Vic Books and the crumbling of the managerial class: A response to Sarah Laing & Reflections on the Freedom Protests

Fergus Stratford reflects on the attitudes of the Wellington urban liberal commentariat with the help of psychoanalyist Jacques Lacan. First published in October 2022.

Having been a reader for many years I can settle upon one conclusion: that the online publication The Spinoff is the media outlet of the urban managerial class. It presents either academic diatribes or identitarian scolding, visually complemented by patronising comics, ostensibly designed to educate the working masses about how to achieve the same sense of guilt and self -loathing which distinguishes the professional managerial classes. These articles and visually corporate comics will almost exclusively be consumed by their similarly “PMC” readership. In general, The Spinoff provides the reader with a model of “left wing”  neoliberal economic and social thought, peppered with identitarian pandering and apparently inspirational tales of how NFTs will result in the economic empowerment of people of colour. As a whole, perhaps 4/5ths of the articles published in The Spinoff are banal – ‘Whatever happened to Drew Neemia’ (a children’s television presenter) or ‘Hear me out: You should cook your lettuce’- occasionally punctuated with insight by writers like Danyl McLauchlan, ironically writing about the very same PMC for whom the website is written, and generating the predictable furore in the meeting chamber of the Central Committee for this peculiar class politics: twitter dot com. In this article I will focus on a piece by  Sarah Laing published June 16th - apparently about the closure of a bookstore, but useful as an exemplar of the politics of contempt that permeate the publication as a whole and the way that ‘left neoliberalism’ relies on significant assumption and deception to maintain a sense of both social order and collective self-perception. 

In ‘Vic Books and the crumbling of an ecosystem’ Laing exhibits the extraordinary discomfort felt by a seemingly significant, or at least very vocal, section of the Wellington bureaucratic caste of office workers, creatives, and others of an insular and usually highly educated white collar section of society. For 23 days in February/March 2022 hundreds of protestors, described in the article as ‘nazis’ and ‘ferals’, descended upon the parliamentary grounds to protest vaccine mandates amongst other perceived crimes and offenses of the Ardern government.  A mixture of anxiety and mocking contempt from the urban (self- described) lanyard-wearing employees spoke to a thinly disguised class hatred towards the protestors - made up of sections of the ‘lumpenproletariat’, unruly and vulgar representatives of the petite bourgeoisie, and a number of those recently unemployed due to the aforementioned vaccine mandates. The bubble of central Wellington had been penetrated, it seems, by the great unwashed.

Since the advent of the coronavirus many public servants (well outside the realm of healthcare) had come to elevate themselves as literal heroes of the pandemic who kept the country running smoothly. Moreover, as part of the enormous bureaucracy of the modern nation-state, their ability to stay home and send emails proved their moral righteousness and ability to hoard virtue merely by ‘staying home’. The shock of ‘ferals’ invading the hallowed ground of the managerial classes, parliament itself (and especially its pristine and manicured front lawn), represented a breakdown of the appearance of order, the symbolic order as described in Lacanian terminology. For Lacan the order of which society is constructed is merely made up of the symbols which constitute our perception of that order in our daily lives e.g. language, laws, and customs. These symbols exist to constrict desire, the deepest primal wants of the Id - the primal an instinctual aspect of our personalities. It is through our recognition of the other (difference) that we understand ourselves as subjects (become self- conscious). The other, then, by being part of our understanding of ourselves as a subject imposes a series of social norms in the form of language, customs, laws, which we accept. This becomes the symbolic order of a given society.

Artists interpretation of an urban Wellingtonian Spinoff reader, in the style of The Spinoff. Cartoon by Julia Sharp, 2022.

Laing’s article is merely one example of the inability of many in the bureaucratic managerial classes in Wellington to cope  with a break in the symbolic order within which they conduct and make sense of their lives and occupations. Moreover, these occupations operated to maintain and strengthen that symbolic order. ‘I hadn’t appreciated the quiet order my fellow lanyard wearers kept’, says Laing, who  goes so far as to compare herself and her peers to a vanguard defending against the politically misaligned and undesirable, lamenting this sudden invasion by people representing the politically loathsome, her colleague exclaiming that “I just want my city back” (emphasis mine). The message is clear - Central Wellington is a sacrosanct playground for the ‘chattering classes’, not a place where those protesters deserve to occupy space, their tents a ‘blister’ on the parliament green. The grounds of parliament have been fair game for protest ever since there has been a parliament, and suppression of protest on those grounds is traditionally opposed as a crackdown on political expression. Except this was the wrong type of occupation, aligned to a disagreeable and unpopular cause.

The article contains a theme of discomfort  inflicted upon us by the pandemic, elucidated by talking instead about comfort. ‘We kept working from home. We were scared to catch Covid. We had become comfortable in our Microsoft Teams camaraderie. We paired smart shirts with comfy pants. We drank our own coffee. “It’s so great to be able to get your washing in when it begins to rain,” we agreed. We worried that we were killing our city through neglect. It depended on us, the lanyard wearers. We were an ecosystem. Would they be able to keep on making bánh mì if I failed to buy one each week? Shops emptied, cafes closed. David Jones said it wasn’t renewing its lease’. Such hubristic spiel represents the disconnectedness of the managerial class of Wellington, with anyone else mentioned seeming to exist merely to serve them. Christopher Lasch in his 1997 book Revolt of the Elites predicted the demise of the city as a class- diverse place of living:

“Mere remnants, our cities are increasingly polarised; upper-middle-class professionals, together with the service workers who cater to their needs, maintain a precarious hold on the high-rent districts and barricade themselves against the poverty and crime threatening to engulf them”.

