3] This is not at all a criticism of Noakes—no one could be expected to provide more depth in a 700 word article.

[4] I will be using some terms and ideas taken from Immanuel Wallerstein over this series to discuss world-economies. An accessible introduction to his work can be found in Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Politics of the World-Economy.

[5] A recent livestream featuring Caleb Maupin was titled “5 settlers discuss #landback”, to give some idea.

[6] The root of this belief is pure economism, and a better path would be to find a route between economism and liberal theories of identity, a task ably performed in Parkinson, Donald. “Neither Intersectionality nor Economism: For a Genuine Class Politics.”

[7] This phrase is heavily overused to describe nearly any formation of consciousness which is not explicitly marxist. The concept of a formation of consciousness will be discussed in Part 3.

[8] An overview of sub-state nationalism, or nationalism among nations without access to state power, is given in Tierney, Stephen. “Reframing Sovereignty? Sub-State National Societies and Contemporary Challenges to the Nation-State.” pp. 161–83.

[9] Antinationalists are sometimes the mirror image of this approach, supporting nearby indigenous struggles, but refusing to support similar struggles overseas that do not conform to their standards of martyrdom.

[10] This in-turn has its origin in a political project by British Conservatives of the 1870s to ascribe to British imperialism a progressive, liberal, and humanitarian set of connotations, while describing the imperialism of other powers as regressive, protectionist, and tyrannical. For the origins of this idea, see Knox, Bruce. “The Earl of Carnarvon, empire and imperialism, 1855–90.” pp. 48–64.

[11] The realisation that colonised and formerly colonised countries are undergoing active underdevelopment had its origins in economists inspired by Frantz Fanon, such as Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy. This “underdevelopment school” would come to include such writers as Andre Gunder Frank, Walter Rodney, and Samir Amin. For an overview see Brewer, Anthony. Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical Survey, pp. 150–200.

[12] Wage disparities in particular have an enormous effect on underdevelopment, and working class pursuit of the “wages of imperialism” creates the impetus for social imperialism. The specific mechanism by which wage disparities result in greater superprofits is given in Cope, Zak. The Wealth of (Some) Nations: Imperialism and the Mechanics of Value Transfer, pp. 47–58, 75–87.

[13] See generally Billig, Michael. Banal Nationalism.

[14] This is the origin of many problems within the present-day world-economy, perhaps best illustrated by Emmanuel, Arghiri. Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade.

[15] Wallerstein. World-Economy, pp. 10–11.

[16] These are referred to broadly by Wallerstein as “antisystemic forces,” really anything that cannot be re-territorialised by capital, and which creates further contradictions within the interstate system. Ibid, pp. 20–22.

[17] The totalising effect of even the more nuanced Eurocentric models of nationality are criticised in Chaterjee, Partha. Empire and Nation: Selected Essays 1985-2005, pp. 23–36.

[18]  Newton’s critique was based on a belief that the classical Marxist theories of the nation could no longer describe the international order of the 1970s, and in this he was entirely correct. See Newton, Huey P., and Erik H. Erikson. In Search of Common Ground: Conversations with Erik H. Erikson and Huey P. Newton, pp. 25–30.

[19] Uri Gordon gives an overview of anarchist approaches to nationalism, and is quick to dispel the idea that all anarchists are opposed to all forms of nationalism. See Gordon, Uri. “Anarchism and Nationalism.”

[20] For example, one local group supports the sub-state nationalism of local indigenous people, but not the Bolivian Movement for Socialism due to its acquisition of state power.

[cyberneticpeoplespolis]

Understanding Unequal Exchange: How does trade imperialism affect the global working class?

This article originally appeared on Anticonquista, an Anti-Imperialist Media outlet for the Latin American and Caribbean Diaspora. This is my attempt to write an accessible explainer on the issue of Unequal Exchange, using some examples from the Pacific and New Zealand to illustrate the sometimes equation-heavy theory.

I was initially inspired to write this explainer by Abdul Nasir’s reexamination of Dependency Theory. It is wonderful to see the fruitful and diverse theories of Imperialism of the late 20th century being revived and discussed on Anticonquista. We must do all we can to resume the important debates that were muted by the collapse of global workers’ institutions at the close of the last century, and overcome the grey orthodoxy that has reasserted itself in radical critiques of imperialism.

Unequal exchange was once considered one of the most important new developments in imperialism studies of the 20th century. The theory, first proposed by French-Greek theorist and resistance fighter Arghiri Emmanuel in the 1960s, was quickly taken up by many of the underdevelopment and imperialism theorists of the day, from Walter Rodney to Samir Amin. Dependency theorists like Andre Gunder Frank had proven that the imperialism had developed to a point where empire was best understood not in terms of capital exports from the core (as in Hobson, Bukharin, Hilferding and Lenin’s models), but in terms of the wealth extracted from the periphery. However, they were not always clear on how this wealth was generated. Emmanuel was the first to propose an original theory of where exactly that extracted wealth came from. This was the theory of unequal exchange, the idea that the bulk of imperialist superprofits stemmed not from monopolies, noncompetition or securing captive markets, but rather from the difference in wages between nations.

To Emmanuel, Marx’s factors of production were not only fixed quantities of labour and material inputs, they also represented the stake each class holds in the total surplus value produced by a society (whether this stake is recognised is another matter). A given quantity of labour hours invested in production represents a stake workers hold over an end product, while a given quantity of raw materials or fixed capital represents the stake a capitalist holds.

In pre-capitalist artisanal production, the labourer is the only one who holds a stake over the end product of their labour. The labourer controls both the tools and the resources required for production, and can work whenever they choose. The labourer can move freely between industries, and will move to whichever one yields the best prices. Many artisans will move into an industry if the prices are very high, and begin producing greater quantities of that commodity, forcing prices down. In pre-capitalist production, the market will reward labourers for fulfilling particular needs, and that reward falls in relation to the degree that need is met, and so wages and profitability both equalise freely.

All that changes in a society with two classes involved in production. Under capitalist production, both the labourer and capitalist have stakes in the final product, and thus the degree to which wages and prices equalise depends on different factors. When capital moves freely between industries, this tends to equalise the rate of profit. When labour moves freely between industries, this tends to equalise wages. Both wages and profitability must be considered when setting prices.

This is all well and good in the context of individual countries. In most countries, labour and capital moves freely between industries, and so wages, profitability, and prices are all relatively consistent between towns and cities in one country.

On an international level however, wages, profitability and prices are often completely inconsistent, especially between richer and poorer countries. This is because capital often moves freely between the core and the periphery, shifting to wherever has the highest rate of profit, while labour is constrained. Workers cannot move between countries due to militarised borders, repressive governments, and migration quotas. In the end, the rate of profit slowly equalises between countries, while wages only become more and more dissimilar between countries due to different levels of unionisation, and other “historical and moral determinants” like the degree of reactionary violence, market suppression and underdevelopment.

At the end of the day, a situation is produced wherein, as Charles Bettleheim explains, “on the world market the poor nations are obliged to sell the product of a relatively large number of hours in order to obtain in exchange from the rich nations the product of a small number of hours of labour.”

This inequality in trade can be further explored in a number of ways. In the past, unequal exchange has been explained through equations and figures, but this topic is too important to be bound up in academic language and convention. What follows is my attempt to explore the consequences of unequal exchange through the eyes of two fictional workers in countries separated by a small stretch of South Pacific ocean.

An example: Natia and Tim

Unequal Exchange can be hard to understand in human terms. By its nature it deals with abstract transfers of wealth in the spaces between nations, never really connecting with our human experience of work and life. But it does have a human dimension, and it extends outwards from a web of interconnected human experiences and struggles. Compare Natia and Tim. Natia works at a copra plantation in Savai’i, in Samoa. She spends her day collecting coconuts, halving them, and leaving them out to dry in the sun in large batches. Sometimes she helps at the kilns, where the sun-dried coconuts are fully dried, and the desiccated meat is crushed into oil and meal. It is a hard process, and sometimes whole batches develop mold and have to be thrown out. The market for the meal is shrinking, as the New Zealand farmers who used to buy it as animal feed have now shifted to Palm Kernel Expeller, much of it grown by debt slaves in Malaysia.

In the end, Natia gets about $350 USD per month for her full-time labour. It’s considered a decent wage in Samoa. Her employer has few ongoing costs aside from her low wages. However, considering the need to compete with PKE and other copra producers, the employer can only sell the copra meal for a very low price: just above the amount needed to pay for Natia and the other workers’ labour.

3,000 kilometres away from Natia, Tim is just starting his shift. He works at a plastics factory in Auckland, New Zealand. The factory is designed to turn mineral oil into a range of commodity plastics and tupperware, and while Tim works hard, his productivity is mostly due to the wide variety of factory machines at his disposal. Tim is able to produce a large amount of plastic products in just one hour, and the market for the products is always high, since the factory is generally able to out-produce and out-compete its smaller competitors.

Tim has been working at the company for a while, and has always participated in his union. The most recent strike was 2 years ago, when the union representatives were able to secure a new collective bargaining agreement that raised Tim’s wages to $3,150 USD per month. It’s nowhere near as much as his many managers get, but Tim is pretty thankful, since it’s considered a living wage by New Zealand standards. The company fought tooth and nail against the pay increase, but in the end it didn’t hurt business too much, and they were able to compensate by raising prices, thanks to their healthy market share.

The products of Natia and Tim’s labour are often exported around the Pacific. A handful of New Zealand farmers still import Pacific copra meal, while stores in Savai’i often stock the tupperware containers and commercial plastics Tim produces. The problem is that the products of their equivalent labour hours are sold at wildly different prices. The amount of tupperware that Time produces in one labour hour gets sold for enough to pay for nine hours of Natia’s work.

Is Tim’s labour itself worth nine times more than Natia’s? Not really; if Natia went to New Zealand and performed similar agricultural work, she would be paid at a rate much more comparable to Tim, if only due to labour laws and the higher cost of living in New Zealand. The product of her labour would also be exchanged at a vastly higher rate, even without additional machinery to help her. The real problem is that Natia could only access those wages if she won a visa through the ballot system, and only a few were given out each year, even before it was shut down entirely due to Covid.

The disparity between the two only becomes more extreme as time goes on. Thousands of other workers produce commodities that are traded between New Zealand and Samoa, and all of them have very similar wages to Natia and Tim. Samoa is limited in how many New Zealand imports it can buy, since its products are worth nine times less than New Zealand’s by default. Meanwhile, New Zealand exporters are making a killing: their products could buy nine times their own value in Samoan commodities! Over time, Samoan industry becomes more and more specialised and export-oriented, and less able to supply domestic consumers with cheaper local goods, processes covered by Samir Amin in Unequal Development. Instead, imported western goods become the norm, and Natia is forced to spend much more on necessities. Competition in the animal feed market threatens to force Natia’s wages down further, or even put the plantation out of business entirely.

Meanwhile, Tim’s wages are enough to buy plenty of consumer goods. He can’t always afford the boutique local brands, but he can afford as much imported produce as he could ever need. Over time, his wages are supplemented by these cheaper goods, and he can afford to save. In addition, the state mandates access to a superannuation fund for workers, and Tim’s contributions are invested in all sorts of foreign industry and international trade futures. Tim doesn’t ever have enough to stop working for a living, but he has enough to perhaps retire comfortably, or even to ensure that his kids don’t have to work as hard as he did. He is secure in the knowledge that in the long run, things seem to be getting better.

Workers like Natia represent the bulk of the global working class, labouring in low-paid labour producing much of the world’s most basic commodities. Their conditions are deteriorating due to the increased dependency, specialisation, and export-orientation of industry in the global periphery, as this means there is less local industry devoted to local needs. They are unable to save, or move to countries with better conditions. Their main hope is an increase in the total global mobility of labour, which might equalise wages and prices between countries. For them, freedom of migration is liberation, as even if they don’t migrate themselves, the resulting wage equalisation benefits everyone.

