On Institutions

A collection of four short essays by N. Wi Neera (Ngāti Toarangatira | Kāi Tahu)Composer, Soldier, and Wellington City Councillor. First published in October 2023 for volume four of The Commonweal.

Ko Tainui te waka,

Ko Whitireia te maunga

Ko Raukawakawa te moana

Ko Takapūwāhia rāua ko Hongoeka ngā marae,

Ko Ngāti Toarangatira, rātou ko Kāi Tahu, ko Ngāri Pāhauwera, ko Ngāpuhi ngā iwi.

Ko Te Rauparaha te tupuna ariki,

Ko Nīkau Wi Neera e tuhituhi ana.

Author’s note: take a shot every time the word ‘institutions’ is written.

I. Longevity

As a young, political man, I too experienced the inevitable phase which has recently become the stuff of parody across social media - I was fascinated by the Roman Republic. I cursed Caesar, wept for hapless Brutus, and above all lamented the fate of noble Cicero. Cicero, as the authors I read painted him, was a believer in institutions. A man who loved the law and despised the legislators. Indeed, it could be said Cicero’s perfect government was one totally absent of politicians - composed purely of institutions, with the law, not men, to govern.

What Cicero realised, unlike many men of his era, was that institutional vitality is the most consistent guarantor of society. Strong institutions have customarily allowed a given constitutional arrangement, for better or worse, to persist. The most notable examples in Cicero’s day, his own people aside, were the Spartans, who famously refused to adopt the heady new democracy of their neighbours in favour of living by their own constitutional arrangements, and thereby remained a pariah for three-quarters of a millennium.

However, as Xenophon writes in the Lacedaemonion Politeia, the longevity of the Spartans was due to fanatical adherence to their constitutional arrangements, and the stasis eventually led to their downfall. Even after the decline of their society to a small, backwater town, the Spartans still lived under the same monarchs, governing councils, and laws as their ancestors. They endured, unreformed, until they were subsumed by the great Northern superpower of Macedon, and later by the Roman-aligned Achaean League.

Moderation in the tempo of reform has, in the past, ensured the perpetuation of a given arrangement past the natural lifespan which its circumstances and traditional institutions may grant it. However, the original institutions must be designed to accept reform within certain parameters, and there exists a natural speed-limit from the reformic stress which a society is able to accept before the point is reached whereat collapse or revolution must follow.

At present, I argue, we are at terrible risk of meeting the fate of the Spartans. Our parameters of liberal capitalism allow for aesthetic reforms, whilst preserving a blind adherence to the paradigm of our institutions as we are laid low by our own existential threat; our changing climate and collapsing biosphere. At our current trajectory, we may well end up a small, backwater species persisting on a dead Earth with a MMP government elected every three years.

II. Whakapapa

What makes our institutions of the 21st century so remarkably resilient, yet so inadequate?

The historian E. Hobsbawm argues that the greatest anomaly of the 20th century was the ultimate victory of liberal democracy. Laymen and intellectuals were more or less in agreement, following the utter collapse of the international order after the defeat of the Central Powers, that the grand experiment of democracy as a phenomenon was in final retreat^[1]. Certainly nobody serious would have predicted it to remain, in almost original fashion, as the predominant mode of government of planet Earth in the year 2023.

The reasons for liberal democracy’s triumph are complex, but Hobsbawm identifies the key tipping point as emerging between the years of 1925 and 1950. Whereas after the First World War, social and economic reforms were implemented by a fearful, declining ruling class in the face of growing revolutionary sentiment across Europe, the alignment of ideologically diverse powers in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s represented the genesis of a war for defence of democracy rather than advancement of the revolution. This planted the seed for ‘democracy of a new kind’, which arose after the Second World War as the primary opposition to international communism. In all three scenarios, we can see the institution of stable liberal democracy act as the choice defensive tool against an externally destabilising force. This is truly its greatest strength, and to us in the present day, its greatest weakness.

Liberal democratic institutions are ostensibly created for effective allocation of resources and the prevention of power’s tendency to concentrate^[2]. Unlike the communist experiments of the 20th century, they are not explicitly created to deliver ubiquity or respond decisively to existential threats. Just as the democracies of the day prevaricated and dallied when faced with the global threat of Nazi Germany, we hesitate before the global threat of climate change. Without the climate equivalent of a Pearl Harbour event, our current institutions are, by design, poorly equipped to respond decisively. Further, with our institutions languishing under the domination of global capital, global problems which require pure co-operation beyond ‘market forces’ are seriously disadvantaged.

The novelty of the 21st-century iteration of these hallowed institutions is, of course, the internet and mass media - along with the refinement of existing global finance and military-industrial structures. Military and economic hegemony have existed since the dawn of the first nation-states, but I argue that true cultural and ideological hegemony was only made possible in the unique decade of the 1990s. It is incredible that the 1990s are routinely considered a ‘nothing’ decade, when they contained perhaps the most consequential transformations of liberal institutions which enabled ultimate Western ideological dominance. The fall of the Soviet Union in ‘91, public access to the World-Wide Web in ‘94, and the years leading to the passing of the US Patriot Act in ‘01, along with a myriad other factors, collectively birthed our current iteration of liberal democracy.

