Rev Left Radio - Polynesian Politics: Māori Indigenous History & Marxist Prison Abolition

Episode Date: September 9, 2018

Emmy Rakete, a Māori communist and organizer from New Zealand, joins Breht to discuss Māori indigenous history in Polynesia, Marxism-Leninism, Prison Abolition, Colonialism, Climate Change, culture, and much more!  Learn about and support her prison abolitionist organization PAPA here: https://papa.org.nz/publications/ Read the free PDF version of the book "Abolitionist Demands" that she contributed to and recommended in the interview here: https://papa.org.nz/assets/bca4acc165/Abolitionist-Demands.pdf Check out her podcast "Shit Hot People's Politburo" here: https://peoplespolitburo.com/blog/ Follow Emmy on twitter @cannibality Outro Music: They Come Marching by Ria Hall  Intro music by Captain Planet. You can find and support his wonderful music here:  https://djcaptainplanet.bandcamp.com Please Rate and Review our show on iTunes or whatever podcast app you use. This dramatically helps increase our reach. Support the Show and get access to bonus content on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio Follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, the Omaha GDC, Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center.  

Hello everyone, welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host and Comrade Red O'Shea, and today we have on Emmy from New Zealand to talk about Maori indigenous politics as well as Marxist prison abolition. Before we get into the interview, though, I do want to make an announcement about a future announcement. A big announcement is coming this month about Revolutionary Left Radio. It's going to include a radical restructuring of, the Patreon account as well as the show itself it's going to include a rev left book club it's going to include a plethora of spin-off podcasts and i'll also add in that announcement a piece

where i sort of deconstruct an anti-socialist argument made by joe rogan so it'll be like a big announcement plus a response to a really shitty anti-marxist argument by joe rogan because he has a huge platform one of the biggest podcasts in the world and so when he says shit about Marxism and socialism. It's our duty to sort of respond to that. So just be aware it's going to be in late September at the end of this month and it's going to be really, really big. And so we're excited about this. A lot of weird shit has happened in my life that's allowing for this to occur. So I just want to kind of give everybody a heads up that at the end of this month, when something pops up in your feed, that's like 20 minutes long and it's just entitled

Big Announcement plus response to Joe Rogan to click on that and listen to. it because it's going to be really detailed and it's going to get out every new thing we're trying to do with the expansion of this platform and giving other comrades a platform that they otherwise might not have had so we're really excited about that stay on the lookout for that and as always if you enjoy what we do here at revolutionary left radio you want to support the show you want to get access to some bonus content please go visit us at patreon.com forward slash rev left radio it really means a lot to us for every person that puts their hard money towards us to support the show and support what we're doing here. We love you all.

Thank you so much. That's said. Let's go ahead and dive into this interview. My name is Emily Rakisi. I'm a Māori woman from the Napaohi tribe that's up north in New Zealand, but I'm currently living in Auckland City, which is kind of our largest city. I'm a member of an organization called People Against Prisons, Altieroa, where a Marxist, prison abolitionist organization who have been running since 2015 kind of trying to build opposition to the new zealand government's really really brutal and racist criminal justice system yeah definitely and i'm i'm really excited to have you on this is a topic that you know i still i have a lot to learn on i think a lot of people in the u.s and europe don't necessarily

pay as much attention to places like australia new zealand as they should um for whatever a reason. So I'm excited to have this conversation. I did want to give a shout out up top to Kate, who goes by Red Star Lesbian on Twitter and Allison from our gender abolition, Michelle Foucault and Marxism-Leninism episode, because it was after that episode that Kate and Allison recommended you to come on to talk about this issue. So this entire episode has kind of spawned off that episode. And I always love to do that. So I'm really glad we're able to make this work. Yeah, it's great. I've been on Internet Friends with Allison for really long time and Kate is actually another member of Peppa, people get presents at all

Tierra. So I appreciate getting the hook up from you too. Thank you. Oh, wonderful. So Kate actually lives in New Zealand? Yeah, in Wellington. Awesome. I didn't even know that. Well, cool. Shout out to them. Go follow them on Twitter. All right, so let's just go ahead and dive in. There's a lot to cover. And as I was mentioning earlier, for a lot of radicals around the world, when it comes to issues in New Zealand, including the political history and struggle of the indigenous Maori people, there's a lot of ignorance. And And I'm no exception to this either. I know virtually nothing about these issues before agreeing to do the show, so I'm excited

to learn along with my listeners on this one. Let's go ahead and just start with the basics. Who are the Maori people? And can you talk about some of the history regarding colonialism, racism, land theft, and the indigenous rights struggles in New Zealand leading up to the 1960s? Yeah, I definitely can. So, Māori are Polynesian people. We came down through the Pacific from kind of Southeast Asia.

about a thousand years ago, a little longer, a little shorter, depending on who you ask. But we spent a long time navigating the Pacific Ocean, moving from island to island. And so there's kind of a whole constellation of related cultures throughout the Pacific, including all the way up to America's own little Pacific imperialized paradise, Hawaii. So Hawaiian people are really close cousins of mine, actually. So, Māori people live in New Zealand. We've been here for about a thousand years. That's kind of us.

