Sheep, goats, angry men in coats.

One of the most troubling elements of recent political life is that some of my fondest theories and literatures are being recast in a new light, and it’s not flattering. The Frankfurt School, comprised of a twitchy bunch of middle-European men, thick in both coat and brow, produced much of the most prescient works on the cultural aspects of consumerist culture.

Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse angrily penned blistering critiques of low culture – films, books, T.V and drew direct lines between consuming this shit and quietly by-standing the Holocaust. More than fifty years on, all of their works are still troublingly apposite, but perhaps what’s become most alarming to me is that their ideas and language have been co-opted by what we might charitably call, ‘the far right’.

Consider this quote from Herbert Marcuse (1964),

Independence of thought, autonomy, and the right to political opposition are being deprived of their basic critical function in a society which seems increasingly capable of satisfying the needs of the Individuals through the way in which it is organised.

Every day some version of this statement will turn up on my Instagram account, usually in the service of those who champion, ‘freedom’. The anti-vax movement didn’t initiate this movement but it networked, refined and mobilised those with nascent views about their ‘freedom’. You know the people I’m talking about – the sovereign citizens, terrain theorists, bio hackers, survivalists etc.,. People I don’t normally think of myself as naturally gravitating towards. Although these people are generally characterised as being racist (something I can’t judge really as I have the privilege of not paying enough attention) what I am absolutely sure they are united by is a sneaky whiff of anti-semitism. The Frankfurt School would be sizzling.

The irony of bleating about the insidious and nefarious social and political manipulation rolled out through instagram is not lost on me. And yet claims about how the mainstream media depoliticises and poisons us, frames junk choices, broadly, controls us, continue apace. Here’s Adorno (1974), not even remotely writing about Instagram,

The phrase, the world wants to be deceived, has become truer than had ever been intended.

The resonance with today’s current bunch of wellness warriors is acute.

So what to make of this? For me, it’s like discovering that your high minded, moral, well-meaning religion (critical theory) has been adopted by Hillsong. Extremism is the hallmark of ‘not really understanding what the Frankfurt School was on about’. The creation of binary narratives – sheep/goats, blind/seeing, redpilled/bluepilled etc.,. are simplistic meta-narratives that mirror the ones that ‘freedom warriors’ claim to be so keen to resist.

The people who really get on the wagon with the ‘freedom’ talk are doing exactly the same thing as the people who run their lives according to the mainstream consumerism presented to them via the same channels. The sheep and the goats are equally serviceable in a curry. They are all making and producing and reproducing themselves and their identities through the medium of images presented and controlled through social media.

Herbert Marcuse claimed that ultimately, the main aim of the culture industries was to make profit, and I think that’s the right place to start thinking about this. Because although people who are extreme about what we might loosely call ‘the freedom movement’ mediated through social media, it is the social media platforms that make money out of them. They are, to repeat the phrase, the product.

Often, these social media personalities complain about being silenced or moderated or edited by the platform because of their unpopular views (for instance, people having their anti-vax posts removed) but in fact, the posts that get removed are the ones that don’t make the platform enough money. Engagement plus advertisement makes profit.

Perhaps these ‘influencers’, bravely baring their unshaved clackers to the world to give a defiant finger to ‘transhumanism’ are aware that the platform still makes money out of their content, but think it’s an acceptable price to pay for the ability to get the message out.

A vast majority of the content about ‘freedom’ exists in the health sphere, and was consolidated and weaponised by the anti-vax issue. Suddenly, a big part of the ‘wellness’ sphere transmogrified into a tight coalition of ‘paleo-bros’ and ‘bio hackers’ – a very male dominated eco system of tightly wound, mostly white guys who are succesful in part because you can’t smell ketosis through the screen. These people, like many, many others (including me) are convinced that the modern food industries are designed for profit rather than human health. It’s very hard to argue with that. But their criticisms of the corporate structures that engender the ‘food’ economy are refracted through their own bodies, identities and relationships. They use much of the language of the men’s rights movement – that men should be strong, protective, muscle bound, virile etc.,. and that the modern food industry has feminised men and contributed to the breakdown of the modern family.

