Labour Party – Unworthy of the Name
This election was the left bloc’s to lose. And boy did the Labour Party set out to lose – incredibly, Labour managed to put together a campaign with less guts than 2023, headed again by a Tory-lite Chris Hipkins smirking through every lacklustre policy announcement, and the trainwreck election night coverage. One would be forgiven for thinking he was relieved to be escaping victory.
The Labour Party had one job: unite the working class, those who have been relentlessly attacked by a massively unpopular hard-right coalition, and offer them a vision that they can claim as their own. The sexist attacks on pay equity, the racist attacks on migrants, the anti-Māori attacks on Te Tiriti – these assaults work to divide the working class against itself, and must be countered with a message of radical solidarity. Labour refuses to learn this important lesson: its base mobilises on the basis of hope for a more vibrant sense of the public good and dignified mahi, not for trash-talking the right, deserved though it may be.
Instead, it offered an insipid campaign, promising focus-grouped micro-policies, announced to rooms of applauding party loyalists but falling flat beyond. A card for three GP visits while public healthcare is being dismantled? 10 percent off some student loans instead of fully state-funded tertiary education? Banning young people from social media while tech capitalists buy their way into education, military infrastructure, and every single facet of our work lives?
It beggars belief. Across the globe, the broad left is building on platforms of public housing, workers’ power, opposition to imperialist force, and broad anti-austerity politics. Instead of this, the Labour Party has attempted to find a comfy spot in the mythical “centre,” following in the wake of a right-drifting National Party, going so far as to refuse to reverse their attacks (while attacking the left-populist Green Party campaign).
The Labour Party may draw its support from the working class, but it is not a working-class party. Its leadership predominantly draws from middle-class lawyers, highly-paid union officials, and ex-student politician ladder climbers. If the Labour Party can find any remaining shred of dignity, it will kick its Keir Starmer-esque milquetoast leader to the curb along with his sycophantic careerists. Labour’s smiling managers of capitalism will never offer a path to socialism. Only the working class can do that for itself. But the Labour Party’s current orientation towards politics asks us all to be meek, to beg advocates in the state to be nicer to us. It does nothing to encourage political participation or self-activity, let alone class consciousness. If the left bloc manages to secure a victory, it will be despite Hipkins, not because of him.
Power to the Highest Bidder
Roughly 73 percent of political donations this election have been made to the ruling coalition. There can be no mistaking: this government has ruled for the rich, because it is bought by the rich. The Mowbrays and Graeme Hart flood the right-wingers’ war chest because they know that the right intends to dismantle health and safety protections, privatise health and education, open up more land for private development, and generally siphon public wealth into private hands.
Given the disproportionate power held by the capitalists and their paid puppet politicians, it is encouraging that the left bloc performed as well as it did. This is first and foremost due to the Green Party reaching its peak historical performance on the back of an excellent left-populist, almost class-based campaign, bolstered by a wave of support from Te Pāti Māori’s electorate-only campaign. The vicious voter-suppression campaign by the coalition government may hand the victory to the right. If it does not, is it only these campaigns, and the people power behind them, that have prevented it.
There are more of us. We are mightily out-resourced, and out-organised, but certainly not outnumbered. Vision, strength, confidence, organisation, hope. These are our tools for reaching the wider working class, and building class consciousness alongside one another.
Where From Here?
In a fit of exasperation, too many on the left are decrying the dumb, the hateful, the cruel neighbours and workmates who have abandoned all that is good and correct. The fear of another three years of rising homelessness, social murder, climate vandalism, and imperialist apologia is well-founded, but these cries of stupidity are misguided. People don’t vote against their interest because they are inherently cruel – they do it either because they have been better spoken to by the forces of reaction, or because a visionary mass politics has not reached them whatsoever.
The falling away of the hegemony of the centre parties represents the slow collapse of the neoliberal order. These capitalists and third-wayers cannot appease the masses indefinitely. France, Serbia, Brazil and so on… the students and working class there are staring down the barrel of the gun, and are getting organised. We should learn from this.
More than ever, the climate crisis has placed a ticking clock on us all. Imperialist violence is escalating, bringing with it death and fuelling the fires of that climate crisis. A might-makes-right international order is back on the table, as tech capitalists threaten to destroy what liberal democracy still clings to. There’s a rupture coming, fuelled by endless voracity of private profit and infinite growth – we need to be building a serious alternative; an independent workers’ socialist party, as is the project of the ISO. If the left doesn’t present a serious alternative, the end-times fascists will do it instead.
A more sympathetic government will provide more fertile ground for organising, for expanding the limits of what our class can do for itself. We could seize on timid reforms, and struggle to expand them outwards, coupling those fights with labour strikes and growing mass social movements against austerity and war, on the basis of radical internationalist solidarity. But a more sympathetic government will not save us from the ravages of an increasingly volatile capitalist world order, nor even the predatory capitalists at home that exploit our labour as best as they can.
The three-year electoral cycle is a constant, recurring pressure release valve. The abysmal voter turnout suggests that a good chunk of the working class aren’t buying what’s being sold. Opportunity’s opportunists have swept in on a wave of capitalist funding to tell us that “politics is broken.” It is broken, not because a left-right split in parliament is divided on how to manage capitalism, but because bourgeois democracy under capitalism works for capital. Putting the left bloc in government would buy us some space and breathing room, but while the exploitative economic structures remain, the capitalists will regroup and fight back. Real change means rejecting capitalism and its rulers, and wielding our collective organisation and power to create a better world.
Whoever is victorious when the dust settles, the bourgeois election will be at our back. People will no longer be looking to an upcoming election for salvation – we’ll have to save each other. Finish grieving, and start organising.