The ability to utterly normalise the paradigm of democratic institutions worldwide, short of a few states in Africa and Asia - though even these states routinely appeal to the aesthetic legitimacy of the global order with titles such as ‘Democratic Republic’ - is enabled in the main by the hijacking of the base sentiment of popular sovereignty promulgated via mass media. The greatest ideological challenge to the US-aligned empire is the People’s Republic of China and the remnant communist states of Latin America and Southeast Asia, which are collectively the victims in the popular consciousness of the greatest ideological operation in mankind’s history.

Locally, as a satellite state of this empire, we in this country are constrained by the institutions of Europe, the culture-war paradigms of North America, and the economics of global capital. Despite Aotearoa’s unique potential to manifest a fusion of European and Polynesian models of government, we remain amongst the most ideologically, culturally, and ontologically repressed societies in the world. To put it contextually, a contemporary idea such as indigenous land sovereignty is so alien to our various paradigms that our institutions cannot even parse it except aesthetically; board seats for iwi members and consultation on regional plans are active self-defence by the institutions to safeguard its continuity and hegemony. It is telling indeed that one of our few locally unique debates, namely around ‘co-governance’, is fought on these terms, rather than on the terms of explicit indigenous sovereignty. This routine defanging is not limited to social issues; class war is reduced to taxation, climate revolution is reduced to a Green New Deal and a $2bn green energy fund in partnership with Blackrock. This is a defining mechanism which underpins our institutions, which will ultimately lead to disaster if the system continues to operate under acceptable levels of stress and thus endures.

Liberal democratic institutions are therefore incredibly robust, defensible, and utterly incapable of addressing existential threats to mankind - because such non-ideological threats do not imperil the institution itself. The continued existence of this system seems to indicate that at least somebody must benefit, even in the face of total extinction. One hears an august old statesman ask “Cui bono?” Naturally, this leads us to the real question: who’s in charge here?

III. Nobody

When I was younger, I assumed evil men were responsible for the world’s woes, personally, intentionally, and discretely responsible. 20th-century socialist doctrine personalises the bourgeois. This is useful, because it is easier to motivate a proletarian population to action through a personified class enemy. However, in the face of the crises of the postmodern age, the personalisation of the bourgeois has been sublimated into a characteristic of our ideological paradigm, as it is easier to direct outrage towards a Bezos, or a Musk, or a Zuckerberg, than it is to recognise them as several heads of a hydra whose hearts beats far deeper down, deep within  our institutions.

The true beneficiaries of the ideological dominance of our institutions are the institutions themselves. They have become undead, zombie institutions which could comfortably perpetuate and reproduce indefinitely with nobody at the helm. The bourgeoisie will die with us as the biophysical capacity of Papatūānuku is reached and the ecosphere fails. By contrast, so long as a single person casts a vote, the institution endures. It is a collective illusion which we will willingly hallucinate until the end of days, if it comes to it.

Upon my election to the Wellington City Council I was immediately shocked by how little power my colleagues and I seemed, on the surface, to wield. We frequently vote in line with officer advice, who in turn are interpreting the information provided by their staff, who are in turn acting within the confines of their job descriptions for a wage. Process suffuses and dictates everything, and prudent governance often means doing less rather than more. Our influence is largely extra-institutional, or at least outside of the confines of process; politics happens by the watercooler rather than in the debating chamber. It is my sincere belief that the dominance of process and the strength of our institutions would enable both central and local governments to operate for decades with nobody at the helm.

Were one to describe this state of affairs to matua Cicero he might weep with joy and envy. However, the perfect stasis of our institutions proves itself time and again totally unable to respond with due agility to the crises of class and climate war, as we produce plan after plan and run our city by a failed neoliberal corporate model and hope for different results. We have even undertaken novel measures to enhance our democratic processes, including my Māori ward seat, and initiatives such as Citizens’ Assemblies, yet we are still immensely constrained by legislation, which is inherited from a parliament constrained by a judiciary, constrained by precedent, constrained by history itself. In politics as a day job, even the most radical of us can only amend motions, influence policy where we can, and hope that our endless, edentated abstractions of revolutionary praxis will one day add up to revolution.

What, then, can be done outside of the so-called halls of power to bring our institutions into a form which provides ubiquity for all, or else bring society to general revolution sufficient to create ground-up institutions which both are fit for the future and deliver on the promise of the past?

IV. What?

The defining ideological paradigm of the 20th century, when compared to the postmodern age, was the dialectic. This manifested as a preoccupation with binarism, which led to the socialist doctrine of pro forma revolution, and only revolution, as the driver of meaningful social change. Whilst this holds true, the world of zombie institutions necessitates a certain level of nuance, and in an institutional environment defined by stasis at every level, action becomes the single currency of revolution, over any notions of ideological purity. Outcome is the single metric by which action can be measured.