In other words, the ‘anti authoritarians’ question and reject the meta narratives of science, government, risk and control and replace them with another set of equally controlling hyper individualistic notions of personal sovereignty, that amount to little more than outing themselves as advanced hyper-consumers who are seeking to reproduce much older traditional ideas about the family and masculinity. The main difference between the meta narratives of science, governmentality and risk is the focus on humans as a group whereas the ‘anti-authoritarians’ are extreme individualists. These people are the ultimate consumers – they are performatively made and remade through their relationship to the products they consume.

To be clear – BOTH groups are pretty bad. On the one hand, there’s the mainstream, slavish adherence to ideas about how to be a controlled body – eat mass produced food and consume the ‘mental health’ bullshit that renders you governable. Many of the strategies of government and public health exist to address the obscene rates of illness that are a direct result of corporate negligence in the service of profit.

BUT, the extreme ‘anti-authoritarians’ are doing more or less the same thing – finding their tribe, allowing themselves to be completely preoccupied with their narcissistic individuality, completely obviating the possibility of political engagement in the current omnishambles. They are noisily ‘opting out’ and thinking this will solve everything.

What to make of all this? How to retain my love affair with critical theory as liberation? For me, it’s with the help of two ideas – governmentality and anti semitism.

The idea of an extreme freedom midwived through extreme narcissism and cultivation of the performative individual is little more than the most modern iteration of identity-based, late capitalist consumerism. The appeal of simplistic, formulaic ideas of control (government bad and evil versus plucky heroic freedom warriors) simply reproduces some very well worn patriarchal tropes. It’s Star Wars in yoga pants.

And anti-semitism? Well, the idea that the extreme left and right are connected by anti-semitism isn’t new. The left think that major media corporations are Jewish controlled, and as such, governments dance to their tune. The right are anti-semitic for more tribal reasons. Both frame Judaism as a powerful, controlling force with a ready supply of sleeper foot-soldiers. The Frankfurt School was developed precisely because its founding members were understandably horrified by the way in which the Holocaust could be countenanced by regular, ordinary working people – their friends, neighbours, colleagues and associates. I’m always stunned when I see people at protests holding signs that say, ‘Always wondered who let the Jews be taken away? Now you know’ etc.,. These are always the same people who ascribe to ideas about the global order that aren’t much different to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

And with that, it’s time for me to go and make a potentiated almond goat’s uterus smoothie.

Class tourism

Under normal circumstances I manage to avoid ABC Life Matters. I know it’s on at 9am, but, every now and then I find myself in the car after a quick ad hoc trip to the school uniform shop, or chewing glass while my ears bleed.

The chattering classes are preoccupied with class tourism, and this episode of Life Matters was the epitome of this. The host breathily gushed her intro about the horrors of the ‘outer suburbs’, setting up the dualism between ‘good’ urbanisation and ‘bad’. Quota words got a lap around the oval – holistic, inclusive (for good suburbia), alienating and ethnic for ‘bad’.

She did note that about 80% of Australians live in suburbs, and yet it seems that the only ones that are a problem are the ‘outer’ ones. Yes, this means the large houses occupied by some of our newest Australians.

To be sure, the angsting over suburbia is an Australian academic tradition, but I think fetishising the outer suburbs as something new and unsettling is just the newest version in an old racist trope. In the 1960s Eastgardens (in Sydney) was considered a nascent den of iniquity, housing undesirables in cheek-by-jowl homes. The design and layout was ‘revolutionary’ – the suburbs were planned for some green space and so that people could have a backyard, as an antidote to the (declining) inner city urban terrace housing that was uncontroversially the pit of all sin.