Workers like Tim represent a minority in the global working class: he is at the bottom end of a labour aristocracy. As we have seen, Tim’s conditions aren’t wonderful, or somehow post-scarcity, but he has the ability to save, to move between industries freely, to invest his surplus wages, and to send his kids to be educated. These are all rights Tim ought to enjoy, ones which he fought hard to keep, but the institutions which enable those rights are also unwittingly contributing to global inequality.

In rich countries, prices and wages are caught in an upward death spiral. Since prices are determined by the interrelationship between wages and profitability, and wages tend to gravitate around the ability to purchase a fixed number of commodities, we can see how wages might push prices higher and vice versa. Other factors push wages and prices higher, including the efforts by unions to stay ahead of the cost of living, and increases in the overall standard of living enabled by external debt.

To break out of that spiral means acting internationally, securing better wages for all workers up and down the supply chain. An alternative approach would involve pressuring western governments to impose price ceilings: a hard limit on the cost of living set in a fixed number of commodities. Theorists like Emmanuel singled out western unions as a major cause of unequal exchange, and it is certainly true that many cannot be relied upon, but it is not necessarily unions themselves so much as the underlying upward spiral of prices and wages. A world with fewer unions, even the most compromised ones, is nonetheless one in which workers wield less power, and have less potential energy to turn towards international organisation.

The global consequences of Unequal Exchange

The relationship between Natia and Tim is just one tiny part of the global problem of unequal exchange. The true scale of unequal exchange has only been explored relatively recently thanks to the work of Zak Cope, in his book The Wealth of (Some) Nations, as well as recent studies that have built upon his findings.

Much of Cope’s recent work is devoted to quantifying and exploring various forms of imperialist superprofits (or the Imperial Transfer of Value). In Cope’s analysis, unequal exchange is not the sole form of imperialist superprofits, but it does constitute a majority. By measuring wage differentials between core and peripheral countries, and comparing those wages to a midpoint (the global median wage), Cope was able to find the total value gained each year through unequal exchange: roughly 2.8 trillion dollars per year.

To put this in perspective, the value gained through unequal exchange is 53.8% of all superprofits flowing from the periphery to the core. It is also 31.5% of the core’s profits available for reinvestment (calculated as the core’s GDP multiplied by rate of savings), in other words, nearly a third of all profits in the core are purely the result of being able to sustain higher wages.

Decades ago, Samir Amin predicted that as the rate of profit fell in core industries, unequal exchange would slowly come to be the dominant source of profits for western capitalists, locking the periphery into a permanent state of dependency in order to prop-up the decayed husk of domestic industry in the core. In many of the world’s richest nations, that prediction is being borne out today.

Shifting the locus of value creation from the core to the periphery means that the core relies less and less on the unprofitable exploitation of its own workers. Instead, many core workers are increasingly being placed in menial office and managerial jobs which produce little to no real value. Such workers are ostensibly there to increase the value of other labourers’ work – so-called “reflexive” labourers – but in practice this is economically impossible, and many of these managers, administrators, and functionaries are simply paid consumers, shifting and manipulating various forms of debt, sitting at the heights of increasingly top-heavy finance and tech juggernauts.

As the core systematically underdevelops itself, taking away its own ability to autogenously produce value, the periphery stands at a crossroads. Many nations are now choosing to promote trade between peripheral partners, effectively disengaging from the predatory trade imperialism of the core. This too has dangers, in that it risks imperialist intervention, and some peripheral nations still side with the core out of fear of repercussions, out of a bribed ruling class, or out of a lack of alternatives.

Workers in the core are still able to organise against trade imperialism directy, even if such activism will always be opposed by sections of the labour aristocracy. Pushing for increased migrant quotas and rights is one proven way to mitigate global wage inequality, as remittances and competition tend to raise peripheral average wages. To return to our Pacific example, compare Samoa with the Cook Islands: both nations were colonised and dominated by New Zealand imperialism, but the Cooks have at least gained an average wage more comparable to the core, entirely thanks to the ability to migrate to a core nation.

Another step would be to encourage labour organisation across national boundaries. As we have seen, a narrow-minded focus on only improving the wages of core workers can actively harm peripheral workers by encouraging greater differences in wages. If the entire supply chain of an industry can be organised, not only would workers exercise greater control over their workplaces by influencing the factors of production, they would also be able to raise the lowest-paid workers up to a greater standard.

One of the greatest lessons we can draw from recent advances in unequal exchange theory is that business-as-usual activism can have unintended consequences. Do we fight to perpetuate labour aristocracy, wealth extraction, and the further stratification of our class? Or do we fight to bring about unity between workers of all nationalities, no matter their position in the hierarchies of industry and empire?

Further Reading

Arghiri Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade, 1972 Emmanuel’s most rigorous examination of Unequal Exchange is still highly relevant reading today, even if sections on Organic Composition of Capital have been questioned by later writers. It also includes an interesting debate between Emmanuel and his mentor Charles Bettleheim.

Zak Cope, The Wealth of (Some) Nations: Imperialism and the Mechanics of Value Transfer, 2019 Cope’s most recent book builds on his ideas from 2013’s Divided World, Divided Class into one of the most rigorous analyses of imperialist value transfer yet attempted. Cope’s analysis of Unequal Exchange is limited to two small chapters, but the rest of the book is well worth a read and covers an enormous swathe of leftist and colonial history.

Anthony Brewer, Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical Survey, 1980 Brewer’s book is a great overview of theories of imperialism, from Marx to Emmanuel and Amin. He takes particular interest in charting the development of Unequal Exchange discourse, and makes a few of his own additions to the theory.

Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, 1974 Rodney was one of the first writers in the colonised world to pick up the idea of Unequal Exchange, and wove it into his masterful history of European colonisation in Africa, which also serves to discredit the “whiggish history” of perpetual progress in the colonised world.

Samir Amin, Unequal Development: An Essay on the Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalism, 1976 Amin was one of the first writers able to explore the various international implications of Unequal Exchange rather than having to develop his own economic framework from scratch. As such his work is often more holistic than the narrow economic focus of Emmanuel. His theory of development is excellent, even if his autarkic conclusions are sometimes flawed.

Esteban Ezequiel Maito, The historical transience of capital: the downward trend in the rate of profit since the 19th century, 2014 Maito’s study represents a rigorous effort to analyse the declining rate of profit. Crucially, Maito accounts for the rate of turnover, something similar studies sometimes fail to do. Maito identifies three separate rates of profit, the core, peripheral, and China, and demonstrates that these are all equalising as they decline. This confirms many of the assumptions of the Unequal Exchange theorists.

[cyberneticpeoplespolis]

New Zealand’s Paternalism and Imperialism in the Pacific

This is something I wrote back in early march for mainstream news publishers, but didn’t get finished in time before the news cycle moved on from the PIF break up. I’m putting it here for posterity and it might also be of interest for anyone curious about why New Zealand still uses its diplomatic weight to bully its neighbors into line.

New Zealand is losing its grip on the Pacific. That might be a good thing.

This year is the 50th anniversary of the Pacific Islands Forum. Many are talking as though it will be the last.

Last month the Micronesian sub-region, comprising Nauru, Kiribati, Palau, the Marshall Islands, and the Federated States of Micronesia, left the PIF. Since only the Polynesian and Melanesian sub-regions remain, the forum now has a distinctly more South Pacific orientation. But alongside the island nations are three big powers who like to think of themselves as “first among equals”. Two are the settler-colonies of Australia, and New Zealand. The third is France, which effectively has two votes at the forum via its tightly-held colonies of New Caledonia and French Polynesia.

Ostensibly, the breakup is the result of a broken “gentleman’s agreement” wherein each sub-region takes turns providing a candidate for the role of General Secretary. This election was Micronesia’s turn, but instead of supporting Micronesia’s Marshallese candidate, Gerald Zackios, the forum instead elected Cook Islands PM Henry Puna.

Much has been made of this “gentleman’s agreement,” but it was an unwritten rule, and hardly a democratic one. The fact that it was made at all speaks to the low stakes of the forum, and the fact that it was broken speaks to the greater consequences for this election than those prior. 

These consequences will largely be felt by those outside the Pacific islands. The Pacific Islands Forum always meant a lot more to diplomats in Canberra, Wellington, Paris and Washington than islanders, who see it as relatively inconsequential. 

This was reflected in the coverage of the forum’s breakup. Australian, New Zealand, and U.S. outlets and pundits all vied to levy blame on one another for the catastrophe, and painted the election as part of a grand proxy war between competing powers.

Depending on who you talk to, it was all part of a scheme by Australia, New Zealand and France to snub the interests of the United States in the Pacific. Or it was all the result of New Zealand and Australia’s indifference and poor diplomacy. Or it was the result of U.S. militarisation of the North Pacific and strong-arming of island nations. Many pointed out that the split represented an opportunity for China. Great power conflict also affected the framing of the candidates. Zackios is seen as Washington’s man in the region, and this seems deliberate, since he has a long history of cooperation with U.S. military and diplomatic projects. Likewise Micronesians claimed Puna is a proxy for either New Zealand or Chinese interests, despite considerably less evidence for the claim. All of these narratives of great power diplomacy and conspiracies do have some truth to them, but the framing does seem to deny a lot of agency to Pacific peoples. Apart from a few Micronesian diplomats and politicians, few have expressed any appetite for cold warfare. In fact there is a great deal of anxiety around escalating tensions, reduced aid, militarised borders, and foreign navies.

In western media narratives, we can see the lingering spectres of both cold war proxy warfare and colonial entitlement. Western nations are framed as enlightened protectors shielding islanders from threats they couldn’t possibly understand. It is an unwritten assumption that this  paternalistic form of leadership endears western powers to the South Pacific. In reality, the former colonial powers are perceived as unwelcome interlopers. For New Zealand especially, the rhetoric used mirrors the way we talk about our own indigenous relations. There are pretensions of partnership, but always with the Crown as the ‘major’ partner. Beneath the surface lurks an uncritical, vestigial paternalism from days gone by. The question of whether New Zealand is fit to be a regional leader is never asked, just as similar questions are never asked in Canberra, Paris or Washington.

This paternal attitude is a complex thing. It is equal parts denial of past abuses, denial of present economics and new cold war paranoia.

An inconvenient past

There is an unspoken assumption that  New Zealand is a benign force of leadership and regional cooperation. However, this assumption becomes stranger and stranger the further back we look. Holding it necessarily entails forgetting about New Zealand’s long history of open and shameless colonialism, from Seddon’s project for a “Britain of the South Pacific” to Massey’s acquisition of Samoa at Versailles. It means forgetting the unnecessary deaths of a fifth of Samoa from pandemic mismanagement, and disregarding the Black Saturday massacre on the streets of Apia. It might be said that those incidents are too distant to be relevant today. How about something more recent, like the environmental devastation of strip-mining Nauru for phosphate, conducted under a New Zealand-Australian joint venture, or decades of using Vanuatu as a tax haven for New Zealand businesses? Even that’s a bit far back. What about in 2015, when the GCSB was found to be conducting a massive spy operation across the Pacific through Waihopai, while simultaneously operating a hidden spy outpost, codename “Caprica,” in the Solomon Islands? 

All of these events represent massive breaches of trust, yet New Zealand often acts as if recent history is the ancient past when it comes to the Pacific. It takes its diplomatic relationships for granted and expects neighbors to forget about the past, and turn a blind eye to the present. 

