Class War in the 21st Century New Zealand: A Combined Rant and Political Suicide Note by Sam Buchanan
“The oppressor would not be so strong if he did not have accomplices among the oppressed” – Simone de Beauvoir
Introduction
The last 40 years have seen the incremental, but steady, shift of political power away from the working class. Much of this power has moved into the hands of the managers, bureaucrats and other functionaries that make up the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC).
This is a problem, firstly because no particular sector of society should have an unfair share of power, secondly because these are people who have never liked democracy very much. Increasing inequality, in other words the continuing class war waged on the working class, also creates resentment (even if the losers are only vaguely aware of what is going on), crime, increased health and mental health costs and demands for increased repression and control.
At this point, the Professional-Managerial Class are the main reason we aren’t getting anywhere. In the class war, they’ve chosen to pay lip service to the needs of the working class, but in actual practice, they side with the ruling class.
This raises an obvious question, when we embrace Jean Jacques Rousseau’s proposal to ‘eat the rich’, should we eat the comfortably well off as well?
Most of the New Zealand political class, and most of the professional-managerial class, comes from what is usually called ‘the middle class’. More accurately, many of these people are, in economic terms, privileged workers. They are not, as the middle class were defined by Marx and others, people who derive their income from investments (owners of large amounts of capital) or small business owners, but people on a comfortable salary that allows them to live in a style that would once have been open only to capitalists and where they exercise some influence over other people’s lives. Some will have a part of their income from shares or ownership of rentals, but many will not. Even though they are dependent on selling their labour, few identify as workers.
The primary role of the PMC is the exercise of control, even at the expense of economic efficiency. This includes control over the three basic forms of power1: violence, mostly manifested in policing and prisons and used particularly to enforce property laws; knowledge, such as the esoteric understandings of language and systems held by bureaucrats and academics; and charisma, most notably seen in the increased tendency to turn politicians, such as Jacinda Ardern, Barack Obama and Chloe Swarbrick, into celebrities, or to make celebrities, Donald Trump and Boris Johnson for example, into politicians.
Class isn’t about wealth, but about the amount of power you exercise in society. Some of the professional middle class, such as journalists and low-grade academics, are not particularly well paid but play a role that gives them some power. Some skilled workers, tradespeople and the like, may earn well, but have little power. Many of the traditional middle-class – small business owners and self-employed professionals have little actual power in society, their income existing at the whim of the ultra-wealthy who set, or the bureaucrats who regulate, market conditions.
The PMC profess to believe that society is rife with problems that need to be addressed – inequality, climate change and colonisation – amongst others. But their own comfort makes this concern purely rhetorical. In practice, whatever their expressions of desire for change, they are the primary obstacle to positive social change. They have attained some power in society, but the price is an unspoken agreement that they will never put it to good use.
It can certainly be tempting to join a system that offers personal rewards and resources and that claims participation in it is the only way to have an impact. Most of ‘the left’ are reluctant to seriously critique the PMC as they aspire to join it, as union or state bureaucrats, politicians or academics. A great deal of ‘left’ activity is focused on academia, much of which is spent training the next generation of academics in what becomes a closed circle, or in applying a detached academic analysis that is increasingly irrelevant to everyday concerns and at best, offers a critique without any guidance as to how change can actually happen.
We can’t blame people for wanting a decent salary, but once ensconced in a ‘good job’ they are unwilling to rock the boat, justifying their actual, if not rhetorical, support for the system by pretending that their presence makes a difference, summoning the spectre of a non-existent evil doer that might take their job if they left it. They may even retain a political critique of the class system, and its consequences, but they accept the culture and methodologies that reinforce that class system.
We don’t see much of them after they get comfy. Now and then they cheer on activists from the sidelines, but that’s about it. It would be nice if they could accept that their jobs are just jobs, a way to make a buck and pay the mortgage. The self-delusion that they are contributing to society and deserve respect for being well paid and comfortable gets awfully galling.
Even if leftists don’t join the PMC, they often adopt its methods and language, which is accepted as the terrain where ‘serious’ politics takes place. Considerable energy has been expended on such methods over the last few decades. If they had worked, we would be seeing the benefits by now. What we are actually seeing is worse social conditions and a huge gulf between the radical policies of many groups, and their tentative and reformist methods.
