Culture wars are a diversion from addressing class struggles

25 comments on “Culture wars are a diversion from addressing class struggles ”

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1. Shanreagh 1

   24 August 2024 at 3:18 pm

   Thank you Incognito. This is a valuable post and deserving of close attention.

   Now this also may stir some debate…what say we focus on issues like poverty, homelessness, unaffordability but don't try to see it or explain it as class issues?

   I am well aware of the history.

   I speak to people about wealth disparities, causes/effects etc but when we talk about class then eyes glaze over.

   Many people think about class as Lords and Ladies, 'THE MIDDLE CLASS said in a deep portentous voice. Scratch the surface of the family history of many white NZers and ask you will find that many came to avoid the issues caused by class in their home countries, including those who came out as late as 40 years ago.

   Many don't believe in the class analysis but will willingly believe that low income folk, elderly, families with children have a poor 'go'. Having a 'fair go' was also part & parcel of mass emigration.

   Other emigrants are economic emigrants. Pasifika people came to NZ for economic reasons.

   For Maori the words of Charlie Tawhiao*, when we worked together back in the day and had the afternoon tea 'changing the world discussions' on a Friday afternoon tea, or pub, are relevant

   "When Maori do well New Zealand does well".

   Maori to me do not fit easily into a class based analysis, they fit into an issues based analysis, socio-economic analysis, a descriptive analysis of what and how we want to change.

   So if we paint a picture of what we have or don't want, and one of the difference we can make, then we might get a bit further.

   If need be we can colour in the picture by explaining about fellow NZers who don't have jobs, don't have adequate housing, don't have, because of living day to day in poor housing and with poor money, aspiration.

   Because not being able to aspire is the killer for me……no money so can't go to many things that give us pleasure and space, out of the day to day eg the pub, pictures, outings, play or follow sport.

   Aspiration is out of reach for many when you are trying to house or feed yourselves.

   Not talking about what is and not class/class analysis then means we can look at the issues you so politely/cunningly call 'culture' issues presumably to do with things like women's issues.

   If we look at issues affecting people then by not having a rigid thing, harking back to our history, called class we can look at issues, any issues, if these are holding people back.

   I think we should be trying to even up wealth disparities. Things like stamp duty, estate taxes, the wealth & CGT that were being worked on by Robertson/Treasury and which were miles better than The Greens punitive offerings

   ….fostering inclusive, goal-oriented discussions, we can work towards more equitable solutions that benefit everyone and not just a few. New Zealand is unique and should create its own path, …

   I agree with goal orientated 'anythings', that which has come out of the corporate world is not always wrong. Problems are defined, programmes are set, programmes are reviewed – similar to the quality circles of the 1990s etc. If we put $$$$ into anything to fix anything we need to know when we have got there.

   I submit often to local authority requests for comment (hence why I support the 'shot across the bows' of the LA ship by Luxon) and most of what I get to comment on has no problem definition.

   So you want to cut the lanes to the landfill by two, why? What was the problem that has caused you to latch onto road narrowing as a solution. And on it goes. With WCC the response usually is a local authority version of the parental 'because'…. we said so'

   So an issues focus based on what is causing the problem, seeking info about causes and solutions is likely to get traction rather then a class based analysis. Of course the class based work can be used as a tool to see if problems are really problems and solutions are really solutions.

   *https://www.wananga.ac.nz/about/awanuiarangi-council/charlie-tawhiao/

   Reply
   • TeWhareWhero 1.1

     24 August 2024 at 8:19 pm

     In your view what causes wealth disparities, ie what creates the layer of citizens who don't have jobs, adequate housing or any housing at all, differential health and educational outcomes, etc?

     Too many approaches locate these disparities in a deficit model, ie some sort of individual failure which either the state or some philanthropic/charitable institution has to take steps to ameliorate, (largely, my cynical self insists on saying, so those who are better off and have a social conscience can sleep better).

     A class-based analysis isn't about just using the terms working class, middle class, ruling class as descriptors … and if people's eyes glaze over when the term class is used, it would be ask why that might be.

     I will try to explain what I mean without writing a book …. bear with, I shall return anon.

