Monday, June 25, 2007

Did the government try and nationalise the foreshore and seabed while I wasn't looking?

Bryce from Liberation* has written an article on Maori Nationalism and Maori liberation. I disagree with most of it (which is hardly surprising), but he does have some good points. In particular, I agree that it's important to look at the historical context of Treaty of Waitangi, and remember that it was a document of colonisation. But this statement just confused me:

. Peace groups, far-left organisations, and parties like the Greens have come out against government moves to bring about public ownership of the foreshore and seabed and thus guarantee public access.
Huh? I guess that statement is technically true. But only in the sense that the Australian government is current taking steps to nationialise Australia and ensure access for everyone.

Although I think it would be hard to sustain an argument that he government was trying to bring about public ownership to the foreshore and seabed to guarantee public access (particularly not as he's got a good analysis of the Labour government. The government has done nothing to ensure public access to the areas of the foreshore and seabed that is currently used by ports, or aquaculture.

Quite a lot of colonial land confiscation is also nationalisation. But selective confiscation isn't necessarily a step on the way to nationalisation. Racist selective confiscation certainly isn't. The Foreshore and Seabed legislation only targeted Maori ownership. That's the fundamental fact Bryce didn't mention.

* Definitely the best blog name ever - I wish I'd thought of it. I was too focused on having a blog name high up the alphabet and getting a Buffy quote in there. So I missed the bleeding obvious.

6 comments:

  1. I much prefer CBTP as a blog name; Liberation is too generic.

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  2. Anonymous9:50 am

    Bryce's analysis of nationalism is very stalinist. It requires territory, language, culture etc as definers of nations. Lenin's position, in opposition to Stalin, was that if peoples of distinct ethnic or national origins are so oppressed that they are attracted to the appeals of bourgeois or petty bourgeois nationalists to solve their problems then we have to treat this nationalism as seriously as we do the European bourgeois nations. After all these latter were imagined into existence by the ruling classes, or factions of them, to protect their property and wealth from their rivals. And these nations were built by sending the working classes into battle to defend and extend them.

    When those nations extended into nonEuropean countries, they subordinated and in a few cases obliterated the existing modes of production. To the extent that they didnt obliterate, but subordinated them, the material existence of such peoples coexisted and interpentrated with the capitalist mode.

    In the case of Maori their subsistence on tribal land as reserve army workers lasted until the 1950s and has been rekindled by the structural crisis since the 1980s. That means that as a result of being over-represented in the reserve army, Maori are falling back on subsistence methods from the past and trying to survive economically. The statistics tell this story.

    The main Maori leadership wants to escape this subsistence and get into business. They are using Treaty settlements to provide jobs, income and education. Yet these settlements are tiny compared to the land and wealth forgone. They can never meet the needs of the majority of Maori who are low paid workers.

    Who do these workers look to to meet their needs? If they continue to be oppressed and super-exploited they will look for allies. Some will see radical nationalist movements as the answer, others will look to the unions and to the working class. However if the rest of the working class turns its back on the oppression of Maori workers, they will look to nationalist leaders to come up with the goods.

    While historic oppression exists and persists along racial or ethnic lines, national solutions will always arise. The only way to stop these from becoming reactionary tribal wars lead by various warlords is for the non-Maori working class to recognise Maori oppression as more than wage labor oppression, and put the fight for Maori rights at the centre of trade union politics. This will demonstrate that the only reliable allies of Maori workers are non-Maori workers, and not the Maori bosses who want to use national demands to exploit Maori workers as much as non-Maori.

    It is necessary to recognise the right to Maori national self determination despite all the reasons that Bryce thinks disqualify Maori as a nation. But we would not advocate that right unless a movement of Maori workers so oppressed by capitalism, and getting so little support from non-Maori workers, demanded this right (which could extend from seperate representation to territorial secession).

    The point then, is that Maori nationalism is already splitting the working class, (look at the Maori Party)not just because of the Treaty process, but because non-Maori workers were not strong enough to fight for Maori workers. The only way to reverse this process is for non-Maori workers to line up alongside Maori workers by acknowledging their national rights.