Any idiot can write a radical policy or manifesto (I wrote this one!). Embracing radical methods, which invites derision and attacks and often comes at a personal cost, is more difficult. Everyone wants revolutionary change but nobody wants the revolution.
And it might be stating the obvious – but that’s sometimes necessary – to say that this is not a call for a class war, but a call to acknowledge that one already exists.
So why have I written this? It may seem that this is just a personal rant against the PMC2 for making everything I try and do harder. That’s partly true. But I think there’s value in understanding the impediments to progress in order that anarchists and other activists can seek out loopholes, take notice of those who have managed to make progress in spite of the obstacles, and, above all, avoid the trap of getting sucked into using the PMC’s methodologies ourselves. It’s remotely possible a few of the PMC might read this and question their own role.
We must acknowledge the failure to build a radical left movement in a time of rising inequality and recurring ecological disasters, a situation in which one should naturally appear. We need to reject middle-class methods, talk about class – loudly and bluntly – and return to a much more confrontational politics.
Otherwise the left might as well give up and spend our time more usefully – growing cabbages or something.
The system the PMC is backing
The capitalist political project has replaced normal human relations – dialogue, discussion, compromise and generosity – with mediators, money in the case of capitalism, laws and regulations in the case of the state. This has broken down relationships between consumers and producers. These need to be restored in order to recognise each other as human, and to deepen the respectful relationships that should exist between humans.
PMC dominance is just the continuation of class war that has existed in Aotearoa since colonisation. Gangsterism of any sort has three phases. Firstly, you use violence to get what you want. When that has succeeded you don’t have to use violence because people are already sufficiently intimidated that a vague threat is enough. Finally, your power becomes so normalised and accepted that even the need for obvious threats dissipates, and violence is mostly held in reserve, should disobedience get out of hand.
Feudalism, colonisation and enclosures are capitalism in its violent phase, we are now well into the third phase where authority is taken for granted and has been institutionalised, and actual violence is a rarity, primarily inflicted on the most marginalised and dispossessed. Some bureaucracy is genuinely necessary to administer things, but most of it is just fossilised violence.
Neo-liberalism is primarily a rhetorical device to cover the economic programme that is actually happening in most of the world – the increased cooperation between different sectors of the powerful. Most notably this is between those who hold economic power – the capitalists – and those who hold state power – politicians, senior public servants, but it also includes the media (even those working in it at comparatively low levels), large NGOs, and even some community groups. On the ground, we don’t see a genuine retreat of state power, and a move to ‘free-markets’ as neo-liberalism theoretically proscribes, but an increase in state power (more police, more regulations, more bureaucracy) and an increase in the freedom of corporations to assert power (more political influence, taxpayer-funded bailouts, displacement of small businesses) at the expense of the power previously held by communities. This is evident around the world, in ‘Western’ countries, in China, Russia and almost everywhere else.
The introduction of neo-liberalism to Aotearoa in the 1980s was a political watershed. The power of the trade unions was broken, and what remained of them was rapidly colonised by middle-class bureaucrats. The Labour party gave up all pretensions of representing labour. The public service increasingly lost its role of serving the public, and became dominated by middle-class managers loyal to the state, rather than the public, and focused on financial and bureaucratic goals. At the same time, the empty political rhetoric of ‘mission statements’, ‘visions’, ‘stakeholder engagement’ and ‘values’ increased, presenting companies and government departments as people-centered, humanitarian institutions. Later the appropriation of Māori words and phrases, and claims of being ‘Treaty-based’ would extend this.
The privilege of the middle class is largely invisible to them as they assume they are normal, an easy illusion to maintain when your class is predominant in media representations and other people are seldom depicted. Most fictional depictions of working class people do not examine their economic deprivation, and often show them as having much more material comfort than could possibly exist in the economic situation they are supposedly in (unless they are criminals, who are the most commonly depicted poor group). A retail worker will be shown as having a large, well-appointed house, a student as owning a late model car, etc.
They have little contact with the real working class – so the natural impulse to solidarity with fellow humans is stunted. It’s very hard to understand the need for solidarity if your only relationship with the producer of the goods you buy, who may live on the other side of town or in a different continent, is mediated by your money passing through several hands before reaching that fellow human.
