Winston Peters recently made a speech attacking Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programmes in Aotearoa. The speech, filled with reactionary bluster, predictably framed DEI as a tool of woke overreach. But what neither Peters nor his liberal opponents will admit is that DEI is not a radical challenge to oppression—it is a corporate mechanism designed to sustain capitalism.
DEI seeks to create “fairness” within a system that is inherently exploitative. It gives capitalism a human face while leaving its fundamental class structure intact. The entire project is about ensuring that racial, gender, and sexual diversity exists within workplace hierarchies—but never questioning why those hierarchies exist in the first place.
DEI: A Liberal Diversion from Class Struggle
Liberals promote DEI as a solution to workplace discrimination, insisting that better representation across identity categories will lead to a more just society. But these are the same categories weaponised by liberal identity politics to obscure the material realities of class struggle. DEI does not challenge capitalism—it reinforces it by fragmenting working-class solidarity, convincing workers that their primary struggle is for fairer representation within an oppressive system rather than the abolition of that system itself.
We are sold an illusion: that exploitation can be made more inclusive, that wage slavery can be made fairer, that oppression can be more equitably distributed rather than abolished altogether. But exploitation with diverse faces is still exploitation.
Peters vs. DEI: Two Sides of the Same Bourgeois Coin
Peters and his ilk attack DEI from a reactionary position, seeking to reinforce a conservative capitalist order. Liberals, in turn, defend it as a necessary reform to make capitalism more just. Both perspectives are distractions. The problem is not an inequitable distribution of power within capitalism; the problem is capitalism itself. DEI programmes, funded and endorsed by the very institutions that profit from exploitation, will never resolve the contradictions of class society.
Take, for example, the absurdity of DEI under capitalism. The logic goes: if all forms of discrimination and underrepresentation were eliminated, workplaces would be fair and inclusive. But no workplace under capitalism is fair, because capitalism is built on surplus value—the theft of workers’ labour. The question is not whether all groups are equally exploited but why exploitation is tolerated at all. DEI offers nothing but a more diverse set of managers overseeing the continued plundering of workers’ labour.
The Only Real DEI: The Abolition of Class Society
A true challenge to inequality does not come from corporate HR policies but from the self-organisation of workers and communities against capitalism itself. It is not achieved through liberal reforms but through revolutionary struggle.
The only real DEI is the dismantling of capitalism:
- Diversity that comes from the self-determination of workers and tangata whenua, not corporate quotas.
- Equity that means the end of private property and exploitation, not marginally higher wages for an elite few.
- Inclusion that means collective decision-making and mutual aid, not the tokenistic incorporation of a few into positions of power over the rest.
It is our task as anarcho-communists to expose these illusions, to organise beyond the distractions of bourgeois identity politics, and to fight for a society free from all forms of oppression—capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal. No amount of corporate DEI training will deliver liberation. Only the abolition of capitalism will.