     Reply
     • tWig 1.1.1

       25 August 2024 at 3:35 pm

       There's also the fact that the greater the number of marginalised groups you belong to, the more negative societal effects you are loaded up with, a concept that arose out of feminist theory.

       'As articulated by author bell hooks, the emergence of intersectionality "challenged the notion that 'gender' was the primary factor determining a woman's fate".The historical exclusion of black women from the feminist movement in the United States resulted in many black 19th- and 20th-century feminists, such as Anna Julia Cooper, challenging their historical exclusion. This disputed the ideas of earlier feminist movements, which were primarily led by white middle-class women, suggesting that women were a homogeneous category who shared the same life experiences. However, once established that the forms of oppression experienced by white middle-class women were different from those experienced by black, poor, or disabled women, feminists began seeking ways to understand how gender, race, and class combine to "determine the female destiny.' Wiki Intersectionality

       This leads to the argument that a class-based only analysis is incomplete. Brown skin plus working (or non-working) class in NZ will experience a different bias to those without. For example, they can find it hard to rent accomodation outside of Maori and PI enclaves. And it's untrue that you can only be racist if you have white skin. Racism is a belief, overt or subconscious, that your group is better than others. For example, Chinese social media is littered with racist videos, according to Human Rights Watch.

       Beware though: intersectionality gets labelled as identity politics, despite its very real presence.

       Reply
       • Karolyn_IS 1.1.1.1

         25 August 2024 at 3:54 pm

         The original intersectionality, as coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw was not just about quantity, but about specificity of experiences of black women, which were not fully recognised in mainstream feminism, or in anti-racism. So often when people talked of racism, the focus was on the experiences and ideas of black men, and ignored the experiences of black women; when people talked of sexism/misogyny, the experiences and issues focused on were those most pertinent to white women.

         It could also meant that black women's experiences were seen totally through a mainstream anti-racist lens or through a mainstream feminist one, and didn't recognise the specific experiences of black women.

         Since then liberal feminists have appropriated the term in a way that is different from the original conception. It creates a hierarchy of oppression, where structural analysis of any category, race, class or sex, disappears, and essentially it becomes more about neoliberal identities, and who is the most oppressed or marginalised.

         Reply
2. Anne 2

   24 August 2024 at 6:47 pm

   An outstanding post Incognito. Will need to read it a few times to gain the full picture.

   In a nutshell:

   "rich people paying rich people to tell middleclass people to blame poor people"

   That is the Atlas maxim being executed in NZ by Luxon/Seymour and co.

   So sad that many people, including a few who comment here, have been totally taken in by the rhetoric.

   Reply
3. aj 3

   24 August 2024 at 8:56 pm

   You'll never hear the right in New Zealand speak about the 'working poor'. Correct me if I'm wrong. The closest they came was in the election run-up when they targeted the 'squeezed middle', made that cohort as large as they could to entice them with tax cuts that most of them would need a microscope to find.

   British rapper and activist Lowkey recently spoke to TRT World about the deep-seated political, racial and economic turmoil in the UK. He finished what was essentially a long monologue with this:

   My final thoughts are these: your enemy is not in a dinghy in the English Channel, your enemy is in a yacht in the Channel Islands publishing the newspapers which millions of people read. You have more in common with those that you rely upon daily in your society and those dying in the English Channel then you have with the political media and business Elites who want to lead you to believe that those people are your enemy.

   The same people that told us lies about WMD are the same people that told us lies about the RMT, you have more in common with striking railway workers, with nurses and with teachers in this country and with refugees than you have with those disempowering both them and you, the same people that told us lies about WMDs are telling us lies about the refugees that those wars created.

   Reply
4. Patricia Bremner 4

   24 August 2024 at 9:55 pm

   Thank you Incognito.

   Reply
5. TeWhareWhero 5

   24 August 2024 at 10:17 pm

   Soz, not a book but verging on a pamphlet.

   A class-based analysis for a Marxist, like me, is predicated on there being an essential conflict in the capitalist relations of production – between the class that has nothing to sell but its labour, & the class which, by buying that labour, exploits the worker, & which, either directly or by controlling the state, has the means to oppress in order to keep exploiting.