The PMC know that poor people exist somewhere, but don’t really have much first-hand experience of them and act as if they are a rare, problematic minority. Rather than see society as it is – a large group of poor people and a small economic elite, they imagine the economic pattern of society as a neat bell curve, with a small group of the wealthy and of the poor at each end, and the overwhelming majority sitting comfortably in the middle. Which is where they assume themselves to be.
What is surprising is their own obliviousness to the threat of class conflict. While the ultra-wealthy purchase bolt-holes and respond in their traditional way – by snuggling up to the state in the hope that its capacity for violence will protect them – the PMC does little but lament the signs of social dysfunction that inequality brings as incomprehensible, even though that social dysfunction is following a pattern familiar to anyone with a slight knowledge of history.
The PMC always argue against any criticism, of themselves, their allies or the people they serve, with the rejoinder 'but they/we are nice people’. Of course, many of them are, but their own definition of ‘nice’ is mostly that people exhibit middle-class cultural norms – using ‘appropriate’ language, never challenging the agreed upon lies and avoiding conflict. If being nice and being middle-class can be conflated, the middle-class don't have to feel guilt, having declared themselves as not being defined by income, assets or power but simply by being ‘the nice people’.
And when you genuinely believe you are the ‘nice people’ trying to improve the world, you become very defensive when your role is questioned. Especially when the system you work in has become so normalised that you can’t comprehend why anyone would want to work outside it. Suggesting that you are blocking real change, or even that real change outside of middle-class parameters is possible, becomes ridiculous – and somewhat offensive.
Of course, there’s a simple test to determine whether a person in a job is genuinely challenging the dominant system. Have they been sacked, defunded or, at very least, reprimanded? If not, the establishment they claim, and might truly believe, that they are fighting, is happy with their work.
Entry to the professional middle class is limited by a set of esoteric rituals and language. Their jargon changes frequently, at present it has a new-age tone to it, previously it had a vocabulary drawn from economics. It frequently re-purposes words from other disciplines – including from radical leftist analysis. Its members are usually well-educated, though often not in any field which is of any use to the work they carry out, one of the reasons the work is done so badly.
Much of their skill set required to gain a qualification, and hence admittance to the ranks of the PMC is in learning to communicate in a certain way and write reports according to inflexible rules and formats, a little like the famous ‘eight-legged essay’ of the latter dynasties of Imperial China (mastering the art of writing an essay in accordance with strict rules was necessary to get jobs, which were a virtual guarantee of wealth and status, in the bureaucracy of the Imperial Chinese government).
In
their dealings with government, the PMC experience the soft squishy
end of the state, not its pointy end. Which makes them even less able
to understand the experience of others. They are rather bemused by
those whose experience of the state has been largely negative.
Political consequences
There are presently three big issues which the radical left has put considerable energy into discussing but hasn’t reached a clear consensus on the way forward – climate change response, economic inequality and decolonisation. Actions to address these also receive rhetorical, and sometimes limited practical, support from the social democratic left. Given the amount of media articles, summits, books, political rhetoric and other signs of concern about these three issues, One would imagine that we would be making significant progress on dealing with them, but we obviously aren’t. What is the impediment to progress here?
The usual answer from the radical left is that powerful interests – corporates, investors, the rich, institutions which can afford professional lobbyists – block progress. This is true, but the group that listens to lobbyists, and puts the plans of the powerful into effect, hindering, halting and hijacking real progress, is the PMC, an effective auxiliary to the powerful even though it is often working against its own long-term interests.
If we want to be generous, we can put their refusal to engage in such things as direct action or even persistent protest, down to genuine cowardice, rather than complacency. But that can’t excuse their voting patterns. Voting differently doesn’t require the middle class to move out of their comfort zone, it fits within the system they have built, is legal, even encouraged. Yet the majority of the PMC can’t bring themselves to even vote for the Green Party (or, back in the day, the Alliance, Values, or whoever was the great hope of the parliamentary left), let alone Te Pāti Māori, which is what they would do if their rhetoric was genuine. We can only conclude that their expressions of concern about social problems are window dressing, dwarfed by their real fear of social change.
It should be no surprise to leftists that the PMC act in their own class interests. When the chips are down, they prefer the system created for the benefit of the ruling class, and in which they receive sufficient scraps to keep them comfortable, rather than working to end that system (or even significantly modify it) and risk losing that comfort.
