A review of Tina Ngata’s Kia Mau: Resisting Colonial Fictions
Tina Ngata of Ngāti Porou has recently published Kia Mau: Resisting Colonial Fictions. At the launch of this book on 28th November 2019, Tina Ngata described how she had started with a blog called The Non-plastic Māori, exploring “the experience of living for a year without purchasing any new plastics”, which quickly developed to explore […]
Vale Dick Scott
Obituaries for Dick Scott, who died on New Year’s Day, have emphasized his importance as a figure changing how New Zealand history was written about, taught, and imagined, especially by Pākehā. He deserves those accolades, but we should remember too that his early, pioneering histories were written as part of a project to change the […]
A new decade begins in crisis
Trump’s assassination of Iran’s top general Qasem Soleimani by drone strike at a civilian airport, has caused an uproar and may lead to a regional war, with Iran striking back at US Military bases in the region. Every detail that comes out in this crisis is more shocking than the last. But focusing on the […]
A looming world recession?
At the ISO’s annual conference over the weekend 7-8 December a session on the international situation was led off with this introduction by Martin Gregory. An assessment of capitalism internationally, both in its political domination and the state of its economy, is essential for forming a view of what might lie ahead for us in […]
Land is the Price: colonialism then…and now
Throughout history capitalists has searched the world for profitable exploitation. To create a paradise for capital, lands were sought, claimed and the people that lived there forced off their communal property. Those commoners then became the pool of labour that the industrial revolution was built on. From the enclosing of the commons in Britain to […]
Ihumātao: a Struggle for Justice
The fight for land rights in Aotearoa is the essential question for radical social change for both mana whenua and tau iwi. To resolve this question requires challenging some of the most fundamental aspects of capitalism in New Zealand – the rule of private property. Property held purely for profit, for factories, for land farming […]
Support the Climate Strikes!
There’s a climate crisis, and Labour and the Greens are failing to act. The climate crisis is upon us, but on some more than others, as more frequent, more extreme weather events take place. In March this year Cyclone Idai affected three million people in Mozambique, Madagascar, Zimbabwe and Malawi, including over 1,000 dead, over […]
Chernobyl
Chernobyl, written by Craig Mazin, dir. Johan Renck. A co-production of HBO and Sky UK. This outstanding TV miniseries covers the accident that occurred in the early hours of 26 April 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine, then part of the USSR. From the confusion in the control room straight after the […]
The Roots of Racism
Racism is not age-old, a trait of humanity, or an outgrowth of any metaphysical ideology. On the scale of human history racism is a recent, modern phenomenon. Its origins can be precisely dated and associated with actual, material, historical developments in human society. The nature of racism has been contingent on actual historical processes. The […]
Racism in New Zealand
The rise of the far-right globally is a frightening development. In the U.S. and Brazil, far-right politicians are the heads of state. Far-right parties have swept to power in Eastern Europe and have gained footholds in Western Europe too, promoting a return to “traditional” family roles, attacks on sexual diversity, antisemitism and islamophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment […]
