Reconstruction 9.3 (2009)
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kiwibrand Globalisation: Banking on Pre-Packaged Artificial Resistance [1] / Sandra Grey and Patricia Mooney Nickel
Introduction
<1> In 2008 millions of New Zealand residents calmly watched television in their homes as a new "call to arms" was broadcast. The urgent call to defend New Zealand's shores from invasion was announced between advertisements for cell phones that would transmit and receive messages from all over the world and for discount travel packages to Fiji and Los Angeles. As images of men in uniform invading New Zealand shores for the first time in modern history flashed on the screen, kiwis were called upon to join the "kiwibank resistance movement."[2] The uniform was a banker's suit and the weapons were briefcases. The act of defence required by the recipients of this emergency message was to move one's money from foreign-owned banks to a kiwi-owned bank in order to protect New Zealand from invasion. One could still purchase the global cell phone and a travel package, as long as one withdrew the money to pay for these goods from a kiwibank account rather than from an Australian bank account in a supposed act of resistance to the globalization of banking.
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<2>
Of course, the image of invasion and font of resistance were fictional.
Australian bankers had not actually docked a boat, physically run on
shore with briefcases, kidnapped the wittiest New Zealand banker, and
tied her perfectly manicured hands behind her back.
<3> In this essay we analyze the "kiwibank resistance movement" as an instance of pre-packaged artificial resistance that inhibits the emergence of organic resistance as it redirects the energy to resist the impact of market globalization on everyday life back into the logic of the neo-liberal state in relationship to market globalization. This redirection allows for the very neo-liberal state that produced global capitalism to capitalize on pre-packaged resistance to the global economy as a means to stabilize its own rationality. We begin by positioning our argument against the now dominant optimism about theories of market-based resistance. Next, we examine in detail the narrative of kiwibrand resistance as an intensification of what Timothy W. Luke and Paul Piccone called the age of artificial negativity. Finally, we consider the contemporary relevance artificial negativity as we demonstrate how banking on pre-packaged artificial resistance secures the sustainability of global capitalism through state-generated negativity.
Theorising Resistance
<4> To speak of resistance lately one seems compelled to speak not only to the narrative of market globalization, but from within the narrative of market globalization. This is true not only in the practice of the everyday commercial discourse with which we are concerned here, but also within the academic discourses that often reinforce the dual myth of citizen as consumer and social life as a market. Even those whom we might have thought of as critical globalization theorists, such as Ulrich Beck, now seem overly optimistic about the possibility of market-based resistance to globalization. In a contribution to the legitimating story about how we can somehow consume our way out of the poverty produced by the market through boycotts and "boycotts," Beck (2005) locates the possibility for resistance within the logic of consumption:
"...the counter-power of global civil society is based on the figure of the political consumer...not buying certain products and therefore casting a vote against the politics of corporations...is completely free of risk. Nonetheless, this counter-power of the political consumer has to be organized...and requires a carefully planned dramaturgy in the public media..." (7).
According to Beck's logic, the ideal of global civil society is nothing more than a global market. It would seem therefore that the "kiwibank resistance movement" in New Zealand would achieve Beck's (2005) vision of "counter-power" as it creates a space in which the political consumer chooses one product over another. The kiwibank resistance movement does exactly as Beck (2005) recommends, centrally organizing these political consumers into a movement through media dramaturgy on television, in print, and in website publications.
<5> What Beck (2005), who staunchly opposes the nation state as a "zombie category," has neglected to realize is that these acts of resistance through consumer choices can simultaneously manifest as patriotic affirmations of not only market globalization, but also the nation state. Indeed, the counter-power of the "kiwibank resistance movement" is in fact state-owned. This is to say, there is very little space between the nation state, the centrally organised political consumer/citizen that Beck sees as the source of resistance, and the global marketplace. This matters because the space for thinking and for acting otherwise "in community with others" is exactly where we find genuine resistance.
<6> We offer in this essay an alternative explanation of resistance that does not assume the inevitability of free market globalization and limited government. Given the difficulty of locating a point of resistance outside of the market and the associated difficulty of identifying that which is actually being resisted - the global market or its impact on the lives of kiwis - it is important to make a distinction between different modes of resistance. It can be said that two general forms of resistance exist. First, there exist forms of resistance that emerge from an understanding of the world that undermines market rationality and therefore opposes the system that sustains such rationality. Second, there exist forms of resistance that emerge from within the system in order to contain through adaptation those alternative understandings according to which the system no longer makes sense. Within this second form of resistance, opposition is aimed at pre-formulation of understanding: this type of resistance makes the world make sense as it understands the world and resistance to the world on its own behalf.
