Humans Rights Against Human Rights

Review of Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism. A new history of the parallel rise of neoliberalism and human rights.

The Hokianga Dog Tax Uprising

Why was a seemingly mundane 19th-century fiscal measure—a tax levied on dog owners—met by Māori with widespread repudiation and an armed uprising? The significance of what is known as the ‘Hokianga Dog Tax Rebellion’ is often framed in terms of its apparent quashing by colonial forces in 1898, taken to signal the moment at which Crown sovereignty was finally imposed upon northern Māori. This paper questions the mainstream historical narrative, taking seriously the political stakes of taxation and locating the ‘dog tax’ within a disciplinary colonial regime that sought to interpellate Māori as financially and morally liable subjects. The dog tax was aimed at the protection of sheep, a central pillar of the early colonial economy, but was also viewed as a means of transforming Māori into citizen-subjects of the colonial regime. The doggedness with which colonial officials sought to enforce payment, and the steadfastness of Māori opposition to the tax, illuminate the highly politicised character of taxation in the colonial context. This article is an excerpt from Catherine Cumming’s The Financial Colonisation of Aotearoa, to be published by Economic and Social Research Aotearoa in late 2021.

Mission-Oriented Capitalism

Review of Mark Carney, Value(s): Building a Better World for All. Stakeholder capitalism as a line of flight from our uninhabitable earth?

Chlöe Swarbrick’s Auckland Central Victory

In the 2020 election, Chlöe Swarbrick won the Green party’s second-ever electorate seat, in Auckland Central. A high-profile candidate, an experienced campaign team, some favourable conditions, and mass engagement enabled Swarbrick to build a winning coalition. For socialists, who are returning to electoral politics throughout liberal democracies, the skills required to win electoral campaigns are key. With an emphasis on ‘building a community, not an army’, the Swarbrick campaign offers useful lessons in how to build and sustain political engagement. With a more explicitly socialist political agenda and a stronger organising theory of change, election campaigns could provide a spark for a left political movement in Aotearoa New Zealand.

The Populist and Institutionalist Logics of Anti-Expressway Campaigns in Aotearoa New Zealand

This article focuses on the opposition to the New Zealand Government’s Roads of National Significance programme to examine the individualistic and collective forms of political engagement that underpin contestation of expressway proposals and the challenges involved in forming an anti-expressway campaign that transcends locally based opposition. Utilising Ernesto Laclau’s notion of populism, it is argued that, in a post-political planning context, a reliance on an individualistic or institutionalist political strategy can restrain collective action and the development of effective supra-local or national campaigns. The populist and institutionalist logics underpinning the campaigns against the Kāpiti expressway proposal reveal the shared interests between activists and local opposition groups and the potential for progressive forms of populist action on environmental issues and transport policy.

Reading Our ‘Destiny in the World We Have Made’: Inscriptions and Incantations of Race in the Wake of the Christchurch Massacres

In the wake of colonial violence, how do we come to terms with its event while refusing the power exercised by these very terms? If race is an organising grammar upon which we must draw in articulating the very realities to which it consigns us, then what recourse does it leave us in disarticulating and remaking these realities? This article is a meditation on these questions in the context of the massacres at two Christchurch mosques, and the raced discourses which they occasioned. In exploring these discourses as raced, the emphasis here is on their temporal qualities: on race as the coding of the time and the place (or non-place) in history where its subjects belong. Against the legibility and transparency with which race interpellates its subjects, is there a magic in the opacity and poetics of speech through which we can rewrite our ‘destinies’ and reinvent ourselves?

Christianity Without Guarantees

This review essay critically examines Hannah Strømmen and Ulrich Schmiedel’s The Claim to Christianity, an activist intervention that seeks to explicate and contest the theologies running through far-right claims to Christianity. While importantly focused on the semantic struggle for Christianity, refusing to interpret the presence of Christianity in far-right ideology as mere instrumentalisation, and espousing a critical Christianity without guarantees, the book suffers from several analytical and evaluative shortcomings. Framing the object of Strømmen and Schmiedel’s work as a component part of the contemporary post-fascist atmosphere, I suggest that drawing on the work of Ernst Bloch and Antonio Gramsci and attending to the utopian, dystopian, stratified, temporally multiple, and synthetic qualities of far-right claims to Christianity better illuminates the ideological operations of post-fascism and suggests the need for powerful alternative theologies.

Landlord Neutral 2030

With the housing crisis continuing to punish renters, we call for the abolition of private landlordism.

Workplace Restructuring and its Discontents

This article analyses the role of fetish—unspoken attachments—within and against the 2020 proposal to restructure the College of Sciences at Massey University.I look at the roles played by three forms of fetish: the commodity fetish, the fetishisation of intellectual labour, and the fetish of knowledge-without-consequences. I analyse the restructuring and its opposition by mapping these fetishes and the deadlocks to which they lead. In addition to highlighting insights that the concept of fetish generates into the politics of the restructuring, I speculate on the role of fetish as a political factor in the contemporary moment.

Welcome Home, Prodigy

Drawing from the author’s childhood confusion over whether ‘prodigal’ means profligate or prodigious, this intervention anticipates the politicisation of returning New Zealand citizens. Written during lockdown, the intervention contrasts predictions of a great repatriation and pundits’ nationalistic revelling in the country’s success at containing the virus with the history of the ‘coming home’ essay and song. Stephen’s argues for a pre-consideration of the emotional states that might be provoked by the returnee. That pre-consideration is aimed at drawing the returnee into the collective, not for the sake of an enlarged spirit of the nation, but for the advancement of Left collective action.