My point is that lack of transport, insularity and a lack of local employment has long been viewed as a planning problem. I note that the radio guests never used the term, ‘dormitory suburb’ but indeed, this is what they’re referring to. However, I think, contrary to the pearl-clutching of all the guests and hosts, none of whom, I am almost certain, actually live in the outer suburbs, the areas they refer to are probably the least problematic ‘new suburbs’ that Australia has had. This is for a number of reasons – there are more employment opportunities in the suburbs, in shops and services, than in the dormitory suburbs of Australia’s recent past. Women are more integrated into life – they work, participate in education more, and there are strong cultural communities that are connected through churches. The housing is often multi generational, which means that people are connected in more ways. And, importantly, there are a mixture of people from different cultural backgrounds, which means that everyday life will take on different patterns. The sterility of the dormitory suburbs of the 1950s-70s was oriented around an extremely regimented, culturally uniform nuclear family.

Sure, there are problems with infrastructure and transport, but listening to the academics and hosts talk, I really wondered if any of them had been to Peterborough or Marrickville, or Summer Hill. How socially cohesive are these neighbourhoods? Are they not dogged by overloaded transport, air pollution and a lack of green space too?

Of course they are. In fact, these suburbs are probably emptier than those in the ‘outer suburbs’ during the daytimes, as people send their kids off to private schools, full time care, and both parents in single generation households go to work full time.

I’m not suggesting that the outer suburbs are great, or without problems – for sure, there are many. I think though that discussing them like they’re some kind of weird, alien, dystopian hellscape is ridiculous. The only suburban places that are truly like this are the ones that are outside the growth corridor and have a majority of public housing. Abject poverty and disadvantage is the recipe that bakes the shithole, nothing else.

International Women’s Day

The older I get, the more I realise that the Holy Trinity of race, class and gender are the immutable schisms that structure every bloody debate.

Grace Tame amongst others, features in a video about increasing safety, respect and equity of women in Australia. For the middle class Twitteratti, there’s only one way this can go – a criticism about the lack of diversity or intersectionalism in the video, “advanced Karen-ing”.

I’m not interested in that. I’m an old school feminist and I’m wary about the censoriousness of contemporary purity politics. We can have multiple demands for justice and they can all be valid.

I like Grace Tame, and Lucy Turnbull, for that matter. I think it was high time someone gave the PM stink-eye.

Listening to the local ABC this morning we were informed that the focus of this IWD was ‘bias’ and a female scientist was interviewed for her thoughts. Rather awkwardly for the interviewer’s proscribed text) she confirmed what a lot of we already know – for many women working in professional, technical fields, there’s not much implicit bias. That which does exist lies around the structural factors – child rearing and ‘career’.

Of course, there’s a reason this is the focus of IWD – modern, western feminism’s obsession with the idea that women’s equality is primarily oriented around equality in the workplace. Our identities are our work and vice versa. Thank God for IWD highlighting that my 200k annual income might be slightly less than that of my be-penised colleague.

Yes, that stuff is important. As I said before, I’m not interested in engaging in whataboutism – this campaign is a good one, but to me, there is a far more important issue.

Two year’s ago Hannah Clarke’s partner murdered her and her three children. He burned them to death after hunting her like a tracked animal.

These are the things that don’t seem to be changing. When I was a teenager, in the 90s, there was the kind of sexism that enabled teachers to have sex with their young female students. Grace Tame’s story and her teacher’s frank belief that he’d done nothing wrong, tells me that this has not changed. I knew women who were raped, bashed, hit with cars, women who were literally starving so they could get away from their partners. When I was at high school there were several girls who were 14 (I left school at 14 so can’t talk about older age groups) who were in sexual relationships with teachers, who were in their 20s and 30s. Some got pregnant – I remember one who moved in with the teacher, and some of the older women I knew being very approving that he’d decided to take care of her. This was in the early 1990s.

This does not seem to have changed.

What has changed is that I don’t know them anymore.

When I went to university, I felt I’d moved into a completely different world. My female friends were bright, motivated and fascinated by their fields of study. They did well, as did the males. It was gendered, for sure, engineering for instance was almost entirely male. But many of the other sciences were not, and many of my female friends went on to have very fulfilling careers in many varied fields.