Trade Imperialism

The fact is that the most detrimental effects New Zealand has on the Pacific aren’t even intentional; it’s the passive, downstream consequences of the New Zealand economy and its trading relationships which undermine Pacific islands the most.

It’s a truism of economics that good businesses buy low and sell high. But what happens when that takes place on the scale of whole nations? When low-waged countries countries trade with high-waged countries, their goods often fetch a uniformly low price regardless of quality or productivity. On the flip side, high waged countries can always get a good price, often more than their goods are worth. This is a phenomena called “Unequal Exchange,” first noticed in the context of recently-decolonised African nations in the 1960s. The reasons for this are complicated, and have a lot to do with the fact that people can’t move between international industries as easily as money, but suffice to say that the Pacific’s trade with New Zealand is a perfect example of the problem. While Pacific peoples earn an average of only $300 a month, New Zealanders earn about $2,800. The end result is that the goods produced by a New Zealand employee in one day can be worth as much as 9 times the amount a Pacific worker could produce in the same time.

This means that when Pacific nations trade with New Zealand, they immediately lose a lot of money paying for overpriced goods, and can’t make enough off their own exports to cover the cost. Even with the Government’s “Pacific Reset” policy which increased the dwindling Pacific aid budget, the small amounts New Zealand pays in aid are overshadowed by its profits.

Naturally, a lot of island nations want to trade with each other instead. By building up each other’s industries and establishing equal terms of trade, they can avoid the crushing dependency on goods made in New Zealand, Australia, and the U.S. But New Zealand exporters would be vehemently opposed. If Pacific nations  were to shake their dependency, they might get a fair price for their goods, and eventually compete with New Zealand business on an equal playing field. 

Instead, Australia and New Zealand often use the Pacific Islands Forum and other regional bodies to torpedo any proposals for deals that don’t include them, and push their own trade deals. One recent deal was PACER Plus, which was criticised heavily by groups like the Pacific Network on Globalisation for the effects it would have on Pacific communities. One Canadian expert also claimed that deals like PACER Plus are precisely what makes Pacific nations want to trade with China instead.

A Cold War in the Pacific

In recent years the Pacific has split down the middle on the question of addressing trade imbalances. It’s one of those problems everyone recognises, but each solution comes with significant risks. On the one hand, groups like the Wellington-based Pacific Co-operation Foundation argue that unbalanced trade deals like PACER Plus are a positive trend, and any imbalance in outcomes only reflects the poor terms of trade already in place. They say Pacific economies need a chance for capital inflows from New Zealand and Australia, even if the latter countries ultimately benefit much more than the islands ever could.

While once upon a time, this was all that Pacific islands could hope for, nowadays there are other options. Semi-developed economies like China can offer many of the same products as much richer countries, at prices Pacific nations can actually afford thanks to much lower wage costs. But in the context of escalating trade warfare – and possible military conflict – between China and the United States, some island economies have chosen to tie their fates more tightly to superpowers in the hopes of receiving more aid and investment. The U.S. in particular requires new island construction sites across the Western Pacific in order to give strategic depth to its plans for an extensive network of missile and aircraft bases to be aimed at China by 2022.

With Micronesia situated close to the massive US naval base at Guam, it is not surprising that the Mircronesian bloc at the Pacific Islands Forum has taken a strongly anti-Chinese stance, in some cases going further than Washington itself. Three of the nations are official associates of the U.S., and three have fostered ties with Taiwan, a strong US ally which is itself heavily dependent on american military and political backing.

On the other side of the divide, most Polynesian and Melanesian nations have attempted to stay out of the escalating tensions. They have continued to trade with New Zealand and Australia, while simultaneously pushing for greater self-sufficiency, including a growing trade relationship with China. The reason for the shift is perfectly logical: China can offer better terms of trade, and its banks can fund major infrastructure projects that almost no western bank would even consider backing. But what of Chinese debt trap diplomacy? All of the Pacific island nations, apart from the Micronesian bloc, have repeatedly ignored the dire warnings by western diplomats about potential asset seizures for defaulting on their huge Chinese loans. The answer is simple: as an exhaustive analysis from The Atlantic recently pointed out, the debt-trap narrative was made up from the start. It’s one of those post-truth narratives that exist beyond debate no matter how many times it’s debunked. This is especially true in the Pacific, where despite obvious vulnerabilities, experts contend that there is no evidence of debt traps. None of that has stopped the spectre from being raised yet again in the wake of Micronesia’s walk-out.

With nothing much to offer except fearmongering and sabre-rattling, is it any surprise that Pacific nations are seeking alternatives to western trade and aid dependency? If New Zealand is serious about restoring trust and equality in the Pacific, it may want to start by recognising island nations can currently get better deals elsewhere, and try to match them. If it wanted to take a more transformational approach, it would consider something like a Pacific Common Travel Area that could allow labour to move as freely as goods, and permanently mitigate the effects of trade imperialism through better remittance income and wage equalisation. Of course, such things would run counter to too many vested interests to be considered.

Just another Pacific island nation

Returning for a moment to the coverage of the breakdown of the Pacific Islands Forum, let’s re-examine the implicit understanding that New Zealand ought to be taking a leadership role. Part of that is natural – New Zealand will always be the biggest island chain among many – but at least part of that sentiment echoes the colonial entitlement of Seddon or Massey. Why should New Zealand be taking a leadership role when its trade interests will always endanger Pacific sovereignty? What about the last century of Pacific-NZ relations would even remotely suggest that New Zealanders are trusted in the Pacific? This distrust is certainly apparent when it comes to Micronesian leaders, who have criticised Cook Islands PM Henry Puna as a lackey of New Zealand, since his islands are still part of the New Zealand Realm. This is hardly fair to Puna, as his personal positions are clearly at odds with New Zealand’s vision for the region, but the fact that his links to New Zealand are such a handicap speaks volumes about New Zealand’s image across the Pacific.

New Zealand’s foreign policy vacillates between an out-of-touch paternalism and an equally out-of-touch assertion that it is an equal member of the Pacific community. Government reports on the Pacific Reset and PACER Plus are filled with this confusing language, speaking of equal partnership one minute and unilateral leadership the next. Both positions are quite blind to New Zealand’s actual reputation, and its ongoing exploitation of Pacific workers via trade imperialism.

It also says a lot that in every opinion piece published on the PIF debacle, the writers have had but one concern: influence. Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was one prominent voice bemoaning the loss of Australia and New Zealand’s influence in the island forum. But what are the actual consequences for island nations? As Stephen Howes and Sadhana Sen pointed out, there aren’t many. Countries were willing to risk a split because no one really had any stakes in the forum. No trade deals were directly tied to forum membership, even those negotiated through its channels, and most of the genuinely important regional initiatives like the University of the South Pacific won’t be affected. 

The only people really bemoaning the loss are those in New Zealand and Australia who used the forum as an opportunity to intervene in Pacific affairs, or those who wanted an opportunity to engage in some old-fashioned cold warfare. Regionalism and cooperation are very good things, but when it comes to diplomacy and trade deals between islands, maybe Australia and New Zealand should sit it out, as their idea of regional leadership is often closer to being the local bullies.

When New Zealand realises the immense imbalances in economic and political power it has perpetuated in the Pacific, maybe then it will be one island nation among many. Until then, it has to earn that right.

[cyberneticpeoplespolis]

New Zealand and the ghost of Social Democracy

In the last article I wrote for the Spinoff I talk about why progressive New Zealanders keep falling for “transformative” branding, especially when it’s wrapped in nostalgia. I also talk about Hauntology and the slow cancellation of the future, and what that means for New Zealand politics. https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/14-03-2021/transformation-and-progressive-ghosts/

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How New Zealand covers up its role in Imperialism

Have a look at my most recent article for the Spinoff on how New Zealand uses its public image to make the public forget about its role in imperialism, including the recent Air NZ-Saudi Arabia scandal: We’re already forgetting about the Air New Zealand-Saudi Arabia scandal

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On Blockading

A treatise on NVDA tactics from a Marxist perspective.

Update: 2019 edition!

I’m updating “On Blockading” for several reasons: For starters; this post got more popular than I could have predicted and that carries with it a greater responsibility to give up-to-date advice. There have also been several developments in Direct Action tactics in Aotearoa since I wrote this: the Weapons Expo has been officially kicked out of New Zealand thanks, in part, to the success of the 2018 blockade I wrote about here. I’ve also been a part of subsequent movements like the Ihumaatao campaign where Direct Action tactics were once again used. These experiences, as well as finding out how horrendously incorrect some parts of this guide were, meant I needed to revisit this piece and bring it up to date.

Keep reading

[cyberneticpeoplespolis]

Since this is still (!) being shared around regularly, I have made some small edits to grammar and layout. I haven’t participated in any direct action movements since Ihumātao in mid 2019, but that campaign also recently came to a positive conclusion thanks, in part, to direct action by kaitiaki/land protectors. 

 Ultimately, three years later, I still feel like this is a good guide, and I haven’t had any experiences since writing it which I feel have invalidated the advice I gave. The only unsuccessful actions I have participated in were ones which didn’t follow this advice at all due to lack of preparation, stressful circumstances, and unforeseeable police actions.

I hope people are staying safe, that you are surrounded by good comrades, and that despite all the chaos right now you still have the energy to fight back when needed.

[cyberneticpeoplespolis]

Updates

I haven’t updated this blog with recent pieces for months now, so here’s a list of everything I’ve written in the meantime. More for my reference/posterity than anything else.

March 2020: Work and Welfare Programme (for OA): https://organiseaotearoa.nz/2020/04/16/work-and-welfare/ June 2020: Justice Programme (for OA): https://organiseaotearoa.nz/2020/06/25/how-can-we-fix-the-broken-justice-system/

November 2020: Swastikas off K Road: How the worst art show in New Zealand came to be (for the Spinoff): https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/12-11-2020/swastikas-off-k-road-how-the-worst-art-show-in-new-zealand-came-to-be/

November 2020: How ‘blood phosphate’ has made New Zealand complicit in a foreign war (for the Spinoff): https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/19-11-2020/how-blood-phosphate-has-made-new-zealand-complicit-in-a-foreign-war/

November 2020:  The searing report linking popular NZ brands to abuse and even slavery (for the Spinoff): https://thespinoff.co.nz/business/24-11-2020/the-searing-report-linking-popular-nz-brands-to-sexual-abuse-and-slavery/

December 2020:  Innovators, Bullshitters, or Aristocrats: Towards an Explanation of Unproductive Work (for Peace Land and Bread): https://www.peacelandbread.com/post/innovators-bullshitters-or-aristocrats-towards-an-explanation-of-unproductive-work 

December 2020:  Oil companies keep leaving their shit in New Zealand waters (for the Spinoff) https://thespinoff.co.nz/business/10-12-2020/oil-companies-keep-leaving-their-shit-in-new-zealand-waters/

[cyberneticpeoplespolis]

Covid 19 and the New Era

Initially published on the OA blog here.

Part 1: Goodbye to the end of History

31 years ago, US political writer Francis Fukuyama wrote an essay titled The end of history. In it, he summed up what many were feeling at the conclusion of the Cold War: without a grand historical conflict between world superpowers, what further challenges could there be to the system we live under today: capitalist liberal-democracy? In this essay, and his later books, he wrote that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, most world governments would shift towards a liberal democracy, with an emphasis on transnational government much like the European Union, and with this new epoch would come a period of unparalleled peace. Events might still occur, he said, but the overall trend of civilisation would be towards endless peace, endless profit, and endless technological advancement that would eventually lead to humans having control over their own evolution.

