behind maori nationalism

7/28/2019 Behind Maori Nationalism

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THIS ARTICLE begins an analysis which situates the rise of Maori sovereignty politics within thecontext of the protracted economic slump and the decline of traditional class-based organisations. Itargues that rather than representing a radical challenge to the status quo, Maori sovereignty politicsare a sign of the weakness of radicalism in a society that is coming apart.

For 30 years after the Second World War, growing economic prosperity, coupled with the ideologies

of anti-communism and New Zealand nationalism, held society here together. Racial integration wasofficial policy, and the postwar boom, which brought most Maori out of poorer rural areas and intoindustry in the cities, seemed to hold out the prospect of equality in wages, job opportunity and livingconditions. Widespread intermarriage also created a society in which Maori and pakeha (white) werelargely relative terms rather than distinct and separate categories.

But since 1973, New Zealand, like the rest of the capitalist world, has been hit by long-term slump.This countrys historic dependence on agricultural exports to Britain meant that the crisis here took aparticularly sharp form, the end of the boom coinciding with Britain joining the European Communityand reducing its imports from New Zealand.

As capitalism restructured and New Zealand was transformed from the most regulated capitalist

economy in the world into the most open one, New Zealand nationalist ideology was undermined. Theend of the Cold War dealt another blow to anti-communism and kiwi nationalism as the ideologicalcements holding society together. What it meant to be a New Zealander became a question ofdebate.

As the slump cut deeper and deeper and old forms of social cohesion frayed, the ruling class foundsociety beginning to come apart beneath them. The rise of Maori nationalism reflects this process ofdisintegration. As slump society has nothing to offer, and as the old labour movement is dead on itsfeet, a section of Maori have seen no way forward and partly retreated into idealised visions of Maoritraditional society.

Culture, however, is not a solution to anything its rise is a reflection of the failure of politicalradicalism to achieve any real gains for the majority of Maori. The rise of culture signals the

abandonment of the struggle for equality on political, social and economic terms. The culturalsolution becomes an apology for the continued existence of the inequalities created by capitalism.The acceptance of an argument centred on cultural diversity and acceptance of differencenaturalises the economic and historical inequalities produced by capitalist property relations. As withbourgeois democracy, what is lost in terms of economic power and ownership of the means ofproduction is supposedly compensated for in cultural terms.

The ruling elite of New Zealand society is quite happy to give cultural power or, at least, therecognition of cultural difference because culture under capitalism is irrelevant to the system ofexploitation itself. This is founded on property relations and not cultural representations.

Culture as Social Control

Culture is difficult to define and understand, a fact that makes it important as a tool of social control.Today, it mystifies social and political problems and represents them as cultural questions, whilstjustifying inequality.

We can see a major problem with the whole notion of traditional culture if we investigate thedevelopment of the notion itself. For instance, what we now understand as culture was in the pastsimply human practical activity or the way people went about their lives. Ordinary people in pre-capitalist societies had no concept of a separate sphere called culture. Things like song and dancewere bound up with work, and what we might today call cultural rituals marked planting, harvestingand so on.

The actual idea of culture, far from being timeless, immutable and innate as cultural apologistssuggest, has a very recent history. The German historian Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803)

first used the term culture in the plural as part of a fierce rejection of the Enlightenment values of the


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French revolution. He wrote: Let us follow our own way... Let men say what they like, good or bad,about our nation, our literature, our language. They are ours. That is all that counts.

He used the concept of culture to argue that differences between people were innate andunchangeable. The scale of difference meant equality was not possible. Indeed, notions of cultureand the cultural divide have historically been crucial components in arguments against equality.

We can see how, therefore, the idea of cultural difference and separateness might be useful to rulingclasses and states incapable of delivering equality. It should be of no surprise that in New Zealand thestate itself, representing the general interests of the capitalist lite, has played an instrumental role inthe culturalisation of social and political questions. This process really got going with the 1984-90Labour government.

At the same time as following the radical right-wing economic policies necessary to re-establishprofitable conditions for capital accumulation in particular, through launching the biggest attack onthe working class here since the DepressionLabour both coopted the existing new socialmovements and promoted policies to divide and confuse potential opposition. It banned US nuclear-armed and nuclear-powered ships from New Zealand harbours, which bought off the peace

movement and united the country behind Labours capitalist restructuring programme. It alsopromoted Maori nationalism.

