I have intended for some time to write this piece, to formalize ideas which have swirled in the æther since I started my first clumsy attempts at writing for a public audience. Some have been abandoned, others changed in form or character. None are exactly the same as they were, principally for having done my best to read widely of the political, historical, and social literature of this country and others. It is that former focus, to know the place in which I now reside, that has changed so much and yet so little. Of course, naturally, there has been much from beyond these fragile islands that have impacted upon how I conceive the world. But it is the distinction of having landed where I am, to have become, colloquially, a Kiwi rather than an Aussie (or by fate been born in some other place at some other time), that molds how I have come to approach the world.

It is these circumstances, of birth and place, which cannot but shape our political analyses and aspirations. At least, that is, in terms of what we might have the capacity to influence by our own efforts. Combined, as our might could be, with grander forces, and that calculation becomes upended. But we have no way to set those forces in motion ourselves, no way to ensure that such a force could be summoned to sweep our own movement into the currents of history, and so we are in turn forced to set aside such possibilities as nice-to-have but completely and totally unreliable as a framework to base our projects on. This leaves us with what we have: a patchy cannon of local theoretical literature, a history as it is presently available, a living knowledge which stretches back to the New Left in terms of organized experience, bourgeois statistics, bourgeois research, a legacy of defeat, a gnarled family tree both withered and verdant of countless dreams for “an organisation of a new kind”. It may not be much to work from compared to prior eras, but it’s what we have – and we must do what we will with what we have.

This piece has of necessity changed drastically over time, as have conditions and my own intellectual development. This is natural, healthy even. A repudiation of stagnation even in times where one feels that is all that is left. As such, it now resides in a curious in-between. I am both trying to present a set of ideas which once occupied my mind and how I applied it to political and intellectual activity, and trying to repudiate and advance beyond them as I have myself moved on. To do this, I will present this kind of in-between where it currently rests, and highlight where I have experienced changes in my thinking.

I will try to elucidate the core ideas which underpin “national pessimism” in a manner which leans to the brief, because at its core it is a simple enough concept that merely has many avenues with which to get lost in the weeds. In the shortest form, what national pessimism attempts to do is provide a proposal on what New Zealand’s role is in a world spanning political-economic system. Namely, in our context, capitalism. What function it serves, and the limitations which that function places on it as a political-economic actor.

The first point is a quick historical note to frame the present discussion. New Zealand enjoys and is cursed by its historical role as a minor regional power on the fringes of the settler-colonial West. This allows for certain benefits including a degree of both domestic and foreign policy independence, albeit on a leash (as it were). However it also has drawbacks, including tight limits to that independence and notably the country’s somewhat unique role as a “policy petri dish” at several critical junctures in the 1890s, 1930s, 1980s, and arguably to a lesser extent in the 2000s.

What this means for the socialists (or any historically progressive movement, extant or potential) is that they must make a fairly simple choice over their relation to the nation – either a national project, a total rejection of that for a ‘pure’ internationalism, or something in between. Many have tried to figure out that mid-point, it was in many ways the crux of the “junior imperialist/super colony” debates of the 1970s and 1980s. A national project cannot overcome the structural impediments which crushed social democracy in the 1970s-1990s, the country is too sparsely populated and too highly at risk of climatic (forestry, agriculture, aquaculture) and economic (FIRE) disaster to achieve partial autarky in the economy even in the best case scenario (were such a setup even desirable).

It, however, is too far removed from the important lifelines of international capital to make really any difference should a revolutionary situation emerge in New Zealand in the absence of a generalised world revolutionary situation. The closest this country has been to a revolutionary situation in which the extant order could be existentially threatened by the emergence of a new political-economic reality was undoubtedly the Great Strike of 1913. Its crushing in a matter of weeks, and temporal disconnection from the world revolutionary situation which upended the later-1910s and 1920s by a mere few years, shuttered the possibility of the situation getting terribly much further than it did. However, unrest of that scale with a revolutionary wing to the upstart social forces certainly could catch onto a broader global revolutionary wave in the right circumstances.

In a modern context, we might imagine the possibility of an internationalist revolution in New Zealand which has a world revolutionary situation to latch onto. However, New Zealand is not that important a node in international capital that it couldn’t be isolated, blockaded, and starved out without too great an impact on world supply chains in any situation where such a confluence of events sees things kick off in this country largely in isolation of world events. In this situation, a millenarian need arises for the world revolution to break out in multiple world powers (likely including the declining world hegemon of the United States and the potential new hegemon of China) for a revolutionary current in New Zealand to have any chance of avoiding this fate. What interests, and depresses, here is that such a necessity strips New Zealand as any kind of distinct entity of historical agency. In this framework, there is no answer to what happens if a revolutionary situation emerges here but not elsewhere, something which is both a necessity and entirely out of the hands of anyone in New Zealand.

