Reimagining Social Work in AotearoaTo all 15,000 of our readers in Aotearoa and overseas and all 1,000 of our loyal subscribers, we wish you and your whānau the happiest year ahead.
Since we know what makes you happy is to educate, agitate, and organise, we want to share some ideas about actions and invite your own thoughts in the reply section below.
As a Pākehā Scotsman who spent most of his festive seasons in the northern hemisphere, I associate Christmas (and Pākehā New Year) with a time of darkness and renewal, with a pivotal pause and reflection point before making resolutions for the year ahead. In Aotearoa, that pivotal point in our annual journey is better reflected with the Māori New Year in June/July. I thank Tangata Whenua for sharing the gift of Matariki. Having said that, old habits are hard to shake off, and – as my comrade and friend Ian Hyslop has said – the slow days between Christmas and New Year are a time for reflection.
The relative calm of the slow days between Christmas and New Year afford an opportuntity for reflection. 2024 has been a challenging year. We have endured a complex hard-right political blitzkrieg from the coalition government. Their focus is on legislative and policy frameworks which promote ‘business freedom’ by facilitating optimum conditions for private profit. This flowering of capitalist fundamentalism (neo-liberalism on steroids) is supported by a range of deceptive ideological tropes – shallow and false representations of equality, such as the idea that the interests of capital and labour are the same or the notion that we can all be capitalists. A raft of contradictions lies below the surface layer of political deceit:
It was good to read that Te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer suggested that we “get past ourselves” and collaborate with others, highlighting ongoing policy coordination with the Green Party and the Labour Party. Green Party co-leader Chloe Swarbrick stated, “We’re meeting regularly as the leadership of the Greens, Te Pāti Māori and Labour and identifying where those areas are for collaboration”.
This blog post introduces an article that appeared in the latest issue of the journal Aotearoa New Zealand Social Work. In that article, I offer an overview of the legacy of Erik Olin Wright (1947–2019), who was, until his untimely death in 2019, a professor of sociology and an analytical Marxist based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the USA. Wright developed a framework for what he called emancipatory social science. In this blog post, I explore one dimension of that framework – his five strategic logics for change – and consider its relevance for Aotearoa today.