REVIEWS
- Jeremy Agar
LABOUR SAVING
by Michael Cullen
Allen & Unwin, Auckland, 2021
WEIRD
There is talk doing the rounds about a book that came out in 2020 with a thesis that European New Zealanders are part of a global culture comprised of, in the words of its title, "The WEIRDest People In The World". Joseph Henrich, an American anthropologist, explains that to be WEIRD is to be the beneficiary of a tradition that is Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic. Were he to have met Michael Cullen, Henrich might well have concluded that he was about as WEIRD as it gets.
The Cullen persona, with its dry wit, its sarcasm, its habit of reminding us every few pages that he was very brainy, always seemed as much a product of England, the place where he started life, as it did Pakeha NZ. The old white man smiling on the cover was born in the land where the Industrial Revolution spawned WEIRDness.
"I do not intend any false modesty about my intelligence, or, particularly, the quickness of my mind", we read, one of several such remarks. Indeed, the title itself refers to Cullen's certain knowledge that it was his steady hand that saved the Labour Party from potential failure. But aren't Kiwi blokes meant to be aw shucks incoherent mumblers?
Too much could be made of this. Cullen was not conceited as such. Just sure of his talents. His values, as he is keen to emphasise, lay in the mainstream of the Labour tradition, largely influenced by Christianity - though the "hierarchies support the elites" (and though he was an atheist from his schooldays on).
"Corrective Action Through Collective Organisation"
The guiding principle, Cullen explains, was for governments to take "corrective action" through "collective organisation". As every commentator has noted, the three obvious examples of this ethic have been bequeathed to us in the form of KiwiSaver, Working for Families, and the superannuation Cullen Fund.
This is no mean legacy, perhaps the clearest expression of an NZ government ameliorating inequality and enhancing ordinary people's life chances since the first Labourites introduced the modern Welfare State. Providing support for families and pensions for the old is core 20th Century social democracy. It is at the heart of (the good side of) WEIRD.
Cullen admits to having enjoyed Parliamentary debate, an activity which provided frequent opportunities for his quick wit to flash at the expense of the plodders opposite. Few Nationalists escaped. Don Brash, the epitome of the "dry" Rogernomic school, might have had a good brain, but it was a rigid brain, which struggled to adapt to the unexpected, and sometimes he seemed to have come "from another planet". Brash was "odd", and his colleague Nick Smith was "very odd".
Ruth Richardson, Minister of Finance after 1990, notoriously punished the country with Ruthanasia. Sharing Brash's inflexibility, Richardson lacked his principled (if misguided) intellect. Cullen saw her as "a kind of cross between an Energizer bunny and a Transformer toy". Her attacks on the disadvantaged came across as hatred of citizens who were not like her. Richardson's near neighbour, Jenny Shipley, who became National Leader and PM in 1997, competed with Richardson to drive politics to ever more reactionary places. Another shared trait, Cullen notes slyly, was evident in Shipley's tendency to think she was "cleverer than she was".
National have always been adept at providing easy targets for ridicule. Cullen points out their ideas often display a "staggering ignorance", as when they drone on about how the Government should be run "like a business". They base this on the delusion that only private business creates wealth. These notions might play well to their base but impartial economists and historians might think the folklore behind the rhetoric is primitive. Cullen's most frequent epithet for the Tories' shtick is "silly". They habitually suppose that to be in Opposition is to oppose anything that Labour puts up, regardless of logic or sense.
But "Labour Saving" is mainly a summing up and a justification of its author's career in public life, Cullen having written it in the few months his terminal cancer would allow. It's chock full of policy and analysis. Unsurprisingly - and accurately - Cullen thought that few MPs knew much about economics. This was his last shot at explaining how to make the country a better place. He concentrates on economics not just because, as Minister of Finance, that was his main role in Parliament. It's also because so much else depends on how the money is managed.
In an account that is accessible to the general reader - as opposed to the work of academics with their often-opaque jargon that laypeople never see - the book is probably as thorough and even fair as we're likely to see. Fair? From an openly partisan politician? Well, yes, in so far as Cullen's approach was always Centrist. He was proud to dub himself a "fiscal conservative", and any attempt from the Right side of the political spectrum to paint him as a "looney radical" - as the over-the-top rhetoric of reaction likes to respond to any moderately progressive initiative - would lack credibility.
From the Left, though, there is much that could be concerning. Several times Cullen complains that the "far Left" (who are not named) wrongly charge him with being a neoliberal. No, he counters, he was a Keynesian*, happy to occupy the wide middle ground between classical economics (a term he prefers to "neoliberalism") and socialism. * Keynesianism (named after economist John Maynard Keynes, 1883-1946) advocated for increased Government expenditures and lower taxes to stimulate demand. Ed.