<7> We therefore make a distinction between organic resistance, building on what Piccone (1978; Raventos 2002) and Luke (1990) called organic negativity, and pre-packaged artificial resistance, by which we designate artificial resistance involving the "exercise of consumer preferences" in synch with the neo-liberal state over a pre-determined and thus inorganic set of pre-packaged options. In the case of the "kiwibank resistance movement," this pre-packaged resistance is marketed by the neo-liberal state itself, in partnership with the market, promoting a trade and economic growth agenda through a consumer-based advertising campaign.[3] Pre-packaged resistance of the sort that Beck, along with the neoclassical economists who invented our (mis)understanding of the "political utility maximizing individual," has in mind conforms exactly to the logic of consumption as the orienting activity of social being, diverting the impulse to resist the market into the stabilization of the market. Within this logic, the market conflated with civil society is the only space for exercising resistance, which is framed as the necessity not only of consumer preferences, but consumer preferences as the defence of national borders and even local communities.
<8> Building on Piccone (1978) and Luke (1990), it is our contention that the possibility for organic transformation is forestalled exactly by channeling the impulse to resist our current socio-political arrangements (a complex nexus of factors such as the relationship between global capitalism, the state, and opposition) into the simplicity of the pre-packaged logic of the dominance of the market over alternative explanations of how we might live together. Read through this lens, the kiwibank resistance movement's call to arms may be a call to "join the movement" against the impacts of globalization, but it is also a call to "join the movement" towards the stabilization of global capitalism. Rather than viewing the "kiwibank resistance movement" as organic resistance, we understand it to be a new and more deeply embedded instance of what Paul Piccone (1978) referred to as system-generated negativity:
"Counter-bureaucratic bureaucracies become one of the paradoxical expressions of artificially generated negativity. The problem with this system-generated negativity is that, to the extent that it is itself bureaucratically sanctioned, it tends to become an extension of the very bureaucracy in need of control...it simply extends the bureaucratic logic it was meant to challenge and becomes counter-productive. The organic negativity necessary to successfully sustain this challenge must develop outside the bureaucratic administrative framework" (48).
Artificial negativity as it is further elaborated by Timothy W. Luke (1990) is particularly relevant to the case of kiwibank, which is a state owned enterprise - a fact not mentioned in the kiwibank resistance movement campaign, which pretends to resist state-led globalization:
"the state-corporate social formation to begin 'artificially' nurturing its own 'negativity'...the attempts to generate 'artificial negativity' are some of the administrative regime's own responses to its continuing but changing crises...'artificial negativity' emerges with the cultural alternatives and the political movements arising from within state-corporate capitalism, but directed against it" (160).
Piccone elaborated on the theory of artificial negativity and its current relevance in a 2002 interview with Jorge Raventos, in which he stated that:
"[W]hat this theory stipulates as that logic of the system - the dialectic of enlightenment that results in prioritizing capitalist relations at the expense of all others, the domination of the concept, and the tendentially 'totally administered society' - unfolds smoothly only as long as it parasitically relies on the traditional cultural structures it simultaneously seeks to destroy as irrational residues obstructing progress" (134).
Extended to the case of kiwibank and contextualized by the local narrative of neo-liberalism, the emphasis on the invasion of supposed "national banking borders" facilitates the portrayal of globalization as being out of control in order to establish its own basis for response. Thus, in order to control varying political movements' reactions to globalization, the state must not only capitalize on resistance, but also create the sense that resistance is taking place, which forestalls organic resistance. Simply put: the appearance of resistance results in less resistance or in a form of resistance that fails to instigate a transformation of the quotidian circumstances in which we find ourselves. We understand that the quality of our lives seems out of our own control in an era of globalization and that something must change. This understanding is the beginning of the emergence of organic resistance. The system responds by generating a more focused understanding, an alternative target, and pre-scripts our understanding of our sense of unease as being due to Australian bankers invading our shores. This artificial resistance dominates, or at least inhibits, the desire to produce organic resistance through the redirection of our understanding of what is going wrong. "It is not the system or globalization itself that needs to be resisted, but the invading Australian bankers." Artificial negativity is system-generated and thus will vary according to the history of a given system, in this case the government of New Zealand and its relationship to kiwibank.
