The words on the cover of issue 25 of The Socialist, ISO’s primary publication, urge readers to Vote Out the Government and Build a Socialist Alternative. This is a call to action: a call against abstentionism from voting, and crucially, towards a view of politics where voting once every three years is a minuscule portion of one’s political activity.
Heading into the 2026 General Election, the wish at the forefront of the majority of the working class is quite simply: we need to change the government. We need to vote out the right-wing bloodsuckers who are preying on Māori, on women workers, and the working class as a whole. And they’re right to want this. The current coalition government is fiercely reactionary, and its base is made of wealthy capitalists who want nothing more than to see an increasingly desperate pool of workers who will fight amongst themselves for the scraps of the wealth that they themselves produce. Binning the current parasitic lot may only introduce a spineless batch of “centrists,” but a centrist government which sees workers as at least part of their political base, and will occasionally act to appease that base, will shift the conditions under which we organise in our favour. Not far, perhaps, but given that our task is to organise a fragmented and atomised vanguard of the working class, we ought to take any action that can shift our line forward, however modest. Any meaningful change will be built by the social movements that can grow and challenge the restraints of those conditions.
Obviously, though, a change of government is woefully insufficient. Our side are not moralists, we are not advocating for a paternalistic state, nor a kinder face slapped on capitalist exploitation. All we want for the working class is power and control over the entire social and economic world built by the producing classes! “For our demands most moderate are, We only want the earth,” as James Connolly said.
So, no, we do not believe that the Labour Party, or any of the parties of the parliamentary left, will save us. The conditions imposed upon us by global capitalism are the problem, not simply our national political leadership. The rampant assault on the working class, led by capitalists and facilitated by the state, sacrifices our livelihoods on the holy altar of “profitability,” leading to widespread destitution and a collapse of our purchasing power. Unable to perform our role (that is, what capitalist economics sees as “our role”) in the economy by pouring money into our hobbies, or getting coffee in town with mates, or maybe even borrowing from a bank to secure a mortgage, we march towards a crisis of overproduction. In other words, the capitalists and the state berate us: “no wages, only spending!”
In true electoral fashion, these forces can never be openly named as the Red-Tie Kind Capitalist Party or the Blue-Tie Tough Capitalist Party. Their role is to trade blame without discussing the underlying mechanisms by which these crises are generated, building a case for their own political legitimacy without calling into question the broader political legitimacy of the system that they operate within.
Instead, our intelligence is insulted. Rather than discuss why we have rising mass unemployment coupled with attacks on beneficiaries, we’re supposed to blame personal failings of workers, and focus on training programmes for jobs that don’t exist. Rather than discussing the New Zealand state’s support for genocide and US imperialist aggression, we’re supposed to believe that we should pour billions of dollars into our imperialist nation’s own military, rather than into healthcare, education, and welfare.
The trading of blows between different shades of capitalists understandably leads many to the conclusion of abstentionism, of washing our hands entirely of the electoral system. For political analysts on the left, this stems from a belief that we ought to accelerate the crisis of political legitimacy of the capitalist state. For others in the working class, it grows from the successful campaign of demoralisation being waged by the right – the belief that “nothing I do matters anyway, so why bother.”
The capitalist state is not currently facing any meaningful crisis of political legitimacy, and it is mere wishful thinking to attempt to argue this crisis into being. That crisis may come, and its arrival is likely being accelerated by the hostile voter suppression of this right-wing government. When it does arrive, the role of voting will become a more hotly-contested question. But today, the leading elements of the working class are calling for a change of government. A low voter turnout that leads to a right-wing electoral victory will only be met with claims of a strengthened mandate to govern, and that governance will be on the terms of an even more hostile capitalist offensive. We must firmly grasp every democratic measure at our disposal, rallying alongside those leading elements of the working class, and make the argument that a change of government in itself is woefully insufficient if the goal is repelling the economic, environmental, and imperialist crises at our doorstep.
Every stabilisation of capitalism leads to declarations that the age of periodic capitalist crises is over. When the inevitable next crisis of overproduction and falling profitability arrives, the state facilitates the widespread employer offensive, making working people pay for damage the owners of big business have unleashed. There is only one way out, and it surely is not to find the mythical perfect economic policy which binds us to endless growth, climate stability, and the mutual satisfaction of workers and capitalists. The only way out is to build a collective politics of revolutionary socialism. To hone our ideas, and to train our political leaders, so we can be ready to seize power from imperialists and fascists when the crises threaten even the veneer of liberal democracy.
One solution: Revolution!
Image: Front cover of Issue 25 of The Socialist, ISO’s publication.