What Fukuyama might not have predicted is that his simple thesis would become one of the most criticised essays of all time. Barely had the ink dried on his paper when scores of writers poked holes in his analysis – something very easy to do, for Fukuyama wasn’t much of a philosopher, but rather a political hack who summed up the dominant view among liberal thinkers at the time. In this, he was wholly successful, but he also ended up being correct in ways his critics couldn’t have predicted.

The next 31 years of history were some of the most uneventful, in terms of real movement, of any decades that had passed before – sure, not all countries became liberal democracies, and sure, history continued to chew up innocent lives and spit them back out, and sure, a few terrorists showed up here and there – but it seemed that no single event could ever truly change things beyond occupying the evening news for a few weeks. We have just emerged from the one of the most viscerally boring periods in human history, at least for the more sheltered populations in the west, and it’s important to recognise this.

Fukuyama’s end of history was not a new thesis: as the postmodernist Jaques Derrida, was quick to point out, Fukuyama had simply regurgitated some of the most turgid liberal philosophies of the early Cold-War era; the idea that liberal-democracy had emerged victorious, and that socialism had been proved wrong once and for all through the many perceived failures of Soviet societies. All that had changed was that Fukuyama said it at the right time: it truly was the end, capitalism had found its perfect justification in neoliberalism, a set of ideologies based in the idea that capitalism was a perfect, trans-historical goal of humanity, that only needed to be sufficiently untethered from regulation and sufficiently protected by a growing military and police forces in order to function properly. In this proper version of capitalism, untethered from the need to legitimise itself in the face of opposing ideologies, there was no need for capitalist societies to change to face new threats, for what can challenge an ideology that is so totalising it can convince people that it’s the only thing that exists? The only thing that has ever existed. A universal default.

In that sense, Fukuyama was perfectly right. History did grind to a halt for three decades. Not just the history of those decades, but all history, for every society throughout history could be painted as nothing but a stepping stone to this universal conclusion. There was no challenge to neoliberalism in that time, no great ideological foe to defeat, no workers’ movement to crush, and the best that the neoliberal states could offer up as some immense civilisational enemy was a pitiful force of Wahhabi terrorists – a by-product of the previous era, and therefore hardly a new historical agent. All that was left for the world to do was to reckon with the leftovers of the Cold-War period (the Wahhabis, remnant socialist societies, and shrinking unions), products of the last true period of historical movement, and wait for whatever technological innovation that would come next and inject some feeling of forward momentum into an otherwise stagnant society.

In time, even technology failed to deliver a feeling of progress. Each new technology of the period wasn’t truly new: all that capitalism could deliver was slightly faster and more powerful versions of technologies based in the previous era of major public scientific investments. Internet, wi-fi, cell phones, miniaturised processors, satellite communications – every single one of these technologies was a product of Cold-War era military or public scientific investment, albeit with a better marketing team. It is almost as if capitalists could produce no new innovation whatsoever, other than a faster, slimmer version of existing tech, that broke more often.

In this sense, one of the two defining features of the past 30 years that gave life a sense of movement and progress, communications technology, proved to be nothing but a latent product of the previous era, that came up against a wall as soon as the legacy technologies it relied upon reached the limits of exploitability. The same would soon be proven true of the other great symbol of neoliberal progress: economic growth.

Since the beginning of the end of history, economic growth has skyrocketed. Only part of this was due to imperialism – the ability for strong states with financial capital to spare to offload their surpluses onto the global south. That would have been a source of actual value were it the primary cause of this continuous economic boom, since it would have meant greater exploitation of labour. Instead capitalism developed along the much easier route – pure speculation in financial markets and tech companies, both of which are largely phantasmal.

Capital was creating a bubble – not of any one market, such as the late 90s tech bubble or the late 2000s housing bubble, but rather it was making a bubble out of capitalism as a whole. Who could have guessed what would pop it?

Part 2: What the fuck is going on?

Sometime around December 1, 2019, a few people got sick in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Many writers have spent thousands of hours speculating about the potential causes of transmission. Was it from a shopper at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market? Did the disease come from the actual produce at this market? Was it a bioweapon? Was it a bat? A Pangolin? Was everyone at the market just too weird and Chinese to not get the disease? What comparatively few news sites have focused on was how on earth a virus could cause an economic crisis so great that we have nothing to truly compare it to.

This is because it could have been anything. It could have been a completely different virus in a completely different country, it could have been a sudden war erupting, it could have been a plane crash, it could have been a Wall Street Executive slipping on a banana peel. The system of global financial markets had been systematically hollowed out and prepared in every possible way to collapse at the drop of a hat sooner or later. To understand how, we need to understand three things: the underlying philosophy of neoliberalism, the way a modern financial market operates, and the general theory of economic crisis put forward by Karl Marx in his unfinished third volume of Capital.

Under neoliberalism, austerity is everything. The existence of everything, often including human life, has to be justified in terms of cost-effectiveness, self-reliance, and interoperability with the rest of the system. This is why social welfare, such as Work & Income New Zealand, operates by giving the absolute bare minimum to beneficiaries, and why all government departments, with the exclusion of Defence, Police, and Corrections, have to operate on paper-thin budgets, constantly needing to justify any expenditure whatsoever in terms of net-benefits to the economy. It is also not a rational ideology, in that in pursuing its goals of profitability and lean government, the means are much more important than the ends. A health system stretched thin (the “ambulance-at-the-bottom-of-the-cliff model”) might actually be more costly to society than a health system which is budgeted to act preventatively and deal with unexpected crises, but this doesn’t really matter. Likewise, stockpiling, preemptively initiating spending, or even paying for proper maintenance can come to be seen as unnecessary luxuries in a system in which everything must be justified in terms of short-term profitability.

This is why the richest country in the world ended up with a shortage of basic medical supplies. Under ideal circumstances, each hospital should have had just enough masks, gloves and smocks to last a normal week, just in time for a new shipment. The same is true of most systems of logistics and supply under neoliberalism – things enter the warehouse, the shipping container, or the truck, just in time for them to leave. If anything stays in the warehouse, or is stockpiled, then that is an inefficiency in the system. Every minute those hospital gowns spend in the warehouse means a surplus is developing, which means profits lost for the manufacturer and shipping company.

The same logic rings true for financial markets. Each sector of the economy deals in just enough liquid assets (money) to operate under normal circumstances. If too much money circulates in the economy at any one time, then we get inflation – the decline in the value of currency. In a crisis, excess liquidity can be a good thing, which is why the US markets are being flooded with trillions of dollars, but under normal circumstances, these simple laws of financial supply and demand create an incentive for capitalists to invest their cash assets as soon as possible, never leaving anything in reserve in the event of a crisis.

But all of this, supply and demand, surplus and shortage, is somewhat obsolete under late capitalism. Contrary to popular belief, most microeconomic problems are pretty easy to solve using the microeconomic levers most accessible to capitalists such as changing prices, production or wages. Capitalists make them out to be huge, complex issues so that price regulation can be painted as naive meddling in the arcane market, but really, these simple problems like overproduction, underproduction, low demand, and the like, can all be fixed using the tools of the private sector. Larger systemic problems (macroeconomic issues), such as sovereign debt, low competitiveness, trade deficits, and poor consumer buying power, can also be fixed, but through the financial levers available to the state, such as bailouts, stimulus packages, elimination of reserve requirements, and massive liquidity injections. What can’t be fixed, at least not permanently, is the general downward trend in profits relative to investment.

The more serious problems of late capitalist economics – wafer-thin profit margins, constantly slowing rates of growth, and constant fears that consumers are “killing” various industries – are all products of one phenomenon that Karl Marx identified as far back as 1857, the discovery of which he called his “greatest triumph” but which remains a lesser known Marxian theory. This is the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, a hypothesis which explains why capitalism is doomed to perpetually swing between boom and bust, until it reaches a crisis from which it can’t recover.

Central to Marx’s theory of crisis is a much more famous theory – the labour theory of value. Put simply this is the idea that all the value that capitalist society places on a commodity comes from the workers who harvested the raw materials, worked in the factory that made it, and built the machines that filled the factory. The work being done by living workers is supplemented by the machines that other workers have made to assist them in their work.

The living people involved in this system are the organic component, while the machines, products, and other lifeless objects are the inorganic component. Taken together, the ratio between these components is the organic composition of capital (OOC). When there are few workers but many machines in a factory, the OOC is lower, and so the productivity of these workers is very high because the machines allow them to multiply their efforts. But high productivity creates a problem – if all of this work can be done by fewer workers, then unemployment will surely rise, wages will go down, and fewer people will be able to pay for the products from the factories. Eventually this leads to a crisis of consumption, which is what we are currently experiencing, and unless you’re over 50 or so, you’ve probably been experiencing one your entire life.

In a consumption crisis, wages are far too low for people to buy commodities or easily reproduce their capacity to work. Since the 1970s, wages have stagnated in most Western countries, but until now capitalists had many ways they could “kick the can down the road,” delaying the crisis for another few years and making higher and higher profits in the meantime. For example, to absorb the huge surpluses generated by an economy undergoing a consumption crisis, Capitalist states could offload their surplus values onto colonies and nations in the global south by creating new markets, or waging wars and thereby investing in weapons and reconstruction. A good example of this was the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, which ended up costing trillions of dollars, allowed for billions to be invested in weapons manufacturers, and opened up a handful of new markets in the bombed out ruins of Baghdad or Fallujah.

This is one way to offset a major crisis, which we might call the “fuck the rest of the world” method. The other method is a bit harder for the capitalists, which is to massively increase consumer buying power through various measures. The most straightforward of these is the one capitalists are most loath to do, since it undermines neoliberal ideology, which is to simply give people money. This was done in Australia in 2008, when each Australian was given $300 and ordered to spend it immediately. Many other countries, even the US, are now rushing to copy this method of stimulus. Another method, which has been growing since mid last century, is by artificially raising a stratum of consumers through employing people in “bullshit jobs,” a term used by economist David Graeber to refer to people engaged in work that doesn’t seem to do anything. This includes a lot of professionals: secretaries of secretaries, managers of managers, supervisors of supervisors and the like. Finally there is another method which is gaining traction among some of the more far-sighted capitalist technocrats, the Universal Basic Income (UBI), which would give people a flat rate of just enough money to fulfil their duty to the economy as consumers. Such a move would represent a last-ditch effort by capital to avoid the looming consumer crisis, which at time of writing appears to be a tsunami whose waters have only reached chest-height.

However, all of these means can only delay the inevitable. A capitalist system undergoing crisis can only offset the real crunch for so long. In 2008, the global capitalist system experienced a major shock when a speculative housing bubble popped in US financial markets. If the crisis continued, the capitalist class would have had to sell off huge amounts of assets, including industrial machinery. This would have solved the underlying productivity crisis for a time by restoring the huge imbalance between the organic and inorganic composition of capital. But this imbalance had been building for decades. Could the capitalist system survive the shock? Mass sell-offs are nothing new – the first response of the US government to the 1929 Wall Street Crash was to encourage these sell-offs, only to find out that doing so would massively increase public unrest from both capital and workers.

In the end, the crisis was instead offset through fiscal policy, as the US federal reserve removed barriers to debt and artificially preserved the value of assets by paying off capitalists with sums that often exceeded the value of their entire business. For this reason, the recovery from the 2008 crisis was slow, but the crisis itself was short-lived. The speculative bubbles weren’t quite popped, but enough air was let out to delay the inevitable, for about 12 years, as it turned out.

Part 3: Infinite new era

It is still entirely possible that the capitalists will be able to kick the can further down the road, and avert the current crisis through arcane fiscal finagling or through truly barbaric methods like forcing US and UK workers back into the workplace well before it is safe to do so.