The Emergence of Artificial Negativity in New Zealand
<9> While Piccone's and Luke's analyses of system-generated resistance to state corporate bureaucracy of the 1960s and 1970s and its tendencies into the 21 st century are focused on the United States, New Zealand, like all Anglo-American economies, experienced the crises of the one-dimensional administrative regimes of this era and saw the emergence of a New Left"...from within the system's own universities, bureaucracies, and corporations - the growing elite of middle-class university students and the professional intelligentsia who had a large stake in the excesses and failures of the one-dimensional administrative regime" (Luke 1990: 170).
<10> The necessity for managerial transformations of the state and corporates was first advanced by bureaucrats within Treasury and other central government agencies during the 1970s. Early in this decade New Zealand faced an economic crisis brought on by state borrowing, the international oil crises, and the move to regional common markets in Europe which resulted in New Zealand losing its traditional preferential status within the British marketplace. A new breed of neo-liberal public servants attributed this crisis to state failure. The solution was thus seen to be wide sweeping social and economic transformation. However, it was not until the 1980s that New Zealand's own "growing elite of middle-class university students and professional intelligentsia" were able to find the political allies to bring about significant neo-liberal reforms of economy and state. Once the ideas achieved political support in 1984, New Zealand moved more rapidly and more deeply into a neo-liberal free market approach in the 1980s than any other developed nation (See Kelsey 1995; Easton 1997). "The process involves the entrenching of the three central tenets of neo-liberalism: 'free' trade and the 'free' mobility of capital, accompanied by a broad reduction in the ambit and role of the state" (Bargh 2006: 1). New Zealand rejected Keynesian economic management in favour of a more market, less-state, neo-liberal approach (Boston, et al. 1999; Castles 1996). This neo-liberal project affected both policy direction and the operations of public sector through the instituting of the "New Public Management" (NPM) ( Sharp 1994; Boston 1995). Corporate management and marketisation (Davis and Rhodes 2000: 75) led to contracts and other competitive market mechanisms becoming the preferred public sector methodology (Reddel 2004: 133).
<11> Among the wide sweeping managerial changes introduced in New Zealand was the separation of government functions into policy advice and service provision, and processes of corporatisation and privatisation of state assets. The mantra for those seeking state sector reforms in New Zealand, as in the U.K. and the U.S., was that "governments should steer and not row" (See Reddel 2004: 133). The "crisis" in the public sector which is at the centre of the emergence of system-generated negativity can be seen in the debates around state owned assets such as New Zealand Post Officer (now NZ Post):
The organization embodied nearly all of the structural and systemic flaws of the traditional State sector - its functions were diverse and in some case unrelated (e.g. postal services and banking); some of its functions conflicted (e.g. telecommunications policy advice v telecommunications regulation v telecommunications operations v telecommunications marketing). Its postal and telecommunications operations were protected monopolies. Commercial policies and prices were determined by the Government on the basis of a wide range of social, economic and political considerations which tended to overwhelm commercial factors. Production systems were highly labour-intensive, with little in the way of incentives to improve efficiency or the quality of service to users. And ultimately, the Government was responsible for funding increasingly substantial capital development commitments - particularly in telecommunications, and bore all the risks associated with the Post Office's very diverse activities. In purely commercial terms, the Government received very little in return for its considerable investments in the New Zealand Post Office (State Services Commission, 1998).
By 1999, when kiwibank emerged as part of the political agenda in New Zealand, the crisis to which artificial negativity initially responded - that generated by state management of the economy and total instrumental rationality - had succeeded and free market logics reigned behind the myth of resistance. Artificial negativity as Piccone and Luke theorized it may have adapted to an even deeper stage of capitalism in which the state seems almost foolish in its attempts to oppose globalization, to understand it otherwise, as predicted by Luke (1990) when he wrote of the administrative state appearing anachronistic "as the transnational corporation seeks to serve any potential customer seeking its goods and services" (168).