    A good example is the Foreshore and Seabed. Much of the left, no doubt Bryce, said that the F&S is better in state ownership (for Marxists that is the collective ownership of the capitalist class) then fall into the hands of tribal leaders. Against this, the CWG said that it is better to fight alongside Maori to reclaim control over the foreshore and seabed to wrest that control from both international capitalism (joint ventures with the state) AND from bourgeois tribal leaders. If the non-Maori workers backed Maori workers in occupying land and F&S sites, this would mobilise the working class as a force against both the state an Maori bosses.

    In other words where national demands and rights are being demanded against the capitalist state, why not join that struggle so that the working class can fight for control of a major resource and take it out of the hands of the state and the MNCs' and Maori capitalism?

    Howard's current attack on landrights in Australia is a parallel case. We need to join with Aborigines to occupy and defend their land, not with the intention of separating (though that right should be recognised and supported if it becomes a popular demand) but to create a racially united working class that has the strength to defeat Howard and then take on the mine owners, a powerful section of the Australian ruling class.

    The Leninist method is to recognise that the bourgeoisie use nationalism as a method of harnessing workers and peasants to fight their wars for bigger pieces of capitalism. Recognising this, Lenin said that the only way to stop this was to win such workers and peasants to international socialism by first defending their right to self-determination, and proving in the struggle that they are the only reliable allies in the fight and that only socialism could win those rights through the defeat of the national bourgeoisie as well as the imperialists.

    So it isnt the national question against the class question. As Lenin said, the national question IS the class question. The answer is in making it so.

    Dave Brown CWG

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  3. Anonymous1:12 pm

    Dave Brown writes:
    "Bryce's analysis of nationalism is very stalinist. It requires territory, language, culture etc as definers of nations. Lenin's position, in opposition to Stalin, was that if peoples of distinct ethnic or national origins are so oppressed that they are attracted to the appeals of bourgeois or petty bourgeois nationalists to solve their problems then we have to treat this nationalism as seriously as we do the European bourgeois nations."

    Actually, Stalin's analysis of what a nation is was largely a result of Lenin's pen as Dave presumably well knows. It has been regarded as *the* Marxist view by Trotskyists, probably more so than by Stalinists, so it is absurd for Dave to label Bryce a "Stalinist" for using those criteria.

    However, as other correspondents have pointed out, it is not particularly useful anyway to simply take a template from another time and place and stick it down on NZ/Aotearoa in the 21st century.

    The reality here and now is that maori and pakeha are completely intermeshed and so seeing maori oppression as a "national question" in the Leninist sense just makes no sense.


    >After all these latter were imagined into existence by the ruling classes, or factions of them, to protect their property and wealth from their rivals. And these nations were built by sending the working classes into battle to defend and extend them."

    This is a very post-modern type analysis of the emergence of the European nation-state.

    In fact, the emergence of these states had less to do with ruling class imaginings than it had to do with the actual course of capitalist development. It was capitalist development in Europe which *created the basis* for nation-states, not ruling class imaginings. And the ruling class imaginings developed on the basis of that actual material development.

    As for the argument that "it isn't the national question against the class question", well in this country it is. This country in 2007 is not Russia in 1917. Or Ireland in 2007. There is not a specific national question in NZ and attempts to concoct one undermine the centrality of the class question AND the struggle against the oppression of Maori.

    Indeed, even in oppressed nations like Ireland, the national question isn't the class question, although the two are closely interlinked.

    The fact that you don't understand the difference between the two, least of all in the NZ context, is a major factor in why, after 35 years of propagating these views, you have been unable to build an organisation around them.

    Philip Ferguson

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  4. Anonymous5:28 pm

    Maia points out that the F&S legislation didn't touch pakeha owners. Quite true. But the logical position is then to argue that it should, not that the foreshore and seabed should be handed over to iwi capitalists.

    The hypocrisy of Labour was also shown when it came to access to rural land, and they changed legislation after the pakeha farming lobby got pissed off about public access rights. That shows Labour is racist, not that the F&S legislation should be rejected.