   That conflict is intrinsic to the capitalist system, ie it can't be resolved without systemic change.

   NB. Women who were subject to forms & degrees of male oppression in other modes of production, became hyper-exploited in capitalism both as paid workers & as the unpaid producers of new generations of workers.

   Capitalism grew out of older forms of social stratification & at its heart is the concept of free individuals, ie free of older social ties in order to have the legal right to enter into a nominally equal contract to sell their labour.

   The actual power disparity between buyer & seller can only be offset by the labouring class forming collectives to wrest accommodations & concessions out of the employer, hence trade unions.

   Various ideological sleights of hand are deployed to persuade people that capitalism is the best way to organise production, distribution & exchange, & its ideologues expend vast amounts of time & money trying both to prove that, & to decry socialism.Eg. such things as persistent & gaping disparities in wealth & opportunity are waved away as the perfectly fair result of naturally occurring degrees of merit.

   After the horrors of WW2, coming as they did just a generation after the imperial bloodletting of WW1, there was a mood for change. Along with the world’s most populous country going communist, national liberation movements sprang up across the colonised world, in the developed world there were mass movements for women’s, indigenous, black & ethnic minority, gay & lesbian, students’, prisoners’ rights – the world was in the grip of a fever of attainment of human rights …

   The very thing on which capitalism depends, the “free individual” with rights, had reared up & bitten it on the arse.

   So what did it do? First came the accommodations inside the imperial bubbles which were expedient because there were a lot of battle-hardened men who wanted something better, & they had to be persuaded:

   a) that capitalism could provide it; &,

   b) that communism couldn’t, & it was the enemy.

   Those accommodations allowed a lot of wonderful things to happen; the reason my life was so very different from my working class parents was the accommodations that capitalism was forced to make, in large part as a result of the state acting in various ways to control or offset the harms done by capitalism’s drive to exploit, & its preparedness to oppress in order to exploit.

   Even the coercive machinery of the state was muzzled … well, sort of, & of course outside the developed world things always moved to the same ugly old rhythms. But in the developed world life was about as good as it had ever been for the class that labours; not only did wages rise & conditions of employment improve, the state invested in health, housing, education, pensions, insurance, hydro schemes…. And it even started to address some of the growing mass of ecological issues by insisting on such things as not polluting the water, air or soil or exposing workers or the wider population to substances that could kill them.

   This interference of the state was useful to capitalism in the short term in diverting potentially revolutionary fervour but it soon got in the way of the untrammelled exploitation of labour & of natural resources that is its life blood.

   So it was always plotting a comeback as evidenced by such facts as almost all US gov’t to gov’t aid to the 3rd world in the 60s & 70s – was directed at infrastructural improvements to facilitate transnational corporations’ extraction of natural resources – roads, railways, airports which facilitated the new wave of hyper-exploitation that was about to be unleashed.

   Capital needs low paid, unorganised labour, the ability to freely extract natural resources & to save costs on environmental controls etc, so the first thing was to remove all restrictions on the export of capital, and off it went in search of its life blood …. cheap lives & unfettered access to raw materials.

   Many of the windows of opportunity that had opened up for working class people in the developed world were slammed shut & they were told, if they couldn’t make it through the ones that remained, it was their fault.

   Those who made it through were often forced to accept lower pay & poorer conditions. The awful corollary is that if pay & conditions get pushed low enough & if health & safety regs & environmental controls are removed, capital may be tempted to return … & thus the cycle will continue – until it can’t any more.

   In the era of global Neo-lib capitalism, exploitation has been ramped up to enable hyper-production & consumption which now puts the entire planet at risk of a rapid descent out of current states of relative disequilibrium, into social & natural chaos. This makes systemic change all the more urgent.

   Of course none of this works in a tidy linear fashion…. but one thing is certain, without systemic change that results in a more sustainable ways of organising production & consumption, none of it will matter.