Content To Manage The Economy He Inherited
He protests too much. The 1999-2008 Clark government might not have extended Rogernomics, but neither did it chart a new course. Cullen was always content to manage the economy that he had inherited, to maintain the status quo. In the post-1984 context measures like the improvement in the minimum wage and the raising of benefits might sometimes present themselves as having restored a measure of equality and fairness, but this is a myopic view.
We all know that inequality has continued to widen. This is because any recovery from the assaults on poorer people's living standards, as exemplified by Richardson's callously and stupidly named "The Mother of all Budgets", have been only partial. The Clark government was only beginning to restore the status quo ante, unwilling to enact fundamental reform. As any pragmatic Government would have. As when John Key's tactical flexibility allowed him to boost social security payments by an unusually sizeable amount. So, was Cullen any more a champion for his constituency than Key was?
Cullen continues by claiming that free trade has historically been a Left impulse, implying that it is inconsistent for progressives to condemn the recent arrangements said to be about "free trade". Left unsaid is the fact that a progressive critique denies that these treaties have always been about the exchange of goods and services.
The phrase "free trade" has often been a misnomer because the deals have often been about extending corporate power. The suggestion that critics of "free trade" are hostile to importing and exporting things places Cullen in the same SILLY place as the lampooned National and ACT. They all tend to favour barbs like saying Jacinda Ardern is making us like North Korea. That is more of the SILLY.
So, Cullen was not above using his gift for language to mislead. Discussing the collapse of the Alliance, the grouping that coalesced under Jim Anderton* and the Greens to resist neoliberalism, he writes that it was prompted by disagreement over policy on Afghanistan. Yes. But he extends his point by asserting that military involvement was to protect the lot of women and children. The Alliance was charged with having abandoned its professed commitment to human rights. *Murray Horton's obituary of Jim Anderton is in Watchdog147, April 2018, Ed.
This is dishonest nonsense. The American-led coalition went to Afghanistan (initially) to get Osama bin Laden. The Alliance's opposition was based on their refusal to agree that it made sense to kill people there when bin Laden was long gone. For the US President and everyone else it was not about women and children.
But the basic worry about Cullenomics comes back to finance. Who gets what? Who pays for it? Cullen writes that NZ's tax revenue, at around 30% of gross domestic product (GDP), has not been enough to achieve what needed to be done to raise the living standards of the disadvantaged. He points out that the tax system was at a "low level of progressivity by international standards".
Cullen Didn't Want To Reform Or Repeal Rogernomics
So, the obvious question arises: why did the Clark government, which had nine years to act, do nothing to raise the revenues it needed? Why did it not reform or repeal the legislation that enabled Rogernomics? It would seem, from his own words, that Cullen never actually wanted to do either. He spent a lot of his time making speeches to business.
He complains in a vague way about how unfair and unhelpful were these lobbies, but he worked on the assumption that he could not call their bluff and make them pay a fair share (Cullen entered Parliament in 1981. It might be relevant that, despite his frequent assertion that he was never keen on Roger Douglas and his cabal, he was Labour's Whip in the neoliberal years after 1984 and there is no public knowledge of his having found the situation untenable).
Much is made of the fact that he resisted the clamour for tax cuts for the rich. These would have been bad for the economy as a whole and very bad for workers and the poor. Cullen is certainly sincere when he says how misguided these would have been. He had direct knowledge of the damage done by the Rogernomes and the languishing society that resulted. And as a historian before he entered politics, he knew that the Lange government was far from being the only one to have wrongly supposed that a rising tide for the rich would lift all boats. It never has. So, to stand firm and not make matters worse was the least that could have been asked of Labour.
What Cullen does not mention is that, just by manipulating the narrative this way, corporate NZ had won its battle. It did not need cuts so much as it needed to ensure that there was no talk of tax increases. Cullen introduced this section with talk of "the vehemence with which I have argued the case for a level of taxation necessary to give practical expression to our essential equality" but it is not easy to picture such vehemence when he was so often cosying up to people like the CEO of McDonald's.
In this Cullen was again mainstream Labour. His (private) distaste for the "rich pricks" was most probably genuine, but he assumed he could not confront them. Walter Nash, another long serving Labour Finance Minister, comes to mind. The Labourites that get mentioned in this section are people who have been identified as occupying the Rightwing of the Party.
Cullen's closest mate in matters financial seems to have been Lianne Dalziel, whom he repeatedly praises. He says that she was reinstated as his sidekick Minister of Commerce on his direct appeal to the Prime Minister. The two of them joined up with Rob Cameron, another who is warmly endorsed. Cameron, though, was no friend of the masses, his professional life having been largely spent as a consultant pushing for the privatisation of public assets (we have previously looked at the Cameron-Dalziel team in these pages in the context of a Dalziel inclination, as the current Mayor of Christchurch, to flog off public property. To get advice on this she engaged Cameron).
Given this background, Cullen and Clark's sarcastic and, at the time, their seemingly inexplicable contempt for Anderton's Kiwibank, can be explained. Even though the country was at the mercy of four big foreign-owned banks, the New Zealand Labour government at first thought it ridiculous that the State might intervene to provide one small outlet that was owned by the people of Aotearoa.