<12> The kiwibank resistance movement indicates that the system of globalization may be generating a deeper form of artificial negativity, one produced by the logic of global markets in relationship to the neo-liberal state. The crisis of legitimacy that plagued the welfare state has now fully given way to neo-liberalism and its associated emphasis on the citizen consumer and the parallel, if not directly reinforcing, shift from government to governance (see Pierre 2000). This shift, which was aimed directly at streamlining supposedly bloated bureaucratic government, gives credence to Luke's (1990) argument that the "counterbureaucratic movement by corporate capital...purposely has opened a limited free space" (172). Kiwibank's pre-packaged resistance and the context in which it occurs indicate that the perceived failures of neo-liberal governance to contain the damage being done to our everyday lives have instigated another system-generated negativity, which attempts to understand these failures as a failure to protect New Zealand's shores from Australian bankers rather than as a result of neo-liberalization and open markets.
kiwibrand Resistance
<13> What the kiwibank story of resistance as it is broadcast in commercial outlets fails to reveal is that kiwibank is wholly owned by NZ Post, one of New Zealand's State Owned Enterprises (SOE). SOEs were created following the passing of the State Owned Enterprises Act 1986, when there was a rush to shed non-core government business in the dual processes of corporatisation and privatisation. These processes were part of the broad neo-liberal "revolution" which occurred in New Zealand.
<14> While kiwibank advertising positions it as "resistance" and by extension "revolutionary", it is not the first state-owned bank in New Zealand. The state's moves to shed non-core business in the 1980s and 1990s led to the corporatisation, privatisation and eventual sale of two state-owned banks: the Bank of New Zealand and what was originally known as the Post Office Savings Bank (later PostBank). The Bank of New Zealand, following two government-led bail-outs in later 1989 and then in 1990, was sold by the New Zealand government to National Australia Bank in 1992. In 1987, as part of the neo-liberal reforms to minimise the state, the old New Zealand Post Office was split into three separate State Owned Enterprises - NZ Post; Postbank; and, Telecom Corporation. Postbank was sold to the ANZ Banking Group of Australia. These sales were the culmination of artificial negativity in New Zealand, stabilizing markets through a narrative of counter bureaucratic bureaucracy.
<15> The very rationale of state ownership of strategic assets and businesses becomes a crucial factor in the current practice of artificial negativity of which kiwibank can be seen to be a part. In the middle of 2000, a project team within NZ Post was established in order to develop a business case for establishing a new New Zealand owned bank. The concept had been one of the governmental actions sought when the left-wing Alliance party joined a coalition government with centre-left Labour Party in 1999. Though as commentators have noted, Labour's agreement to allow NZ Post to set up kiwibank was not smooth sailing, as Tim Bale (2003) states: "True, Labour finally agreed to introduce a modicum of paid parental leave and to allow the post office to start a state-backed bank directed as customers left behind by the faceless technology and fees of foreign-owned multinationals; but it let it be known it was doing so only through gritted teeth" (206).
<16> The kiwibank state bank project was approved in February 2001 and a year later the Reserve Bank had granted full registration to kiwibank. It opened 310 branches in March to June of 2002, and since that time has extended it business in a number of ways, for example, by setting up ATMs; launching an alliance with Citibank; and, purchasing 51 percent of NZ Home Loans in 2006. The bank currently has around a 5 percent share of the New Zealand banking market.
<17> The entire concept of state owned enterprises and their place as "resistance" requires scrutiny, particularly as they are often positioned by those on the right as a return to the "bad old days of a state managed economy" in New Zealand. So does the establishment of kiwibank in 2002 constitute real resistance to the neo-liberal project of the 1980s and 1990s? Is kiwibank a "resistance movement",resisting foreign capital and globalization, as its promoters and advertising suggests? Or is the kiwibank resistance movement just a clever advertising campaign?
kiwibank Resistance as Artificial Negativity
<18> The bank itself is quick to note that its mission is "to earn the respect of New Zealanders by providing a real banking alternative delivered with Kiwi spirit." This seems to be premised on New Zealand resisting the global economy, that is "a world economic order in which capital, trade, production, information and technology flow to and from the destinations determined by market forces without having regard to the barriers erected by national or regional governments, policies and jurisdictions" (Gould 2006: 8). This branding which is tied up with nationalistic and anti-global capital rhetoric has been more recently seen in the buy back of NZ Rail from an overseas owner in 2008, and its re-branding as KiwiRail.