The Treaty of Waitangi, the 1840 deal by which a section of Maori chiefs recognised Victoria asQueen of New Zealand in return for her guaranteeing them their lands, was dusted off and promotedas the founding document of New Zealand. Under both Labour and National governments, middle-class social controllers now lecture ordinary people about their obligations under this document.Treaty issues and cultural safety now form elements of training for nurses, teachers, social workersand other state sector workers. You have to pass the cultural safety section of nursing training toqualify, for instance.

Teaching young people respect for authority, which is the reality behind the cultural correctnesssmokescreen, is obviously important for the New Zealand ruling class and a project dear to the heart

of the liberal middle class. As old forms of authoritarianism have been undermined by the end of theCold War, two decades of recession and the decay of the overall fabric of society, cultural correctnessplays an important role in restoring respect for authority. After all, if you talk back to your headmasteror a cop, youre a rebel and that has a positive connotation for young people; if you talk back to aMaori elder or white liberal, youre a racist and that accusation is enough to intimidate many peopleinto line.

The liberal middle class, who probably administer more of the apparatus of the capitalist state in thiscountry than anywhere else in the world, particularly fear Maori youth, and placing them onprogrammes policed by elders and the weight of last centurys reinvented Maori cultural traditions isuseful for keeping them under control. Culture is used cynically to institute a feudal hierarchy ofvalues that are no longer historically relevant. Pushing Maori youth onto programmes to look up theirwhakapapa (genealogy) that is, to which of the alleged original Maori canoes they can trace theirancestry is a nice, harmless activity which will keep them from rioting in the streets the waydecultured black youth in Britain and the USA do. Indeed, the white liberals and new Maori radicalsare united with the ruling class in being horrified at the fact that many urban Maori youth are attractedmore to rap and other expressions of alienated black youth in the USA than they are to so-calledtraditional Maori culture.

The governments promotion of cultural sensitivity and correctness, whilst important as a means ofsocial control, is also a double-edged sword. As different cultural identities are constructed and theworking class atomised, the ruling class own nation-state becomes fragmented too, just one cultureamongst many. This undermines its ability to rule. In fact, no-one is fully in control any more.

Attacking the Working Class

The long slump in New Zealand has seen major attacks on civil liberties and powerful new anti-unionlegislation. Under the Employment Contracts Act of 1991, workers in many places now sign individual


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contracts with their employers. Penal and overtime rates have been largely done away with. The 1991budget slashed the dole, solo parents and widows benefits by 25 per cent. These cuts hit Maoridisproportionately, due to the high levels of Maori joblessness and dependence on welfare benefits.

Equally, as New Zealand capitalism has restructured over the past decade, Maori have suffered themost. Of the 70 000 jobs slashed in manufacturing, 40 per cent were Maori. Traditional sectors of

employment, such as the meat works, have also been devastated. Especially hard-hit Maori youthhave been pushed to the very margins of society, and are seen by both the ruling class and whitemiddle class as an underclass. Amongst the 16-25 age group, about half Maori are unemployed.

The need both to contain the underclass and widen divisions within the working class as a means ofpreventing any challenge to the system has led to a mushrooming of state-sponsored schemes. Forinstance, in the public service caucuses were set up in the 1980s for Maori, Pacific Island and womenworkers. These identity-based caucuses stressed the politics of difference, and their members sataround wallowing in their victimhood and seeing their co-workers insensitivity on race and gender asthe source of the problems they faced. Meanwhile, the state got on with the serious business ofslashing thousands of jobs in that sector, and undermining living conditions and long-establishedrights.

Of course, in capitalist society, where all social relations are organised around the production ofcommodities, such identities are largely irrelevant as anything other than a mask for the realprocesses at work. After all, class is the only historical division of real importance to the capitalist. Thedivisions of gender and nationality and so on grow out of the way in which labour-power is createdand reproduced under capitalism. These created differences are subsequently used by the capitaliststo divide the working class, for instance through creating super-exploited groups and a reserve armyof labour, and thereby hold down allworkers wages.