So, perhaps it is not surprising that we do not get a direct understanding of the establishment of Kiwibank in this section, where the process comes across as a matey partnership between Michael and Jim. At this stage it is worth noting that, Kiwibank aside, there is no mention of any other bank, nor of banking in general.
Cullen was always praised by the Rightwing media as "a safe pair of hands", a phrase which translates as "he won't do anything Big Business does not like", so, as the economy recovered from the years of Shipley and Richardson austerity and the public accounts grew as a result of fiscal policy holding steady, Cullen could deliver nine successive surpluses. Public debt was sharply reduced. Give the man his due: now in the Covid economy we are reaping the reward, even if it has been at the expense of a much-needed boost to Treasury funds.
It is always (tiresomely) been said that Clark and Cullen were "joined at the hip" and these days the Ardern/Robertson combo looks to be similarly harmonious. For all their disappointments they are a preferable style to the Lange/Douglas outfit, let alone the National ideologues, all of whom allowed their personalities and biases to get in the way of competence. Cullen's manner would have annoyed many, not least the Greens, a different branch of the WEIRD family, at whom he (inevitably) lobs disparaging remarks. The feeling of unease would have been mutual.
His Style Fast Going Out Of Fashion
Indeed, the often-acerbic Cullen style is a style that these days is fast going out of fashion. In his look at the WEIRD, Henrich contrasts Pakeha with Cook Islanders, suggesting that the more a society retains pre-modern conditions, the less WEIRD it remains. The non-WEIRD tend to favour relationships over individual perspectives, and there is little here about Michael's feelings of aroha or talk of his whanau. He would argue that that is because his topic was his stewardship of the economy. All very WEIRD.
Cullen offers the observation that his Government's proposals on how to resolve the Foreshore and Seabed mess were "all so eminently sensible that it was inevitable that it satisfied practically no one". It might be supposed that this is WEIRD arrogance in full flight, but he had a point. At both edges of an abrasively divided nation, there was posturing and misinformation. Cullen argues that, despite the popular view to the contrary, the Government's proposals would have secured what mainstream Māori and Pakeha (public) statements sought. And, anyway, the legislation that replaced the failed Bill is essentially no different and all is quiet on the beaches.
The misunderstandings, often deliberate, that were engendered in this period were some of Cullen's worst memories of his career. Conversely his involvement with subsequent Treaty settlements was his most satisfying and constructive. He says that they enabled him to retire from politics in a serene frame of mind. He might not have been as totally WEIRD as he appeared to be.
FIFTY YEARS A FEMINIST
by Sue Kedgley
Massey University Press, 2021
For 50 years, and counting, Sue Kedgley has been a feminist. She dates her involvement from 1971, when she read a book about women's place in the scheme of things and was immediately impressed. Women's liberation, as the movement was then called, got rolling in Auckland, and a good part of this very readable autobiography tells the story of those early days. The book is dedicated to those 70s' pioneers. Soon after graduating from Victoria University Kedgley was working at the United Nations, where she knew the influential leaders of the women's movement. Her portraits of Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer are intriguing. "Women’s lib" was bold, provocative, united and successful.
But as soon as 1976 Friedan was complaining that the movement was being hammered by "ideological internal battles". Kedgley was "dismayed" to have the same opinion when she returned to NZ about this time to hear "arguments about the place of lesbian and Maori feminists within feminism. What I found distressing ... was the level of intolerance and political correctness... There was also increasing pressure to conform to a particular dress code, language, lifestyle and ideology which I found alarming".
Male Chauvinist Piggishness
There were entirely different reasons for distress in New York. It must have been frustrating that the Secretary General of the UN, the Austrian Kurt Waldheim, was crudely sexist. Among the many informative anecdotes that we are given is the occasion when Kedgley and some female colleagues took a petition to Waldheim with a list of reforms that would make the UN more welcoming to women. He told them that next time they visited his lofty office they should be in pink, which would be more attractive than their black clothes.
In the 70s the male of the species was like that. Pat Robertson, a rabble-rousing forerunner of the religious Right that is ubiquitous in Trumpian America, just knew that people like Kedgley were adherents of a "socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians" (some women's libbers in Aotearoa might have endorsed the latter charge, Kedgley might have thought - but does not say). Maybe the Waldheims of the world have mellowed. Or at least learnt to shut up. The Pat Robertsons of the world have changed not a bit.
Green MP & Councillor
Between 1999 and 2011 Kedgley was a Green MP. This meant she had to endure puerile gibes from Nationalist blokes. She asks why it is that 130 years after women won the right to vote, politicians retain attitudes more suited to Saudi Arabia (not her comparison) than a modern democracy. At least she was not around when Waldheim's contemporary, Piggy Muldoon, the NZ Prime Minister, let it be known that "[w]hen I see a nice lady I have an urge not to roar at her but to pat her... I have had difficulty getting to grips with the concept of women Members of Parliament" (did Muldoon tug women's pony tails?) So ingrained is the blokes' way of life that - this century - the female National MP for Taupo endorsed it, claiming that indeed the sexes were not equal.