But it seems equally possible that the world as we know it is over. By this I don’t mean that we’ll soon be living in a Mad Max-style apocalypse, but rather that period of “the end of history” is finally over. Capitalism will probably recover, either through solving the crisis through the above means before it gets worse, or it will allow the crisis to reach its conclusion and engage in massive selloffs of fixed capital, which might extend its rule by several decades by restoring some degree of profitability relative to investments. What that could mean for our people and ecology is anyone’s guess.

But whatever the results of this crisis are, one thing seems very clear. For the first time in our lives, workers have been forced to sit at home and think – not between shifts, or under the endless stress of being a beneficiary expected to look for work that often doesn’t exist, but just thinking, and getting bored. I don’t remember a time when capitalism gave an entire class of people the opportunity to get truly bored, apart from the upper classes, who get to call it ennui.

The politics of idleness are interesting. A few thousand years ago, the backbreaking labour of slaves, poor citizens, and women created the opportunity for the first truly idle class – the Ancient Greek philosophers who are credited with the entire foundation of our moral and political systems. For the next few thousand years, the only people who were allowed to be idle were the sons of rich nobles and merchants, and only with the birth of capitalism did common people find themselves idle – the unemployed newly-displaced rural folk who waited outside the great cities of Europe, waiting for jobs at the new textile factories to open up. Many of these people became the backbone of the first workers’ parties, often millenarian Christian-socialists and underground brotherhoods like the Chartists, Luddites, or League of the Just, which Marx and Engels would later co-opt and rename The Communist League.

Idleness in these times was feared greatly by those in power, and rightly so. Nothing worried them more than huge surplus populations growing restless, organising in their idle time, and realising their position somewhere near the bottom of a great social pyramid. From time to time these surplus populations grew so great that entire nations had to be set up just to get rid of them: the unemployed and wretched masses of the British Isles found themselves criminalised and subject to transportation to the penal colonies of the Caribbean, the Americas, and later New South Wales. Luckier surplus citizens found themselves in the free colonies, such as Perth, or New Zealand.

But are we truly surplus to requirements? Surely after the crash we’ll get our jobs back?

Many economists aren’t so sure. Unemployment modelling already shows rates are going to grow higher than during the great depression, and that’s without a much more pessimistic Marxian analysis of the crisis. To be surplus is a new experience to many of us. Idleness will force us to reckon with our position in the pyramid of society, just as those 19th century oligarchs were afraid of all those years ago.

The ideological backbone of capitalism as it currently exists has been broken. Neoliberalism has shown itself incapable of dealing with Covid-19. But what we make of this realisation is up to us. The ideological backbone might be broken, but the real nuts and bolts of the system: the police and politicians, bosses and workplaces, will still remain. Given enough time, they will use this crisis of legitimacy to forge a new kind of capitalism: maybe a society with a UBI? Or a form of eco-capitalism? Or maybe they’ll go the other direction, and lead us down a road to fascism, or Trumpian nationalistic fervor? If I had to place bets, I’d put it on a mix of all of the above, as usually seems to happen in a crisis of legitimacy. After all, the last great crisis of legitimacy happened during the Great Depression, leading to both the social-democratic compromise of the New Deal and Michael Joseph Savage’s welfare state, as well as the horrors of Nazism.

In truth I don’t think it matters so much what path capitalism chooses to take in order to legitimise itself in this new era, because unless the agency of that choice lies with working people – with beneficiaries, Māori, migrants, the multitude, the proletariat – it will leave us worse off. It might end the crisis, but we’ll live with the knowledge that the next one will be worse, and once again our lives will be utterly beyond our control.

So agency should be our watchword in this new era. So long as we lack agency, we are only a few years from collapse. So long as we lack agency, the response to crises will be arbitrary. New Zealanders got lucky in getting a rational response to the crisis, but next time we might be more like the US or UK – sending thousands more people to die in the name of profits. Taking power, then, is the only way to ensure that this total lack of agency never happens again.

So far in the things I’ve written for this blog, I’ve not actually included a call to join Organise Aotearoa. In a system built on broken promises, who am I to make a promise to readers that things will get better if only we fight for a revolutionary overthrow of the bosses, police and markets that put us in crisis again and again? As an organisation, we are young, and we are emerging from a very beaten-down, hollowed-out, and disparate left-wing movement. Revolution doesn’t seem realistic to many people, but then, neither did capitalism being crushed by a virus a few weeks ago. Socialism will never just happen – it takes work, and a sense of realism. We have a lot of work to do, but only in this period of transition can we see the possible futures laid out before us – apocalyptic misery, or social and economic justice. To fight for this is always worth the effort.

The best summary of the times we’re living in come from this quote I’m quite fond of:

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen”

[cyberneticpeoplespolis]

Initial Thoughts on Flight PS-752

Today I woke up to western governments revealing that they now believe that the Ukrainian airliner shot down over Tehran was, either deliberately or accidentally, destroyed by Iran’s own defense systems. My initial thoughts were: that’s bullshit. No flight information has yet been released, and a Ukrainian investigation, which is open to several potential causes, hasn’t even had a chance to begin.

However having seen the footage released by the NYT, showing a missile clearly intercepting the airliner, I began worrying about something else: if this was indeed a case of missile interception, then western media is going to take advantage of the technical illiteracy of the public when it comes to weapons systems to push several unfounded narratives.

Confusion

Logging in to Twitter I saw several prominent members of the international communist movement expressing deep, and understandable, confusion over the narratives surrounding the shoot-down. I don’t mean to speak down to anyone, and my only expertise in this area is having programmed missile flight behaviors for some video games based on some technical specs, hardly an engineering degree. Still I want to help clear up some confusion.

Several people were confused about whether the narrative that was developing had anything to do with the missile salvos that were launched against US bases in Iraq. Some questioned how a missile from the launch sites could have intercepted an airliner hundreds of miles away in Tehran, a long way away from Iraq. Others questioned how an Iranian military, which showed such incredible precision in targeting uninhabited areas in Iraq, could make a move so imprecise as downing a friendly aircraft.

This is because the missiles involved in these two separate incidents are completely different. The Surface-to-Surface missiles fired at the Iraqi bases were likely Fajr-3 ballistic missiles, which have an inertial navigational system. Such a system is usually calibrated at the launching site, and is able to detect changes in the missile’s own speed and trajectory, often using an altimeter to detect the distance from the ground, and thereby change its direction once it has entered the upper atmosphere and strike a target. Such a system cannot hit moving targets or detect what is ahead of it. Some modern systems issue course corrections via GPS, giving greater accuracy, but they still cannot truly change behaviour once they have been fired.

No one is claiming that such a missile hit flight PS-752, as even if it was travelling along the missile’s ballistic trajectory, which it wasn’t,  the chances of the two objects hitting each other at high speed is a million-to-one.

On the other hand, the missile that hit Flight PS-752 would have had a totally different guidance system. It would either have used a passive infrared system, a semi-active radar system, or an active radar system. All modern AA missiles use one or another of these systems. Passive infrared picks up on the “heat signature” of an aircraft and follows that. Semi-active radar means the missile is sent data from a radar set on the ground and intercepts the target based on that. Active radar missiles have their own miniaturised radar system that can send and receive signals and detect aircraft itself.

All of these systems are fired at very high speeds to attack planes at high altitude and speeds. Passive infrared and active radar missiles are also considered “fire and forget” missiles, as they continue to pursue their target even after the operator of the system has directed their attention elsewhere. Combined, this means that it’s perfectly reasonable that the Iranian military could conduct both a very careful surface-to-surface attack without any civilian casualties, but also mistakenly conduct a surface-to-air attack that tragically killed hundreds. Once an AA missile is fired, it can’t typically be called off.

Deliberate Misinformation

None of this is to suggest that the US and Canadian narratives should be believed as they are also full of conjecture, half-truths and outright lies. Several sources claimed that the US had direct intelligence from the airliner, or that US intelligence knew for certain the type of missile involved and the circumstances that lead to the downing.

Without making use of a psychic, the US could not possibly know what kind of radar signature “locked on” to the Ukrainian flight. They didn’t have some sort of direct data uplink to the cockpit, nor do civilian flights have passive radar arrays which can detect missile launches, as the reports seem to suggest. The overall impression I get is that the sources are trying to mislead the public using a hollywood understanding of how missiles work.

The US and Canadian sources say with a great degree of certainty that the missiles fired were two Russian-made Tor-M1 missiles (SA-15 “Gauntlet” missiles in NATOspeak). These are semi-active radar missiles, which are relatively small and fast. They hit the airliner in an engine, causing a fire, after which point the plane turned around and attempted to land.

However this is based entirely on two blurry cellphone videos. One purports to show a small piece of a Tor missile amidst the wreckage, the other shows a missile being fired at an airliner, hitting it.

The thing is, it’s entirely believable that this is the case. A Tor missile would strike a plane in a similar manner. It would be unlikely to cause catastrophic damage due to its small size. It would likely have a similar linear flight path compared to the “snaking” flight path of an Infrared missile. The discrepancies in the narrative are about the number of missiles (US sources say 2, the video seems to show 1 unless they are close together), and the location of the hit (a radar guided missile is more likely to hit the centre of mass - ie. the fuselage, rather than an engine, which is more commonly targeted by Infrared).

This distinction is somewhat important as depending on the guidance system it rules out the potential for other actors in the region, say foreign agents, downing the plane. A Tor would be too large to covertly operate, whereas small infrared missiles, such as the infamous FIM-92 “Stinger,” can and have been used in CIA operations in the region before. I don’t personally believe this story (if the US wanted a false-flag event there would have been many better options), but it’s an example of a narrative that can’t be ruled out.

What is more unbelievable is that western sources can report on such things with any degree of certainty. Iran has allowed a civilian investigation by Ukraine to continue, and so surely any conclusions must be left up to them. Iran has declined to hand the black box from the aircraft, a key piece of evidence, over to the US, but seeing how the US has seized upon the opportunity to push a warmongering narrative, that seems completely reasonable.

I suppose the point of this article is to warn against using “technical” reasons as to why a particular narrative is believable or unbelievable. It’s entirely believable that Iran mistakenly shot down an airliner, just as the US shot down Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988, although that incident was much more negligent. If we do go to war over this, then it won’t be for “technical” reasons; it will be because the US and Canada want to go to war, and the deaths of 62 Canadians can be easily used in a cynical outpouring of international “outrage” over so-called Iranian negligence. This was a tragedy, caused by the US more so than the operators of the missile that probably downed the flight, as Iranian defense certainly wouldn’t have made such a mistake if the US hadn’t increased tensions through a series of illegal killings. The international communist movement needs to spend less time focusing on technical details about western media narratives, as these can make us lose the forest for the trees. The focus should be on not letting warmongering media spin civilian deaths as a justification for further killing.

[cyberneticpeoplespolis]

Marxism and Conspiracy Theories

Originally commissioned for the Organise Aotearoa website, you can find more articles here. In running a socialist organisation, especially one that has an audience and collaborators outside of the regular “left wing activist” crowd, we often find ourselves in contact with conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists.

Some people even think socialists like us are conspiracy theorists—after all, aren’t we blaming nearly all of our problems on a tiny group of people who we say control the Government, most political parties, our workplaces, and our media? On the other hand, some believe that socialism is itself a part of a conspiracy, and that we are influencing culture and secretly control universities or political parties.

Conspiracy theories are usually based in the idea that some outside influence or ruling organisation controls everything around us, and this means that there is quite often a grain of truth somewhere in the mix. On the other hand, conspiracy theories can be a dangerous way of misdirecting anger away from those who deserve it and onto ethnic minorities or other scapegoats.

That’s why we’re attempting to write this in good faith rather than dismissing people we disagree with as cranks and crazies. Rather than appealing to rationality and common sense, we’re more interested in giving people the tools to separate fact from fiction. So what should you do if you’re confronted with a theory or worldview you think might be conspiratorial?

