Right Wing Resistance – photo: The Press 1Apr2012
26 March 2012: ‘Fearfax’ media unit
The Press showed its colours the day
Occupy Christchurch ceased its South Hagley Park encampment, by not reporting that event and favouring
White power movement delivers ‘warning’ and
It’ll be all white on the Right articles instead.[1] This despite Occupy in its heyday having marched five to six times the number of protestors up Riccarton Road and being more significant globally than neo-nazism. By covering up the popular resistance to capitalist economic crisis – as part of a shaken and fearful, top-down market response – what the
Press choice of profile illustrated was the right corporate-fascist social order of New Zealand that Fairfax helps maintain. The
National Party leads this order and other expressions of it are common, such as when dairy-industry interests overturned electorally accountable regulation of natural resource use at
Environment Canterbury, to loud
Press plaudits.* When no improvement is evident – regardless of popular pressure – we need to understand why: Democracy is not yet real; filling out the bigger picture around it – as Occupy arose promising – is imperative to the peaceful, equitable and sustainable future we all need, out of ever-less-certain times, by advancing political philosophy of action. The deep and stultifying influence of anti-democratic force – both corporate-militarist and political – needs now be traced to its ending.
Occupy means liberation from all violence.
[1] What the Right Wing Resistance march was against:
Race Relations Day.
[The complexities and sensitivities of this political topic are perhaps unsuitable for a single short blog post; but the transformational debate has to start somewhere, so here is an introduction of new thinking and theory of ‘social-fascism‘ – towards human rEvolution, for (bio)diversity and sustainable change. Kia ora.]
Document parts:
1. Anarchism – an ideology of the desperate, the deluded and the deranged;
2. Labour Party – social-democrats I;
3. Green Party – social-democrats II;
4. The Occupy world – context.
1. Anarchism
The roots of militarism, including the abhorrence that was European fascism and Anglo-American forms, drew on aristocratic risings to the challenge of modernity and the industrial violence that it bore. It was capability More Powerful Than Dynamite: [amongst] Radicals, Plutocrats, Progressives, and New York’s Year of Anarchy – “In the year that saw the start of World War I, the United States was itself on the verge of revolution: industrial depression in the east, striking coal miners in Colorado, and increasingly tense relations with Mexico. ‘There was blood in the air that year,’ a witness later recalled, ‘there truly was.’ In New York, the year had opened with bright expectations, but 1914 quickly tumbled into disillusionment and violence. For John Purroy Mitchel, the city’s new ‘boy mayor,’ the trouble started in January, when a crushing winter caused homeless shelters to overflow. By April, anarchist throngs paraded past industrialists mansions, and tens of thousands filled Union Square demanding ‘Bread or Revolution.’ Then, on July 4, 1914, a detonation destroyed a seven-story Harlem tenement. It was the largest explosion the city had ever known. Among the dead were three bombmakers; incited by anarchist Alexander Berkman, they had been preparing to dynamite the estate of John D. Rockefeller Jr., son of a plutocratic dynasty and widely vilified for a massacre of his company’s striking workers in Colorado earlier that spring.” – synopsis powells.com ; “‘The United States is no place for a man of wealth,’ complained a millionaire at the turn of the twentieth century. ‘The personal danger for every man of wealth has grown greater here every year … the incessant denunciation of wealthy employers is bound to rouse some fanatic in the laboring classes to murder'” – review Real Lessons from the Age of Industrial Violence PortlandOccupier.org 27 May 2012
The bombings, assassinations, regicides and syndicalist agitation threatened the ruling classes and doomed socialism to individualist, ‘propaganda of the deed’ diversion into a wall of reaction that has lasted to this day, after giving pretext to the mass nationalist fratricide of World War One. Anarchism’s forceful hegemony over the workers’ movement is primarily what spurred the same violent technique to gain hegemony over all societies – through the rising middle-classes’ fear – as moderated or full fascism. Anarchism shares with fascism a syndicalist base and vociferous rejection of peace and pacifism. Bolshevism arose after anarchism and faced the same containment-in-kind, as a political technique accessing violence. Anarchism is thus the formative root of social-fascism and of continued corporate-fascist rule and alienation. These antitheses must be peacefully balanced and neutralised, for resolving social inequality and economic and environmental crisis. But masked vandalism and pitched street battle have carried the arts of instigation and reaction into the twenty-first century – to frustrate Occupy progress – like in every former industrial period. This must be clearly understood. Anarchism is in reality a ‘softer’ form, an ostensibly socially-motivated form of fascism. Without intellectual or collective integrity, and by its violent outlook and contempt for every legal code and social norm, anarchism is a perniciously reactionary force. Having syndicalism in common with anarchism, “when brought within the orbit of the State, Fascism recognises the real needs which gave rise to socialism and trade-unionism, giving them due weight in the guild or corporative system in which divergent interests are coordinated and harmonised in the unity of the State” The Doctrine of Fascism Wikipedia.