Issues that get discussed in some detail include the long history of uncertainty on how to bring up babies, food safety and animal cruelty. Kedgley has written several books on some of these topics. You'd think that torturing chooks and pigs, as is still the common practice in the country, would have gone out of fashion about the same time as men stopped drowning witches, but the blokes still find it absurd that some people think we might produce eggs and pork humanely.
After retiring from national politics - very small 'n' please - Kedgley served on the Wellington City Council and then the Regional Council as a Green. The Mayor wanted to put up high rises along the waterfront, but opposition from progressive councillors like Kedgley and a supportive public opinion allowed this to be resisted. Thus, the fine spaces that Wellingtonians now enjoy (for an internationally significant example of progressive urban politics, check my review below of "Crimes Against Nature"). Another silly idea that was not - then - able to be resisted was the privatisation of electricity.
Kedgley says that she was seen as "sensible" by polite society because she dressed well. There is a persistent belief that if you favour dreadlocks, for example, you must be radical and if you wear a suit you must be conservative. In reality there might be no such correlation. On the other hand, men - and women? - were known to distrust Kedgley because she was attractive. That's not a quality that blokedom seeks in a female politician.
She Has Given Her Country Plenty
Kedgley finishes by reflecting on feminism today, bemoaning "a new strand of intolerance, an online 'call-out' culture' that polices orthodoxy". She says that "young feminists stay silent so as not to say the wrong thing". It's back to 1976. Is she right? Don't ask me. I see nothing. I know nothing. Kedgley was an unusual politician in having entered public life because of the issues involved rather than to be there for the sake of power or career. This enabled her to vary her contributions, to switch activities when there was a risk of becoming just another placeholder. She has given her country plenty.
A small variation over dates. For me, as a male generally heedless of gender issues, feminism began not in 1971 but in 1969. That was when a former girlfriend was in the media, demonstrating in New York, uttering a vocabulary that was entirely unfamiliar. Another quibble. Kedgley says she was at the Beatles' Wellington concert. So was I. Like her, I could hear nothing of their songs over the screaming as panties arrived on my head from the seats behind. She says this was in 1963; but it was in 1964. It is the only thing in the book with which I do not agree.
CRIMES AGAINST NATURE
by Jeff Sparrow
Scribe, Melbourne, 2021
Every year the world's rich countries waste $US680 billion worth of food while 690 million people in the poor world starve. Every year around the world the sum expended on guns and military stuff is $US1,917 billion. Every year around the world the sum expended on advertising is $US325 billion. Jeff Sparrow cites these numbers at the end of his passionate critique, his starting point having been that violent and destructive social relationships constitute a crime against nature. And a crime against the world's people.
Central Point Is That The Misery Is Unnecessary
Poverty and death are not our lot because there are too many people on the planet and they are not the result of there not being enough fertile land. The staggering sums devoted to the forces of chaos and exploitation are necessary and intended by the system of capitalism, which needs inequality, waste and division.
The world need not be this way. To background his case Sparrow takes us back over 100 years when electric vehicles (EVs) were at first preferred to cars powered by internal combustion. He looks at why petrol took over. Similarly, trams came to be replaced by buses. A publicly owned tram network would have been fine but American companies were run by private monopolies which bought land on city fringes to create routes and profits.
He cites the notorious example of Los Angeles, where a consortium of General Motors (cars), Firestone (tyres), Standard Oil and Phillips Petroleum bought the public transport system in order to switch from trams, using electricity, to petrol guzzling and rubber tyred buses. Cars made distance and travel compulsory. They separate work from play, yet they came to signify "freedom". When a Donald Trump sneers at EVs as the imposition of effete liberal elites he is echoing an ideology that stretches back to the robber barons of the late 19th Century.
In contrast Sparrow, an Australian, looks at Indigenous life: "Their labour - hunting, burning the bush, sowing and collecting plants - combined what the Europeans would describe as work, recreation, worship and art". Indigenous society was not keen on regulated work. This is the basis for the common view that the pre-modern economy was bedevilled by laziness, the different cultures being seen in racial terms. But Sparrow notes that early modern Europe hosted the same division.
Economies which are WEIRD (for an explanation of WEIRDness check the review of Michael Cullen's autobiography above) got their head of steam from the Industrial Revolution, which can be dated roughly to 1750 onwards. Sparrow looks at coal, the era's energy source and the chief suspect when it comes to crimes against nature. He argues that coal came to be the industrial revolution's main fuel not because it was the cheapest or most efficient source of energy. Mills were. Coal came to replace the mills, powered by water, because rivers were in the countryside. Factory owners needed their workers massed into towns where they could be more readily controlled.