    People have rightly pointed out, too, that state ownership by itself neither guarantees public access nor that it won't be sold off. But nor does iwi ownership. In fact, the experience of iwi ownership in the South Island is that land is treated as a commodity by the controlling iwi capitalists just the same as it is by white farmers or white businesspeople. The point is that state ownership provides a framework in which it is easier to fight for real public ownership than if it was handed over to private title. And none of Bryce's critics on this blog have actually pointed out that iwi ownership means *private title*.

    Philip Ferguson

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  5. Anonymous4:05 am

    Phil Fergsuon is being disingenuous. Lenin changed his mind about a lot of things after the brakout of war in 1914. The national question was one of them. Dave Brown's comments are a more accurate summary of the position he developed in 1917 and afterwards. In his essay in 'On The Left', Kerry Taylor shows that the Communist International lenin founded supported the right of Maori to self-determination, frequently prodding the local Communist Party to take action on Maori issues and to raise the demand. It's pathetic to see self-proclaimed Marxists basing their view of tino rangatiratanga on something that Stalin, the gravedigger of revolutions, wrote, but sadly the Workers Party does have some Stalinist ghosts in its closet. As for stolen land won back being 'privately owned' - that depends on how you define privately owned. The class struggles within iwi will determine if liberated land will be used for good or bad purposes - for the browntable or te morehu. But anyone who says that the struggle to relcaim stolen land at places like Bastion Point and Moutoa Gardens was reactionary is lining up on the wrong side.

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  6. Anonymous2:40 pm

    Anonymous said...

    >Phil Fergsuon is being disingenuous. Lenin changed his mind about a lot of things after the brakout of war in 1914.>

    Lenin’s views on the national question are remarkably consistent. He always supported the right of oppressed *nations* to self-determination, but he never regarded every oppressed ethnic group as a nation – thus his position on the Jewish question and his opposition to the Bund.

    Anonymous said:
    >The national question was one of them. Dave Brown's comments are a more accurate summary of the position he developed in 1917 and afterwards. In his essay in 'On The Left', Kerry Taylor shows that the Communist International lenin founded supported the right of Maori to self-determination, frequently prodding the local Communist Party to take action on Maori issues and to raise the demand.>

    You’d need to actually present some evidence that the Third International in Lenin’s day supported such a position. Actually it was under Stalin that the Third International supported self-determination for Blacks in the United States, for instance, leading the CPUSA to come up with the absurdity of advocating the separation of the “Black Belt” from the rest of the United States – in effect a recipe for a Bantustan.

    Moreover, in the 1920s the vast majority of Maori were still rural-dwellers, being largely left to rot in very poor rural areas. Today Maori are overwhelmingly urbanised and intermixed with pakeha. There *might* have been some basis for seeing Maori as a separate nation, or potential nation, in the early 1920s but there ceased to be such a basis once the urbanisation and proletarianisation of Maori proceeded with great rapidity from after WW2 onwards.

    Anonymous said:
    >It's pathetic to see self-proclaimed Marxists basing their view of tino rangatiratanga on something that Stalin, the gravedigger of revolutions, wrote, but sadly the Workers Party does have some Stalinist ghosts in its closet.>

    But the positon that Stalin wrote was overseen by Lenin. It was the position historically held by Marxists since then. The fact that Stalin actually penned it – and did so long before he came to power in the USSR – is neither here nor there.

    Anonymous said:
    >As for stolen land won back being 'privately owned' - that depends on how you define privately owned. The class struggles within iwi will determine if liberated land will be used for good or bad purposes - for the browntable or te morehu.>

    But there are currently no class struggles within iwi of any significance. The *concrete reality* of the F&S legislation is that iwi ownership would have meant private title.

    Anonymous said:
    >But anyone who says that the struggle to relcaim stolen land at places like Bastion Point and Moutoa Gardens was reactionary is lining up on the wrong side.>

    As some who was involved in support work around Bastion Point, I find this comment curious. I was never aware that Dave exactly distinguished himself by involvement around Bastion Point.

    Seeing private title for the foreshore and seabed is lining up on the wrong side.

    Phil

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