Counterfutures

The Fictitious University

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Issue 14 (2023) editorial by Neil Vallelly.

Book Forum: Catherine Comyn, The Financial Colonisation of Aotearoa (2022)

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Catherine Comyn’s The Financial Colonisation of Aotearoa (2022) examines the centrality of finance in the colonisation of Aotearoa, from the sale of Māori lands and the first colonial emigration scheme to the founding of settler nationhood and the enforcement of colonial grievances. Moving from the formation of the New Zealand Company in the 1830s to the Hokianga Dog Tax Uprising at the close of the nineteenth century, this book reveals the inextricability of finance and colonialism. In this forum, Arama Rata, Jane Kelsey, and Simon Barber offer their thoughts on Comyn’s book and use it as a prompt to think about the legacies and ongoing ruptures of financial colonisation. The forum concludes with Comyn’s response to their readings of the book.

A Striking History

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Cybèle Locke
Comrade: Bill Andersen—A Communist, Working-Class Life
Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2022, 412pp

It was with a mix of excitement and trepidation that I started reading Cybèle Locke’s Comrade soon after its publication
in late 2022. Excitement because Locke’s reputation as a rigorous historical researcher precedes her and this had been a long, heartfelt project on her part; trepidation because Bill Andersen had been a difficult character to deal with through much of my earlier political life. From my earliest activist days in the Progressive Youth Movement and Resistance Bookshop, through to the Springbok Tour, and then the fraught divisions within the unemployed workers’ movement of the 1980s, Andersen had been on the opposite side of
many of the debates and struggles in which I was involved. As well as ideological factors, his position as a dominant and dominating male union leader was alienating in the extreme to those of us on the feminist and socialist Left looking for new ways to organise, ones which didn’t tug the forelock at all times to older white men.

What is the Far-Right in Aotearoa New Zealand

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Matthew Cunningham, Paul Spoonley, and Marinus La Rooij (eds.)
Histories of Hate: The Radical Right in Aotearoa New Zealand
Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2023, 444pp

In 1988, Stuart Hall published The Hard Road to Renewal, a collection of essays written over the previous decade that attempted to grapple with the nature and significance of ‘Thatcherism’ in Britain. The Thatcherist neoliberal project, Hall argued, attempted to reconfigure the common sense of the people. The aim of the neoliberal project was to dismantle social democracy and the post-war welfare state and construct a new modernity characterised by free-market enterprise, imbued with conservative values of tradition,
family, and nation.

Constitutional Transformation in Chile: Mapping the Horizon of Struggle

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Camila Vergara, interviewed by Neil Vallelly.

Adoptee Activism

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In this article, we, three adoptee scholars, share collectively our experiences of adoption while engaging in activism that contests adoption practices. We apply autoethnographic and reflexive strategies to unpack our shared conversation in order to foreground the plight of adoptees and offer insight into adoption and the importance of the current law reform in Aotearoa New Zealand. We draw on a model of adoptee consciousness to frame the complexity of our ‘lived experience’ and activism. In doing this we outline some of
the challenges we face as adoptees because adoption, as a human-rights injustice, is largely misunderstood, overlooked, or ignored. To begin, however, it is necessary to outline the history of closed stranger adoption in Aotearoa New Zealand with the purpose of providing context.

The Political Theology of Covid Governance

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A popular view of contemporary New Zealand politics is that it is devoid of ‘religious’ dynamics, but the government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic showed that religious ideals, cosmological paradigms, doctrinal discourses, and ritual practices continue to shape political processes. This article analyses themes of transcendence and the sacred in the government’s handling of the Covid pandemic, themes that became fundamental to the daily management of the pandemic and its various effects. Drawing on scholarship on political theology, this article explores ideas of solidarity, sacrifice, sovereignty, and the iconic to facilitate a better understanding of the contestations over governance during a time of crisis.

Confronting Fascism

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How did socialists in interwar Europe interpret fascism as it was evolving in the period? Taking a broad sociology of knowledge approach, this article examines the significant variety and complexity of socialist interpretations of fascism, but also the ways in which organisational interests, competitive intersocialist relations, and situational forces shaped and constrained these analyses. Furthermore, it explores the ways in which socialist defeats and the detachment of intellectuals from socialist organisations produced creative ruptures in socialist knowledge about fascism. The vigour, diversity, and richness of the knowledge on fascism produced by socialists in the interwar period can be of significant contemporary value to the Left as it faces an expanding, enigmatic far-right.