<19> The rhetoric of the bank's key political proponent, Progressives Leader Jim Anderton, certainly positions the new state owned bank as "resistance" to "foreign ownership." In particular Kiwibank is seen as "resistance" to the Australian owned banks who dominate the banking industry in New Zealand (though as was noted earlier it was successive New Zealand governments in the 1980s and 1990s that permitted the sale of two New Zealand owned banks to Australia owners). There are dual sentiments of commercial success and anti-foreign investment in many statements around kiwibank. As Jim Anderton notes (2008): "It is successful not just because it is providing more branches and forcing the big Aussie banks to keep their branches open and moderate their fees...It is successful because it is doing a good job." This rhetoric infuses the current kiwibank advertising campaign, both on television screens and in pamphleteering:
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<20> This anti-Australian rhetoric is a popular theme for New Zealanders. Most recently, the rejection of Australian ownership and the challenge this poses for "New Zealand sovereignty" was witnessed during a dispute between New Zealand workers and Australian supermarket giant Progressive Enterprises. In a country often reluctant to take part in union organised resistance, New Zealand rallied behind locked out supermarket workers in 2004 because it was an Australian owned company setting employment rules in "our" nation.
<21> The kiwibank resistance movement not only moves beyond the advertising broadcast by the bank as political sentiment, it sits within a whole range of pre-packaged resistance evident in New Zealand. There has been channeling of dissent by state agents into a range of projects which supposedly seek to correct the ills generated by the neo-liberal project. There have been a range of attempts by the state to regenerate "social capital" and "civil society" through projects such as Pathways to Partnership:
Pathway to Partnership is a multi-year plan to build strong, sustainable and more effective community-based services for families, children and young people. At its core is the strong, supportive working relationship between government and the community sector (Ministry of Social Development 2008).
There has been renewed vigour in government consultation with "clients and consumers" of state services, including comfy e-government initiative such as "The Couch" set up by the Families Commission to "hear the views of New Zealanders on issues relating to families." The Families Commission (2008) notes:
It is part of our wider community engagement programme in which we regularly seek feedback from families, as well as community groups and organizations, through forums and meetings...The responses from our polls and questionnaires will help us in our advocacy work to improve services and support for families, and improve our advice on proposed government policies.
Indeed, as was the case with neo-liberalism in the 1980s, New Zealand has been particularly innovative in the shift from government to governance, establishing the Office of the Community and Voluntary Sector in 2003 and the Pathways to Partnership program in 2007; both programs place an emphasis on governing through "civil society" organizations. In its anti-government rhetoric instigated by a neo-liberal government, this shift to governance is itself an instance of artificial negativity.
<22> Moves by government departments to include citizens in decision-making have resulted in the use of focus group consultations between policy/research teams and "user" (consumer) or "stakeholder" groups. As noted by Wallace (2007), the fact the governments define the issues for consultation, set the questions and manage the process, while citizens are invited to contribute their views and opinions undercuts the democratic principles that they claim to adhere to: "The upshot is that public policy documents (and, indeed, other forms of presentation) can turn out to be perfunctory or, at best, educative rather than genuinely consultative" (96). An example of this was a "road-show" held by New Zealand's Ministry of Women's Affairs in 2007. The Ministry claimed that the road show was an effort to hear from women in New Zealand, but the presentation given in Wellington appeared more about selling to women the "positive" legislative and policy measures of the Labour-led coalitions since 1999, than about hearing critiques of government actions. Similar moves towards consultation and inclusiveness are seen in "third way" Britain also. As Crouch (2004) notes:
It is in this context that we can understand remarks by certain leading British new Labour figures concerning the need to develop institutions of democracy going beyond the idea of elected representatives in parliament, and citing the use of focus groups as an example (Mulgan, 1999). The idea is preposterous. A focus group is entirely in the control of its organisers; they select the participants, the issues and the way in which they are to be discussed and the outcome analysed (22).
This type of initiative by those within the state could be seen to fit squarely within the artificial negativity described by Luke (1990) who states that "the system accommodates artificial negativity by organizing increased citizen participation as part of its standard operating procedure" (174). These local initiatives are representative of the global "renewal social democracy" or "third way" agenda. As such, the New Zealand "resistance" to neo-liberalism from within the state is similar to what is seen in the UK where "New Labour" controlled the leadership of the Labour party and made a "virtue out of accommodating to the 'new reality' of the global economy" (Gould 2006: 110). This acceptance of the new reality of the global economy calls into questions whether the state is channeling dissent into appropriate and nondisruptive actions in order to avoid the crises of the neo-liberal governance model to fully manifesting themselves and leading to organic resistance. If we turn back to kiwibank as the exemplar for a moment we can see a range of contradictions and limitations to this form of "system-generated resistance."
<23> If we understand market globalization to be based, at the least, in a loose network bureaucracy made of money, banking, markets, and marketing, then the kiwibank package has generated a counter-movement based in the very logic of that bureaucracy which it claims to oppose. This is to say, kiwibank shares in common with the market globalization that it opposes: money, banking, markets, and marketing. The kiwibank resistance movement is inorganic to the extent that it does not develop outside of the framework that it claims to oppose.