When the middle class waver in their support for the status quo, as they do from time to time when moral questions are pressed to the extent that they can no longer ignore them, the state can easily bring them back on board by turning a political conflict into a violent one. While the middle class can overlook state violence – the military, police and prisons – as it isn’t directed at them, they are happy to use the violence of the oppressed, even when clearly used in self-defence, as an excuse to return to the side of established power. Property rights are held to be sacrosanct, even though the PMC know full well that much ownership has its roots in criminal acts.
Having spawned disinformation to justify their policies for decades, they are genuinely surprised by the refusal of people to believe them. As the professional-managerial class increases its stranglehold on society, the distrust of government at all levels is increasing. Even many of that class understand the system is fundamentally flawed, but decades of non-existent political education has led to them being unable to conceive of an alternative.
While the responses to distrust of government are often irrational – conspiracy theories, far right lunacies and anti-science views – they are a consequence of people having their opinions dismissed, ‘consultation’ becoming merely a tick-box exercise and elected representatives either sidelined, or pushed to select from a tiny set of options by bureaucrats. Simply writing off these irrational responses, doesn’t help. Next to nobody trusts the government, and the government seems utterly blasé about that. Every policy decision that happens without genuine consent on the part of the governed feeds resentment – and those in charge seem blithely unaware of that, just smugly believing that they ‘got away with it’.
Our government just says ‘trust us’ with no reasons given as to why we should. Given their appalling record, we are right to distrust them. We see no effort on the part of the government to actually build trust, whereas right-wingers and loonies go to great effort to build up bodies of ‘evidence’ and to win people over. Even worse, irrational responses are used to further justify the rule of the elite, as us ordinary people are declared too stupid to be trusted. And so democracy is in a perilous state.
There’s a particular kind of diversion used by those in power. When challenged, politely respond to a different, much more basic, and more-easily refuted challenge, implying that the challenger is a bit stupid and needs simple things explained. Make the explanation as long-winded as possible and move on to the next question, or claim to be out of time. You won’t win the argument, but you can avoid having it. There are many other ways by which the PMC avoid, rather than solve, conflicts.
Middle-class people see this avoidance of conflict as being clever, but are then bemused by the consequent lack of interest the people who have been ignored or silenced show in an issue, and apparently fail to register the quiet resentment and distrust that is being built up.
For the middle-class the aim in a debate is not to discuss the issues, but to maintain ‘face’, to keep the debate ‘constructive’, i.e. meaningless.
A while back, I was working in international development and one of my roles was to go to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) for consultations on trade agreements (my brief sojourn as a member of the PMC!). The meetings were fairly predictable, on one side was a bunch of ideologically committed neo-liberal bureaucrats (paid by the taxpayer to advocate against the state) who held all the power, on the other trade cynics of various shades from assorted NGOs. Obviously, nothing was ever achieved, other than to allow the ministry to tick a box saying they’d carried out ‘consultation’, but nobody minded until an NGO advocate began attending who was very knowledgeable and began to put difficult questions to the bureaucrats. MFAT panicked and started phoning my boss asking that she be excluded as ‘she was ruining the meetings’. It was unacceptable to debate the issues the meetings were ostensibly about in anything other than a purely superficial manner (luckily for MFAT, the advocate soon found a better job and stopped coming).
Once I pressed the same bureaucrats on their willingness to negotiate with the barbaric military gang then running Burma – as part of a trade agreement with ASEAN. They retorted that they made a point of ignoring the Burmese representatives’ questions at meetings. They actually seemed to think we’d be impressed that they were mildly impolite to violent gangsters while continuing to do deals with them. For fuck’s sake! Of course, it would never occur to them to see those people as gangsters. Violent thugs are working class people, not government representatives. And since New Zealand government officials do not deal with gangsters, these delegates, whatever their failings, by definition couldn’t be gangsters.
The middle-class ideology is sacrosanct, therefore reality had obviously got it wrong.
Their role is to ensure nothing gets done
The bureaucratic culture of the PMC is intended to maintain control, not to be efficient. It is ridiculously slow to make decisions – the old slur thrown at anarchists, that we would have to spend half our lives having meetings if a non-hierarchical society came into existence – has come true in the lives of the middle class.