Those extreme minorities, the archetypal ‘terrorists’, brought violence and defeat through intransigently destructive confrontational method. Though its utopian ideals can be heartening, most anarchism in practise is antinomian (“against law” as a principle) and has proven to be the ideology of the desperate, the deluded and the deranged: the main seed of social-fascism for (criminally by habit and ill-discipline, opportunist by nature) denying others their right to choose completely peaceful means of social change: “Black Bloc adherents detest those of us on the organized left and seek, quite consciously, to take away our tools of empowerment. They confuse acts of petty vandalism and a repellent cynicism with revolution. The real enemies, they argue, are not the corporate capitalists, but their collaborators among the unions, workers’ movements, radical intellectuals, environmental activists and populist movements such as the Zapatistas. Any group that seeks to rebuild social structures, especially through nonviolent acts of civil disobedience, rather than physically destroy, becomes, in the eyes of Black Bloc anarchists, the enemy. Black Bloc anarchists spend most of their fury not on the architects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or globalism, but on those, such as the Zapatistas, who respond to the problem. It is a grotesque inversion of value systems. Because Black Bloc anarchists do not believe in organization, indeed oppose all organized movements, they ensure their own powerlessness. They can only be obstructionist. And they are primarily obstructionist to those who resist.. There is a maturation process we have to go through, as individuals and as a movement. We can’t say, ‘Hey, I’m going to throw a flowerpot at a cop because it is fun.’” [We need to start building the ideal society instead.] Black Bloc: The Cancer in Occupy truth-out.org 6 February 2012 + early precedents: A Shadow of Glorious (Though Strange) Good Things to Come: The Ranters and Libertarian Communism in the English Civil War see glossary libcom.org
That militarist reaction rose specifically to counter anarchist threat to good order, not only in Italy, is evidenced by this 1924 Pacific story where an earthquake emergency provided cover for the murders of twenty Japanese Socialists, the “anarchist leader”, his feminist wife and their seven-year-old nephew – Maoriland Worker, Volume 14, Issue 4, 30 January 1924, Page 7.
2. Labour Party – social-democrats I.
The language of industrial violence carried directly from the militant anarchists to the social-democrats – their social-fascist alternates – as when protesting rising food prices in 1915:
The Widening Protest
AGAINST THE FOOD PIRATES
Runanga’s Resolution Gains Support
“..a great deal of support wherever working-class representatives sit as councillors.. The Christchurch City Council discussed the rise in food prices. Councillor Burgoyne, in moving a resolution of protest against the recent big advance, said there were men in this country acting in a traitorous way by exploiting the public. If he had his way they would all be arreasted and shot. Other councillors spoke in a similar strain. The resolution was carried.”
Runanga Borough Council, 25 Feb 1915:
“That this Borough Council registers an emphatic protest at the way in which the foodstuffs of this Dominion are being advanced, and attributed to the war in Europe, and thus increasing the cost of living to those least able to bear it. And we further call upon the Government to exercise the powers invested in it by regulating the price of common necessities within the bounds of reason which will check the cupidity of the few and protect the well-being of the whole.”
From: Maoriland Worker, Volume 6, Issue 215, 24 March 1915, Page 5 – paperspast.natlib.govt.nz
Note the handover of agency for resolving the problem to Government, and out of workers’ hands – such typifies the social-fascist role. Corporate-fascism cannot and will never be overcome by social-fascism, history has shown. Today, social-fascist techniques, tendencies and sympathies continue to obstruct the redistributive breakup of corporate-fascism, that has long been necessary for human progress. The social-fascism of the anarchists and the social-democrats is self-serving betrayal of the working-class interests they claim to represent.