Domestic violence is not solely a ‘class thing’, I guess I want to say that, but it is generously enabled and amplified by it. Social mobility is exactly what it says on the box – mobile. Yes, it is the practical ability to leave a poisonous situation but it’s also the ability to think of oneself in different terms.

Women accept the treatment they believe they deserve.

Ms Higgins features in the IWD video. I’ve known a few women who’ve woken up from black-out drunk sex. What makes Ms Higgins feel indignant about the experience when others don’t? What makes Ms Higgins speak out about it when others haven’t?

Social class is a distal cause. And yes, I realise the main cause is obviously that a male had sex with her when she was too drunk to consent. And so with that in mind, I think I’d like to move away from ruminating on the cultural causes and simply rely on reality – we know this shit when we see it. We should act on it.

Instead of endlessly wringing our hands about respect or the root causes or whatever, let’s just apply the laws that we have. Let’s take it seriously. When someone like Hannah Clarke gives an account of the controlling behaviour of her husband and then leaves him, let’s see that for what it is – one of the most dangerous periods in a woman’s life.

When a teacher starts fucking a 14 year old student, let’s see that for what it is. Let’s actually use the laws that exist.

We know all this shit – endlessly pontificating about the root causes of violence against women is a parlour game. You can see this in the language – see all those documents that talk about ‘gendered violence’, instead of violence against women.

Watch the IWD video if you like. It’s slickly produced and beautifully represents the moneyed classes beautifully. Or, watch this video, in between the Facebook ads for diet products and cute dogs. It’s from 2018, of a woman giving a speech about her dear friend and colleague who was murdered by her partner. Watch all of it. It’s about a million times more compelling than Lucy Turnbull telling you off.

The Battle of Portaloo – Wellington, March 2022.

But first, a note: this may not make sense, as I’m in week two of being Officially Fucked Up with Covid. Let’s begin.

Aotearoa, and Pōneke in particular, are having a bit of a tidy up this morning, following the protests staged on Parliament lawn over the last three weeks. Yesterday I received a link to three streams on twitch.tv, from my brother;

‘Shit is kicking off in Wellington’,

Which indeed, it was. The police, after three weeks of standing, watching, waiting, moved in and removed the protesters, using force. It’s led to the usual angst over who the motivations and group identity of the protesters as everyone seeks to over-analyse a bunch of tired fuckwits setting fire to tents in a howling Wellington gale.

The responses are so predictable, but I’d make a few, highly contestable observations. The final accounting will be delineated according to good old fashioned racism. It will, in the final shake down, be the fault of Māori. Not entirely, of course – there’ll be some finger pointing at foreign influences, but the crass violent stuff? Guess who gets lumped with that?

Let’s be clear, I live in a racist country. No-one in their right mind would ever argue that Australia was not deeply, irretrievably racist. It is. But so is New Zealand. New Zealanders just do a better job of telling themselves they’re not.

Indeed, the subsequent chatter is part of a well attended project to upholster the protest in high minded, socially responsible, kindness. Standby for statements like, “we need to hold space for…” and “we need to consider what it means to be….”.

And of course, look closely at how not-racism is framed.

The jeunesse doree consume media laced with Māori words and have gaily incorporated a kind of New Age spiritualism into their everyday lives, expressed, quite naturally, through the idiom of hard core neoliberalism. Large corporate entities ‘lead the way’ to ‘radically include’ Māori ‘ways of doing and being’ into their commercial operations.

The New York Times expressing its horror at New Zealand’s lack of manners this morning

Here the New York Times wrings its pale, sclerotic hands over the creep of what they see as American-style dissent. Everyone sees their own motivations, prejudices and experiences reflected in these things. It’s a kind of Rorschach test.

A quick story; When I was about 8, I went to stay with my grandparents. My cousin lived with them – shifting kids around was pretty common in my family. So, me and my cousin, (who, I should mention, was the coolest person ever because she was almost three years older than me and extremely sophisticated by virtue of saucily wearing the F out of her white bubblegum jeans) were sitting in the back seat of grandma’s car, outside the 3 Guys, in Papatoetoe. We had the back windows cranked down, and were horsing around in the back seat. It was warm, sunny and a bit rainy, in that foetid Auckland kind of way, and this Pākehā guy walks up right beside the car. My cousin looks out the window at him, and he takes one look at her, and pale-face me, sitting on the other side of the back seat and says, “Fuckin Hori” and spits at her. He missed, and she just wound up the window and went back to giggling about whatever we were doing.