Proponents of liberal democracy frequently espouse its universal enfranchisement as a virtue. However, its universality makes it superlatively selfish. Universal institutions absolutely cannot accommodate alternate modes of power, and the existence of dual power to such a degree as to afford communities true sovereignty would exceed the institutional parameters to an extremely stressful extent. The latent threat of unions, co-operatives, and mutual aid networks has been seen to extract heavy concessions out of liberal democratic institutions in the past, and when pushed far enough (for example, to the extent of workers’ soviets) can be inspissated to topple entire regimes. These examples also have the benefit of being known to society, despite the enduring psychological operations to memory-hole them as a relic of the past.

Dual power, to have any chance of growing to a vehicle to shake and stress the clockwork, zombie institutions of their opposition, must satisfy three conditions if it is to be revolutionary.

Firstly, it must be sovereign. It must consist solely of mutual aid relations, and be conducted without the influence of, or support to, a ‘legitimate’ institutional power. Unions of the 21st century can stumble here, as dues are occasionally used (up to NZD$90,000 in a certain case this year) for political donations - mostly to the Labour Party. There is no shame in taking funding for community projects, but the executive core of any revolutionary organisation must be totally independent.

Secondly, it must be action-oriented. For power to be effective, it must present a meaningful alternative to the institutions it is challenging. This is arguably the easiest step; community food gardens, local healthcare, electricity generation, community defence, and the like are all accessible ways to subvert institutional supremacy. These actions are material, and less overtly political, and are more likely to mobilise people than purely theoretical or educational movements alone. 

Thirdly, it must be sustainable. If there is one thing revolutionaries must learn from the opposition, it is that organisational robustness allows a movement longevity and resilience. Dual power must be prepared to resist infiltration, astroturfing, plants, psyops, and every tool the machine has at its disposal to undermine and destroy it - yet succeed by virtue alone. It must be distributed, to some degree, and able to operate in the event of the loss of key personalities or premises.

With all these criteria met, dual power becomes an institution unto itself, playing on and enhancing local culture and neighbourhood, and offering an immediately viable alternative to dependence on the institutions and power structures which maintain the oppressive contradictions of capitalism.The only remedy to institutional stasis is revolutionary immediacy. Localism is the ultimate rejection of Capital’s institutional hegemony, and it is often said that the most revolutionary thing that any one of us can do, today, is to meet our neighbours.

Nā reira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa i pānui mai.

(V. Epilogue)

Though it is easy to bemoan the personalisation of the bourgeoisie, and identify institutions as the greatest opposition to revolution, it is still useful to recognise that the shape of our society allows the Prime Minister to have more in common, in terms of class interests, with a Bunnings employee than with the true global finance carteliers of the world. It becomes us to recognise the personal expression of the tendencies of Capital, though myopic and short-lived they may be. Therefore, the following coda, as a complement to the scope of the previous essays, is appended.

The following was originally published online in July of 2023 and written in Vienna, Austria.

At certain magnitudes of personal wealth, national identity effectively ceases to exist. Capital has flowed freely around the world for centuries, and as every year passes, national boundaries mean less and less for the movement of wealth, data, and persons. Individuals doing business on a global scale can move freely across borders, live anywhere for functionally unlimited amounts of time, and speak a single language in familiar corporate or luxury environment designed to cater to them, regardless of the host country. Every hotel, every forum, every conference, every Davos meeting looks the same and serves the same monolithic class aesthetic of the Untethered, the true International. These are citizens only of global Capital, and they have no allegiance to either the country of their birth or their host tax haven at any given time. A passport is meaningless except insofar as it facilitates access to Capital.

The elite are disconnected from the peculiarities of national cultures, because those peculiarities are a fundamentally proletarian experience. Speaking local languages, cooking local kai, managing local laws, even driving on a particular side of the road are practices undertaken on their behalf. All defining performance elements of culture come from the particular proletarian experience of a place. Patriotism and cultural identity belong to working people. It is an opiate, a blinder to the nature of the world at higher magnitudes of wealth, yet also a source of strength.

The horrific, mundane reality of Capital can only be countered by internationalism, not globalism. Working people of all lands have more in common with each other than with the elites who share their passport. International struggle and localism is how culture is won and preserved. Get to know your local dairy owner, meet your neighbours, thank your bus driver, go to your marae, and spend time with your old people, and defy the capitalist to whom these mean nothing more than an increment on a bottom line.

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^[1]Hobsbawm, E. J. (1995). Chapter 4: The Fall of Liberalism. In Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991. Abacus.

^[2] Modlik, H. (2023, May). Strengthening Democracy through Open Government. Transparency International New Zealand. Wellington; Victoria University of Wellington.