Whether by F.D. Roosevelt (USA) or M.J. Savage (NZ) – historical leadership cults both – “social fascism is the use of the various Socialist Parties to mobilize the toiling masses in support of declining capitalism” The Meaning Of Social Fascism – Its Historical and Theoretical Background, by Earl Browder, New York City, 1933. Social fascism “was a theory supported by the Communist International (Comintern) during the early 1930s, which believed that social democracy was a variant of fascism because, in addition to a shared corporatist economic model, it stood in the way of [socialism]” says Wikipedia. The term was sidelined by history, when the anti-fascist war effort united every variant of socialist for Allied victory. But identification of social-fascism must be revived – widening the lens to take in the Stalinist forces who raised then abandoned the term, as national socialists also – to make sense of the political world. It is a general trend of profit-driven industrialism, spanning and ensnaring the globe anti-democratically. Social-fascism poses as a democratic form while actively removing (monopolising) the space that free speech, new ideas and real progress need to prosper.
New Zealand militarism has deep roots in the seizure of agricultural land from indigenous Maaori. It sent imperial rule packing rather than be restrained, elected a parliament for home rule, and mobilised rural force to smash syndicalist trade union strikes when they arose. 1914 began inter-imperial war as the ultimate diversion of proletarian life-force, from which it still awaits recovery. The Axis powers knew colonial fruits were the balm to internal labour unrest and went about grabbing them confrontationally. New Zealand was always first into these scraps, increasing the global supply chain for buying its workers off any picket line through comparative privilege.
Twentieth century history was long and makes no sense without identifying its key drivers: worker socialism, militarism and nationalism; internationally organising and ascendent (on top of coal as transport energy) labour had to be stopped somehow or global capital would have fallen to redistributive socialism so these were the ideological divisions used. This pressured the transition to petroleum and is how Stalin came to look so much like Hitler, in deadly competition (for oil too) then passing the succesful form of national socialism on to Mao Tse Tung – whose inheritors New Zealand signs ever-closer deals with today. Far from having been defeated, national socialism has shaped our geo-political world completely, through subtly different forms although denial is mythically strong in each national identity. Nationalism and socialism are cited as the key dynamics that founded modern Israel in 1947, for example, and of course militarism has been primary to its survival. It is in the successful imperial nations that confronted fascist Europe in which its reactionary influence upon them is best disguised – such is the benefit of illusional luxury bestowed by conquest, that corporate dictatorship can have such a beneficent ‘democratic’ face, as in the Anglo-American empire including New Zealand.
And now social-fascism has a fresh new face:
3. Green Party – social-democrats II.
The “Green New Deal” policy, of initiating environmental work towards economic recovery, draws explicitly on the Roosevelt US social-democratic era. Ideologically very confused, the Green Party lays claim to being the truest of social-democrats, whereas they have roots that are in effect fascist: “Fascists have commonly presented themselves as politically syncretic – opposing firm association with any section of the left-right spectrum, considering it inadequate to describe their beliefs, and being critical of the left, right, and centre.. Fascists claim that their ideology is a trans-class movement, advocating resolution to domestic class conflict within a nation to secure national solidarity” Wikipedia. It is the internationalism and pacifism of the Green movement that disconnects it from its anarchic, semi-fascist direction, but, by obstructing and denying worker self-determination as a principle, and presenting themselves as some “new” alternative on the parliamentary road, the Green Party in fact continue the social-fascist tradition.
* Actions exemplifying the rightward Green drift are legion. One example was their fudging of conflicts-of-interest by voting farmers with irrigation consents on the Canterbury Regional Council (Environment Canterbury) in 2009. Green advice was to ‘keep quiet’ about the blatant law-breaking – that is the essence of mainstream New Zealand culture based on corrupt, historic land theft – so to keep Green seats at the decision-making table. Green careerist self-interest, in defence of capitalist dictatorship, marks their politics as oppressive, privilege-based and social-fascist. The Greens sided with farmers to undermine climate change work by the council, in a vain attempt to increase their bureaucratic leverage. Even worse, they sided with corporate Iwi – in the shallow name of political correctness – when democracy was sidelined by Government-Iwi intervention in the council, seeking long-term strategic allies in the new pseudo-left corporate brokerage of power politics that Iwi-Green alliance now represents. No good can come from either camp, nor in combination.
The Occupy movement invites creation of a New Zealand left, where, outside of the Mana Party, none yet exists. Outside of the Mana Party there are only an assortment of right-leaning politics: corporate-fascist or social-fascist political parties and history, objectively. That narrow sampling is all that mainstream media will report, shunning the peaceful revolutionary potential of Occupy. How that capitalist hegemony came about through political history, and where the equitable way forward may be looked for, has been documented here.