Often, members of the PMC don’t have much in the way of skills, they succeed by fitting smoothly into a culture that is primarily interested in preserving itself. The job of making sure nothing changes is made easier by the fact that they are genuinely hopeless at getting anything done. The middle class aren’t necessarily particularly knowledgeable or skilled, but they have the confidence to believe themselves to be, and the ego to believe other people aren’t.
Most working class jobs – be it in hospo, trades, care work or whatever, have very immediate feedback loops stemming from success or failure. If you mess up, you know about it straight away. Success or failure is pretty abstract amongst the PMC, and consequences easily evaded.
While the middle class see themselves as organisers, they rarely have to organise anything practical. There are a few exceptions, such as event management, but few managers ever have to organise something as complex as a building site or run a café. It is historically unprecedented that tens of thousands of people do jobs which show no clear evidence of producing any necessary product or service. The impact on those people should not be underestimated – a worker in a factory may hate their job, but their own usefulness isn’t questioned. They can see a physical product of their labours.
When you can’t see a real result of your work, you become more desperate to exercise power of any sort, simply to assert the fact of your own existence. Often, the easiest thing to do is require subordinates to provide ever-increasing amounts of information, no matter how useless.
Collective decision-making is a rare skill amongst professionals. Preferred processes are complex and often hinge on finding somebody else to make the actual decision, which is referred to as a ‘proposal’ and which can then be rubber stamped by ‘managers’. Hence the huge rise in the hiring of ‘consultants’ to write reports on even the most minor things. Our local mayor recently told me she had suggested rearranging the furniture in the council chambers. The management hired a consultant to consider how that could be done, as there were ‘health and safety’ issues to be addressed! Complexifying ludicrously simple things is one of the strange arts the PMC excels at.
Constraints on decision-making are, of course, a necessary thing when you have states and corporates that exercise enormous power. But those necessary constraints have been hijacked to serve the needs of the PMC – there is no decision-making system that can function correctly if those using it have ill intent or hold very narrow views as to what outcomes are acceptable. Decisions can be reached very quickly if they serve the needs of the powerful. It’s only when they serve the needs of the powerless, or are a threat to the system of control, that the delays and obfuscations kick in.
A job I did for a new political and cultural space in Wellington is an example of the efficiency of different decision-making processes. The new space was scruffy and needed painting. I said I’d paint the toilet walls and everyone immediately agreed. A few minutes were spent sorting out some details. The decision for me to do the job was easy to reach due to two factors: I was assumed to be tolerably competent, and it was fairly inconsequential.
Contrast that with a similar job when I was working for the Department of Conservation as a caretaker/host of a tramping hut in a national park. Outside the hut were a couple of old timber signs covered in flaking paint. When one of the office staff happened by, I mentioned that I had sanded and repainted one of the signs and planned to do the other next week, but needed some more yellow paint. Her response was that the job would first have to be logged, then budgeted, then taken to the monthly meeting and finally approved by a senior manager before I could do it. I dropped the subject and next week went to the shed, picked up some paint and repainted the sign.
This is a fairly common response by workers to bureaucratic systems – tell lies or just keep the boss in the dark and carry on getting things done, or just goof off, safe in the knowledge that nobody will even notice what does or doesn’t happen so long as the illusion of control is maintained.
One of the consequences of neo-liberal ideology is that suffering has been individualised and relegated to the private sphere – as a personal or medical problem, or as a failure to take educational or economic opportunities. When an issue becomes acute, and something does have to be done, it is preferred to address the consequences for individuals, rather than at its root. We’ll give people on the dole an extra 20 bucks during winter, rather than admit the entire model of the electricity market is flawed.
Such incremental changes are designed to mildly alleviate suffering, but not remove it – to give the appearance that something is being done to address it. The primary aim is to ensure the continued functioning of the system and to ensure that the middle class can live with itself.
When the issue is a misuse of power by a member of the PMC, insisting on privacy, of either perpetrator and victim, can be used to ensure nobody in power is held to account.
In order to monopolise power the middle class have mastered the art of delaying, dismissing, defusing and diverting. Anyone attempting to change even a small thing will find everything takes longer, and requires more effort than you’d ever imagine possible. It doesn’t help that the people trying to change things are usually doing it in their own time, while the people delaying and slowing the change are usually getting paid. The PMC are then surprised by the lack of interest others show in political work or community development. Don’t these people, they ask, realise this is important?