You know, we didn't have metalworking. We lived in collectivist village units. We have really, really, really complicated tribal structures that I'm going to try not to go into because God knows how long it will take me to explain all of that. And we lived, you know, a pretty happy, comfortable life in these islands for quite a long time. and then the British showed up. And, you know, as usual in world history, things started to go quite badly from there. So the first actual major points of British colonisation in this country was through the New Zealand Company, which was a private corporation operating out of London.

And their purpose was to move some of the surface population of kind of just post-industrial revolution, Britain, move those surface proletarians out of England and into somewhere where they could be doing something kind of useful. And so they started kind of speculating on the value of land in this country and selling portions of it to European settlers. This turned into a big problem because almost none of that land was actually available for them to come here and live on.

You know, Māori people were living on it. So we ended up having a lot of conflict when people who claimed that they had title to land that Māori were living. on and using, and many people who are saying, well, we don't mind sharing, but you can't ask us to just leave. And that blew up into a series of really, really brutal, vicious guerrilla wars across the entire country from about 1845, when my ancestors first started, you know, shooting priests in the head all the way through until probably even around World War I was when these

conflicts had really started to settle down. But that was a good kind of 60, 70 year period where it was pretty much barely a restrained open war between British and Māori. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, that totally echoes what obviously happened on the American continent and what's happened to people all over the world who have been victimized by colonialism and then imperialism. Yeah. So in the paper you sent me entitled The Evolution of Contemporary Maori Protest, the author of that paper traces the development of the Maori political struggle from the 60s up until today? What were some of the movements in the 60s and 70s that Maori activists engaged in? And what were some of its most significant victories? The context of the kind of Māori cultural nationalist struggles from the 60s

through to about the 80s. One of the most important things that you need to understand, to understand those is that by the time of about World War I, Māori had pretty much been driven completely outside of European civilization in New Zealand. all of the major cities and all of the industrial areas were almost entirely populated by Europeans, and Māori had been driven into the less habitable kind of fringes of the least fertile and productive land. But around the 1960s, the Māori population had recovered to the point that it was no longer possible to sustain us kind of just on those very marginal areas. And so you saw this movement of urbanization, where Māori would move from their traditional kind of tribal territories,

into the main industrial centres of the country to look for work. And at the same time, you have this wave of proletarianization, where Māori in that period were moving away from being subsistence farmers and into being part of an urban proletariat. And so out of that movement, you have this huge wave of social dysfunction among Māori, because all of the traditional ties that bound us together as communities were all being cut by the necessary economic forces that were done. driving us away from our communities, away from our families, away from our tribes,

and into really densely populated urban industrial production. So one of the main movements that emerged out of, you know, out of this crisis was called Yatamatoa, and Nhatamatoa, which means something like the young warriors, but Nhatamatoa were a multicultural nationalist organization who fought a lot of really vibrant struggles around things like language. So the Māori language had been banned in schools and largely stomped out, but they fought really long and hard to try to have funding made available for Māori language preschools, which would teach children the Māori language from, you know, the very earliest ages.

They also fought a lot of stuff around the disposition of land. So the New Zealand government signed an agreement. with Māori called Tittiti or Waitangi, or the Treaty of Waitangi, which basically said that they weren't going to steal all of our ship. And then they immediately stole all of our shit. And so a large part of Nātamur's politics was around redress of treaty grievances. And that led to the creation of something called the Waitangi Tribunal, which is a body of the New Zealand government, which is made up of, there's like a board of the tribunal. And their job is to look at grievances that are brought to them by Māori. saying, you know, this farm used to belong to my tribe, but now it's a farm or it's an airport or it's, you know, a section of highway. And then they'll work out how to redress that grievance. And so that was something that was created through the work of Nata Matamatoa. And that was kind of one of, I think, the crowning, the dual achievements of modern language education for preschoolers and the creation of the Waitangi Tribunal to redress, it was.

first only new treaty grievances, but within a very short period of time, also historical treaty grievances. Those are the two kind of crowning achievements of the multicultural nationalist struggle period. Yeah, it's really interesting. When you talk about language, you know, language is really a linchpin of culture, and it's no mistake that in the context of colonialism or other forms of domination, to snuff out of culture, one of the main things that, you know, colonizers tend to go after throughout history is language. So you say that that was a successful fight in the 60s? What is the state of language today in that context? So it really, really varies. So I've got almost no Māori. I can do my pronunciation and I can

roll my ars, as you've all probably heard, but I'm not very proficient in the language. And that's the case for most Māori, particularly urban Māori. There's kind of an urban rural divide still in a community between Māori who have lived in cities for a long time. I'm like fourth generation urban so we did it even before the 60s we like like out of here went straight to the city but um for people who are living more rural who live on their like traditional um territories with their um like full travel connections in place it's a lot easier to have the language um so it's it's very very mixed and it's very spotty um but it's still one of the really amazing things is seeing um you know there are just the other day i was with my partner looking with

were on holiday in her traditional areas and we met we were in the park it's like a geothermal park that's hot springs and stuff and there was this little giggle of like preschoolers who are with one of the teachers walking through the park and they were all talking to each other in maudi and it was the cutest little thing they were like little black things yeah that's beautiful um so like here you know here in the u.s we have we have reservations which you know has a long history of just brutality and desperation and lots of corruption, et cetera. Do you have reservation systems in New Zealand? Or how does that kind of work?