Dark Satanic Mills
The exploitation was massive. Sparrow writes that around 1830 the life expectancy of the average worker in Manchester was said to be 17. It's a number so astonishing that he does not seem to be confident it is accurate. It does not need to be. The point is made (a historian looking at Victorian London has assessed that the population was roughly divided into thirds: those with full-time work, those with spasmodic jobs, and the permanently jobless).
A pattern emerges. Early modern capitalism wanted workers massed in cities. Later capitalism wanted them dispersed into suburbs. Both artificially alienated people from a more sympathetic environment in order to exploit them. Both engendered an artificial demand for polluting energy. Around the time of World War 1 the act of buying and selling began to be called "consumption", another meaning of which is "tuberculosis". To "consume", Sparrow points out, is not good. As my dictionary puts it, to consume is to "destroy by wasting, fire, evaporation etc; to use up; to devour; to waste or spend; to exhaust". Consumption is wasting of the body. And if you are spent, you are exhausted.
Conversely "thrift" is derived from "thrive". Get "just what you need" - which is to get exactly what you need and only what you need - as my local supermarket advises, whether sincerely or not. Thrift is a pre-capitalist ethic. Capitalism depends on creating both scarcity and surplus, or, in Sparrow's words, shifting consumption from "parsimony" to "profligacy". The present phase of the wasteful society can be dated from the 1950s, when advertising began its gross expansion. "The Hidden Persuaders" (1957), a Vance Packard book, quoted some post-war US ads:
"Buy days mean paydays and paydays mean better days"; "Buy, buy, buy; it's your patriotic duty!" One business leader suggested that "the way to end glut is to produce gluttons". Another explained: "We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever-increasing rate", because "we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption". Consumption as religion? One corporate ideologue wrote that the modern factory unified labour, science and capital. So, yes, in his view the factory was capitalism's cathedral.
Plastic Central To Wastrel Society
As coal is to energy, so plastic is to the pollution of the wastrel society. Standard Packaging was up front: "Tomorrow, more than ever, our life will be 'disposable'". They were right about that. There are now eight million metric tons of single use plastic bags a year filthying the ocean and killing sea creatures. Again, as with coal, there was at the time no consumer demand for plastic. It had to be created. Sparrow cites Modern Plastics to this effect, where, as a trade journal, this could be stated explicitly. Before the hidden persuaders conspired, there was a general view that bags could be washed and used repeatedly.
So, it is unsurprising that the present steep rise in environmental degradation dates from the 1950s. With his focus on the hegemonic influence of big business, Sparrow has no time for their frequent attempts to damp down public expectations. He gives two examples. BP, which these days supposedly stands for Beyond Petroleum, talks of our carbon footprint and how we all need to reduce it. Before that, DuPont, the chemical giant, talked of a "clean up our act" ethos. These PR ploys play on individuals' guilt, diverting attention from root causes. Sparrow says any appeal to individual behaviours "sets the consumer a task that cannot possibly be achieved".
In fact, Sparrow is dismissive of all attempts to blame people for the mess we are in. He reminds us that poverty and famine do not result from shortages of food. They arise from the manipulations of the powerful, who routinely destroy products to keep a price high and keep developing world workers poor so as to keep them dependent. And to beat competitors in the rich world for price. Look again at the numbers at the start of this review and compare them to the cost of providing basics like clean water and adequate housing for the world's poor. Waste and war get billions; the world's masses need only a tiny fraction of that to live healthy and peaceful lives.
Strike!
Is there nothing optimistic on offer? It's not all gloom. Sparrow finishes with suggestions as to how the strength of democratic opinion can be mobilised. To emphasise lifestyle choices is to be co-opted by capital, and to rely on protest rallies is not enough. Big money can wait them out. His alternative is to follow the tactics of Sydneysiders in the 1970s, when developers threatened to erase historic neighbourhoods to put up high rises. Building workers went on strike and public opinion (which is almost always anti-big money) won. He likes Greta Thunberg and her school strikes, a tactic that "reveals power".
REVIEW
- Jane Kelsey
ACTIVISTS AND THE SURVEILLANCE STATE
Learning From Repression
edited by Aziz Choudry, Pluto Press, London, 2019
This is a great book. Activists on any issues in all countries should read and reflect on its insights and challenges. As with his previous edited collections, Aziz has brought together a range of contributors who speak from their on-the-ground experience of surveillance as activists informed by critical analysis.
It is a fitting swansong for Aziz, who passed away in May 2021, and a tribute to his insistence that grounded voices are the best guide to a progressive future, rather than the abstract analyses of cloistered academics or liberal non-Government organisations' (NGOs) campaigns that ignore history, politics, power and imperialism.