This does not mean that Marxists are indifferent to the struggles of these other oppressed groups insociety. Quite the contrary: Marxists argue that until the working class makes these causes its own,the workers themselves will never be able to achieve liberation. Unlike feminists, Maori nationalistsand so on, Marxists are able to show how the existing relations of property require these forms of

oppression. Marxists can show that they are the product of an historically transient social systemwhich can be abolished. And we can show that there is a social force the working class, as theuniversal class with a vested material interest in doing away with all relations of exploitation andoppression.

For the majority of Maori and all oppressed people, the way forward is not in idealised culturalrepresentations of a bygone era, but a full-blown struggle to overturn the existing relations ofproduction around which society is organised. Maori sovereignty, feminism and labourism are allobstacles to this: thus the importance of situating the rise of cultural solutions and identities in thecontext of a decaying social order.

Statues, Trees and Oppression

Amongst the most prominent recent activities of the Maori sovereignty radicals have been thechainsawing of the lone pine tree atop One Tree Hill in Auckland, attacks on statues and thevandalising of the Americas Cup. According to Mike Smith, who carried out the attack on the pine, itwas a colonialist tree which was oppressive to Maori. This event was top news in New Zealand for awhole week, sparking widespread public debate. (It also raised some problems for the politicallycorrect, who had to choose between tree-hugging Green values and anti-racism.) At the same time,radicals in Wanganui beheaded a statue of Robert Ballance, a local MP and premier in the late1800s. Other statues were also attacked. Like the pine tree, these were said to be oppressive toMaori.

These attacks have typically been carried out by an individual or two. Far from reflecting anythinggenuinely radical, these actions actually point up the hopelessness of those carrying them out.Inanimate objects do not have the power to oppress anyone. It is real social relations of exploitation

and oppression which keep Maori at the bottom of the heap, and it is these real social relations whichthe new radicals studiously avoid confronting. In fact, not only do they avoid challenging the actual


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relations of oppression, they are perfectly prepared to go along with them as long as they can bemade partners.

Moderate RadicalsFor all their talk about hostility to the Crown, the new radicals share the states desire to tribaliseMaori. The difference is over who gets to have which powers in the process.

The new Maori radicals have very modest aims. These are generally expressed as a partnershipwith the Crown, that is, with the British monarchy, represented by the existing capitalist governmentin New Zealand. When the Crown is reluctant to show sufficient partnership, the radicals declarethey are out for Maori rule over the whole country by the year 2000, although how this might beattained remains to be spelt out.

The governments and radicals tribalisation policy also leads to intra-Maori conflict and conflictbetween Maori and pakeha workers. For instance, non-tribal urban Maori have now set up anorganisation to claim their own monetary compensation for past injustices. In some cases, there havebeen disputes over just who owns what land, with one tribe claiming ownership by dint of conquest ofanother tribe, as with the Chatham Islands, off the coast of the South Island.

Meanwhile, Maori workers who reject sovereignty politics and cultural invention are demonised andlabelled as lost Maori unable to recognise or recapture their supposedly innate Maoriness. In otherwords, the sovereignty activists, in order to advance their ends, have to resort to the very racialcategories invented by traditional conservatives and racists. In doing so they oppose even the limiteddemocratic rights offered under capitalism, which, at its inception, was a system that opposed innateprivilege of any kind.

Unfortunately, given the general political and economic state of the country at present, the kind ofpolitics expressed at Moutua Gardens are likely to grow. So is the white backlash, which so far hasbeen expressed largely in vocal terms on the countrys many radio talkback shows, and in somemutilation of Maori carvings and monuments.

Indigenous StatusThe formulation of the sovereignty activists arguments, and a point now enshrined by the state, is thenotion of Maori as tangata whenua (original inhabitants). Yet this is highly problematic, to say theleast.

Nations are a product of modern capitalism, and they emerged with the growth of trade and thedominance of generalised commodity production and distribution. Nations are not constitutedgeographically or racially or linguistically, but through being unified by a system of commodityproduction and exchange, a language and culture expressing the needs of that system and a territoryto contain all these elements. There is no Maori nation, nor was there ever one. Indeed, even theword Maori was not used to describe the population of the iwi (tribes) existing in the pre-Europeanperiod, and only came into general usage in the late 1800s.