No. So I have a quite limited understanding of how reservations function, but no, we don't have anything like reservations. The New Zealand government basically claims total sovereignty over the entire country. And so there's not really any kind of governmental power sharing going on. there is a degree of economic power sharing going on, but we'll probably talk about that in a minute. What we do have instead is that there will be different regions for different tribes where there will tend to be infrastructure in place, which helps support the people who live in that area. But it's much less like government and much more like NGOs, if that makes any sense.

Yeah, absolutely. In those rural places, you've talked about it being sort of different than inside the city. are elements of the collectivist culture and as you said language are some of those things like broadly more or sustained in rural areas than they are in city areas how deep does that go yeah it's interesting right so when I think about this stuff I often look at the work of Louis Altersair and the stuff that he says about the base superstructure relation and how the different you know the ideological components of societies that are rhyme according to capitalism usually but not necessarily operate in lockstep

with the material base of that society. So, you know, it's still capitalism out there. You can't just drive away from capitalism in New Zealand, no matter how small the island might seem. But there is still, I think, a degree of superstructural or, like, ideological commitment to traditional Māori collectivist ideological values. The kind of centre of any community

is a structure called the Marai. It's, there'll be like a ground at the center of a community or of a village. And that ground will be ranged with a fence and it'll have like a large carved meeting house at the back of it, which is kind of the main meeting place for everyone of a given community. There'll also be something called Farikai, which is like a kitchen for preparing food. And to this day, even at my university where I work, the Marai and the Farikai former kind of

center for communities to come and meet and make decisions collectively, to share food and resources collectively for education, for teaching. So I've taught a few classes out of the Marai, which is a really cool experience. So, yeah, there's definitely like a degree

of, you know, continuation of these ideas and beliefs, which is really, really important part, I think, of building consciousness and of, you know, making the struggle for decoanization. and for communism happen, but it's a cinder, you know, we need a flame, and it's not there yet, we have to build it. Well, I really enjoy it, and I think it's illuminating to employ the base superstructure

analysis when explaining some of that. I find that, you know, incredibly interesting. But sort of moving on, especially talking as we were a little bit ago about the movements in the 60s and 70s, and these movements, you know, as in all movements for liberation or, you know, any form of sort of fighting against, exploitation or oppression, contradictions and ideological splits or polarizations begin to take root and develop. Can you talk about the differences in the Maori liberation movement, especially with regards to the influence and development of cultural nationalism,

class divisions, and the rise of even an elite inside Maori? Yeah, exactly. So I definitely can. So one of the really interesting things when you look at the political economy of Māori society is that, you know, if we look at Ingalls and we look at origin of the family where he's describing, you know, ancient societies. They aren't all class societies. So there's a stage which he calls in German, Ur-Communismus, which an English translator has unfortunately translated into English for us as primitive communism, which obviously has some really negative racist connotations, and I try to avoid using the term. But Māori society, before the imposition of colonialism in this country,

was primitive communist. There was no separation between people who own the means of production and the people who work the means of production. And there was no separation between the people who produced goods and the people who used those goods. So, you know, pretty much, you know, the ideal state, which we are trying to build a way of establishing, you know, in the future. What this meant was that when Māori liberation struggle started here in the 60s and 70s, there wasn't any firm critique of class within Māori society going on in those organizations and in those struggles, because there had never been class divisions in our society before. There was no bourgeoisie and proletariat

in the year 1600 in New Zealand. So one of the major failings, I would say, of the Māori protest movement, so the 1960s, 70s and 80s is that Marxism was always very, very marginal to those. there were times when the Māori protest movements would work with Marxists and with trade unionists, but it was primarily alliance based on, you know, based on like a recognition that on the part of unionists and Marxists, that Māori liberation is a good thing, and on the part of Māori that these people want to help us. It was never based on any idea that there might be an internal relation between Māori liberation and the United States. of capitalism. And so this meant that modern liberation struggles never really critiqued the possibility of a Māori ruling class. And so unfortunately that is

basically what was created through the action of these movements. So once the Waitangi Tribunal, which I've spoken about, was formed, part of its job was to make financial redress for violations of the Treaty of Waitangi by the New Zealand government. This meant that when tribes received a large treaty settlement they would create a corporation called a runanga which was used to administer those funds and it essentially created a big tribal corporate ruling class within Māori society who have access to huge amounts of wealth who have access to huge amounts of resources who are responsible for running these big companies that are operated at least nominally for the interests of Māori or of their tribe as a whole.