The 11 essays shine a historical and comparative light on State and corporate surveillance, its effect on progressive politics and, as importantly, on strategies to expose and challenge those practices. There is nothing pollyannaish here. Several writers share their raw experiences of mental health crises, fear and mistrust, financial threats through blacklists, and lessons learned by mistakes and failures.
The book has three parts. The first three essays provide the analytical framework: one from Aziz, written while he was still at McGill University in Montreal before moving to South Africa early in 2021; one from Radha d'Souza, who lived in Aotearoa in the 1990s and early 2000s and is now a Professor of Law at the University of Westminster in London; and one from South African journalist/academic Jane Duncan.
Part two hosts the bulk of essays from community activist/researchers, investigative journalists and activist academics on experiences of surveillance across many countries. Their stories and analyses will resonate with activists in Aotearoa. Part three focuses on strategies for researching surveillance, although that is a theme across the whole book.
Aziz's introduction frames the essays with several critical reflections: the historical underpinnings of surveillance under colonialism, imperialism and capitalism; how secrecy shields State and capital from scrutiny; international collaboration among State agencies; the hybridisation of public surveillance and lucrative forms of private security; the State's cosmetic responses to exposés by convening inquiries and promising greater transparency and accountability; and the real life consequences of surveillance for people and resistance (something Aziz was acutely aware of).
History And Capitalism
The history of security and surveillance is a constant theme. Aziz writes on the first page how: "Many of today's covert (and overt) policing and State security policies, practices and concepts have their roots in counter-insurgency techniques [or] pedagogies of oppression" "tested against earlier anti-colonial/independence struggles, in policing Black life under slavery and Indigenous peoples' resistance".
David Austin describes this continuity, in an interview with Aziz, as "slavery's afterlife" that delivers "emancipation without freedom". Val Morse captures the pitfalls of amnesia about this history by quoting from Milan Kundera, cited by: "the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting".
An inter-related theme is the State's intimate relationship with capital. Radha traces four epochs of surveillance, culminating in the current "warfare state", epitomised by the US, which "bears the imprint of the epoch of Imperialism - global in scope and outreach and with the capacities to command and control other states". This warfare state operates within the system of transnational monopoly finance capitalism.
Radha documents how the omnipresent Wall Street and America Inc organised self-regulating institutions within and outside the US intelligence, surveillance and security apparatus, and "blurred the boundaries between public/private, civilian/military, national/international". The military and civilian governance frameworks of the warfare state link other states together in a global imperial chain. Yet each state is different with its own internal structure, history and capacities for resisting external pressure.
Bob Boughton demonstrates this theme in his chapter on the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation's (ASIO) intensive surveillance of the Communist Party of Australia as it worked clandestinely with the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (Fretilin) before the 1975 Indonesian invasion of East Timor. Bob's story is familiar: spy agencies use their obsession with the "communist threat" as "ideological cover for the defence and extension of capital's control over [East Timor's] strategic resources and trade routes essential to its continued growth".
Other authors show how the State-corporate-military complex continues to grow, with support from the rapidly revolving door between government and corporations, despite repeated exposés and scandals. The latest is the complicity of Big Tech and the State. The collection and/or storage of State data is now being outsourced to private companies, giving them enormous power and commercial resource. While abuses by Cambridge Analytica and social media are now well-documented, Jane Duncan's chapter exposes less well-understood forms of "dataveillance", such as blacklists compiled for governments and corporations.
"National Security"
A third theme is the power to define. The term "national security", of itself, implies the exclusion and expulsion of some groups of people, often violently. It silences fundamental questions about what the national interest is, who decides that, based on what sources. The reality, as Canadian Gary Kinsman writes, is that those with political and class power define their interests as the "national interest".
"It is their security that is being defended, and it is our various movements for justice that challenge their national security". In states that are constituted by class, gender, colonialism, race and heteronorms, movements of dissent, resistance and transformation are intrinsically viewed as threats to national security.
National security has been redefined in the era of neoliberal globalisation with the explicit goal of protecting capitalism. Security laws that protect economic and financial interests remove any need to justify surveillance of Indigenous, ecological, climate, anti-poverty and anticapitalist resistance to corporations and economic policies, meaning: "Their national security is a threat to the security and progress of our movements".
Other terms like "domestic extremists" enable "mission creep". Nafeed Ahmed discusses how far-Right ideologues radicalised UK political parties' notions of "national security" beyond violent extremism to non-violent extremism. The UK's Prevent strategy, for example, targets "vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs". This is used to drive a wedge within communities. Those who are deemed obstructive, and those who align to government objectives, are slotted into the "bad Muslim/good Muslim" dichotomy.
Counter-Surveillance Strategies
There are lots of examples of overt and covert surveillance that aim at intelligence gathering, deterrence, disruption, protection of corporate and government interests, and disinformation designed to foment division and have a chilling effect. Those are largely familiar. The counter-strategies are much more interesting.