That leaves an in-between, of which I believe the most viable option is a kind of pan-Polynesian or pan-Pacific “regionalism” of a kind reminiscent to what Owen Gager was proposing in the 1970s and 1980s. This is where the regional imperialist role has the great potential to cap the project at the knees – a pan-Polynesian or Pacific republic requires a generalized revolutionary situation which takes other regional imperialists out of the picture (that is, circling back to a millenarian need for a world revolution to break out) and makes irrelevant New Zealand’s own role as regional imperialist. Without ending the relevance of that imperial role, any move to found a pan-Polynesian republic will degenerate into an imperial expansion into Polynesia and the resumption of imperial extraction of labour and resources rather than an equitable setup (of whatever kind of revolutionary or post-revolutionary establishment might emerge) which both respects the need to abolish a periphery/core relationship and supersedes national aspirations as a going concern.

What I think is that many among the movement as it exists today already have some idea similar to this and have either decided to ignore it or throw their lot fully into autarkic national projects (whether consciously admitted or not) or internationalist millenarianism in which New Zealand is effectively stripped of its subjective autonomy – it is at the whim of someone else’s revolution. As such, ‘national pessimism’ is not only the recognition of this impossible bind, but the consequences it has had for the development of both New Zealand as a nation-state and a distinct culture (or amalgam of cultures) and the revolutionary tradition which has emerged within and against it. Both the nation building project and the revolutionary opposition to that project have repeatedly and crucially been molded by coming up against those aforementioned structural barriers of New Zealand’s evolving historical role in the world system.

Indeed, many of the weird quirks of New Zealand as a national project, I believe, are actually downstream from this impossible bind. The national myth of New Zealand as a DIY paradise, ‘Godzone’, a ‘lucky country’, is a kind of ‘cover story’ to avoid admitting the structural barriers which have molded the project (at many junctures, entirely out of the hands of the ruling order in New Zealand itself). To admit this role would be to admit that much of what is celebrated as unique about the civic national culture of New Zealand is, as such, far less the fully autonomous subjectivity of this country in its own path of development than most would like to imagine. This is to say, that much of what is supposedly the distinctly ‘Kiwi way’ has emerged as much from the historical restrictions placed on the national body by material circumstance as it has from some emergent ‘national spirit’ in which civic pride can be imbued on the basis of entirely ‘free’ choices made at historical junctures in New Zealand’s national development.

This has, among other things, required the simultaneous revision, reverence, and suppression of history to maintain the myth (a story common to many countries, but which has its own unique considerations in each context). An evolving selectiveness must be adhered to such that the national myth meets the material needs of developing circumstances. This requires heightened and lessened emphasis on historical events over time such that those events and their history (and legacy) are bent to the evolving needs of the stability and profitability of the national project. This is a matter not of autonomous and ‘free’ decisions about the course of the national body, but simple and impersonal evolving material need. There is a structural restriction on the degree to which a ‘national story’ might be told in the words of those telling it, the national myth must in this manner serve first and foremost the evolving needs of the national body. It is a series of bounded choices.

‘National pessimism’ is a recognition of the national project as both the easiest choice and a structurally impossible course. It is one that requires New Zealand as a national project to ‘mature’ in a way that is precisely in direct conflict with how it has actually developed (and likely will develop) to meet the needs of unfolding conditions. A national pessimist outlook is one which in the first order does not reject the national project on any moral or ideological grounds, but simply recognises that it is not a possible direction for a socialist (or any historically progressive) project in New Zealand. National pessimism is precisely a pessimism about the national project as it has emerged and is likely to develop, and as such a pessimism about any form of socialism which accepts ‘socialism in one country’ as a viable direction for New Zealand.

This draws us to the further development of the idea into the closely related concept of ‘national fatalism’, which in some ways acts as its twin. This is in short form an argument that the opposite course is so totally dependent on circumstances entirely out of the control of anyone that lives in New Zealand, that there is no way to organise toward the possibility of a revolution dependent on revolution in much of the rest of the world. It sees internationalist revolution as only possible on the coattails of revolutionary fervent breaking out in much of the world, but especially in the two competitors for world hegemon (the USA and China). It is the bitter acceptance that in a framework of ‘pure’ internationalism, socialists and revolutionaries in New Zealand are stripped of any subjectivity of action and rendered to being entirely reliant on the actions of revolutionaries in other parts of the world. This is to say that as far as the immediate considerations of such political actors in New Zealand are concerned, the ‘auto-world revolution’ option is no option at all, but merely awaiting the return of the messiah cloaked in communist pieties. There is no or few immediate tasks, no pathway to revolution (or any socialist project), there is no way to plan or strategise into the future, only a general building of forces which may only act when circumstances that may never come dictates.