<24> All New Zealand SOEs are required to make a profit for their key shareholder - the New Zealand government - and, as such, are seen as part of the nation's economic growth strategy. Then Minister of Economic Development and State Owned Enterprises, Trevor Mallard, (2007) stated that "The government is determined to ensure that we transform our economy around a higher productivity, sustainable future. The SOEs can not be exempt from that transformation agenda or they will drag on the economy as a whole" (10). The importance of efficiency, productivity, and competitiveness dominated the early discussions about the re-establishment of a state-owned bank in New Zealand. When the idea of Kiwibank was being mooted, the government sought from NZ Post a business case for the bank. Progressive Leader Jim Anderton (2005) stated that the key assumption was whether or not the new bank would attract enough customers: "NZ Post officials needed to win an average of two new customers at each branch each week for three years...Ministers were persuaded that the numbers were realistic and the project won the green light." This fits with along-term goal of neo-liberal states, "economic growth" in the form of ongoing increases in the aggregate national income. Even the politician who is credited with being behind the banks inception, MP Jim Anderton, is quick to boast that (2005)"...long before Kiwibank turned a profit, I was able to declare it had already achieved a net economic gain for New Zealand."
<25> Alongside the profit motive of SOEs, however, there is a legislated expectation that SOEs will be "socially responsible." Maarten Wevers (2008) notes: "Post has been successful in marrying the requirements of commercial success with social responsibility. Now, you might say that that is no more than what is required by section 4 of the SOE Act - to be as profitable and efficient as comparable businesses not owned by the Crown, and exhibit a sense of social responsibility by having regard to the interests of the community in which it operates" (para. 36). This directive does seem to take a backseat to the economic imperatives put in place in 1986 during the neo-liberal reforms. Also, as noted by Patterson (2007) "In other cases some SOEs have been left to pursue incompatible objectives. Take Television New Zealand (TVNZ) as an example. The company is required to both maximise its profitability by producing a dividend for the government and reflect the charter that requires it to broadcast a range of programming that is of little commercial value" (8).
<26> For many of the SOEs in New Zealand it is perhaps more likely that it is their "consumer responsibility" roles within the free market environment which are more pressing than any "social responsibility." Kiwibank has taken great pride in pointing out to customers (and would-be customers) that it has repeatedly won a banking award for its "customer" service. And its resistance pamphleteering is quick to point out that the bank is leading the market:
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<27> Perhaps for those keen to see the "political consumer" as the embodiment of resistance in the new global capital environment, the response of business elites in New Zealand to the establishment of kiwibank may indicate a chink in the global capital armour. NZ Business Roundtable Chief Executive Roger Kerr (2006) notes that "SOEs are not subject to normal market disciplines (such as share price performance and takeovers) and the ability to monitor them is weak...The SOE model was always an uncomfortable halfway house. Businesses need to change and grow, yet taxpayer risks are increased by diversification. The only solution to the dilemma is privatisation...'Public ownership of the means of production, ownership and exchange' is a policy that has failed worldwide, yet New Zealand has its head in the sand on the issue." This is a fundamental neo-liberal objection to state ownership in which it is argued that the state always distorts economic performance . . . as it interferes with "natural" market mechanisms (Bargh 2006: 10).
<28> One of the key messages of the kiwibank resistance movement, and other recent pre-packaged resistance movements by those working within the New Zealand state, centre on the idea of the local vs. global. The "kiwibank resistance movement" is not just seen as being a defence of national borders; it is also presented as a move which defends the local. The rejection of foreign ownership and global capital is infused with rhetoric about the economic well-being of local communities as well. As Maria Bargh (2006) states: "One crucial form of resistance to neo-liberal globalization is our continued insistence on specificity, which both asserts and represents a clear challenge to neo-liberalism's insistence on the infinite substitutability of one person (or neo-liberal subject) for another" (86). While specificity, rather than universality, may crucial to anti-global resistance, we would question whether a system generated resistance based on "localism" is a true challenge to the system. In fact, basing our resistance in "political consumers", such as those shifting their money from Australian banks to kiwibank, does not challenge the universalising tendencies of the global market as kiwis continue to be addressed as global "political consumers."