Is it falsifiable?

Falsifiability means that something can be proven wrong if the right evidence can be used against it. Many conspiracy theories rely on being unfalsifiable, what this means is that no matter how much evidence disproves the theory, you’ll still find a few people who believe it. For example, climate change denial is unfalsifiable because it is based on the idea that all the world’s scientists are deliberately misleading the public. No matter how many reports about looming ecological catastrophe come out, climate change denialism will still linger on because those producing the reports can’t be trusted. The only way that climate change denialism can be disproven is when our planet becomes completely uninhabitable, by which time the debate is pretty irrelevant.

In contrast, a worldview like socialism is falsifiable in part because there are thousands of ways we could be proven wrong if we saw the correct evidence. If someone becomes a billionaire without exploiting the labour of another human being, that would be direct evidence against socialism. A capitalist state completely abolishing wealth inequality would be another example. There are many things that simply could not happen without socialism being untrue—they just haven’t happened yet!

However not all conclusions of socialism are falsifiable, especially the application of revolutionary solutions in our current context. We don’t presume to have created a completely flawless worldview, and only through practice can theory be put to the test.

Where does the money lead?

Another hallmark of conspiracy theories is that they propose scenarios that simply don’t make economic sense. What is the profit motive behind paying off thousands and thousands of people so that they don’t reveal the “truth” about society when it makes much more sense to hide in plain sight for free? Every scheme requires a believable investment and a believable motive, but many conspiracy theories would require elaborate networks and millions of paid employees, all kept in perfect secrecy.

On the other hand, conspiracy theories which turned out to be true, such as the Jeffrey Epstein case, had clear social and profit motives. A single prisoner held information that was damaging to several politicians and businessmen, and they simply exercised their class solidarity to kill him before he could stand trial. This is a good example of a real-life conspiracy, as it was done so clumsily that it was only a matter of time before it was exposed.

As socialists, the main conspiracy we espouse is one that makes perfect economic sense, and takes place in plain sight: that the rich have created systems to endlessly exploit the labour of the poor—something that even the most capitalist economist would admit after a few drinks. While many conspiracies rely on the idea that truth is completely separate from appearance, most socialist theories rely on taking the most readily apparent and ordinary parts of daily life, and revealing truth through putting them in a wider economic and social context.

Does it focus on Jewish people?

Perhaps the most insidious aspect of conspiracy theories is how they are able to misdirect the anger of working class people towards minorities. Many popular conspiracy theories tie in to one big overarching conspiracy theory, collectively termed “New World Order” (NWO) conspiracies.

NWO conspiracies typically revolve around a secret pact involving Freemasons, the Illuminati, and the Elders of Zion with occasional guest appearances by Nazis, Rhodes’ scholars, aliens, communists and satanists.

One aspect of NWO conspiracies that makes them so insidious and widespread is their tendency to bleed into one another thanks to internet forums, right-wing ultranationalist organisations, and other purveyors of “stigmatised knowledge.” This means that people who believe in NWO conspiracies often come to believe that racial groups, especially Jews, are a part of, or behind all of the other conspiracies.

This is because of a few factors: Jews were historically the most literate minority in Early Modern Europe, which often led to conditional entry into the management and middle classes. This, combined with Christian religious hostility, led to situations where Jews were blamed for nearly everything. By the time the 19th century arrived, whole fabricated documents (The Protocols of the Elders of Zion) were being produced, claiming to expose a Jewish conspiracy to corrupt the world.

This means that many conspiracy theories involve a conscious or unconscious hostility towards Jews and other minorities. Jewish banking families like the Rothschilds are blown out of proportion, becoming arch-capitalist overlords rather than relatively small-scale bank owners. Jewish association with other “conspiratorial organisations” also had tragic consequences for other groups: along with the 6 million Jews murdered by Nazis, 200,000 Freemasons and 1,450 Jehovah’s Witnesses were also killed thanks to their alleged participation in Jewish conspiracies.

Many people in Aotearoa espouse rhetoric similar to NWO conspiracism without realising what a tragic history such thinking has led to. We need to educate people about the full implications of this brand of conspiracy theories, and completely divorce it from the socialist movement.

What about Marxism?

Marxism inevitably gets lumped in with many of the conspiracies outlined above. This is natural, since aren’t we conspiring to overthrow governments and institute our own world order (a new mode of production)? But underneath this relatively innocuous association is something more sinister. Marxism gets painted as a Jewish conspiracy, since we get our name from the proudly Jewish Karl Marx. This was something exploited by Marx’s contemporaries, and something that undercuts much of the criticism of socialism to this day.

This is a particularly dangerous association, not only because it creates unsafe situations for our Jewish comrades, but also because it prevents us from redirecting the misguided anger of conspiratorialism towards those who are actually pulling the strings: the bourgeoisie, of all cultures, ethnicities and nationalities. After all, why should anyone listen to us if we’re shills for the NWO, or Jewish capitalists like George Soros? This brings us back to one of the concepts we raised earlier—it makes conspiracy thinking unfalsifiable, because the only people willing to talk about the real conspiracies can be dismissed as part of the problem!

Does it mistake “Shock Doctrine” for “False Flags?”

Many conspiracies rely on the idea that the ruling class or other groups deliberately stage or perpetrate massive catastrophes in order to further their goals. A good example of these “False Flag” conspiracies is the 9/11 Truther movement which claims that the US Federal Government deliberately blew up the World Trade Centre and made it look as if it was the result of airliner impacts. They believe this, in part, because the US Government massively benefited from the attacks, and was able to use it for propaganda to consolidate its own domestic power and enable overseas imperialism.

However such claims could also be explained by a much more real and mundane tactic of the ruling class: the “Shock Doctrine.” This is the idea that Governments will opportunistically take advantage of shocking events and people’s fear to push through legislation, or exercise repressive measures and emergency powers. A recent and notable example of this took place in New Zealand. The Christchurch Mosque attacks were used by police as justification for expanding the police’s access to automatic weapons. The police had been lobbying for greater access to firearms for years, and these policies would likely have been adopted regardless of events. However, by using tragic acts of terrorism for their own gain, the police were able to convince even left-wing civil society that this policy is justified. Through the Shock Doctrine, terrible events often lead to Governments achieving their policy objectives, and this appears to some outside observers as if they planned the whole thing.

In truth, the real crime is the unending ability for capitalist states to use civilian deaths and tragedy as political capital in pushing their agendas.

Does it present an unwinnable situation?

One thing all of these conspiracy theories have in common is that they create situations in which we are so hopelessly outmatched and outmanoeuvred by infinitely powerful organisations that there’s no point except to give up, and maybe occasionally update a blog about it all. In a way, it’s comforting to know that someone has a plan, even if it’s an evil one, because our only options are to sit back and watch it unfurl rather than exercise our own agency to make plans of our own.

Socialism differs from many other conspiracies because we know there is no single plan, no blueprint by which the bourgeoisie controls us. They are a mass of competing interests, but they will also work together in cases where their interests align, such as when ensuring collective profits through wars and crises, or when removing threats to their collective interests, such as taxation and working class solidarity.

Socialism holds that there is no individual with the ability to shape reality except working class people working together to develop our own plans. Those who rule over us aren’t shady organisations with no public face, but rather a class of individuals with names and addresses, as well as visible social and economic systems they have set up to advance their interests.

So does OA believe in conspiracies?

In short, yes absolutely! Every time the bourgeoisie works together on a project, they are exercising their class solidarity, in other words, conspiring with each other. They do this all the time, from a group of lobbyists helping one another pressure governments, to a gun manufacturer providing a discount to a police force. Real life conspiracies are…well, kind of boring compared to the ones that capture people’s imaginations. Even the shadiest aspects of the capitalist world, such as corporate espionage, CIA coups and propaganda campaigns, tend not to put a lot of effort into covering their tracks, instead relying on our apathy and the subservience of news media to let the story die.

What we don’t engage in is conspiratorialism, the idea that we can theorise about conspiracies based on loose connections, anecdotal evidence, and confirmation biases.

Real conspiracies are simple, visible, and pretty uninteresting to most people. We simply don’t need to explain things via the most complex, hidden, and obscure structures known to humankind.

[cyberneticpeoplespolis]

On Blockading

A treatise on NVDA tactics from a Marxist perspective.

Update: 2019 edition!

I’m updating “On Blockading” for several reasons: For starters; this post got more popular than I could have predicted and that carries with it a greater responsibility to give up-to-date advice. There have also been several developments in Direct Action tactics in Aotearoa since I wrote this: the Weapons Expo has been officially kicked out of New Zealand thanks, in part, to the success of the 2018 blockade I wrote about here. I’ve also been a part of subsequent movements like the Ihumaatao campaign where Direct Action tactics were once again used. These experiences, as well as finding out how horrendously incorrect some parts of this guide were, meant I needed to revisit this piece and bring it up to date.

Keep reading

[cyberneticpeoplespolis]

I’ve updated a lot of what I said in my weirdly popular post on blockade tactics at the 2018 Weapons Expo! Partly because I was embarrassed by how I wrote a year ago, and partly because it was still being reblogged with information that was completely wrong. I may also be revisiting it with new sections as parts of it still need updating with new stuff I’ve found out.

[cyberneticpeoplespolis]

A Primer on Northern Syria

Originally posted on the Organise Aotearoa Blog on 14/10/19

Northern Syria, also known as the NES (Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria) or by its Kurdish name, Rojava (the west), is often in the news for all the wrong reasons. This week, Turkish troops and their local Islamist allies crossed the border in the name of protecting Turkey from Kurdish-led militants it denounces as terrorists. The US, ostensibly an ally of the Kurds, has granted Turkey a free hand to bomb the region at its leisure, and has assisted Turkey by closing off the border crossings with Iraq, and along the Euphrates. To understand the conflict holistically means we need to go far back into history, before capitalism, and before the ethno-nationalism it fostered could tear the region apart.

Pre-Capitalist History

Prior to the spread of Islam in the 600s, the region known as The Levant, or Lebanon, Palestine and Syria, was home to a number of competing religions. Greek Orthodox Christianity, Syriac Christianity, and Zoroastrianism (an ancient precursor to modern monotheistic religions) were all practiced across the region, along with smaller religions that can be traced back to the earliest human cities in Mesopotamia, such as the Yazidi religion. Most of these religions are still practiced by minorities in the region today, with the exception of Zoroastrianism which has been reduced to tiny enclaves much farther east.

In pre-capitalist times, humans have understood cultural differences quite differently to how we do today. It’s hard for many to understand now, but race and ethnicity were concepts that would only come into play later. Religious and cultural practice was a much more important and tangible aspect of identity. When Islam spread across the region, many Levantine peoples welcomed it because of its similarities to local forms of Christian iconoclasm (meaning religious opposition to figurative representation of the divine).

Map showing the spread of Islam under successive Caliphs.

Islam brought with it a renaissance period where Levantine peoples led the world in the arts and sciences. The conservative institutions of the Byzantine orthodox church, and Sassanid Zoroastrian fundamentalists were swept aside by a new wave of Islamic scholars and thinkers, whose rationalist approach now seems extremely modern compared to other cultures of the time. Islam was led by Caliphs, ideally philosopher-king descendents of the prophet, far removed from the more sinister modern use of the term.

By the late Middle Ages, the Caliphs were no longer direct descendents of the prophet, but rather powerful sultans who took on the title themselves. By the 1400s the Caliphs were a Turkish dynasty from central Anatolia, the Osmanolgu family, better known as the Ottomans. The Ottomans ushered in a second Islamic renaissance, and despite their brutal methods of warfare, were relatively fair administrators who allowed a great deal of autonomy for minorities. Christians, Jews and Muslims cohabited peacefully, to the point that whole cities were granted to minorities, such as the Jewish-led city of Salonica (Thessaloniki) in Greece.