   Arguably the most fascinating aspect of all this in NZ was, at precisely the same time as employers were launching attacks on organised labour, & the government was enabling the looting of the public purse, it was also making all manner of progressive concessions in respect of other demands. All those changes were important & long overdue but they also served as an ideological smokescreen that obscured what was being done, & served as a comfort blanket for all those who had sold out the working class.

   They still do. The trick is to hold on to those rights & wrest back all those that were lost. I know, easy said …

   Reply
   • Res Publica 5.1

     25 August 2024 at 8:30 am

     They still do. The trick is to hold on to those rights & wrest back all those that were lost.

     Amen!

     One of the things we are desperately missing in our national political discourse is bold, clearheaded, explicitly left analysis to counterprogram all of the neoliberal drivel that's constantly being pumped out by the bourgeois.

     Instead, Labour has chosen to keep staking out half-hearted, limp-wristed positions designed to soothe the ruffled feathers of the landlord class rather than address any actual problem.

     We won't fix our society by co-opting that lot: only through smashing their power, and the economic and political institutions that maintain it so completely they will have no choice but to accept a new state of affairs.

     Because if poverty is moral failure, it's not on the part of the working poor or unemployed. It's of the bourgeois that see their poverty as an acceptable tradeoff for their wealth and power, and a useful tool for distracting the masses.

     Reply
   • Psycho Milt 5.2

     25 August 2024 at 3:23 pm

     Those accommodations allowed a lot of wonderful things to happen; the reason my life was so very different from my working class parents was the accommodations that capitalism was forced to make, in large part as a result of the state acting in various ways to control or offset the harms done by capitalism’s drive to exploit, & its preparedness to oppress in order to exploit.

     This is important to keep in mind. When right-wingers quack on about how capitalism "lifted millions out of poverty," they mean these accommodations capitalism was forced unwillingly to make by leftist governments lifted millions out of poverty. And they usually make the claim to try and argue for removing those accommodations.

     Reply
   • tWig 5.3

     25 August 2024 at 3:39 pm

     Good touch on the intersectionality there,

     Reply
6. Binders full of women 6

   25 August 2024 at 7:05 am

   Is Carmel talking politics with Duncan while they're both on Celebrity Treasure Island the beginning of taking class analysis to a wider audience?

   Reply
7. Kay 7

   25 August 2024 at 9:12 am

   The 40 year long project of 'divide and rule' has been incredibly successful, and is still ongoing. Naming specific groups for the cause of all the county's woes- a certain German chancellor had it down to a fine art form, and his legacy continues, especially targeting immigrants/race. (Yes, invoking Godwins law because it's appropriate).

   In NZ, it's been LGBT, beneficiaries, Maori, minimum wage workers, the disabled, renters, students, immigrants, generations (anyone I've missed?) For the most, people at the bottom of the food chain, who have the audacity not to own property. And plenty of the citizens fall for this, every time, in order to make themselves feel superior over the next level down.

   Property is the class system in NZ- those who have, and those who don't, so to a large extent it's generational warfare as well, ie older generations had opportunities unavailable now, but can't get out of the mindset that they did fine so everyone else in morally bankrupt if the can't afford a house.

   Reply
   • TeWhareWhero 7.1

     25 August 2024 at 11:38 am

     The reason the neo-liberal forms of divide and rule have been so successful is they were grafted onto older forms of division, much like the reason the European ideology of race took so easily and grew so rapidly was because it was grafted onto older prejudices against darkened, weathered skin as a mark of those who laboured.

     Strip it down to its underpants and it's all about economic exploitation, and the various forms and degrees of oppression needed to enable it.

     The ideological is mostly preferred to the use of brute force … why go to the bother and expense of putting people in literal chains when you can get them to chain themselves, even to seeing their chains as desirable fashion accessories?

     (Of course brute force is used against others both to feed the military-industrial complex and as a reminder that it can and will be deployed domestically if needed.)

     If you can make one group of exploited and oppressed people see another, equally exploited and oppressed group as the cause of their lack of opportunity or rights, great.

     Equally great is allowing exploited and oppressed people some small measure of freedom and material reward but making them fearful of losing it, or you make keeping it conditional on them fighting off any and all others who might want a part of it.