And that tends not to be the case. They tend to functionally just be a brown bourgeoisie. So one of the major examples of this is Seelord, which is a huge fisheries company in New Zealand. So Seelord is, if I remember correctly, 50% owned by a confederation of different tribes. and that means that the profits from sea lord are meant to be redistributed to those tribes but I'm from one of those tribes and I never got in a seafood check

so there's a huge amount of money and it's all going somewhere but you know as a proletarian Mali person it's not going to me and it's got to be going to somebody I ran the math on some statistics that the Ministry of Maudi development put out a few years ago and it works out that every Maldi

person, if we look at the size of the entire so-called Māori economy of the total amount of capital and resources that are in Māori hands, every single Māori person, adults, children, everyone has $110,000 worth of capital. Now I am worth far less than $110,000 and I am fairly middle class as many people go. So there is an enormous, enormous Māori economy and almost no Māori people are taking part of it. Almost all of us are completely destitute. So there is a tiny, extremely rich class of business people in our society, and that was created, I would argue, largely through the failures of the multi-proteist movement to take into account class, which is pretty terrible. Yeah, I mean, that's horrifying, it's tragic, but it's also kind of fascinating because, you know, as you were talking, it made me think of this problem that I've wrestled with as a Marxist and I've talked to indigenous folks about. And, you know, a lot of times just the idea of trying to introduce Marxism into indigenous struggles or Marxist analysis, a lot of times, and, you know, for fair reason, indigenous folks, especially here in the U.S. may be resistant or skeptical of what they consider to be, you know, European ideologies, you know, kind of coming from white European countries.

And sometimes it clashes with some of the cultural beliefs and commitments that indigenous cultures tend to have. So as a Marxist and as an indigenous person, what are some of the unique challenges that you've seen trying to introduce Marxist class analysis into, you know, communities of indigenous folks? Yeah, it's a difficult question, right? I think that this notion of Marxism being a European concept is a really interesting one. First of all, just because if we look at the big five of Marxism, Marx was Jewish. Engels was white. Lenin was Kalmuk and Jewish, although he didn't know it. Stalin was Georgian and Georgians definitely weren't considered European or like white at the time

and Mao was Chinese. So it's pretty ridiculous to say that Marxism is an intrinsically European concept or an intrinsically colonizing concept. Even just if we, you know, tally up like good racial scientists and look at the ethnicity of some of the most important Marxists, Europeans have been fairly marginal to Marxism as a whole, I would argue. But even if that weren't the case, even if all of the most important Marxists, of all time had been white guys called John. It wouldn't matter because it's right, like it's correct. And some things are just actually true, right? If you live because you go to work and sell your labour to somebody, then you're part of the working class. If you live because

you're a vampiric parasite using your control of capital to blackmail everybody in the planet into being a slave, then you're part of the bourgeoisie. That's just a reflection of the objective material fact of what the world is like. It doesn't matter who points that out. So it is difficult bringing this class analysis into places where it hasn't been used before but it's such an important part of building politics and that can actually

fix the world, right? If we just take this kind of purely culturalist, purely identitarian take on which ideas can work and where then we're kind of stuck only using ideas from places where the people who have said them came from but

the economy of this country didn't come from this country like capitalism isn't from here. So why would our response to capitalism have to be from here? I think it's really important that we can look at ways to learn from our friends and comrades all around the world, you know, including Marx. Yeah, no, absolutely. I completely 110% agree with that. And, you know, as we all know, many anti-colonial, anti-imperialist movements throughout the world in the last century or two have been Marxist in nature, lots of oppressed people of all nationalities, have picked up the weapons of Marxism and used it as a tool of liberation. You know, and everything you

said was very important. I just sometimes struggle with how to, you know, kind of introduce that analysis to cultures that might not totally, you know, view it as something that, you know, they can relate to or whatever. It's an ongoing problem. I know nobody has all the answers, but I just find it to be a fascinating issue. Yeah, for sure. So let's go ahead and move on, because we're going to get to Marxism more in a little bit here, especially when it comes to your prison abolition work. But last question on sort of this section is, what are some of the most pronounced and immediate struggles for the Maori people currently? And what path forward do you think would be the most beneficial and effective for liberation in the New Zealand context today?

So I'm actually not going to not be able to talk about Marxism in this part. Yeah, that's fine. So some of the major, major problems in New Zealand society at the moment are housing. So we're in the grip of, I don't know what it's like in the States. We're in the grip of a massive housing crisis here. sure um the cost of a home in most cities has doubled if not quadrupled since the 2008 financial crisis um and that means that you know everyone but particularly maori people and particularly migrants from the pacific so samoan and soongan people um but we are at you know really really grave risk of living in really substandard housing um this is you know a semi-tropical island so it's damp and it can get really cold at night. If you're living in a damp, cold house, it's going to fill up with

mould. And if you get black mold in your house and you breathe that stuff in, you're going to get rheumatic fever. And so about 15 children will die every year of, you know, their lungs rot, their hearts collapse and they die because their housing is substandard, right? This is a really major problem. And more kids than that get thousands of people get sick every year from diseases that are caused because they live in, you know, terrible housing that isn't maintained, isn't insulated, and just isn't fit for human beings to live inside of. But it's not profitable for landlords to, you know, update their housing. It's not profitable for them to build houses that are safe to live in.

