The Election is over and the New Year has begun. It's time for the left to ask ourselves a hard question | Pat Biss

Look. John Campbell’s a national treasure. I don’t wanna be mean to the guy, but the first few minutes of TVNZ’s election night coverage were one of the most bleakly, unintentionally hilarious moments of television we got in 2023. 

After an opening segment where a cohort of respected political commentators told us that “anything could happen,” and really did put as much effort as anyone could into making a general election sound like an exciting media event–rather than the important but utterly dry night-long lectures on statistics and political hopelessness they actually are–the early votes came in and everyone knew it was all over. 

Of course, these are people who are good at their jobs. They 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 to black. 
The big, insufferable and all-consuming story of the year was done. And it hadn’t even been particularly good T.V. 

The problem with telling current events as stories, of course, is that most stories have an end. Now, in the unfunny post credits gag that is “NZ politics” until someone moves the rock and the press gallery crawl back out from under it in February, 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, when working within the lines set out for us in our PERFECTLY FUNCTIONING LIBERAL DEMOCRACY, this really is all we can do. Our last government lost, fair and square, and the new guys are gonna do what they’re gonna do. The old government has died, a new one struggled to be born. Now is the time of accepting our fate and writing “why Labour lost” articles. 

Of course, I’m just as keen as the next entirely-too-online twentysomething communist to get in on some good old fashioned Labour bashing, but a far more important to ask question than “why did a guy as charismatic and politically inspirational as wet cardboard not win the hearts and minds of the people of Aotearoa?” is “What the fuck do we do now?”

Some have of course already begun to answer this.
Rallies in solidarity with Palestinians and against our shiny new governments 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, but a protest is just a protest and when it ends it’s ended.
That’s in no way a condemnation of the organisers or the participants–they’re doing amazing work–but a visual and verbal message can only ever be visual and verbal. 

Likewise, while I don’t have quite as much love for the groups involved, I’m not really here to say that the electoral side of things doesn’t have a place, either. This is a local newsletter and I only know what’s local to me anyway, but I do know that the local left wing activist “scene” (for want of better words. I’m sorry) has no shortage of protest organisers and over-enthusiastic members of the Green Party who promise they’re somehow the way forward for socialism. We’ve got left wing film screenings, lecture nights and endless reading groups where we can “educate ourselves,” and there’s a place for all of those. 
What we don’t have is any real, concerted effort at material organising. And there needs to be a place for that, too.

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 like we’re 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).

It’s vital for a radical left, who believe in a politics beyond election watching and don’t place faith (stated or otherwise) in the current system, to exist. But, 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,” and aims to recruit members to its various sects almost exclusively from the other sects. One whose only interest in action is in protest and literature. One whose only interest is, in short, to interpret 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 our unions and tenancy advocacy 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.