Domination and Submissions

Like innumerable tens of thousands of people, I was in Wellington with my family last year to join the Hīkoi mō te Tiriti. We marched in a vast mass, a crowd so enormous it was impossible to delineate a beginning or an end. When we arrived at parliament after marching for an hour, friends reported that the back of the hīkoi had only just left Waitangi Square. The atmosphere was familiar to those of us who have participated in large demonstrations. Jodi Dean calls it the ‘egalitarian discharge’ produced by the collective subject that emerges when people gather in a crowd – the joy of being part of a greater whole. We became a collective entity, delighting in the way that being gathered together made us into a disindividual whole. As we gathered at parliament, a rupture opened up in the political order. Parliament was not a place, separate from the masses, where politics was contained. We had busted in. We spilled out, over the lawn, over the fences, over adjacent roads and public spaces. A being with thousands and thousands of bodies formed, concentrated at Parliament, and then – slowly, imperceptibly, inevitably – it disintegrated. People’s feet hurt, they had to catch a flight, their son or daughter needed a lift across town – whatever the reasons, the constituent elements of the crowd broke apart and the collective being that we had been dissipated.

This is the lifecycle of every protest, demonstration, or crowd event. This wasn’t a trajectory unique to the Hīkoi mō te Tiriti. We gathered, we roared our approval to a series of speakers who denounced the racist Treaty Principles Bill, and then we left. I have done this dozens of times. I want us to hold this beautiful moment of rupture in our minds, that egalitarian discharge of the mighty crowd, as we think about what is to be done. I was moved to write this article because last week, the deadline for public submissions on the Treaty Principles Bill was scheduled to close. So many of us chose to submit that Parliament’s website went down, and the deadline had to be extended. Sitting in the lounge, typing up what I hoped was a measured submission, I reflected on the two moments – the gap in history that opened up before the power of the masses, and how that gap seemed to have closed as I sat there writing my submission. Power. The power to choose, the power to shape society, to shape the economy, to alter the course of events. Is this what it looks like?

I expect that, given the hundreds of thousands of submissions that the select committee has received, my individual submission will not be read. The words I used will not enter into the conscious mind of any of the MPs who will vote for or against the Treaty Principles Bill. At best, I will be part of a statistical mass of those who voiced their opposition to the bill. I doubt, too, whether there are any persuadable MPs who have yet to truly decide what they think. Like casting a ballot, my submission on the Treaty Principles Bill is a request to power, but not power itself. This is not a critique of Toitū Te Tiriti, the organisers of the hīkoi. They have responded to the situation perfectly. What we need is to be able to go beyond the situation. There is a place where power lies, and there is a process we may participate in, but there is no means by which the masses can actually exercise power. Our access to power is mediated, both by the structure of representative electoral democracy and by the processes and institutions of that state.

As communists, our interests are those of the working class – the vast majority of the population who live, work, and die to enrich the capitalist class. Is this process – this mediated, indirect petition, with no mechanism to control the actions of the state – is this how we can see those interests enacted? I was thinking recently about something the historian Bruce Jesson once said about New Zealand. He called it the ‘hollow society,’ hollow because of the encompassing power of the state and the weakness of civil society. Established through conquest, colonial society does not predate the centralised administration that was necessary to wage war against Māori. The government existed as a commanding unity of repressive and administrative power before any meaningful independent organisations did – clubs, volunteer societies, labour unions, and even the churches were all insignificant compared to the colonial administration. New Zealand has a highly concentrated state apparatus, with few meaningful forms of delegation to lower bodies. Even city councils are largely tasked with executing plans determined by Cabinet. Even New Zealand’s trade union movement was, from the 1930s onwards, too often an appendage of state rule. Prior generations of Marxists decried our often compliant and cooperative trade unions as merely another layer of management.

The hollowness of New Zealand’s society has two consequences for the left. Firstly, it means that power is concentrated almost solely in the Cabinet of the ruling Government. We have few low-hanging fruit where meaningful political power could be grasped. There will be no People’s Republic of Hamilton. Secondly, it means that New Zealanders are ill-equipped to participate in organised struggle. We lack precedent for uprisings, with a few honourable exceptions from which we will need to learn, and we lack the organisational forms required to carry uprisings out. Politics in New Zealand, moreso than in most of the world, is a thing that is done by other people, in line with decisions other people have made. Government policy is not the outcome of any kind of mass participatory process but comes primarily from ministers themselves. Where the state is concerned – where the matter of state power is concerned – the working class does not have its hands on the wheel. The state is a dictatorship of the capitalist class, governed by laws – both formal and informal – that ensure the interests of that class. The electoral process is not capable of ending that dictatorship, and the rich will not consent to a vote for them to cease being rich. We are in a situation which can only be smashed, and live in a society which is unusually bad at smashing things.

While the egalitarian discharge of the crowd opens up a gap in the political order of the ruling class, the crowd itself does not produce politics. Crowds are a precondition of revolutionary social transformations, but crowds do not create new worlds. The egalitarian discharge, that beautiful moment of possibility where we see that we are not merely ourselves but are part of a greater collective, can only be the start of something. Crowds cannot exercise power. A massive demonstration can occur, but if the ruling class is able to redefine it in retrospect, nothing will change. Tsar Nicholas II was able to turn the 1905 Russian Revolution, a crowd event demanding social change, into a mere call for an advisory assembly whose advise he promptly ignored. Crowds dissipate, and their meaning is open to contestation, liable to be stuffed back into the closet by the ruling class or dissipated by liberals who fear open revolt. As the climate crisis unfolds, neoliberal austerity wrecks the living conditions of the masses, and the state leans more and more upon violent repression in order to hold capitalism together, we will need to develop a new orientation towards power. When the masses come together in a crowd, the radical left needs to present them with a plan for the conquest of state power and a new, equal social order.

So, should we all euthanise ourselves? Of course not. While the situation for the radical left is not yet good, there are tendencies here which we can work with. The radical left is stuck in the post-Occupy politics of horizontalism and movementism – we make demands of the state, but have no strategy for actually taking and exercising state power for ourselves. This self-limiting politics has run its time out, and we should be ready to move beyond it. Our organisational energy may be mostly channelled into social movement campaigns – but we’re fucking good at them. We are skilled theorists, organisers, and campaigners. We must unify the advanced elements of the radical left into an organised body which intends not just to criticise the powerful, but to actually take power. This is what Mao Zedong termed the subjective factor of revolution, the human element that is capable of defying circumstance to make impossible things happen. But more than this subjective element, we have the objective element. The capitalists can have cops, courts, prisons, helicopters, guns – none of it matters, because we have the masses. The ruling class relies on making the poor poorer so the rich can get richer. In serving their own interests, they serve ours too. The immiseration of the working class is serving to pull as all into a tighter organic unity, providing a material basis for the politics of solidarity. As the darkness of neoliberal austerity deepens, the rubble of social democracy fades from view and the communist horizon grows clearer.

Dr. Emmy Rākete is press spokesperson for People Against Prisons Aotearoa and lecturer in Criminology at the University of Auckland.

Kyle ChurchJanuary 14, 2025