So, you know, in some places you have 18 people living in four bedroom homes. This isn't a problem that can be fixed through a cultural struggle. This is a thing that you can fix by getting people to learn their language. all that stuff is really important and good, and I support all of it. I mean, I'm trying to learn the Māori language right now. But most of the things that are killing Māori children, most of the things that are cutting our lives short, all of those are directly political-economic issues

that can only be resolved through class struggle. Housing, I think, is one of the most clear examples of that. Because, you know, I don't know about you, but I've got two hands, right? I can nail a board together. I can saw a plank. I can pour concrete. any working person is capable of being part of building housing we are all capable of building as much housing as all of us need

the only reason that doesn't get done is because the capitalist class benefits from only building as much housing as is profitable for them and then blackmailing us into paying them to let us live in it so we're not we're not going to fix this until we destroy the bourgeoisie yeah absolutely and you know when you're talking about the issues of housing in new Zealand, you know, sometimes people will think, oh, you know, the U.S. and New Zealand, surely they have to be different, but we have to understand the universal aspects of capitalism, because everything that you described about substandard housing, about landlordism, I mean,

it's happening here in the U.S. We have a housing complex in Florida called Stony Brook, where, you know, children largely poor and children of color are being exposed to high levels of black mold, being hospitalized, you know, absentee landlords. We have gentrification problem in big cities here in the U.S., which forces people to substandard housing and pushes people out of the communities that they're used to living and growing in. So that capitalist vampiric onslaught happens on every corner of the globe.

And that's why Marxism or just revolutionary politics generally is international. And the proletariat needs to understand the international dimensions of this problem because it's not going to be solved just in the confines of national struggles in and of themselves. Yeah, exactly. If the poor are dying here and the poor are dying there and the poor are dying there and exact same way then this is not a local problem right this is something that we can only fix and we stand up together hold each other up and shoot somebody i'm not sure if we've got to shoot someone

absolutely for sure i do want to before we move on though because you know talking about issues in in new zealand i i come to think of of climate change you know indigenous folks in a lot of lower sea level areas around the world coastal regions they're they're going to be the first to pay the price of climate change even though it was fueled largely by western societies but largely by the bourgeoisie inside of those societies. So they benefit from, you know, oil extraction and pollution while the poorest and least resourced face the brunt of it. So what's the climate crisis like for New Zealand specifically? Well, I live at the top of the hill. So I've got to say it's nothing. It's fine. It's not a big problem. Yeah. So the fossil fuel extraction industry

is really, really trying to sink its teeth into the country. One of the, major things that we have is a high likelihood of really, really large off-sea underwater oil deposits. And so, going back to Treaty of Waitangi stuff, the New Zealand government in 2000 and, I think 2003, I was quite young at the time, so I can't quite remember, but around the early 2000s, the New Zealand government declared that it was the owner of all underwater land in the country. The home was that land was already held by different tribes under native title. And so the government just extinguished those titles and performed the largest, the single largest land confiscation in New Zealand's history.

Wow. And the reason that they did that was because that land could then be optioned off to different fossil fuel companies looking to be able to, you know, set up extractive industries here, build refineries, you know, all of that shit that's going to drown all of us in the next 30 years. So yeah, it's a pretty major problem. The other, I think, major problem is that New Zealand is like a miniature imperialist power in the Pacific. So there are already Pacific islands, atolls and stuff, which were already barely above sea level. That's just how they form. And, you know, now they are

literally being covered in seawater. There are places where the water table is full of saltwater now, and you just, nothing grows on these islands anymore. And when people have come to New Zealand and tried to say, you know, I'm a refugee, my country is literally no longer habitable for human life, the New Zealand government says no, because, you know, it's a miniature imperialist power in the Pacific. It's trying to maintain its economic position, and it can't do that if it's having to care for people whose, you know, livelihoods have been absolutely fucking destroyed by this extractive, you know, completely short-sighted, you know, process of capitalist energy production.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you know, similar things are trying to be happening in the, in the Philippines where the U.S. is working with the Duterte regime to take over. indigenous lands and the Maoists are teaming up with the indigenous folks to fight back. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's a beautiful thing in the Philippines. It's a long protracted struggle, of course, but there is some hope there, and I'd like to see that, you know, be replicated throughout. And also not even just the rising sea levels and, you know, salt water ruining plant life on smaller islands, but also ocean acidification, ocean pollution, the death of coral reefs,

the death of wildlife in the oceans itself, which I'm sure, and correct me if I'm wrong, you know, historically has been a major cultural poundstone for the Mori people, all Pacific Islanders, et cetera. So the problem is very, very complex, and it's going to be devastating not only to those regions currently, but also to the cultures who have depended on, you know, that natural balance for so long. Yeah, absolutely. Like, if I look at my family tree far back enough, eventually, you know, the ocean is back there. Like, I'm not seen it from that guy. Right. You know, a lot of coastal trees and stuff are like my great-great-grandfather's nephew.

So, like, these aren't kind of just abstract relationships for more people. They are, like, a really important part of how we understand ourselves and orient ourselves in relation to the world. And we can't just let all of these things be poisoned and destroyed and torn up and paved over and turned into a McDonald's, just because it will be really profitable for some guy in a suit. exactly exactly the fight the fight rages on and I hope um you know shows like this and every other multimedia project podcasts like your own start to you know really increase the consciousness of people and gear people up for this fight because it's on our doorstep and it's it's a global fight and this this century is the crossroads for the human species how we how we fight back and

and how well we do this century is going to dictate whether there's human life on this planet in 200 300 years or not and so the you know the stakes could not be higher. God. I don't want to get too dark there, but. But let's go ahead and move over to Marxist prison abolition, because this is another huge thing that you do, and I wanted

to make sure that we address. So in present day, as I was studying for this interview, I saw in one of the papers you sent me the fact that in present day, New Zealand, Maori people make up more than half of all prisoners, despite making up only 15% of the general population in

New Zealand. I mean, that mirrors in jarringly accurate ways, the racial compositions of the U.S. prison system as well. Can you talk about the history between the Maori people and how the prison system has always been used as a sort of a bludgeon to oppress and lock up indigenous people in New Zealand? Oh, yeah, man.