In New Zealand, the development of capitalism has created a new nation out of diverse peoples whocame here at different points in time. An important point about this process was made back in 1955 byUS Marxist Richard Fraser in relation to blacks and the development of the modern American nation:

Instead of turning further inward upon itself until a completely new and independent language andculture would emerge, the Negro culture assimilated with the national and became the greatest singlefactor in modifying the basic Anglo-Saxon culture of the United States. These are expressions of thehistorical law of mutual assimilation between Negro and white in the United States.

Similarly in New Zealand, Maori did not turn in on themselves and create a distinct national entity but,especially in the post-Second World War migration to the cities (and to a certain extent even wellbefore this) intermixed and interbred with Europeans. The lives of Maori today are far more like thelives of pakeha than like the lives of Maori 150 years ago. The difference, of course, is that Maori are


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oppressed by racism and it is precisely this oppression to which neither the sovereignty activists northe traditional labour movement have any answers.

This country, whether any of us like it or not, has changed totally since 1840. Neither the populationgroups (Maori and pakeha) nor the mode of production (communal subsistence agriculture) whichexisted then are with us today. A new nation the New Zealand nation has been forged by a new

social system (capitalism). The Treaty of Waitangi is as irrelevant as the Magna Carta, and should beof interest only as an historical document, albeit one which showed the extraordinary duplicity of theBritish government, which had as little intention of living up to it as feudal monarchs had of living up toany declarations of peoples rights they might have made in their time.

Not only is tangata whenua a meaningless concept in urban, capitalist New Zealand as we approachthe third millenium, it is also used for entirely reactionary purposes. On the one hand, the state (andthe capitalist interests behind the state) use it to compensate for the fact that they have nothing ofsubstance to offer the vast majority of Maori (that is, Maori workers); on the other hand, the new Maorimiddle class and Brown Table elements use it as a negotiating ploy and lever to get their hands onthe pie which has been created through the exploitation of Maori and pakeha workers.

Tangata whenua status is also used to deny other people rights in this country. In 1994, for instance,on the TV current affairs programme The Ralston Group, Maori radical Moana Maniapoto Jacksonargued that Asian immigration should be stopped until Treaty issues had been settled. This was at atime of intense public debate about Asian immigration and an escalation of racist attacks on Asians.Fifteen years ago, Donna Awatere who authored Maori Sovereignty, the first book in which theseconcepts were articulatedsupported the New Zealand governments successful attempt to deprivethousands of Samoans of citizenship rights, arguing that Samoans were only in New Zealand at thepleasure, and as guests, of the tangata whenua.

Not a National Liberation StruggleAlthough the radicals and their white liberal supporters like to draw comparisons between the Maorisovereignty and foreign struggles for national liberation, such a comparison immediately points up theproblems with the very conceptions used by these groups in New Zealand. National liberation

movements are forged explicitly against tribalism, whilst the new Maori radicals emphasise it. KenMair and other spokespeople for the Moutua Gardens occupation, for instance, emphasised over andover again their tribal nationhood and Whanganuitanga. Another prominent activist, Tame Iti,describes himself as a Tuhoe nationalist, and delivers silly notices to his pakeha neighbours that hisgroup is their new landlord, and that if they dont like it they will have to leave.

National liberation movements also reject fighting for return of long-gone tribal lands, emphasisinginstead the rights of landless tenant farmers, agricultural workers, etc, to land through the division ofbig colonial landholdings. National liberation movements are modernising social forces. Theychallenge colonialism not because it uprooted past local traditions, but because it is an obstacle tomodernity and progress.

Colonial powers attempting to prevent national liberation, on the other hand, attempt to maintain (andeven create) tribal divisions. The attempt of the apartheid regime to make out that there were a wholenumber of different nations in South Africa is a classic case of this. In contrast, those fightingapartheid stressed that there was a single South African nation, created historically by social,economic and political developments in the country. This single South African nation involved peopleof different skin colours and backgrounds, and its full formation as an historical nation was held backby apartheid.

In New Zealand, the state has also played a key role in foisting a new tribalism on Maori. Whilst thedevelopment of capitalism and especially the urbanisation and proletarianisation of Maori after theSecond World War destroyed the last basis of iwi society, the Labour government of the 1980s, inoperating the Waitangi Tribunal to settle Maori grievances, arranged settlements on a tribal basis.Essentially, people had to sign up to a tribe to get anything. (Naturally this has led to clashes about

who is and isnt a member of each tribe, with a small lite often having control of membership.) Laterdeals, such as the Sealord agreement, which gave iwi a major stake in a huge fishing venture assettlement for Maori coastal fishing claims, reinforced this artificial division. It was also perpetrated in


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the media. Today, any news item dealing with anything involving any Maori invariably containsphrases such as Local iwi said..., Local iwi feel..., According to local iwi... and so on.