Map showing the spread of the Ottoman caliphate.

However, this second period of peace wouldn’t always last. As the centuries passed, the Ottomans found themselves in direct competition with European powers, whose absolute monarchies and mercantilism proved to be a much stronger economic and political base. By the time of the Industrial revolution, the Ottomans were referred to as “The Sick Man of Europe.” A vast, but ultimately weak power, that could be easily divided up between the emerging European colonial powers.

The Ottomans adapted to this by adopting European-style cultural, political and economic practices. They experimented with colonial practices, beginning Turkish colonies across their provinces, and attempted to impose aspects of modern state power, like standing armies and police forces. These reforms were not enough, and the Ottomans found themselves being eaten alive by European powers. Napoleonic France took Egypt, Russia took Crimea, and Britain took Cyprus.

Capitalism reaches the Levant

This crisis led to growing anxiety amongst the emerging Turkish bourgeoisie. They feared that the Empire wouldn’t modernise fast enough to avoid disintegration, and that the Sultan needed to abolish the system of regional autonomy (the millet system), and replace it with a modern capitalist state under an absolute monarchy. Ottoman nationalism emerged as a means to consolidate the many regional identities, and a policy of “Turkification” was pursued throughout the empire. Capitalism requires a relatively homogenous populace in order to effectively create a working class to fuel industrial modernisation, and so the myriad ethnic identities of the empire presented a problem.

Several events in the first decades of the 20th century created the conditions for the form of Turkish ethnonationalism we see today. In 1908, Turkish army officers and the Ottoman bourgeoisie rose up in the Young Turk Revolution, demanding a liberal parliamentary system with representation for ethnic minorities. A counter-revolution in 1909 by reactionaries and proto-Islamists reversed some of the changes, and brought violence against ethnic minorities who were seen to be in support of the earlier revolution. The empire was now divided between liberal-bourgeois Ottomanism and reactionary Turkish ethnonationalism. A narrative of betrayal stemming from the loss of the Balkans in 1912 and an inability to mobilise the Anatolian Armenian population against Russia in 1914 added fuel to the flames. From 1915 to 1923, up to 1.5 million Armenians and other Christian minorities were systematically killed, the first modern genocide on an industrial scale, and a crime denied by Turkey to this day. Lesser known are the Greek and Assyrian massacres, which themselves account for up to a million additional deaths. Muslim populations historically allied to the Ottomans, such as Kurds and Circassians, participated in the killings.

Map showing sites of documented Armenian and Assyrian genocide.

Ultimately neither clamping down on dissenting minorities, mobilising Turkish enthnonationalist sentiment, nor an alliance with the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary could save the empire. During the First World War, the “Sick Man of Europe” was finally carved up between the European colonial powers, after they successfully took advantage of a large scale Arab revolt by making false promises of statehood. The League of Nations, established in the aftermath of the war and the precursor to the modern UN, tasked various ‘responsible’ European powers with administering the conquered territories in the Levant and Mesopotamia.

The agreements signed during this period, in which the Arab revolt was thoroughly betrayed, would have profound implications, and are the source of many modern borders. Israel can trace its legacy back to this period; in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, Zionist immigration to Mandate Palestine was encouraged as a form of demographic engineering. The Sykes-Picot agreement led to the creation of Palestine, Transjordan (Jordan), Kuwait, and Iraq under British influence, and Lebanon and Syria under the French. Saudi Arabia, then known as the Emirate of Nejd, also participated in the partitioning by annexing the Ottoman Persian Gulf territories, and the lands captured in the Arab revolt by the rival Hashemites. In all of these territories, the Europeans encouraged regional nationalism and solidified the new borders, cutting several communities and tribes off from one another and effectively fracturing the entire region.

Map showing European zones of influence following WWI. Europeans also effectively controlled Egypt, Cyprus, and zones within Turkey, which is not shown. 

The Mandate territories revolted against the Europeans several times. Turkey, occupied by the Europeans since 1918, successfully overthrew them in 1923, led by Mustafa Kemal Pasha (Atatürk), who attempted to combine the liberal-secular parliamentarism and Turkish ethnonationalism of the 1908 and 1909 revolutions into an ideology known as Kemalism. Palestine also attempted to overthrow the British in 1936 but was brutally crushed. Iraq attempted to do the same in 1941, even allying itself with Nazi Germany to do so, but was similarly put down.

After the end of the Second World War, the European powers were no longer able to exert direct control over the entire Levant, instead holding on to key areas like the Suez canal. The British also granted large parts of Mandate Palestine to the emerging Zionist movement as they believed an Israeli state would be more amenable to the West than the unruly Arabs. Pan-Arabism emerged in this period as a rejection of the atomisation, arbitrary borders, and demographic engineering that marked the European mandate territories. Wars against Israel and horror at its genocide of Palestinians would be a rallying cry for this movement, which resulted in a degree of consolidation in Levantine identity.

The Postcolonial Levant

Pan-Arabism would take on a social-democratic character as the various postcolonial states founded welfare systems, and allied themselves with the Soviet Union. However, the ideology was still strongly anti-communist on the domestic front. Indeed, anticommunism was the chief motive behind the zenith of Pan-Arabism: the attempt at a united Arab state in 1958. The United Arab Republic (UAR) was a union between Egypt and Syria, both led by social-democratic nationalist governments who feared that the alternative would be a Syrian communist revolution. Iraqi military officers soon overthrew their pro-Western monarchy and very nearly joined the UAR themselves.

Ultimately however, this sentiment would be short lived. As the threat of communism died down and the realities of post-colonial statehood set in, Pan-Arabism was replaced with a number of competing ideas. Marxists remained a strong faction, but would never again find themselves in a position to take power. Ba’athism, a legacy of the Pan-Arabist period, would later become the dominant ideology in Syria and Iraq, where its contradictory character would lead to both social-democratic reforms and the uneven repression of minorities and communists. Islamism, encouraged as a state ideology in Saudi Arabia, also became a powerful force, buoyed by its successes and US-funding in Afghanistan. Ethnonationalist separatism also emerged out of the decline of Pan-Arabism, which sharpened the contradictions facing minorities like the Kurds, Assyrians, and Armenians.

Modern Northern Syria

Northern Syria bears the marks of all of these competing ideologies from the postcolonial/Cold-War period, as well as the ethnic and religious divides from the preceding centuries. There are Marxist factions, generally split along ethnic lines between Kurds and Arab/Alawites; as well as Ba’athists; Islamists, most infamously ISIS; and ethno-nationalists of all stripes. Amongst them are the somewhat apolitical ethnic and religious minorities, like the Yazidis, who are motivated primarily by survival in the face of repeated threats of genocide. Newer factions include Kurdish Apoists, and the mercenary factions funded by various global powers.

Northern Syria is also the site of three major global battlegrounds. There is an expansionist and ethnonationalist Turkey seeking to quash Kurdish aspirations to nationhood; a regional battle between Saudi wahhabism (extreme Sunni fundamentalism) and Iranian principlism (revolutionary Shia Islam); and the US and EU making the most of the situation to access oil and guarantee long-term superiority over Russia. There are also smaller conflicts exploited by all parties, as well as the opportunism and warlordism that a collapse of civilian government and constant arms shipments engenders.

Map of the Syrian war as of October 13, 2019. Government (Ba’athist) areas are shown in red. Green areas are a mix of Western-backed militias (in Al-Tanf), Free Syrian Army remnants (in Idlib) and Turkish-backed militias (in the far north). Yellow is areas controlled by the SDF and Kurds. Black shows hardline Islamist remnants. Blue shows Israeli occupation.

Discussion of Northern Syria inevitably centers around the PYD (the Kurdish Democratic Union Party), arguably the most mythologised and interesting of all the Syrian factions. Depending on who you talk to on the internet, the PYD can be anything from anarchist insurrectionists, to Marxist revolutionaries, to eco-feminist warriors, to Kurdish terrorists, to Western imperialist Contras paid to undermine peace in the region. It’s our goal to demystify the group somewhat.

The PYD is the Syrian sister party of the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, led by the imprisoned Abdullah Öcalan. Initially a Marxist group formed out of Kurdish students in Turkey, the PKK was forced underground by Turkish repression, becoming a guerilla army armed and supported by the Ba’athist governments of Iraq and Syria, who tolerated the PKK’s Marxist rhetoric so long as it was aimed at Turkey. The PKK of today is quite different, having dropped Marxism-Leninism and alliances with Ba’athism from its doctrine. The PKK and PYD, along with the other member parties of the KCK (Kurdistan Communities Union) umbrella organisation, have shifted towards enacting a democratic confederalist or “Apoist” (after a diminutive form of Öcalan’s name) programme in the predominantly Kurdish areas of northern Iraq and Syria, southeastern Turkey, and northwestern Iran. This gained a lot of attention in the west due to its communalist, feminist, and anti-capitalist aspirations. However, the system of autonomous cantons remains an admirable small-scale experiment, and tends to be overstated by the western left. The territory has also had difficulty living up to its ecological aspirations due to reliance on diesel generators, unregulated oil refineries, and wartime economic constraints.

The PYD and its armed wing, the YPG/YPJ, also gained infamy for its conditional alliance with the US and EU, whereby the Kurds and their allies gained air support, weapons and other assistance in return for allowing 10 US military bases on their territory. The US also assisted with arming the SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces), a broad military coalition that included the YPG/YPJ along with those whom it had previously opposed, such as Kurdish nationalists, religious Sunni Kurds, mercenaries, and conscripted soldiers of dubious willingness. As the result of US negotiations this new armed force came to control all lands north of the Euphrates, well beyond the initial territorial aspirations of the PYD, which had initially only included the majority-Kurdish regions in a strip along the northern border. This put the Kurdish-led military force in control of most of Syria’s oil fields, and a large population of Arabs and minorities critical of the SDF, the only Syrian faction to use forced conscription. Allegations of ethnic chauvinism, and the discovery of “blacksites” (interrogation and torture facilities) within SDF areas added to the criticism.

Map showing initial Kurdish territorial aspirations. De-facto Kurdish territories are now much larger.

Turkey is the main adversary of the Kurdish-led force. Since 2014 Turkey has been ruled by the fascist-adjacent and increasingly autocratic Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whose Justice and Development Party is a direct descendent of the reactionary strain of Islamo-Turkish nationalism introduced in the counter-revolution of 1909. Turkish chauvinism towards Kurds stretches back decades, officially denying their existence and calling them “Mountain Turks” despite their historical loyalty in the Ottoman period.

Turkey is also in NATO, the US imperialist military alliance, however it often violates agreements with the US and makes overtures towards Russia, attempting to play both sides off against one another for military aid. Turkey has used this shaky alliance to lobby the US for more territorial control in Syria. The Afrin region was taken from Kurdish forces in 2016, and this week, vast swathes of northern Syria were declared up for grabs by Turkish expansionism.

Northern Syria invaded

Whatever our overall analysis of Syrian factions may be (and it is so easy to make mistakes in such a heavily propagandised environment) the question of the hour is Turkish expansionism, as this is the specific form that ethnonationalism has taken in the region. Turkey plans to demographically engineer a huge swathe of northern Syria by resettling 2 million refugees in NES, a move tantamount to a threat of genocide against displaced minorities. The US, for its part, has done far more harm than good as an ally, and is now patrolling the Euphrates, effectively enforcing the isolation of NES.

