29 April 2025
This article on the tasks of communists in contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand was originally published in the March 2025 “What is to be done?” special edition of Commonweal, newsletter of the New Zealand Federation of Socialist Societies. The Federation called for submissions from leftist organisations around New Zealand on this theme, with hopes of fostering “a conversation that will take us much further down the track towards answering the question”.
This piece addresses a very select audience—comrades who see the need for communist revolution and wish to discuss the tasks of communists within the present New Zealand left.
Recent years have seen a striking increase in protest in this country. In the last six years, rallies for Palestine, trans rights, the School Strike for Climate, Hīkoi mō te Tiriti and the camp at Ihumātao have drawn the largest numbers ever recorded for their respective causes. All but the most stolid sectarians realise that communists should be working within them, but often leftist support comes with illusions in the significance, scope and content of existing movements.
Most of us understand that social progress under capitalism is partial, temporary or illusory. For every movement for rights and dignity that achieves significant gains, there are others that merely incorporate new minorities into the bourgeois apparatus, or are simply too far beyond the pale of capitalist profitability or morality to have a chance. Even substantial gains can be reversed once crowds disperse and circumstances change, as demonstrated by the present worldwide rollback of rights to abortion, hormones and protest.
And yet, most of the left engage with social movements. Why? Some believe they inherently strengthen class struggle, fostering a spirit of generalised resistance. There is an illusion that a convergence of movements could become the revolution itself and that communists should move into struggles like stormwater into a river, swelling its banks until it overflows into adjacent waters. One big torrent—the movement of movements—would carry us to revolution, with communists merely contributing numbers, organisation or minor course corrections.
It’s true that this perspective has helped groups like the International Socialist Organisation move from isolation to a regular supporting force at rallies. It’s also true that such movements permit communists a chance to interact with advanced elements of the working class. But capitalism is readily capable of absorbing sectoral movements even far larger and more radical than we have today. They plainly don’t contain an inherent content of class struggle, let alone revolution.
Revolutionary politics isn’t native to social movements. It has to be injected into them to achieve genuinely irreversible liberation. Spontaneists reject this because it undermines a strategy of merging into social movements to gently guide them towards their inherent but unrealised potential. Communists seek to change the consciousness of other activists, winning people to ideas which are not natural to the course of their struggle, and likely butting heads with organic leaders.
The International Bolshevik Tendency often participates in sectoral movements, most recently in trans and student struggles. We seek not only to join but to form militant poles within movements, posing a class perspective that opposes subordination of the struggle to liberal mis-leadership, and introduces transitional demands to raise the level of action and consciousness toward revolution.
Some tell us this is out of place. Rally-goers do not expect to be told how trans or student struggles need to be tied to militant trade unionism and the expropriation of the capitalist class, or how liberation short of socialist revolution is illusory. But this kind of intervention gains a hearing for the communist program and through it we have experienced modest growth.
At a time when workers don’t have a party able to provide an alternative to single-issue movements, the job of revolutionaries is to work towards building that party, a cohesive revolutionary leadership. This requires clarification of the tasks ahead through competition with groups and programs that merely propose fixes to capitalism, and through argument about how to transcend the immediate issues and move toward revolution. Sectoral movements can’t uproot the oppression that creates them, but to convince their best fighters of this requires us to join in their struggles—without compromising revolutionary politics.
Unlike street protest, trade unionism has not risen to meet the rightward shift in politics. The 2018–19 strike wave ended with Covid, and militancy has been slow to return. Unions, already weakened by decades of mis-leadership and ebbing struggle, have largely failed to resist anti-worker politics, mostly limiting themselves to endorsing Labour at election time. Yet they remain a crucial instrument of working-class defence and potential mass political struggle. With the exception of the sectarian Socialist Equality Group, the New Zealand left agrees on this, but confuses supporting the unions as they are with fighting for what they must become.
The reasons can sound compelling. In a period of reduced class struggle the union bureaucracy is generally to the left of the disengaged rank-and-file. Ask an organiser why they didn’t drive a harder bargain, encourage a strike, or advocate a politics left of Labour, and the answer is usually “I’d love to, but I can’t without more members.” The left generally accepts that the current task is building back the dismal capacity of the unions by acting as an adjunct to the present leadership. But isn’t this the mantra of every Labour politician? Every reformist thrust into a position of responsibility? “I’d love to, but the support—the votes—the power, isn’t there.” Is it always cold necessity that the real fight starts tomorrow? Or have we mistaken cause and effect?
Union membership hasn’t returned precisely because the unions have failed to fight, even in limited ways, when workers needed it. Workers have learnt to expect little from the unions, and engage with them accordingly. Simply increasing membership won’t achieve leftist aims without a struggle to re-politicise unions—something most leaders actively resist.
Unlike sectoral movements, class struggle is native to the unions, but it is so deformed by mis-leadership that the tasks for communists are largely the same: to struggle for a militant pole, for open discussion of strategic differences, and to challenge the leadership. Day-to-day struggle over wages, hours and conditions must be connected to the need for industrial action across sectors or even national borders, the use of workers’ industrial power to intervene in ongoing struggles, such as against the oppression of M¯ori or trans people, and the question of workers’ state power itself.
In particular, this will necessitate a struggle against anti-strike laws, an issue that union leaderships have tossed in the “too hard” basket, and with it much of the hope for a renewed working- class politics in this country.
Leftists are painfully conscious of the “Life of Brian” caricature of the revolutionary movement as a mess of petty sectarian squabbles, and many respond by seeking to unify “all communists”, “all who want revolution” or “everyone left of the Greens”. This big tent approach has shaped groups like Organise Aotearoa, System Change Aotearoa, and Te Nuku Maui. But no such group actually becomes the pole of regroupment it envisions, leaving many “broad churches”, each refusing to discuss or clarify their differences. The NZ left is united in its (non-revolutionary) politics and disunited in its practical work—we need the opposite: unity in campaigns to defend the basic interests of the working class and the oppressed, while at the same time conducting hard debate for the clarification of the revolutionary program.
A revolutionary group must do more than preaching revolution in the abstract, while only uniting in action around easy low-level demands. The crucial question is how to get from the minimum program, from today’s struggles, to the ever-distant maximum program of socialist revolution. It may be possible to temporarily paper over differences on that vital part of the program that lies between the minimum and the maximum, but in the end this is the way that group after group falls apart, or falls into irrelevance.
Unity between revolutionaries is important, but unity can only be achieved around the necessary basis for unity. Fusions are only desirable if they bring revolutionaries together and advance their strength and capacity. Conversely, splits are no bad thing when they succeed in separating revolutionaries from reformists, sectarians and other non-revolutionaries.
There is no shortcut to success. Revolutionary communists in this country are few, and this number won’t be grown by pithy populism. The task of this moment is propaganda—appealing to the concerns of the section of the masses that are at this time open to communist ideas—and to consistently work to bring definition to the revolutionary program through processes of debate, education, struggle and engagement with the left and the broader world as a whole. Aotearoa New Zealand can be a sleepy country that has produced a left with humble ambitions. Communism means having the courage to demand the world.