Specificity of Social SystemsNew Zealand is no more likely to return to the social relations of the pre-1840 period than Europe is torevive the common lands system of the late medieval period. The tribalisation process, and the

business ventures wrapped up with it, are organised totally within the constraints of modern-daycapitalism. They have nothing in common with the actual pre-European forms of Maori socialorganisation. There is no Maori way of conducting capitalism, any more than there is a French wayor pakeha way; there is only a capitalist way.

This highlights the importance of criticising cultural solutions, and of understanding the limitations ofany sort of cultural radicalism under capitalism. Take, for instance, the Maori language. It may be ableto express concepts of land and nature that English is unable to, but this is because Maori languagedeveloped entirely in a pre-capitalist tribal society. Since this no longer exists, and we live undercapitalism, Maori cannot express urgent politico-economic concepts like exploitation or surplus-labour. These concepts are historical, and are reflected as part of the language and culture thatdevelops under capitalism.

Similarly, different cultural attitudes to land, reflected in language, arise as different societies hadcertain social and material relationships with the land. As Marx explains in relation to money and thedevelopment of land ownership:

Man has often made man himself, under the form of slaves, serve as the primitive material of money,but has never used land for that purpose. Such an idea could only spring up in a bourgeois societyalready well developed. It dates from the last third of the seventeenth century, and the first attempt toput it into practice on a national scale was made a century afterwards, during the French bourgeoisrevolution. (Capital, Volume 1, p92)

Thus, attitudes to land change historically: it is only when land becomes alienable that it can serve asa commodity and vice versa. Land can only become alienable when people are removed from direct

dependence on, and occupancy of, it. Under feudalism, where land was still the main source ofproduction and production was geared around direct consumption by the producers, people in Europehad an attitude to it similar to Maori. Once capitalism developed, a key aspect of which was primitiveaccumulation whereby the mass of producers were removed from the land and separated from themeans of production, attitudes to land changed markedly.

The fact that culture and practice reflect the actual social system rather than some innate culturalessence in people, can be seen today at the most practical level in the actions of the trust boards andthe new Maori corporate warriors. A particularly graphic example is the case of the tribe covering byfar the largest geographical area, the South Islands Ngai Tahu and its trust board. The trust boardhas become a major property-owner over the past decade. Recently it took over the land on whichthere was a go-kart track in Christchurch. The track was forced to close down, and its workers, manyof whom were Maori, joined the dole queue.

Mana Motuhake leader and Alliance MP Sandra Lee has also raised in parliament the question of thelarge sums paid by the trust board to a consultancy agency co-owned by Sir Tipene ORegan.ORegan, coincidentally, happens to be the supremo of the trust board. He is also a member of theWaitangi Tribunal, the Fisheries Commission and god knows what else, all delivering heftyremuneration. (Conflict of interest, presumably, is a pakeha concept.) ORegan is one of a wholelayer of people associated with such quangos and money-making whose public adoption ofMaoriness is relatively recent essentially coinciding happily with the advent of the Waitangi industryand the substantial opportunities for personal profit provided by it.

Although the main body of the ruling class is likely to remain pakeha, consultancy and other scamstied up with the trust boards and burgeoning new Maori authorities are the principle vehicles for the

emergence of a Maori wing of the capitalist class. This wing will exploit Maori workers (and probably


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some pakeha too) and harness the Maori population to the state and the interests of capital ingeneral.

Any of the new radicals who think that sovereignty is or can be made to be about anything otherthan this are deluding themselves. They may shake their heads at the political trajectory ofsovereigntys first great ideologue Donna Awatere, now one of the wealthiest women in New Zealand

and a list MP for ACT, the most economically right-wing party in parliament. But all that Awatere hasdone is hold up a mirror to them: she has shown them where this line leads, and given the gameaway.