This wasn’t a million years ago, it was the late 1980s. And it was very, very common. If you didn’t see this shit growing up, you weren’t looking very hard. Or, it didn’t affect you and you could ignore it.

Let’s leave that there and just observe the predictability of the narrative around the end of the protest. I think I could predict the end date of the protest because about one week earlier hand-wringing Pākehā twitter started to say shit like this;

“I’m not at the protest but I’ve noticed that the white hippies/yoga mums/middle class women are leaving because the whole thing is getting too brown for them”.

And then, the absolute nail in the ‘send in the headkickers’ coffin – “Poor Māori are turning up because they’ve been brainwashed into doing the bidding of a protest movement they don’t know much about. It is mobilising their grievances for the purposes of the nasty middle class yoga mums”.

These ideas are so common – the idea that this is all the fault of white middle class NZ, who’re committed to their hobby politics (anti vaccination/wellness bullshit) right up until the point that things get more serious, at which point, they manipulate silly “brown” people to do their bidding, while they retire back to their bench-top oat grinders.

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve heard triumphant social media claims about, ‘the guys at XX petrol station gave us our tank for free!’. Guess who gets free petrol?

And then, we get the Māori public-servant, professional cheerleaders too – anguished over their cousins and friends making cocks out of themselves, looking like ignorant rural bumpkins.

Of course, there’s a kernel of truth to all of these ideas, but the reality is a lot messier, and it’s very hard for me to not notice the overwhelming drive or purpose of these narratives – Māori are violent, and the violent end of the protest was about them.

Now I’m seeing bullshit about Māori ‘warriorness’ – which absolutely confirms it.

In the last few days the argument centred on whether Māori were unwitting dupes, or ‘warriors’ pushing their own sovereignty issues. It doesn’t matter either way, because the point of these arguments is to make the idea that the responsibility for the violent and extreme end of the protest lies with Māori. This becomes the underlying, unquestioned part of the narrative.

Here’s a slightly different take that might act as a prophylactic in the coming days;

The anti-mandate protest was kicked off by a loose coalition of wellness ‘yoga mums’, paranoid sovereign citizen delusionists, ordinary, privileged, mostly Pākehā people unaccustomed to being told what to do by the government and those who ‘just want it to go back to 2019’. I said mostly Pākehā for the simple reason that Māori have got a pretty clear idea about what would happen if a bunch of them turned up and started camping on Parliament’s front lawn. As the camp became more established, and the police held off, other groups, those who would usually feel less able to march around in front of the police swearing at them, turned up.

Then, two weeks in, the inevitable happened – the early, un-vaccinated protestors had the finger of predictability inserted up them. A pandemic of “radiation sickness” (Covid) spread through the camp and hollowed out the initial group, leaving those later arrivals in their place. Emboldened, some of the Māori protesters called for others to bolster the ranks, much to the relief of the politicians, who’d been waiting until the crowd was sufficiently brown enough to send in the head kickers.

And now, a small but influential group of self aggrandising Māori carpet-baggers will seek to talk up the role of Māori in the protest, as a means to feathering their own nest, while the rest of Pākehā NZ get on with telling themselves that the protest was nice except for the crazies in the beginning and that the messy ending was mostly a (brown) ‘gang thing’. It also conveniently obviates the need to call this a political protest. It’s most politics, it’s just crazy people and Māori.

People often look to make sophisticated explanations about events like this, partly, I think, because they like to feel like they’re the authors of them -whoever tells you what is going on has some power over it all, a high fungible form of capital in the era of late-capitalism.

But the reality is a lot more banal. The holy trinity of race, sex and class is usually a perfectly serviceable explanation, if only people care to answer one question – are we racist?