Where national pessimism rejects the national project, national fatalism despairs at the chances of the international project. The two operating in unison take the structural impediments of both and apply them to the in-between options. The possibilities which reside in the space in between the two projects, of autarkic ‘socialism in one country’ or open ‘internationalism without fetters’, must interact in one way or another with these two poles of political attraction. And as such, the draw towards either may doom the ‘third revolutionary way’ to oblivion. I very much recognise that this is a deeply nihilistic position to find oneself in, insofar as it precludes a concrete belief in any political platform or path forward. It is one that – critically – I no longer believe to be the case.

I found this bind inescapable for years, but as my circumstances changed, so too did my thinking. Why exactly did this have to be a binary question with the grounds in between solely attracted to one pole or the other? The way in which I had framed things had been heavily impacted by my pessimistic thinking in the late-2010s and early-2020s, and while I still think I had hit on something of note, it may not quite have been the bind I’d set up for myself. If my thinking then had been toward national pessimism, could the logical next step be a revolt against it – and could there be further insights in tearing the whole thing down just as there may have been in building it up? Hence the title of this article: these are notes towards and against national pessimism. The condition may not, in fact, be terminal.

I find increasingly that the third option, teasing out something in the middle, was framed wrong from the start. It was not simply a mid-point drawn inexorably towards one or another strategy doomed to failure, but a political pole of attraction unto itself. The dichotomy could actually quite easily be rejected, even if the path forward remained murky. It may or may not look like the kind of pan-Pacific regionalism proposed by many on the socialist left since the 1970s, but it wasn’t the worst idea to consider it as a proposal-unto-itself rather than an amalgam of distinct ideas. If there is a supersession point to be found here, it would be in establishing new poles of attraction. If this is the case, what exactly might it mean then? One thing that it may mean is that the problem should be inverted and analyzed on the useful points made by the two poles established earlier, both on their own terms and in their critique of the opposite. If we take each project, each pole, on its own terms and in critique of the other – and we apply the critiques established above as an underlying framework – we might be able to see where the interaction points are. The places in which a useful insight emerges which may light a new way forward.

If we must move against national pessimism, and in its emergence into the light immediately cast it away, then we must do so through considered action and determined study. One matter that seems clear in writing this is that there are no fast and easy answers to building a force fit to assume political and social power. This must be a strategy of patience, one in which we cannot assume a fixed date to work towards but, to quote William Morris:

“…a view to dealing with the crisis if it should come in our day, or of handing on the tradition of our hope to others if we should die before it comes.”

We must educate our own, and any who are willing to learn. We must engage with one another, and our many potential collaborators and interlocutors from around the world. We will need to build political infrastructure on all fronts, and to experiment with what might work and what might not. If we wish to overthrow the present order of things we must have as good a grasp as possible of how that order functions at all levels. This is only possible by intervention in mind and action. And that intervention is only possible with the infrastructure to accommodate it. The infrastructure to facilitate learning – both the continuous introduction of those new to the cause and the continuous development of the depth of learning to any who wish to pursue it. The infrastructure to facilitate communication and knowledge – with one another and the world at large, to make legible the daily activity and discussion of a planet of billions. The infrastructure to facilitate political intervention – such that wherever we intervene, from workplaces to polling stations, newsrooms to streets, campuses to civil society, we have made our best determination of how to do so. The infrastructure to facilitate comradely conviviality – such that our life is reproduced with a meaning, a purpose, a sense of who we are doing this for and with, and what we might be working towards together.

These things can only start with what we have, and only work towards the direction that evolves as circumstances do – through rough currents by a guiding star. If we reject national pessimism, it is only by recognising it (or something like it) that we might supersede it towards the possibility of political rupture in the present order of things and the establishment of an order more befitting human flourishing in a world of peace and ecological renewal. By recognising in our present situation those structural limits which constrain the immediate options, we can tease out the points of friction which make the breaking of those limits possible. National pessimism is a useful tonic to hope which becomes utopian to the point of toxicity, its supersession in turn soothes and cures the cynicism which such a perspective breeds. Both become necessary in conflict and cooperation with one another. Is our condition terminal? Only if we let it be such.