So too Wellington has become a barracks for low paid service workers who solely exist to provide the enlightened classes with gourmet breakfasts and flat whites, barricading themselves within bland architectural monstrosities. Lamenting how Wellington city used to be cool and creative while insisting on the sterilisation of countercultural existence, as every dive-bar music venue is turned into a craft beer swillery, and noise control is called zealously upon anyone who dares to make the city an interesting place to live. Meanwhile rents skyrocket, and while these socially conscious ‘left wing’ neoliberals lament the fact, all their vitriol against boomer landlords usually hides the awkward reality of their own looming inheritance from the very same ‘boomers’.

I found the hesitancy of the office workers to return to their well ventilated and socially distanced workplaces rather funny, as at the time of the protests I was a maintenance worker for a property management company which ran a hotel in central Wellington. This hotel served as public housing, trying to plug the enormous gaps in social housing successive governments have failed to address. It provided the poorest people in the city with a decrepit high rise of damp, leaky rooms at eye watering rental prices, subsidised by the public purse. You couldn’t hide from the reality of decades of neo-liberal status quo in our once impressive state housing sector. Physically impossible to socially distance, due to the extreme weight of the furniture and objects  fellow maintenance staff and I would be required to move around the dilapidated hotel, we were required  to report back to work immediately on the first day of level three in 2021 with loss of a job and income hanging over us if we did not come back. This was the reality for all construction and maintenance workers in New Zealand. Contrast this to the ability to make twee conversations about the comfort/discomfort of working from home, joking along with the encouragement of peers and supervisors alike while entirely shielded from the traumatic real of potentially contracting coronavirus..

Laing concludes her article with a lament for the closing of Vic Books. ‘I returned to work with my paper bag full of books. I would try not to read them too fast. Or maybe I would read them fast and cancel my Netflix, Disney+ and Neon subscriptions to free up some funds. I felt good because I had supported a local business. It needed me. But I was not enough.’ A fairly ordinary cafe cum bookshop closes, and it is given an obituary as though a loved one had tragically died. Of course, it was an outcome of the politically backward protests and not a knock-on effect of covid lockdowns. We can all find politically attractive scapegoats if we are willing to shop around!

As someone who is on the left these protests were not something that I could align with due to the many disagreeable elements involved. Although I felt sympathy for the workers in attendance who were fired from their jobs for choosing not to be vaccinated, it was still an unabashed display of right -wing populist fury. From unashamed and geographically confused Trumpians, to evangelical Zionist millenarians and archetypical Motueka hippies this ramshackle gathering nonetheless represented a coming together of New Zealand’s political outcasts who would never normally be given this much air-time. Bryce Edwards described it correctly as a “festival like atmosphere”. It genuinely was like a festival, though that phrase has stuck in the craw of many of the commentariat. The three times I went there to observe, albeit a festival without working plumbing or quality music acts. The official soundtrack of the convocation being $2 Shop Immortal Technique on the ‘main stage’ in front of the Beehive, where any person who had a loud voice and conviction was handed the microphone and allowed to speak on whatever topic they felt like.

Like Laing, the responses from the commentariat consisted of excessive solicitousness, through to authoritarian fantasising.  Commentators such as Morgan Godfery quickly dropped the ACAB posturing they had latched onto when the global spectacle of the American ‘racial reckoning’ of 2020 hit. Morgan seemed disappointed when writing in the pages of  The Guardian “that there was only a ‘moderate display of State force – unarmed police and parking wardens”. A far cry from his 2020 piece Manafesto, written with his partner Hana Aoake, in which they called for “the immediate overthrow of the government” and to “fry the pigs until they are crispy”. This more ‘radical’ left response seemed to be motivated by the belief that the politics of ‘the street’ belongs to the left. A sense of invasion of ‘our turf’ where we are righteous while they are merely riotous. The protests themselves were hardly a villainous hive of fascists or the beginning of the machtergreifung stage of New Zealand's history, more just a gathering of buffoons and misanthropic social oddities. Political incoherence eventually took hold and the majority abandoned the occupation. When the police did decide to use force it was only the most extreme zealots who remained, further damaging the lawn and even setting fire to a playground, images of the latter being shared as though it was Notre Dame Cathedral. From this commune of eccentrics so far the only thing to arise has been Brian Tamaki’s coalition of fringe political parties Freedoms NZ ,consisting of the New Nation Party, Outdoors and Freedom Party, and Vision NZ. I imagine that like Tamaki's other failed political projects, the Family Party and the Destiny New Zealand party, we will once again see right to far-right populism is about as popular as Tamaki himself - extraordinarily popular with a tiny handful of people, and utterly despised by the vast majority. The prophetic panic from the Op Ed twitterati will once again appear hysterical, but they will have some solace. The lawn at parliament is once again a lush shade of green.