Counterfutures

Germinating Resistance: Organising in the New Zealand Rental Sector

Robert Whitaker — 2022-08-21

Launching in 2015, Renters United (RU) has sought to build a movement to push back against Iandlordism in New Zealand and secure healthy and affordable homes for all renters. RU organisers Robert Whitaker and Geordie Rogers sit down with Nic Guerrero to discuss the organisational strategy of RU and reflect on what has worked well over the past seven years. They discuss the need to empower renters to speak out, the search for crux issues around which meaningful reform can be built, and, above all, the importance of telling renters’ stories.

Colonial and Anticolonial Credit: The Native Lands Acts and Te Peeke o Aotearoa

Catherine Comyn — 2022-08-21

In the 1860s and 1870s the Native Lands Acts facilitated the colonial appropriation of huge amounts of Māori land. The acts, as is commonly known, were explicitly implemented to destroy the ‘communism’ identified as foundational to Māori society, and sought to achieve this by ‘individualising’ Māori land title. However, in addition to this movement of individualisation, the acts fundamentally enacted and relied upon the financialisation of Māori lands, their transformation into securities against debts. This paper examines the colonial weaponisation of credit as a means of division and seizure and contrasts this with the anticolonial deployment of credit by Māori in the form of Te Peeke o Aotearoa. Founded in 1885, and situated within a broader politics of unification and the defence of land, Te Peeke o Aotearoa was an exclusively Māori alternative to prevailing colonial financial institutions that not only reasserted Māori economic autonomy but threatened to weaken the fabric of the colonial project.

The Habilitation Centre Ideal: Carceral Contradictions and Alternatives to Prison in Aotearoa New Zealand

Liam Martin — 2022-08-21

This article examines the potential role of ‘habilitation centres’ in the Labour government’s attempts to reduce the prison population, starting with the recent recommendations of an expert panel who called for the ‘gradual replacement of most prisons with community-based habilitation centres’. I trace this idea to the Roper report in the 1980s, showing how its emergence in Aotearoa New Zealand was shaped by problematic models of community corrections developed in the United States, with the habilitation centre articulated as a political compromise at a time of neoliberalisation and growing calls for Māori self-determination in criminal justice. Drawing on insights from Foucault and the broader field of carceral studies—though leaving the theory largely in the background—I spotlight the contradictions of the habilitation centre and other prison alternatives that rely on creating new sites of carceral confinement in the community. The analysis points to the dangers of a national network of habilitation centres being developed to extend, rather than replace, the existing system of hyper-incarceration.

On Tristan Tzara and Steve Bannon

Bryce Galloway — 2022-08-21

In 2021, the Suter Gallery (Nelson) mounted a group show of Aotearoa artists whose work embraces absurdity. One of Bryce Galloway’s offerings to the show was the catalogue essay, reworked and re-presented here. The essay investigates whether the well-worn proposition that absurd art finds greater currency in times of socio-political duress still holds in the face of today’s accelerating online narratives and divergent internet realities.

Black Study and Communist Affect

Anisha Sankar — 2022-08-21

All Incomplete is a continuation of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s dialogue in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. This earlier book has cult status in what is identifiably Aotearoa’s under-commons (or what Arcia Tecun calls in Te Moana Nui a Kiwa ‘the undercurrents’). With All Incomplete, Harney and Moten move beyond the university, creating a lexicon for fugitive thought—fugitive being the opposite of settling. Their propositions for thought and sociality are important to think with and through, especially in a settler-colonial context like Aotearoa New Zealand. I follow their notion of ‘black study’ as it develops through All Incomplete, arguing that black study constitutes a mode of what Jackie Wang calls ‘communist affect’—a mode of being-for-others that reveals a kind of ‘already-existing communism’ in the present. I then look to how some of the ideas introduced by The Undercommons have been taken up in Aotearoa and consider the contributions that All Incomplete could make to our own context.

Online Graphics Can Change Conversations About Racism in Aotearoa

Jenny Rankine — 2022-08-21

Racism is endemic in many online spaces, promoted by the structures of social networking sites (SNS), and few initiatives have attempted to counter everyday racism online. This article describes how tauiwi groups collaboratively developed anti-racist graphics, which unpredictably became memes that stimulated online and offline conversations about anti-racism and decolonisation. I outline the difficulties in developing such graphics, suggest where to post them, and argue that the strategies used to develop anti-racist graphics could be useful in combatting other social inequities. The article draws on a larger PhD study in which I interviewed online news editors, analysed racism on SNS, developed and posted anti-racist graphics on two Facebook genres, and analysed the results. It envisions a future where online users commonly see witty images that challenge structural inequities.

The Revenge Economy and the Problem of Unpayability

Faisal Al-Asaad — 2022-08-21

In Revenge Capitalism Max Haiven draws on a rich set of historical scholarship and theoretical traditions to formulate the concept of the revenge economy and outline its characteristics. Haiven also examines modes of social, political, and economic organisation that run counter to the revenge economy and explores the avenging imaginaries that underlie them. After highlighting some of the traditions that inform Haiven’s thesis, I focus on his engagement with different theories and arrangements of debt. I suggest that a distinguishing aspect of Haiven’s thesis is the way he reads debt as a fundamental principle of social and economic life. At the same time, I put this reading into conversation with our own context in Aotearoa New Zealand and suggest that a serious engagement with the institution and philosophy of utu is indispensable for both transforming debt relations as well as abolishing revenge capitalism.

Wealth, Money, Power, and Class in Aotearoa New Zealand

Geoff Bertram — 2022-08-21

Review of Max Rashbrooke, Too Much Money: How Wealth Disparities Are Unbalancing Aotearoa New Zealand. A masterful overview of the available statistical information on the size of wealth holdings and their degree of concentration in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Utility, Futility, Counter-utility

Tim Corballis — 2022-08-21

Review of Neil Vallelly, Futilitarianism: Neoliberalism and the Production of Uselessness. Futility as both dominant structure of feeling and fulcrum for political action in the twilight of neoliberalism.