Donna Awateres evolution from 1970s revolutionary to 1990s Rogernome is the logical result of apolitics which fails to situate all oppression within the totality of capitalist social relations and rejectsthe centrality of the exploitation and reproduction of labour-power and thus class. Once these arerejected, the only road ahead is one of reconciliation with the existing system either in the activesense of joining it (Awatere) or in the passive sense of retreating into cross-carrying and ever morehopeless and bizarre activities shaped by a world of cultural fantasy (Tame Iti & Co).

Culture, Poverty, Suicide

The way in which the system and the radicals collude in covering over the source of the problemswhich afflict most Maori can be seen also in questions like health.

For instance, suicide amongst young Maori is explained away as the result of deculturalisation.Given that a Maori baby, like a pakeha baby, has no culture when it is born, and simply grows up andtakes on the existing culture, this explanation is clearly nonsense. Young working-class peopleMaori and pakeha commit suicide because their lives have been horrendously circumscribed andstuffed up by capitalism even before they have had a chance to live them.

If we turn to look at health statistics, we can see that working-class Maori health statistics are closerto those of working-class pakeha than to those of the new Maori middle class and Brown Tableelements. Just as the poor health of low-income pakeha is explained by their poverty, not the fact thatthey dont do Morris dancing, live a peasant existence and speak medieval English, so the poor health

of low-income Maori has nothing to do with deculturalisation and everything to do with immiseration.

Towards a Better LifeTuriana Turia, one of the leaders of the Moutua Gardens protest said on TV at the time that she wasthere because she wanted a better life for her kids. Today, she is an MP thanks to Labour head officewanting her as number 20 on their list vote. Joe Hawke, the leader of the most famous landoccupation this century Bastion Point in 1977-78 has now also got into Parliament thanks to theLabour Party list, having trailed a poor second behind New Zealand Firsts Tau Henare in theconstituency vote. Turia and Hawke are thus now leading figures in the political party which has usedand abused Maori for over 60 years, and which devastated the working class, especially Maoriworkers, in the mid-late 1980s.

The demise of the old labour movement and the inability of the left to wage a real struggle againstracism, let alone do so on a forward-looking basis, means that Maori anger at their oppression undercapitalism will continue to be expressed in forms such as the Moutua Gardens occupation. Theirposition at the bottom of the heap means that, for many Maori, progress actually does appear ameaningless concept and the future less attractive than a romanticised past. Re-affirming lastcenturys (real or imagined) tribal culture replaces a modernising and liberating vision.

This situation is far from unique to Maori today. The historic defeat of Maori at the hands of Britishcolonialism in the 1800s gave rise to various forms of mysticism and messianism. As Richard Fraseralso noted in the 1950s, black separatism was strong in the USA after a tremendous socialcatastrophe. The powerful separatist movement led by Marcus Garvey, for example, followed thecollapse of the post-civil war radical Reconstruction period by the late 1870s and the subsequent riseof Jim Crow, the system of discrimination which held sway in the southern states until the 1960s.


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This defeat, Fraser noted, pushed blacks back into such a terrible isolation and demoralisation, thatthere was no channel for the movement to express its traditional demand for equality. The result wasthe Garvey movement... The historical trajectory of the black struggle was, noted Fraser, towardgenuine integration that is, integration based on equality. Rosa Parks and the civil rights movement,for instance, fought not for separate buses for blacks, but for their right to sit in the same bus aswhites.

Of course, as a Marxist, Fraser also understood that capitalism could not bring about equality. Whilstformal segregation, such as under the Jim Crow system in the southern US states, was brought to anend, economic segregation continued. Equality could only be guaranteed through what he calledrevolutionary integration, which meant a struggle against capitalism.

As with blacks in the USA, the responsibility for the second-class existence of Maori lies with thecapitalist system. This system has nothing to offer the working class, least of all Maori workers. The

job of Marxists in New Zealand is to target capitalism, and, rather than tail-ending spontaneous andmisdirected actions such as the Moutua Gardens occupation, statue beheading and pine-tree attacksor romanticising sovereignty politics, to argue the case for a real struggle against racism and thesocial system which both created and constantly reproduces it. A better life for Maori, as for allworkers, is to be found in a free future, not a romanticised past.

The fight against racism is in the interests of all workers, including white workers, since it is only byovercoming the ethnic and gender divisions created within the working class by capitalism that anyworkers can effectively fight for their own liberation as a class.

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