Let's move from the really depressing subject of climate change to the really, really happy subject of racist prisons. Yeah, yeah. So prisons, the first prisons that were built in this country were built by Europeans for Europeans. they were like military brigues and stuff like that but really early on in the conflict between Māori and Pākeha between Māori and Europeans

what was found was that there were just a lot of us around we weren't dying off fast enough and that meant that we could form pretty effective communities to resist them so one of the major incidents during this period of conflict was in 18, early 1880s at a village that was called Parihaka at the time it had about 5% of all Māori people in the country living in this village so it was like quite a major settlement and it was led by a guy called Tohukakahu and Tefi

Orongamai. There were like two chiefs and leaders but it was a pan-tribal settlement so it wasn't just for any given tribe it was for all Māori people who believed in these two they're kind of like Christian mystics they're like prophets what they said was that we have to resist land expropriation we've got to make sure that all this land isn't confiscated. But the problem was that the land the village was built on had already been earmarked by the New Zealand government for confiscation as part of a way of offsetting the costs of the war against Waikato

that had been fought in the decades before this conflict. So there was already set up for a big scrap between the two of them. But Tifiti Oromai and Tsohakaahu were pacifists. They didn't believe in violence. And as much as I respect for that, I definitely don't share. But, Parihaka set about a campaign of peaceful, non-violent resistance to land expropriation. So when the New Zealand government land surveyors would come through and start making maps of the area so they could figure out which parts were going to be sold to who,

as they went and laid down stones to help set up their maps, men from Parihaka would follow behind them and pick up the stones and take them home with them. As they were building roads to help them get landscaping equipment out, that they could tear down the farms and start building, you know, colonial homesteads, men and young boys from Parihaka would go out and build fences across the roads. And when European farmers would start to set up farms out there, the men from Parihaka would go out with plows, and they would plow up the fields behind them

and start doing their own planting there, because it was still their land. And so the New Zealand government recognized that the situation wasn't going to last, right? either the people of Plihaka were going to snap and start shooting people, in which case they would have another war on their hands or it would be impossible it would just end up being impossible to actually settle anyone in this land. And the New Zealand government

really, really needed the money. So they sent in a huge, huge force of volunteer white supremacist paramilitaries and the precursors to the New Zealand police who were called the armed constabulary force and they sent out a huge, huge army of these guys out to Parihaka and they arrested about 600 men from Parihaka

and threw them all in prison and then they raised the village to the ground, sexually assaulted the women and children, stole everything, all the stuff that rampaging colonial armies have always done and it will always do to like we put them in the ground. But when you look at the minutes from the parliamentary discussions of the time you find out the really, really interesting thing So John Brice, who was the Minister of Native Affairs at the time, said,

this bill, this Māori prisoner bill, is a complete farce. If we put these guys in front of a judge, they wouldn't even get 24 hours in prison, if that much. There's just no way that our laws can justify keeping these men in prison. They literally haven't broken the law. So when I introduce this bill, what I'm proposing is that you just let me do whatever I fucking want with these guys. And I will throw them in prison for as long as I need to to make sure that Parihaka can't put up an effective resistance to the expropriation of their land. And that's exactly what they did.

So all of these men were sent to penal slavery in the South Island. They had to build, like, roads and infrastructure for the New Zealand government, and they weren't released for years and years. And a lot of them are alleged to have died, chained up in, like, literal caves. So what this little conflict, I think, really shows is that the prison system in this country has never had a lot in particular to do with, crime or with deviance or with punishment or with making sure that people don't go on to commit crimes. What prisons do in this country is mediate the conflict between oppressor and oppressed,

between colonized and colonized, between exploiter and exploited. The men in Parihaka hadn't actually broken the law and they were still sent in their hundreds into prisons because prisons don't have much to do with maintaining the law. They have everything to do with stopping resistance. It's a way to hold people down while you slap them around. I mean, absolutely. And here in the U.S. where we have more people in prisons than any other country in the world, both in per capita terms as well as in overall terms, I mean, the parallels are striking. You did mention white supremacy, and clearly that's a huge force and just the entire thrust of colonialism and imperialism.

But it did spark a question in my mind. What is the fascist presence in New Zealand like? Do you have to deal with fascist groups like we do here in the U.S. and in Europe? So they've all got really excited by alt-right shit on the internet. And so we've got a bunch of, like, bumbling geeks. But the organized fascist movement in New Zealand has never been particularly large. It is starting to grow. There's always been a really committed white nationalist presence in the city of Christchurch, which is why it's a place I avoid.

