Aristocracy in Aotearoa; New Zealand's Identity Politics Crisis : stupidpol
Posting this to atone for my latent radlib tendencies. If you have any concerns, please contact my parole officer /u/Incoherencel
.
There’s been a bit of a fuss online recently about New Zealand after a Māori MP led a haka in parliament against the sitting government and their libertarian lapdogs, so there’s no better time than now to talk about the co-governance movement in New Zealand (also relevant to any readers from Australia or the Americas). First, the background of the issue - skip this part if you don’t care. Next, the way identity politics is used to divide the NZ working class.
To summarise the debate:
The fundamentals of the issue come down to interpretations of our founding treaty, for which we have two positions of interest. Under the status quo, the English version of the treaty plays some role in New Zealand law - in a very simple sense, Māori have special seats in parliament and government agencies work with iwi (tribes) on certain matters. The liberal perspective is that the Māori people were cheated out of power, and we should follow the Māori version of the treaty, which guarantees Māori absolute sovereignty. I won’t get into too much depth with this, but the libertarian ACT Party is trying to change New Zealand’s founding document to be libertarian IDpol slop - stupid in its own right, and a point from which to launch more libertarian reforms. Māori have fair grievances with this position (although their methods may come off as “cringe”) - the problem is that their interpretation is also drivel.
But what the hell is a co-governance!? The Māori people and the state share decision-making, on certain issues. This includes the provision of social services by Māori-focused entities, co-management of natural resources, and Māori representation in local and national government bodies. The latter two are the most important, and what I'll be discussing; these are disasters that have more or less remained unchecked.
Māori capitalism and Māori exploitation
Often, the case made for indigenous management of resources is something along the lines of “indigenous people are connected to the lands, they’re better at taking care of the environment”. Of course, opposing this common-sense idea is seen as bigotry of the highest degree, even though this is simply a liberal rephrasing of the “noble savage” myth. Believe it or not, Māori are not incorruptible paragons of morality - they’re actually just normal people. They are so normal, in fact, that their attempts to resist European capitalism resulted in them merely reinventing capitalism.
Iwi are historical tribes of Māori. In modern politics they often govern alongside local governments, and exercise absolute control over certain areas of land. Unlike the government, however, they are not elected - iwi are accountable to no-one, not even their own people. This ends up in iwi structuring themselves like a corporation, except they’re also beyond the law, essentially nobility. In action, this results in rampant exploitation.
The iwi Ngāi Tahu is a great example of this - they’re one of the largest iwi, claiming the vast majority of New Zealand’s South Island as their lands (around half the country, for those geographically challenged). New Zealand has long struggled against the dairy industry - known for buying up land en masse and raping it with environmentally destructive practices such as deforestation and the leaching of cancerous chemicals into local water supplies. The New Zealand left understandably opposes this, but their solution tends to be co-governance - they bend over backwards to ensure iwi control these lands. What does Ngāi Tahu do with these lands? They rape them with environmentally destructive practices, only this time, without the checks and balances of the government that corporations normally have. Dairy farms become Ngāi Tahu farms, and deforestation becomes Ngāi Tahu deforestation. These practices are so rampant that Ngāi Tahu even drove a species of beetle to extinction.
Unchecked iwi corporatism subjugates the worker, too. In a similar situation, we saw our biggest iwi-owned fishing company faced with mass strikes. Despite millions of dollars of profit, their Māori workers earned less than a living wage - the government powerless to do anything due to iwi autonomy. Ngāi Tahu claims to use their superprofits to advocate for the Māori people, but the extent of this seems to be lobbying for their own enrichment. While the Māori proletariat struggles, the iwi corporatist makes millions from their labour, mystifying class relations to portray themselves as the oppressed rather than the oppressor. The story we see time and time again is not one where iwi power fixes the ails of capitalism, but one where they claim guardianship status of natural and human resources, exploiting them for profit.
Māori electoral politics
The story with Māori politics is the same - it is a tale of self-interest. The Māori Party (Te Pāti Māori) is the big driving force of New Zealand identity politics, notably, they are the ones behind the haka I mentioned prior and the recent nation-wide protests. As you may expect, they are about as productive as the iwi - they are wreckers who only exist to flail and drag the left down with them.
The New Zealand left (I use this term lightly) is in a precarious position wherein they are forced to work with the Māori Party due to being too unpopular to form a coalition alone. At the same time, the Māori Party detests the left - accusing them of election fraud and publicly disavowing them, leading to a collapse in left-wing Māori support that makes the left even more dependent on them. When the left governs, they must appease the Māori Party, resulting in the adoption of deeply unpopular policies. Working with the Māori Party, the last Labour Government adopted a programme that gives local iwi the right to govern the water supply (including Ngāi Tahu) - a policy so unpopular that it likely led to Labour’s landslide defeat last year. This also results in amusements such as the adoption of Māori “ways of knowing” in the government and schools. This is not the work of stupidity alone; the bourgeoisie seeks to “corral people back into identi-camps … which insist that we cannot understand one another unless we belong to the same identity group”, as written by Mark Fisher. What I mean to say is that the Māori Party seeks to fragment the working class, focusing on the Māori-Pākeha divide rather than the bourgeoisie-proletariat divide.
Ultimately, we see that the Māori Party’s main role in politics is to (a) expand the mandate of the iwi bourgeoisie, (b) make themselves more powerful by expanding Māori political representation and undermining the left.
What is the path forward?
I’ll be brief here because the answer is simple; unsurprisingly, leftism is the path forward. While iwi exploit the Māori proletariat and the Māori Party sabotages left-wing electoral politics, Māori have had to take their leadership into their own hands. Real gains for the Māori community have come about primarily due to class unity through unionisation and the expansion of social services. The only way forward is the unity of the working class rather than division along racial lines.
TLDR: proles good, bourgeoisie IDpol bad
https://www.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/1gvu8zq/aristocracy_in_aotearoa_new_zealands_identity/
There are no comments yet.