It would be a great mistake for people in the west to conclude that the people of Northern Syria somehow deserve a Turkish invasion as just desserts for their alliance with the US, especially since many Kurds and other minorities joined the fight in a struggle for survival against ISIS and Turkish-funded militias, only later finding their movement subverted by US geopolitical goals. Moreover, Turkey is the only faction in the Syrian conflict with a history of genocidal policies towards all of the minorities of Northern Syria at one point or another, and thus a defense of NES is a defense of all ethnic minorities in the region regardless of their political orientation.

All Syrian peoples deserve self-determination without the intervention of foreign powers. It may be easy to dismiss such a conflict as too complicated, the product of ‘tribal’ conflicts among a backwards people, but this ignores the entire history of imperialism in the Middle East. Thousands of ethnicities lived in relative peace prior to the imposition of nationalist ideology, demographic engineering and arbitrary borders, all products of capitalism. The Syrian people deserve an end to the constant war imposed upon them.

[cyberneticpeoplespolis]

Ecuadorians are showing Aotearoa how it’s done

Originally posted on the Organise Aotearoa blog on 09/10/19.

In a stunningly rapid turn of events, Ecuador has risen up against the neoliberal government of President Moreno, and the march on their capital city of Quito should serve as a prime example for people in Aotearoa looking for a political path forward.

The rise of President Lenin Moreno echoes with similar stories across the world. A citizenry elects an administration with centre-left rhetoric, promising a more humane style of government concerned with the welfare and wellbeing of the people. The new candidates promise the world during the election, and in the immediate aftermath look as if they might even make good on some of those assurances.

After the elections have ended these Governments slide back into business-as-usual politics and neoliberal penny-pinching. In the case of President Moreno, soon after the elections were won, a ‘Productive Development Act’ was passed which enshrined a total austerity policy, reducing public spending, liberalising trade, and destroying unions. Tax-evading multinationals were invited back into the country and granted amnesty for their past fraud. International systems of dispute arbitration, which generally favour large companies, were introduced in direct violation of Ecuador’s constitution.

This wholesale sellout of the Ecuadorian people mirrors the actions of ‘centre-left’ governments around the world, which promise to stand up against international financial institutions only to fold and impose harsh austerity measures of their own. Like many, Moreno tried to pin the blame on the spending of his predecessor, President Correa, a move eerily similar to the introduction of neoliberal austerity in Aotearoa in the 1980s, when Labour’s ‘Rogernomics’ was blamed on the erratic spending of Muldoon.

Earlier this year, Moreno deepened his betrayal of the Ecuadorian people, taking out a further $10 billion in loans from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and cosying up to US Imperialism in the hope of more aid. These new massive loans, along with a further $4.2 billion last month, came with consequences, necessitating a withdrawal of fuel subsidies which helped many rural families reach the cities for work and basic services.

Ecuador’s transport union was the first to take action, with a large strike on Thursday which crippled the flow of capital around the country. By Saturday, large groups of students, rural workers, and indigenous activists had taken to the streets. The protests took on a distinctly indigenous character reminiscent of other movements across Latin America, collectively termed “indigenismo,” that seek to combine socialism, indigenous identity, and anti-imperialism.

On Sunday the protests continued despite repression, with one protester being run over by a car and military and police forces attempting to halt the marches. Many officers refused to carry out the suppression of the protestors, instead joining the march towards the capital.

Attempts to blame other movements for socialism and liberation in Latin America proved fruitless. The US-backed Governments of Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Paraguay and Peru all proclaimed support for Moreno, as did the widely discredited self-proclaimed president of Venezuela, Juan Guaidó. The socialist governments of Bolivia and Venezuela support the protests despite the increasing sanctions being heaped on them in the last few weeks. Domestic support for the protests even includes Moreno’s fellow party member and predecessor President Correa, who said “Please, Moreno, quit.”

While the protests initially seem to have been focused on reversing the latest austerity measures, Moreno has treated the recent march on the capital as an existential threat. In an address on Monday he denounced the protesters as vandals and lawbreakers, and declared an abrupt change of capital to the coastal city of Guayaquil. Moreno has gathered senior police and military figures around him, even as the lower ranks disobey orders and his own party members desert him.

It would be naive of us to suggest that lessons from Ecuador are directly applicable to Aotearoa. Latin America occupies a different position in the global supply chain, and has a far greater history of socialist liberation struggles and interventions from imperialist powers. Still, there are some similarities between us; neoliberal austerity politics has utterly failed us, there is growing dissatisfaction with the empty promises of the centre-left, an indigenous decolonial movement is in the air, and regressive fuel taxes are likely to spread. People in Aotearoa who are sick of neoliberal politics would do well to look towards the last week in Ecuador for inspiration. In just one week, they have experienced more profound political change than we have in decades.

[cyberneticpeoplespolis]

New Zealand needs to stand up to Indonesia over West Papua

Originally posted on the Organise Aotearoa blog on 07/10/19.  Groups in support of the Free West Papua Movement fear an escalation of state violence in West Papua is imminent, and are calling on the NZ Government to join the international outcry against racial violence.

Over the last 24 hours, Indonesian paramilitary organisations such as the Islamic Defenders’ Front (FPI) were spotted in Wamena, West Papua, attempting to push locals out of their homes. Nationalist-Islamist groups in Indonesia are a common sight on the main islands, and while they are sometimes a cause for concern in Jakarta, the Government tolerates their presence provided they can be mobilised against liberation movements. That these same groups are now marching down the streets in West Papua is worrying.

Members of the FPI were also present during the siege and attempted lynching of Papuan students by Indonesian nationalists and soldiers in Surabaya on August 16. According to the ABC, “Nationalist vigilantes gathered outside the student’s dormitory building from Friday night — a day before Indonesia’s independence day —singing the Indonesian national anthem, cutting power to the building, and attacking good Samaritans delivering food and drinks to the trapped students.

The mob grew the following day, chanting ‘get rid of the Papuans right now’ and ‘monkeys, get out’. Eventually, elite counter-terrorist commandos from the Indonesian military were brought in, not to keep the peace, but to side with the race-rioters and assault the Papuans.

The presence of militia groups in West Papua is particularly concerning, as Indonesia has historically used paramilitary religious, nationalist and youth groups as the vanguard in major crackdowns against independence movements, such as in East Timor. In that often forgotten occupation, up to 300,000 people were killed in the tiny nation, often by Indonesian-backed warlords, militias and mobs rather than occupying soldiers. The National Military dislikes getting its own hands dirty.

Wamena has already seen race-riots against locals (called “monkeys” by Indonesian media) that have claimed as many as 41 lives in recent days. Many fear that the violence will increase now that Indonesian-backed militias have taken over from the army and police, giving plausible deniability against allegations of human rights abuses.

Organise Aotearoa says that as a Pacific nation, the New Zealand state has an obligation to speak out or intervene diplomatically to push back against Indonesian racial chauvinism, and the ongoing neo-colonial development of West Papua. We have a common cultural and historical link with Melanesia, and just as importantly, an internationalist commitment to fighting for the rights of all oppressed and working people. That it is happening on a whenua so close to us, with relatively little outcry, is all the more shameful.

More inaction and silence on the part of the Government will lead people in Aotearoa to the conclusion that the state doesn’t care about violence against heavily racialised groups like Melanesians.

Papua Merdeka!

[cyberneticpeoplespolis]

Stop all “Blood Phosphate” imports! Saharawi resistance figure kicks off speaking tour of Aotearoa

Originally posted on the Organise Aotearoa blog on 07/10/19. Tecber’s tour has already ended but I’m saving all blog posts for posterity. Saharawi resistance figure, Tecber Ahmed Saleh, has begun a tour across New Zealand to talk about life under Moroccan occupation and the role New Zealand’s fertiliser companies have had in prolonging this occupation through importing phosphates from the region.

Morocco invaded Western Sahara in the “Green March” of 1975. Before then, the territory was ruled by Generalissimo Franco’s fascist Spain, but as the despot lay on his deathbed, he signed a secret agreement to split Western Sahara between Morocco in the North and Mauritania in the South. Franco knew that Spain’s colonies wouldn’t be held after his death, and he feared that an independent Western Sahara would join his enemies in the growing decolonial and communist movements in Africa. Rather than allow this, he signed over the territory, and 74,000 Saharawi with it, to nations whom he knew would suppress any communist or decolonial sentiment.

Many Saharawi fled the region at this time, travelling across the desert into Algeria. Others fought a war against Morocco and Mauritania, forcing the latter to withdraw in 1979. Those who remained were bombed repeatedly by Moroccan aircraft carrying napalm, a flammable gasoline jelly which causes horrific burns. The ruling Islamic-nationalist government of Algeria was just as anti-socialist as the Moroccans, but made an exception to the Saharawi resistance fighters due to their own hostility towards Morocco. They granted a swathe of southern Algeria to the refugees, who administer the harsh desert region autonomously.

The exiled population in the camps has now reached 173,600. This was the place where Ahmed Saleh was born. The Saharawi have been waiting for a referendum for self-determination, agreed to by Morocco in a United Nations peace plan, since 1991, but it has not yet been put on the table by the Moroccan government.

Phosphate, used as a high-grade fertiliser, has historically been the only significant resource in the region. The Spanish ran large mining colonies in the territory, and these were later taken over by the Moroccans, who now have a near-monopoly on the world’s supply. The state-owned OCP corporation accounts for a significant portion of Morocco’s economy, and funds the lifestyle of the “progressive” monarch, Mohammed VI, whose 12 palaces cost $1 million per-day to operate.

New Zealand is the only country in which private companies still import the “blood phosphate” from the conflict zone, where human rights abuses are common. Western Sahara accounts for around a sixth of the Maghrebi phosphate industry, and even though open warfare has been over for nearly 3 decades, the situation in the territory is one of brutal occupation. The Saharawi people still see no benefit from the exploitation of their only natural resource.

Human rights violations include widely corroborated reports of torture, police brutality, and the repeated arrest and sentencing of members of human rights NGOs. Journalists are also frequently targeted with “assaults, arrests and harassment.”

“New Zealand fertiliser companies, Ravensdown and Ballance Agri-Nutrients, have been buying phosphate from The OCP Group, controlled by the Moroccan Royal Family,” says spokesperson for the Western Sahara Solidarity campaign, Mike Barton. “There’s profit to be made by extracting phosphate from Western Sahara, and our trade is undermining Saharawi human rights.”

“New Zealand needs to stop importing blood phosphate from Western Sahara.”

Ravensdown maintains that it is confident the practice is still legal under international law, despite the mounting weight of international resolutions and even legal blockades of ships carrying phosphate to NZ. The ship Cherry Blossom was detained in South Africa in 2017 with a 54,000 tonne cargo of phosphate worth $5 million destined for Ballance in Tauranga. South African legal teams took a stand against New Zealand and determined that the rock belonged to the Saharawi people.

However Morocco has applied its own campaign on international pressure, using its diplomatic staff and lobbyists to silence discussion of Saharawi self-determination wherever possible. Ahmed Saleh’s sold-out tour of Australia was cut short when she was prevented from speaking at the University of Sydney due to pressure from the Morroccan embassy.

Ahmed Saleh kicked off her New Zealand tour with a visit to the land occupation site at Ihumātao, and spoke in Auckland the following night. She has a speaking appointment in Hamilton tonight, before moving on to Christchurch, Dunedin Wellington, and Lower Hutt.

Hamilton: October 7, 6:30pm at the Meteor.

Christchurch: October 9, 7pm at WEA Canterbury Workers’ Educational Association.

Dunedin: October 10, 6pm at University of Otago Castle 1 Theatre.

Wellington: October 14, 7pm at Thistle Hall.

Lower Hutt: October 15, 7:30pm at Waiwhetu Uniting Church.