<29> While resistance and defence of New Zealand is the rallying cry of kiwibank, the challenge is not intended to disrupt the logic of the global economic system. This is evident when considering that the New Zealand state is not opposed to foreign ownership. As the then Minister of Economic Development Trevor Mallard (2007) stated: "Last year, I coined the phrase, 'partner, not plunder' when it came to foreign investment in New Zealand - as a way of retaining and continuing to build the Kiwi national economic identity" (11). And when considering that kiwibank's parent company, NZ Post, recently sold 50 percent of its courier business, Express Couriers to DHL international.
Conclusion: Banking on Resistance
<30> The deepening of artificial negativity, which we propose that the kiwibank resistance movement indicates, is self-generated as the rationality of global capitalism is coming to appear irrational - local succumbed to global, but it now turns back upon itself. Just as the "the total organization of social interaction under the state-corporate regime endangers the rational capitalistic development that it originally sought to advance, which necessitates, in turn, the reversal of this totalizing instrumental logic" (Luke 1990: 166), neo-liberalism and open markets have generated the need to reign in the perception that globalization is harmful without actually reversing the shift to neo-liberalism and open markets. This form of artificial negativity, in the case of the kiwibank resistance movement, does resist the narrative of globalization and thus looks like a logical course of action. Yet, as a state owned enterprise, kiwibank and its pre-packed resistance are system-generated by a neo-liberal state. The nexus of these two factors reconciles for the system the need to appear to be reigning in global capitalism without opposing participation in global capitalism. The extent to which market globalization is able to impact New Zealand is, of course, the result of state-determined market controls. Yet, kiwibank is a state owned enterprise that has generated its own resistance to the very conditions that the state created.
<31> What we seem to be experiencing is a new crisis spurred on by the failures of the project of economic rationalism which was at the heart of the initiation of artificial negativity. These crises centre on both "the debilitating impact of the global economy on the political systems and democratic processes of advanced countries" (Gould 2006: 9) A key expression of this disenchantment and disengagement has been what Emy and James (1996) have called 'a retreat from the state', whereby the state is characterised as a useless abstraction, an unresponsive monolith of hierarchical power, redundant in the face of the global system of power, or increasingly minimised through processes of decentralisation and fragmentation (Emy and James, 1996: 29-35)" (Reddell 2004: 134). The global economy has not delivered as promised. The deligitimising of the state, the challenge to state sovereignty, and the degradation of democracy need to be answered. In New Zealand blame is being laid at the feet of globalization as somehow independent of the very state that opened the market in the first place and the future well-being of the nation is purported to lie in the hands of New Zealand consumers, who are told that they merely need to spend differently. Just as the advanced industrial nation-state generated neo-liberalism and "governance," globalization is generating local sentiments against global markets, but does so within the limited free space of "local banking." Like the artificial negativity identified by Luke (1990), "[i]instead of being systematically repressed, these weak oppositional forces are systematically subsidized and strongly encouraged to prod the bureaucratic apparatus to perform more efficiently or more humanely" (172-173).
<32> The kiwibank resistance movement is more nefarious than just market-based resistance, which is problematic because it stabilizes the myth that we are naturally orientated towards consumption and can only resist as consumers. While we find this myth to be false in the interest of the market, it is not enough to criticize consumer-based resistance without understanding how not only the global market, but also the nation state that creates and is created by this global market, is fortified by the false appearance of changing sentiments towards the rationality of globalization, which increasingly appears irrational and thus requires a new logic of stabilization. The artificiality of the pre-packaged kiwibank resistance movement emerges in the intersection of the history of the neo-liberal state in New Zealand, the fictional story of resistance to the invasion of globalization, and the resultant need to reconcile these two competing explanations - the necessity of the neo-liberal state that created open markets and the resistance to globalization - which generate the logic for why "we" have no choice but to favour capital over the well-being of humanity.
<33> The final question to examine then is whether this pre-packaged resistance to global capital forestalls organic resistance or opens up new space for genuine critique. As noted by Luke (1990) with regard the initial emergence of artificial negativity: "In the short run, this development may result merely in a reconsolidation of instrumental domination; but in the long run, it might ultimately make possible new forms of human emancipation" (166). So what will constitute this new forms of emancipation? "Emancipation today necessarily demands the repoliticization of mass society and renewed education of each individual in the cultivation of his or her own personal autonomy, political skills, and individual discipline" (Luke 1990: 177).