But it's small, but it's definitely growing. And it's growing in response to, like, internet. fascism, which I think is really interesting and concerning. We recently had Lauren Southern and Peter Molinue, who are two big alt-right kind of internet YouTube personalities, come to the country to do, as part of the international speaking tour. But we got the event shut down and they didn't get to speak. Nice. Well, yeah, I mean, keep up the good work. I mean, God damn, it's on the re-rise everywhere in the world, it seems, and we're all in our local communities, you know, doing our best to beat it back down into the ground. So to continue the good work there.

but I do want to talk about other good work you're doing and kind of circle back around to prison abolition. What organization did you help found in 2015 to address prison issues in New Zealand? How has that organizing evolved over the last few years? And what successes have you had thus far? So in 2015, it was announced by the Auckland Gay Pride Association that uniformed cops and uniform prison officers were going to be marching in our city's pride parade. I know, it was sickening. And so I was part of a reading group at the time.

And so I really kind of knew some other prison abolitionists. And I only really know gay people. So, you know, they're all gay prison abolitionists. And we decided, well, let's like do something because this really, really sucks. And so we pinched up a banner saying no pride in prisons and went to the parade ground. And we, me and two others ran out onto like the route of the parade right in front of this huge, huge column of cops. There was like a guy on horseback. There was like motorcycles. There was like a marching band in kilts with like bagpipes and everything. And we were holding up this banner

saying no pride in prisons trying to say like, hey, you know, there are trans women being held in men's prisons right now. There are, you know, young gay people getting beaten up by the cops every fucking day. And like, fuck that. Fuck the police. Fuck prisons. And as a result of being out there on a parade route, one of the security offices for the Pride Parade dragged me off the road and threw me onto the sidewalk and I like smashed my arm, like broke it into pieces. Wow. It's been like six months in a cast. Jesus.

It sucks. But it led to the formation of an organization called No Pride in Prisons. And so at the time, we kind of thought of ourselves as like a collective that was working to do prison abolitionist organizing. And we had some really, really early organizing successes. So there was a young trans woman who was being held in a men's prison because she'd stabbed a guy who was trying to sexually assault her. And we managed to get her moved out of the men's prison into a women's prison where she had a great time.

We also started on other forms of prison efficacy, like writing to people. We started a pen pal network so that people who are inside could communicate with people who are on the outside. But we started to find that decision making as kind of a loose collective was really, really difficult. I don't know if you've had like similar problems or what we found was that because there was no structure saying whose responsibility it was to make a decision or not make a decision people kind of there was like an ad hocracy right there was a tyranny of whoever happened to be around and the people who cared more about this you know people who had the free time who could put in the hours to do stuff tended to be the ones who for better or for worse took on that

decision-making power and you know I was I was one of the these people. And I really love and I care about my comrades and I want them to be an important part of what we do. But because I had the time and I, you know, I was available, I ended up really, really dominating the decision making of the organization. Not because I have a Stalinist drive, although maybe I've been accused of that, I don't know, but because of this thing that Joe Freeman, an early feminist writer, calls the tyranny of structurallessness, which is that if you don't have a structure, you do have a structure. You have an informal structure. And informal structures are even worse than formal structures because you can't address them. If there's no written down

rulebook saying, oh, Emmy makes every decision. But functionally, oh, well, Emmy makes every decision, then you can't even say, well, hang on, I don't like that this is the case, because you can just kind of go, well, that's not the rules, so it's fine. So we decided that we needed a formal structure to make sure that we were a democratic organization. that we were an organization that took into account the ideas and the views of our mass membership and to make sure that we were, you know, functioning as effectively as we possibly could. So we're a democratic centralist organization. We have local branches.

We also have a national organizing committee, which kind of oversees coordinating stuff between branches and for doing national legal campaigns. And it's been really, really, really good. Yeah. So, I mean, I know you touched on a lot of the answers to this next question in that last one, but maybe we can even go a little further because I think it's an important. important part of this. I mean, oftentimes when when one sees prison abolitionist movements, especially here in the U.S., you know, that they tend to be disproportionately spearheaded

by anarchists and they do, and they do great work. I have close comrades here in Omaha that spearhead, you know, prison work and they come from the anarchist background. And I love them. Yeah, yeah, for sure. But you definitely take an explicitly Marxist approach, which you alluded to in the last answer, to prison abolition, including, as you said, the employment of Democratic Centralist Party structure and the employment of historical materialist analysis. Can you just maybe talk a little bit more about this in detail and kind of talk about some of the differences or some of the strengths that you've realized in a Marxist approach to this problem? Yeah, for sure. So all the stuff that I'm going to say isn't just because, you know,

I'm a state and revolution thumping Marxist-Leninist who hates anarchists. Right. I am a state and revolution-thumping Marxist leninist, but all of the stuff is stuff that I learned through doing organizing as an anarchist and as someone who believed the anarchist and anarchist organizing methods were the best way to achieve our goals. And, you know, as someone who found out that it didn't work and it was really ineffective. So that problem with the tyranny of structurallessness was a major, major problem of getting stuff done, especially when you're doing ideological work. So if you're writing a pamphlet explaining why prisons are bad,

there are a lot of reasons that people might think prisons are bad, right? So cultural nationalists think that prisons are bad because we put Māori people in them. anarchists think that prisons are bad because they're a form of hierarchical control and as Marxists we think that prisons are bad because they reinforce and mediate the class conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat and that takes the form of hierarchical control of people that takes the form of the very very disproportionate incarceration of Māori but at its core at its base the prison is a political economic institution that maintains the class society that we live in. And that distinction, I think, is a really, really important one.