4. The Occupy world – context.
We need no more Labourist, social-fascist defeatism like Christchurch weary “the people of Christchurch don’t seem to have much of a fight left in them” Christchurch Mail 09/05/2012
Spiritual Insurrection: Mystical Anarchism “Politics is perhaps no longer, as it was in the so-called anti-globalization movement, a struggle for and with visibility. Resistance is about the cultivation of invisibility, opacity, anonymity, and resonance.” adbusters.org 1 Jun 2012
Post-Crash Fascism “Planning for the apocalypse ..Climate change arrives in a world primed for crisis.. intersect with the already-existing crises of poverty and violence.. catastrophic convergence.. that problems compound and amplify each other, one expressing itself through another.. conditioned by the traumas of their past.. damaged societies.. often respond to new crises in ways that are irrational, shortsighted, and self-destructive.. bad adaptation.. Cold War–era militarism and the economic pathologies of neoliberal capitalism. Over the last 40 years, both of these forces have distorted the state’s relationship to society – removing and undermining the state’s collectivist, regulatory and redistributive functions, while overdeveloping its repressive and military capacities.. inhibits society’s ability to avoid violent dislocations as climate change kicks in.. political adaptation is already underway, one that might be called the politics of the armed lifeboat: responding to climate change by arming, excluding, forgetting, repressing, policing, and killing. One can imagine a green authoritarianism emerging in rich countries, while the climate crisis pushes the Third World into chaos. Already, as climate change fuels violence in the form of crime, repression, civil unrest, war and even state collapse in the Global South, the North is responding with a new authoritarianism. The Pentagon and its European allies are actively planning a militarized adaptation, which emphasizes the long-term, open-ended containment of failed or failing states – counterinsurgency forever. This sort of ‘climate fascism,’ a politics based on exclusion, segregation, and repression, is horrific and bound to fail. There must be another path.” adbusters.org 11 Feb 2012
So what of Fairfax News? – the trade unions fight back against cuts, and Rinehart won’t bully us, Fairfax says abc.net.au 19 June 2012 + “Analysts yesterday questioned whether Fairfax’s bold moves to cut 1900 staff, shift The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald to tabloid size and erect paywalls around its websites would be enough to shake off the medium-term structural pressures facing Fairfax. Deutsche Bank valued the company’s metropolitan print businesses, which include the flagship titles, SMH and The Age, as worthless” Fairfax seeks Rinehart legal deal as directors want commitment they won’t be sued theaustralian.com.au 20 June 2012 + Fairfax papers must speak to mainstream Australia “The myopia that predominates at Fairfax has seen its broadsheets cater, almost exclusively, to a conclave of left-leaning professionals, public servants and activists situated in inner-city Sydney and Melbourne. Rarely do they report on the shift of economic power to the north and the west of the country. They do not understand the mining boom and ridicule the idea of workers from the states in which they publish chasing the opportunity to work in the most dynamic area of the economy. Their reporting of Aboriginal Australia is confined to Redfern or St Kilda rather than exploring the important stories that can be found across the continent. Too often they focus on inner-city anti-development protests rather than life in the sprawling suburbs where most people live.. They editorialise in favour of the latest fads and praise the Greens, who, the Herald argued, had inherited the “mantle of leadership in progressive politics”. Both papers usually champion negativity, embrace a culture of complaint, oppose economic progress and push the limits of social reform.. represent the establishment mentality opposed to change” theaustralian.com.au + Murdoch wields axe and cheque book too smh.com.au/business
Refs. Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning Jonah Goldberg, January 2008 “makes a persuasive case that fascism was from the beginning a movement of the left” New York Post review + Juan Perón and Social-Fascism in Argentina “The experience in Argentina is a shining example ‘social-fascism,’ of the fusion between social-democracy and fascism, of failed reformism and corporatism.” The Red Phoenix 2012/03/05 etc.
“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent” – Isaac Asimov; Occupy update @ globalrevolution.tv + How to Start a Revolution “Remember that armed struggle is not an option. No matter how well armed or trained you are, you cannot withstand an organized country’s military – especially if a superpower and its allies are backing the regime in place” wikiHow.com
Draft – to be continued – check back again later.
natural autonomy N/A 