As you would expect from an Aziz book there is a major focus on multi-layered, historically informed strategies to confront systemic causes of oppression and advance alternatives for systemic change. Aziz himself urges activists to learn from peoples' experiences, alongside other forms of critical knowledge and political analysis, to "better understand State surveillance, build a broader politics of resistance, and learn from history". For example, Duncan points to the importance of older South African activists sharing historic memories of surveillance abuses and how to challenge them.
Activists also need to understand the broader politics of both surveillance and their campaigns. Community activists needs to join the dots across movements, laterally and internationally, and engage in dynamic inter-generational conversations that connect "the intelligence and experience of youth ... with the experience of the older generation, engaged in an ongoing conversation".
Passive resistance and non-cooperation can also be powerful, although people may fear penalties and consequences. When those who are systematically targeted can't mobilise, solidarity activists have an important role to play, from behind. Sometimes non-movements of fragmented, but collective, practices can also be effective, too.
I found the critiques of "successful" strategies and State co-option especially thought-provoking. Kinsman's critique of State apologies as a State management device resonates with those on Te Urewera and the Dawn Raids. The Canadian state apologised for purging queers from the public service in which began as an "apology from below", fought for and secured from the State by decades of resistance.
It became an "apology from above", designed by the State to incorporate the targets into the mainstream without confronting the structures of repression or celebrating their successful resistances. This "social amnesia" effectively divorces the State's contemporary responses from their targets' histories of repression and their victories of resistance (and their limitations).
A related tactic is the normalisation of deviants. Kinsman challenges Canada's use of vacuous buzzwords like inclusiveness and diversity, which also litters New Zealand government-speak: "On whose terms are people being included (and who has already been included) and who is diverse and who is at the centre and is not defined as 'diverse'?" "Pedagogies of resistance", by contrast, "remember not only State violence but also our diverse resistance to it" as an empowering way forward.
Assessments of hard-won public inquiries, and court cases against the State or as part of defences against charges, note they have rarely delivered real change, and most of the evidence, including testimony, remains hidden. But they have served to shine the spotlight on abuses by states and corporations.Their political effectiveness relies on targets, independent journalists and other researchers to produce counter-narratives.Consciousness raising on the issues is also important, including with opposition politicians and mainstream media, while recognising their imperatives may not align with the campaigns' (how true!).
Research And Investigation
Reliable, quality research is crucial. Boughton refers to a "pedagogy of mobilisation" that harnesses technical skills, experience and knowledge of activists on the ground and develops communication frameworks, while minimising disruption by security forces. Some activism centres on researching, investigating and exposing states' surveillance practices, usually with the goal to raise awareness of security among campaigners and alert others who have had dealings with the same person, hold those responsible to account and "rattle the tree" for more evidence.
Eveline Lubbers tells how activists turned the tables on the UK Forward Intelligence Teams (FIT) by establishing Fitwatch. She stresses the importance of careful sourcing to support exposés, including the mapping of undercover infiltrators to identify patterns and "tradecraft", and networks of former Police and spies working in the corporate sector. Years of meticulous documentation, media coverage, and sharing of information on undercover Police officers forced the Government to hold a formal inquiry, but provides very little accountability.
Her chapter highlights several really important strategic challenges. Longer-term research requires reciprocal respect and trust. While anti-surveillance campaigners might want to publish exposés, the groups targeted for surveillance might not want to go public for various valid reasons. Publication can compound distress and personal trauma. Sources and other groups may lose trust and become unwilling to share crucial information. Funders may see them as high risk and pull the plug. Lubbers talks of learning to "go with the flow" and not judging people for the decisions they make.
A second risk is that exposés and heightened awareness of security can fuel unnecessary paranoia and conspiracy theories. Lubbers discloses the harm she suffered to her own mental health. Alongside their documentation work, Fitwatch added a personal dimension that provides support and counselling to help activists deal with trauma and burnout and provide solidarity, support campaigners who are targeted, and help work through issues of betrayal and distrust within infiltrated groups.
Duncan insists that research based NGOs must play a supporting role: "Technical knowledge can be built in mass movements, if technically proficient NGOs have the humility to place those social forces that are most likely to change how power is organised in society at the centre of anti-surveillance work". An empowering train-the-trainer approach is one way to remove dependency and enable community activists to defend themselves.
Liberal Rights Versus Structural Transformation
Much of Aziz's writing and activism challenged NGOs' depoliticised issue-based analyses and campaigns that target "expert" or liberal constituencies. Several essays explore these tensions with varying degrees of pragmatism. Broughton's account of ASIO and East Timor explores the tensions between two traditions of international solidarity: international socialism that centres the downfall of global capitalism, and liberal solidarity among the likes of church groups and NGOs who believe an explicit anti-imperialist line would alienate a broader support base. Security agencies exploit and foment such divisions.