Because, you know, so we showed off also as a queer and trans organization, right, with a specific interest in the treatment of queer and trans prisoners. And those are still really important struggles. This is still essential struggles that we can't just forget about. But most people in prison are not queer or trans. So we can't just focus on these particularities, right? We have to attack the root of the problem. That's, you know, famously, that's what radical means, right? it's to go straight to the root of a problem and tear it out from its base. And unless we have an understanding of the material political economic function of prisons, we aren't tearing it out of its base, right?

We're attacking really important stuff, but we can't solve the fundamental problem, which is that prisons exist to mediate class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. By hiding away things that show that there are massive social dysfunctions caused by the ordinary operation of capitalism, by hiding away people whose social dysfunctions show that capitalism can't create societies that people treat each other nicely. All that stuff, I think, is really important to a Marxist analysis of prisons. But if we're Marxists, that also has implications for how we organize, right?

There's a theory of power that comes with Marxism. Lawyers are not the motor of history according to Marx, right? Class struggle is the motor of history according to Marx. The people are the engine of class struggle, are the engine of history. And so that means that we can't be an organization of advocates or lobbyists, right? Because advocates and lobbyists don't change the world. The people change the world when we rise up as a collective and fight back against our oppressors. And so while other organizations might, for instance, just be a group of maybe 10 or 20 people

who all think that prisons are bad and they're totally right and who are really committed to doing organizing and that's totally admirable, unless you have a mass base to your organization, unless you mobilize the base of society, right? Working class people as a whole, mobilize them in order to directly attack the social structures that oppress them. You can't fix those problems. All you can do is do one-on-one negotiations with the bourgeoisie

as though the entire working class was a hostage in a bank robbery and you were the cops that were negotiate with the bank robbers, right? I'm not interested in one-on-one negotiations with the enemy. I'm interested in defeating the enemy. And to do that, you need to have, you know, you need a revolutionary mobilization of the entire working class to do so. Absolutely. Well, incredibly well said.

I'm very sympathetic to that argument, as a Marxist myself. For those who are interested, we do have a previous prison abolition episode where I interviewed two anarchists, and they talk from that perspective. So if you want to learn more about that perspective, go ahead to our back catalog and check that out. Before we let you go, though, Emmy, is there anything else you want to say before we let you go? Anything else, any other points you want to make, anything we didn't cover? in this interview so far?

Just that there's a really, really good book that I helped to write and edit called The Abolitionist Demands, which is a set of 50 demands that we as an organization sat down and wrote out that is kind of like our roadmap to how we can achieve prison abolition in New Zealand. So it's a document written specifically about our national context, but I think it will be really, if your listeners are really interested in knowing. either more about us or if they want some ideas on how they can start to build a prison abolitionist organization, then the abolitionist demands might be a good place for them to start

looking. I'll also give like a sly plug if that's okay. Yeah, of course. So I'm on another podcast called Shit Hot People's Pollock Bureau, which is a Marxist take on New Zealand politics. So if you want to hear more of me complaining about rich brown people, if you want to hear more of my they'll death threats towards rich people or you know if you just thought that I had a funny voice and you want to make fun of me some more then you can find us on sound cloud i think we're on i'm not a tech person but that's where i'm told all of our stuff is available definitely well you're you're fucking awesome emmy keep up the amazing work thank you so much for coming on we will link to all of that in the show notes and and hopefully people go check you out we'll also when we post

on twitter link to your twitter account so people can go follow you learn more reach out to you if they have any more questions, et cetera. Again, thank you so much for coming on. And I know it's Sunday morning where you are, and it's Saturday evening where I am. I think it's the first Rev. Left interview we've ever done from two different days across space and time. So that's pretty interesting.

Yeah, no, I really, really appreciate it. I had a great time. Absolutely. Solidarity from Omaha. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Fire ammunition Let me ask you a question

So what is it you seek To cover the earth below Taken from beneath my feet You see I have the answer Oh time will tell My descendants won't suffer Blow up a part to head If it's one

You wanna press on me I'll be ready If it's war, you won't press for me, I'll be ready, I'll be ready, ready, ready. And still they're marching, two by two, I'm strong, say come out pounding to breach their way into this place I'm standing, be fortified, don't judge your tongue face value, cause we Got more inside You see I'm clever Fault this thing through

Got it down on paper Come here, let me show you If it's war You wanna press for me I'll be ready I'll be ready If it's war You wanna press for me

I'll be ready I'll be ready Freddy, ready, ready. Don't underestimate what you don't know. That's your first mistake. One, two, three, go. See, I will rise Obama amidst the fear. I will stand my ground.

You will bring me down around. If it's war you wanna press for me, I'll be ready, I'll be ready. If it's war, you wanna press for me, I'll be ready, I'll be ready. Freddy, Freddy, Freddy. Thank you.