New Year's Revolutions | Pat Biss

New year, new ghastly right-wing government. The left needs to be doing real, material organising more than ever, so why aren't we?

The first few minutes of TVNZ’s election night coverage were some of the bleakest, most unintentionally hilarious television we got in 2023. 
Within minutes of an opening segment where a cohort of respected journos excitedly told us that “anything could happen,” the early votes came in and that was that. 
Our hosts did their best to improvise a hard pivot from “anything could happen” to “something already has” and get our country’s election-night coverage back on track, but they may as well have cut the broadcast. 

The story of the year was over. And it hadn’t even been very good TV. 

The problem with telling current events as stories, of course, is that most stories have an end. Now, until the next season of NZ politics drops in 2026, we’re stuck in a kind of awful post-credits gag. All we can really do is try to find schadenfreude in watching three fundamentally awful people who hate each other try to pretend that they aren’t and they don’t for long enough to deliver on their inspirational goals of crushing working class power, giving all your kids lung cancer and making this country somehow more systematically racist than it already is. 

Of course, that’s not really all we can do. Our job on the radical left always seems to be making the case that Labour, the Greens and the ballot box are not the be-all, end-all of left wing politics, and I’m just as keen as the next entirely-too-online twentysomething communist to get in on some good old fashioned Labour bashing. However, a far more important question than “why did a guy with the charisma and political inspiration of wet cardboard not win the hearts and minds of the nation?” is “What the fuck do we do now?”

Some people are already answering this.
Rallies in solidarity with Palestinians and against our shiny new government’s near-immediate moves to attack Māori rights and language have seen fantastic turnouts, which is inspiring.
It feels good and politically heartening to be part of those crowds these days. I’m not here to criticise any protest organisers or participants–they’re doing amazing work–but a protest has a limit. We make our point, then we go home. 

The issue is not the protests or their organisers. There’s absolutely a place for them. 
And, fine, even a place for film screenings, lecture nights and endless reading groups where we can “educate ourselves.” The issue’s that there’s also a place for socialist orgs to be doing material organising, and it’s a place that sits depressingly empty these days. 

This is in no small part because material organising at the level things are at right now is both a lot of work, and usually the sort of thing that doesn’t feel particularly revolutionary. And by and large we like to feel revolutionary on the left, don’t we?
As a movement, we’ll focus an awful lot on our “party” names and logos, on that interminable drive to “educate ourselves” to be better Marxists and to differentiate ourselves from the other half dozen “parties” with half a dozen members who obviously aren’t better Marxists for some reason or another. We seem to believe that the things that feel the most revolutionary must therefore be the most revolutionary.
We often want to dismiss any attempt at actual material change that isn’t a pitchfork and guillotine-armed march down Molesworth to be either “reformist” (usually if the dead 20th century line we’ve attached ourselves to is Trotskyist or Anarchist in nature) or “revisionist” (if it’s Marxist-Leninist).
In Wellington at least, we’ve ended up as a movement which puts an enormous amount of energy into writing polemics about who is or isn’t a “pseudo leftist.” Into attempts to recruit members to our various sects almost exclusively from the other sects. One whose only action is in protest and literature. One whose interest is, in short, in interpreting the world instead of changing it. 

What needs to happen in the next three years is for us would-be revolutionaries to accept that revolution is nine times out of ten actually pretty boring. We need to devote ourselves to the slow, grinding work of actually building the kind of power that stays behind after the chanting and banner waving is over and you run out of leaflets to hand out for the day because the comrade who said they’d print some more ahead of the rally forgot to for the third time running.
As small communist groups, we need to start where we actually are. That can begin by sitting down and taking stock:
Who works where? Is there a union presence on site? Do they need a delegate?
Who lives where? What are the issues in that part of town? How can we get involved with that? 

As much as we’re in a uniquely (for a long while, at least) depressing and painful situation, we’re also in a uniquely exciting one if we can just manage the energy for it. As depressingly as this election turned out (not that there’d have been much to cheer for if we’d “won”), it undeniably brought an enormous amount of young, left-wing people into political activity. People who’ve been on the streets in the past few months in those protests. People who overwhelmingly know that what is isn’t what should be, people who ought to be involved in changing things and will either head home or be fed into the young Greens/Labour meat grinder if they aren’t given a chance to be part of something worth believing in.
As well, we’ve got a trade union movement gearing up to suffer what promises to be the worst attacks on workers’ rights since Shipley was Prime Minister which is gonna desperately need a new generation of driven, socialist, rank-and-file militants in its ranks.

The list goes on–we can’t let the only response to a horrifically backwards climate policy be a bunch of Liberal weirdos who everyone kinda hates, can we? So why is it that virtually the only visible work on climate change being done is dumb, useless bullshit from Restore Passenger Rail?

The next three years need to be about building capacity. About growing grassroots. About getting involved with unions and tenancy advocacy and community groups and doing the hard yards to convince people that there are places where politics happen outside of parliament, that there are ways that things could be that aren’t what they are, that people deserve to have power in their workplaces and their communities and their cities and their countries.

It’s very easy to sit around and say radical sounding things. If we wanna call ourselves communists and socialists and mean it, then let’s get out into the world and start doing the difficult stuff.