In
reality, political apathy is not widespread, however disillusionment
is, and the behaviour of the PMC is the main cause of that.
There is hope, nonetheless!
If the preconception of the middle class – that society is generally democratic – held true, one would expect the degree of progress on the three big issues of today (climate change, economic inequality, decolonisation) to be the opposite of what it is.
Climate change responses have broad support, yet almost nothing is being achieved. Emissions are still rising, targets are weak and there is little interest in doing what is required to actually meet them. Economic equality has been barely addressed, at best some policy tinkering has ensured that inequality growth has slowed since the increase in the late 1980s and 1990s.
On the other hand, decolonisation, which has the weakest popular support, is actually making progress. That might sound a heretical thing for an anarchist to say given the continued existence of a white colonial system, but over my adult lifetime, one of the few positive changes in Aotearoa has been the increase in the status of Te Reo, visibility of Māori culture, and the building of Māori economic power.
Forty years ago, Te Reo was barely heard or seen, even as a ceremonial language, Māori economic institutions almost non-existent and the culture treated as an amusing historical relic. The suggestion that Māori values be considered in legal or government decision-making would have been met with incomprehension.
If the initial intent of Treaty settlement process was to divide Maori, and give some a foothold in the Pākehā world – enough incentive to join the establishment that the PMC control – this hasn’t quite worked out as intended. Sure, there’s been significant intrusion of the middle class methodologies described above into the world of Māori business and community organising. Some of that was forced on communities by the insistence of the state to only deal with certain types of structure, some of it a result of the normalising of PMC methodologies in wider society so that they are simply taken for granted. But, in spite of that, normal human relationships haven’t been eradicated from Te Ao Māori. They still play a major role.
The PMC believed they could accept empowerment of Māori. They saw it as outside the class war, assuming that they could safely back the assertion of Māori culture and language without losing their own economic privileges. One of the things about middle class complacency is they fail to notice change until it’s too late. That can be good, when positive change in society is occurring that they would oppose if they noticed it, or took it seriously (unfortunately the same goes for negative changes).
The aim to keep economic power in Pākehā hands has mostly worked so far, but Māori business acumen may be threatening in the future. In Hamilton the city council attempted to change planning laws to prevent Tainui developing businesses in competition with the existing CBD. The attempt failed, after Tainui won a court battle in 2010, but this sort of manoeuvre may become common if Māori capitalism continues to grow.
The left should take note that the most progress has been by the community that is least under control of the PMC, and has been led by the people with the least adherence to the methodologies the PMC approve of.
What is needed
The first aim of today’s left should be to take back power from the Professional Managerial Class. We should be continually challenging their right to monopolise it. When we discuss ‘identity’ class backgrounds shouldn’t be quietly ignored.
The modern left has been reluctant to openly talk about class, preferring euphemisms such as ‘poverty’, which doesn’t reflect the multi-generational nature of class and can be used to suggest that only a minority suffers from the impacts of economic inequality.
This needs to change. Addressing issues such as colonisation or climate change without a clear class analysis is both ineffective and dangerous. Decolonising without addressing class makes no sense. Colonisation, and ‘globalisation’, are part of a grand process of establishing, spreading and normalising class hierarchies, first in a few European countries, then globally.
Environmental damage is a result of both a small group’s choice to engage in a psychotic scramble for wealth, and the great mass of people’s attempts to survive under the conditions created by that scramble. The two things are both harmful, but they are anything but equivalent.
The middle class ‘theoretical’ left needs to either get involved in grassroots activity or stop wasting our time and close itself down. There’s actually a lot going on out there in communities, and even a bit in workplaces – mutual aid, environmental projects, mental health support efforts – but the left seems pretty indifferent to it, not recognising it as ‘political’ activity.
Meanwhile the middle class left indulges in academic activities that have little impact on anything, but are a great tool for maintaining a pretence of doing something. They are very keen on grassroots activities, but prefer to examine those safely entombed in the catacombs of history which don’t demand participation, and hence effort and sacrifice, on their part. Political thinking that hasn’t been tested by first-hand experience is pretty vapid.