<34> While the kiwibank's pre-packaged resistance creates a "counter-power" of political consumers who are organised and a carefully planned dramaturgy in the public media as Beck would require of resistance within the logic of consumption, there is little indication that the "movement" will result in a repoliticisation of New Zealand's citizens. The resistance movement narrative is carefully planned and packaged, with little in the way of the consciousness building and negotiation of identity so key to organic resistance movements. Consumers are presented with the choice of joining a market leading bank which is New Zealand owned, or turning to one of those Australian banks which will move profits off shore - both options within the rationality of global capitalism.
<35> While resistance to foreign ownership of banking is encouraged, there is no suggestion that the New Zealand state might run a bank which has as its primary motive social objectives, and which is not required to make a profit for its state shareholder. There is no suggestion either that the state will eschew free market banking in favour of a highly regulated state run banking system. The kiwibank resistance movement has not really shifted the view that "intervention is to be eschewed, and there is a recognition on a global scale of what at the national level would be described as the monetarist view that governments should limit themselves to establishing conditions of monetary stability and leave the economy to look after itself" (Gould 2006: 94-5). While banking and consumerism might be seen as an activity of all "patriotic" New Zealanders, politics is still the business of a small number of elites.
<36> Examination of pre-packaged artificial resistances, as in the case of kiwibank, is important as a means to instigate thought about a wider range of alternatives. Faced with the degrading tendencies of global capital and when inspired to resist them, Beck (2005) proposes that:
"The consumer stands beyond the master-slave dialectic. His counter-power results from being able to refuse to make a purchase, at any time and any place. The 'weapon of non-purchase' cannot be restricted in terms of location, time or commodity. It is dependent on certain conditions, such as a person having the money in the first place or there being a surplus of products and services available for consumers to choose from. And it is these conditions - that is, the plurality of opportunities to buy and consume - which bring down the subjective costs of penalizing this product from this corporation through organized non-purchase" (7).
This consumer power is exposed as another in a string of aspartame-spun solutions when read through the lens of Piccone's 2002 discussion of the evolution of artificial negativity:
"As these crises unfold, the theory further stipulates that the system will attempt to reconstitute artificially the needed subjectivity (negativity as one of the system's most important internal control systems) through bureaucratic means. Such a strategy, however, is doomed to fail, to the extent that subjectivity, creativity, and negativity cannot be spun out administratively - artificially - without becoming extensions of that same apparatus they are meant to rationalize and modulate" (Raventos 2002: 134).
Beck's global consumer citizen subject armed with purchase power is precisely the subjectivity needed in order to artificially reconstitute global neo-liberalism through pre-packaged resistance. In line with Beck, the only action recommended by the "kiwibank resistance movement" and the environment within which it sits is the movement of money. While this "act of resistance" may impact the "foreign banks" (though even this is questioned due to the small market share captured by kiwibank) it simultaneously stabilizes the logic of the market in concert with the state. The kiwibank case shows that the social human being (a category broader than Beck's "consumer") is unable to stand "beyond" market globalization.
<37> While the kiwibank resistance movement is one which shuts down organic resistance, it is important to consider if more broadly there is space in this new crisis of the state for organic resistance to develop and what role those within the state should play in facilitating change? Redell (2004) notes that the "notion of an 'active state' in which governments and their agencies play an essential leadership and strategic function in collaboration with social movements and other less organised forms of civil society offers a viable expression of social governance which is both democratic and focused on community outcomes" (136). This certainly is the sentiment found in the rhetoric of the current New Zealand government and its "renewal of social democracy;" however there is very little evidence that with state agents in control and presenting pre-packaged and inorganic resistance to the supposedly "consumer public," that any real political power will be given to citizens and non-state groups. Ultimately, however, resistance is always possible.
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Notes
[1] A draft version of this manuscript was presented at the American Political Science Association Conference, Boston, MA, August 28-31, 2008.
[2] Kiwi is a vernacular phrase for New Zealanders.
[3] Although we are here focused on a state owned enterprise, packaged resistance also describes non-state marketing campaigns including "buycotts" such as Blackspot Sneakers ($90.00 USD), which are branded in opposition to the dominance of the Nike brand, and the "Sweetie Purse" ($240.00 USD), made of capitalism's waste products such as candy wrappers and potato chip bags. The point of packaged resistance being that it is based in the logic of marketing and the market. These movements, if re-packaged, are nothing new, however; as one anonymous reviewer pointed out to us, counter-culture consumption dates back at least to the "uncola" campaign by 7-Up in the 1970s.
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