These tensions are especially pronounced in semi-clandestine resistance. Security of information and sources dictates the sharing of information on a "need to know" basis. That relies on reciprocal trust among campaigners.That trust can easily be eroded by informants and disinformation and by ideological and strategic differences, unless those issues are honestly worked through. Broughton sees the key to effective solidarity as supporting the priorities of the "front-line" movement. By definition, liberals tend to see it differently ... .
Garry Kinsman's chapter provides similar insights into surveillance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) activism. The positions of moderate legal campaigners and neoliberal queers, who opposed the "excesses" of Canada's anti-terrorism legislation, excluded militant and often more effective struggles, and legitimised the continued use of "national security" against those activists.
Another example is the individualised, legalistic and depoliticised nature of rights-based campaigns. Duncan's review of strategies to counter digital surveillance in UK, South Africa and Mauritius highlights the limitations of privacy-centred campaigns, while Susaina Maira shows how rights-based activism ignores the way that "freedom of expression is racially distributed".
Bringing It Home To Aotearoa
Val Morse's chapter on Aotearoa New Zealand brings together many of these themes ... The "inherent and ever-present colonial settler project". The State's role in the limitless appetite for capitalist expansion, whether for land, mining or armaments. The many episodes of State abuse against Māori, trade unionists, pacifists, communist parties, anti-apartheid and anti-nuclear activists. Tracking and data gathering. The unwillingness of successive governments to curtail privatised surveillance and their use of paid informants such as Thompson & Clark to spy on Canterbury earthquake claimants and environmental activists.
Well-documented violations of the State's own laws, from the NZ Security Intelligence Service (SIS) burglary of Aziz's Christchurch home in 1996 related to anti-APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation) activism, the "antiterrorism" raids on Tuhoe in Te Urewera in 2007, the Snowden revelations and Kim Dotcom saga from 2011, Ahmed Zaoui's imprisonment, all produced social discomfort about the security forces and surveillance.
Yet those powers continue to expand. A charm offensive by the two main spy agencies (SIS and the Government Communications Security Bureau - GCSB), and the focus on rising cybercrime, has blunted the ability to run effective campaigns. Val calls for integration of the struggle against surveillance and social control into all struggles, and conversely for all struggles to take a genuinely intersectional approach to political struggle based on analyses of power.
BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU
- Murray Horton
Of all the review books that we've ever received through the post from overseas publishers, "Activists And The Surveillance State" is unique. The packaging had been completely cut open. There was an apologetic note from NZ Post saying: "Received in this condition". An unfortunate accident in transit? Possibly, but no other book sent to us has ever suffered that same fate. It was cut open, not accidentally torn. It seems more than coincidental that it is a book by Aziz and co. Obviously, the surveillance State wanted the activists to realise that the title is accurate.
REVIEW
- Greg Waite
NOMADLAND
by Jessica Bruder
Swift, London, 2021
This book, and the excellent film of the same name, tells the stories of Americans driven by low wages, casualisation and high rents to abandon traditional homes in favour of mobile solutions - sleeping in cars, caravans, campers and buses, while chasing seasonal work to avoid the extremes of summer heat and winter cold.
Jessica Bruder tells their story with empathy, recognising the pitfalls but acknowledging the impossibility of renting for many today. You may have heard that America is a land of cheap housing, but only home ownership is cheap. Renting is definitely not. Their ratio of median weekly rent to gross minimum wage for 40 hours (0.88, $US256 to $US290, 2019) is way higher than New Zealand (0.69, $NZ550 to $NZ800, 2021) - and who could afford either on the minimum wage?
Unfortunately, the pitfalls of this new life are many. Police move them on from free parking, national parks set time limits to avoid permanent residents. Walmart's 24-hour carparks are often a last resort, where short stays are tolerated - but you still have to use a toilet and wash somewhere. And many of this travelling workforce are older. Perhaps they lost their job in a restructure, lost their savings in medical bills, divorce or other misadventure. With welfare so low, they are left with little choice but to keep working in thankless jobs for minimum wages.
Amazon Takes Advantage
Many of them work for Amazon during the rush before Thanksgiving - the company has dedicated warehouses in the desert with giant adjacent carparks for temporary staff to "live" on, if you could call this living. One told of using a Fitbit to record walking 18 miles a day on concrete, between constant bending down and reaching up to put goods into bins awaiting just-in-time ordering. But there are also many humorous stories in this book, alongside a general disgust for modern wastefulness. Who knew you could buy "butt-plugs" on Amazon with furry animal tails attached? What a top sexist gift.
The book ends with Linda buying a block of desert land just north of Mexico, land so poor and remote she can afford it. There are no building restrictions there and her goal is to build her house from recycled tyres and packed earth. You admire her determination but worry about her future. This is what life looks like when you can't afford to rent on the minimum wage - no retirement and a much less secure home.
This is something we should think a lot about here in New Zealand. We are already ranked just behind the USA in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) rankings for low-income unaffordable rental, and rents will keep rising as house prices top out and capital gains to landlords disappear.
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