The professionalisation of activism has lead to a hollowing out of the left. There are paid positions, and funding, for people who document radical left activism, or analyse left activism, or analyse the analysis of left activism, but few, if any, paid positions for radical left activists. There are positions for academics, in the bureaucratised unions (which mostly involves advocacy, legal work and lobbying, few of today’s union workers have the skills to run a strike or even a protest) and occasionally in activist roles underpinned by middle-class values, in Greenpeace and the like. Paying a few people to organise, represent or manage the political work of volunteers who don’t get paid fits nicely into the PMC model. At best, you are monopolising a ‘skilled role’ which prevents others having a go at it and gaining experience, at worst you are managing and defusing dissent.
This kind of activism is one of the things that has lead to an obsession with ‘leadership’ among activists. Leadership is sometimes imposed on you by events – either because you’ve found yourself in a position where the focus is on you and you‘ve just got to run with it, or because something really needs doing and nobody else is going to do it, but it shouldn’t be a goal. For anarchists especially, being a ‘highly competent ally’ is a better aim.
We need to guard against accepting the methods and assumptions of the middle class. If you don’t laugh out loud when you hear the word ‘consultation’, and run when you hear the word ‘consultant’, you may have been infected by PMC ideology. Practice rejecting leadership cults, celebrity culture, spin doctoring and hero worship in politics. Especially when the people involved are on your side.
Essential tasks include practicing non-hierarchical human relations until you get good at it, learning to get good at seeking consensus rather than trying to get your own way. Decision-making skills are one of the left’s weakest areas – another thing that professionalisation messes up. It’s much easier to follow orders, or let yourself be guided by ideology, than to have to find a compromise amongst a group of strong-minded people. But this is what will take us forward.
Practicing genuine mutual aid (all parties contribute, and take from, a pool of goods and services), as distinct from charitable (one party giving goods or services to another) or barter (two parties exchanging goods or services) is a good primer for understanding how a future society might work.
Reform has mostly been driven by fear – most political progress happens not because those in power desire it, but because they are frightened of the consequences of not reforming. They wish to head off greater changes by making small ones and thus regaining control. Even a hard-fought campaign that ends in failure can scare the bejesus out of the PMC and lead to future reforms that benefit the working class that the PMC they would never otherwise considered. They’ll never admit we frightened ’em, but their actions will confirm it.
Historical amnesia, or plain ignorance, is a wonderfully convenient thing, but historically, economic inequality and injustice have always increased until riots and revolution threaten. In their 2009 book The Spirit Level, authors Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson build a strong case against economic inequality, and noted in passing that the only countries to significantly bring down levels of inequality have been those faced with a serious threat of revolution. Trouble is, the authors are middle class, so ignored that bit of historical evidence and advocated setting up a nice, respectable foundation to discuss inequality. The book was all the rage amongst the liberal left when it came out and has now largely been forgotten as nothing happened to actually change things.
Be aware that from the anti-land sales protests of Parihaka to anti-apartheid campaigns in South Africa to anti-nuclear campaigns in Aotearoa, criminality has been a feature of almost every successful movement for social change, including the ones in the past which are now championed by middle-class ‘leftists’ who get very upset at the suggestion of illegal acts in the present. And some features of those protests, such as the strikes by dock workers when nuclear powered or armed ships visited, would be illegal nowadays.
One of the few genuine increases in human freedom in this country in recent decades was the quashing of anti-gay laws. But if tens of thousands of gay men hadn’t ignored the law that made them criminals for having sex there would have been no pressure to make that reform happen. This was one of the biggest civil disobedience events in Aotearoa’s history, but is seldom recognised as such.
Stop trying to be nice. Give them shit (they deserve it). Ingratiating yourselves to the PMC will get you nowhere. Break with the PMC’s delineations of acceptable discourse or behaviour. Speak bluntly and don’t feel the need to be polite. Stoke their anxiety.
Finally,
as an individual, you can cheaply, and successfully, inoculate
yourself from the temptations of middle class privilege by getting
‘Fuck
Society’
tattooed
on your forehead.
What you see is what you get
You've made your bed, you better lie in it
You choose your leaders and place your trust
As their lies wash you down and their promises rust
You'll see kidney machines replaced by rockets and guns
And the public wants what the public gets…
– The Jam
Going Underground
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