     The point of a class analysis is to draw aside all the ideological veils to reveal capitalism for what it really is – an immensely powerful force at the core of which is an irreconcilable conflict, and which, by its own logic, will consume the entire planet if not stopped.

     The only way it can be stopped is through mass action which is why divide and distract remains the primary weapon of the ruling class.

     Anyone who thinks there isn't a ruling class any longer nor is there a working class, has been distracted and will be easily sucked into division.

     Reply
   • Shanreagh 7.2

     25 August 2024 at 12:14 pm

     Property is the class system in NZ- those who have, and those who don't, so to a large extent it's generational warfare as well, ie older generations had opportunities unavailable now, but can't get out of the mindset that they did fine so everyone else in morally bankrupt if the can't afford a house.

     Yes I think this is possibly a better way of expressing the need than a marxist class based analysis.

     As I said I've got no probs with running the classical class based analysis over problems/possible solutions but think if we are trying to come up with problem definitions and therefore solutions we will lose supporters if we work on class…..so many believe it is talking about middle, upper, lower, squeezed middle etc.

     If we concentrate on what membership of sections of our society this looks like it may be more real.

     The other indicator to me is that neo libs (still a force to be reckoned with) believe in small government ie constraining the ability of Govt to respond, not only to things such as natural disiasters but day to day like analysis & delivery, let alone planning for the future.

     We also need to look at tax and get a groundswell going there for a reform. To me it is a rubbish outlook when we slam down hard on low income earners while letting high income owners get away with not paying their fair share.

     And speaking again about Luxon's shot across the bows at the Local Govt Conference…financial management needs to be looked at, it is not a dirty couple of words. It is unconscionable for ratepayers, see how this dovetails into the concept of being able to house oneself mentioned by Kay and quoted above, to pay rates increases that are 3 & 4 times the rate of inflation. Then renters – if landlords are paying 3 & 4 times the rate of inflation in rates is it OK for rents to go up by this amount? Of course it is not.

     So now as well as being issues based we could be equity based.

     I think we should have a handful of issues say five/six

     housing and homelessness

     out of which drops

     rates

     renting

     access to social housing

     concepts such as sweat equity, ability to build on Maori land

     heating, lighting cooking so energy so looking at energy costs, renationalising?

     paying our fair share

     out of which drops tax

     cross linked to rates

     receiving a fair share

     wages, salaries

     cross linked to tax

     pay equity

     Valuing people

     Have all the treaty grievances been dealt with? Chasing a grievance is aspiration, mind and time sapping

     cross linked to environment as we all need three waters

     public transport

     women's issues

     Maori

     education

     health

     (I would love for education and health to be taken ouit of being a political football. I said in an earlier discussion on health that we (working in health) used to dream of a cross party agreement on health so we didn't get the feast/famine or really famine/less famine scenarios.)

     valuing the environment

     three waters or similar

     infrastructure – beef up rail, link to local authorities and moving many people by public transport.

     valuing those who export

     Link to etc etc

     Exporting brings in new money to circulate

     Etc, etc

     Reply
8. weka 8

   25 August 2024 at 1:58 pm

   Incognito, would you mind saying what you mean by 'class' and 'culture war'? Because in my own analysis (and that of others) class refers to socioeconomic, ethnicity, and sex, on the basis that those are the three classes that capitalist systems exploit to run capitalism.

   Without a clear understanding of class and culture war, we get centre lefties calling justice issues around colonisation 'grievances', whereas I see colonisation as central to any conversation about wealth and class disparity in NZ.

   Historically, left politics have treated women's issues as add ons. This is creates problems for fairly obvious reasons, but in order to be able to address that we have ot be able to delineate between class and culture war. Otherwise it migh be that again women are told we will get to your politics once we've done the more important work.

   I'm also thinking about how green politics might supercede trad left politics, in that there is no equity in a world approaching climate collapse, or averting climate collapse if the environment isn't centred.

   I largely agree with what you are pointing to here, if I understood it, it is to refocus the left onto socioeconomic justice and wellbeing. Just exploring what that might mean especially in the context of TS 3.0.

   Reply
   • weka 8.1

     25 August 2024 at 1:59 pm

     (btw, because otherwise it will get complicated, none of the above refers to the soon to be restricted topic of the gender/sex war, so I don't need to talk about that. Māori and feminist politics still exist even so).

     Reply
   • Darien Fenton 8.2

     25 August 2024 at 4:04 pm

     I agree.

     Reply
   • Ad 8.3

     25 August 2024 at 5:56 pm

     Agree. The NZ left whatever it is, is a rag-tag collection of little groups each with their own causes and champions. Maybe there's still a tiny few who still use the term "working class" in a sentence, but I doubt it.

     Reply
     • TeWhareWhero 8.3.1

       25 August 2024 at 6:49 pm

       That's the best Colonel Blimp impression I've read in while.

       Reply
     • Incognito 8.3.2

       25 August 2024 at 8:37 pm

       Are you arguing over semantics? Class and working class (NB this wasn’t once mentioned in the OP, not the left, or socialism, for that matter) might be historical but not archaic terms. Their meaning may have changed over time, the face of working class (and their associated/affiliated representation) may not be the same as in 1980s, but class struggles are still very real and relevant today. Culture warriors are class deniers, for all intents and purposes.

       Reply
9. feijoa 9

   25 August 2024 at 2:28 pm

   I think the left needs new language.

   Lots of social movements develop language to suit, why not the left?

   The term 'working class' is problematic, and perhaps needs modernising. I think many NZers believe we left that old stuff behind in Britain, and using terms like class are like a step into the past.

   Something working people can identify with and rally behind, once they think – yes! that's me!!

   And the rhetoric matches their reality. Simple, really.

   Reply
10. Psycho Milt 10

    25 August 2024 at 3:44 pm

    Like weka, I'd like to know how you're defining "culture wars." It often feels like a term for "issues I personally don't care about."

    I used to take a fairly Marxist view of social class, ie it's a matter of relationship to the means of production, but with age and experience I've come to see it more broadly: heterosexuals and homosexuals are classes, based on sexual orientation; men and women are sex classes; Māori and Pākehā are ethnic classes, etc. Certainly the people who want to exploit or oppress one or another of those classes have no trouble identifying who their target is. Youthful Marxist me who knew everything would have said socio-economic class is what matters and these other things are distractions from it, but older, wiser me isn't convinced.

    Reply
    • TeWhareWhero 10.1

      25 August 2024 at 8:15 pm

      There’s a broad class of people who exchange their labour (of whatever sort) for a wage. There are wide variations within that class in terms of status and remuneration.

      It is complicated by there being sections within that broad class who are hyper-exploited and / or super-oppressed on the basis of such factors as their sex, ethnicity, sexuality, age etc, and by there being women, people of colour, gay people etc in the exploiting / oppressing strata.

      It is complicated further in the modern era by employers cutting labour costs by making previously directly employed workers, subcontractors, or consultants. (Not too dissimilar to the hangover of pre-industrial arrangements in Britain's slate mines in which miners provided all their own gear and rented a pitch from the mine owner and were forced to sell the finished slate to the owner at prices set by him.)

      It is complicated even more by neo-lib capitalism having changed the terrain for the working class in the developed world by exporting capital to other countries where the classic relationship to the means of production is much clearer – all those myriad factories, sweat ships, mills and mines which produce all the stuff we consume.

      There is another complication – arguably the most important in the deindustrialised developed world– the role of finance capital in the creation of a new sort of power relationship – of debtor to lender.

      The western world runs on debt, from mortgages to hire purchase loans to credit cards, most people carry a mass of it which places them in a debtor – lender relationship to finance capital, which then commodifies all that debt and trades in it.

      That debt also serves to force many of those debtors into selling their labour in whatever way they can, for whatever wage they can get.

      Bottom line for me is, if you don't have a grasp of the dynamics of the thing you are attempting to change, be that incrementally or radically, in part or holistically, you are starting from a weakened position because the opponents of change have a very clear grasp both of what they are defending and what they are opposing.

      And if the “left” abandons working class people by pretending class not even a thing anymore, who do we suppose will be lining up to take advantage of that?

      Reply

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