Organise Aotearoa - Slowly attempting to make something new

Bernard Marsh, National Secretary of Organise Aotearoa, provides a perspective for the Special Edition of The Commonweal: What is to be done? Published in March 2025.

When Organise Aotearoa launched in 2018 it quickly grew to be one of the largest socialist organisations in the country. This did not last long. Where once we were a national organisation with active members all over the country, now we’re limited to Tāmaki Makaurau and are lucky to have more than 10 active members at any given time.

In response to this collapse, we’ve been embarking on what we’re calling the OA refresh process. During this process we’ve done a lot of soul-searching as to how our organisation has ended up in the situation it’s in. And the conclusion we’ve come to is that the problems faced by OA—factionalism, directionlessness, burnout—are not unique to OA but are the results of wider material conditions and that the attempt to solve them is one and the same with figuring out how to abolish capitalism.

Organisation as the key political question of our time

When Leftist groups fall apart there is a tendency to blame the personalities involved, the political tendency they follow, or to trot out caricatures of leftists as argumentative or uncommitted to real change. But the fact of the matter is that we are organising in a socio-political environment that continuously structurally reinforces itself. Leftist organisations have problems with racism and sexism and what not because all organisations in our society do. Leftists have problems getting people to turn up and carry out their responsibilities and get things done because all volunteer groups under capitalism do. Leftists have problems with burnout because everyone has burnout now. And no one has figured out a solution to any of this yet—regardless of whether or not you believe anyone has successfully created a socialist society, it’s a matter of fact no one has done it out of a post-industrial liberal democracy.

This is not, however, a call for doomerism, nor a call to completely ignore all that has gone before. Rather it is simply to say that in order to break out of this rut that the entire Aotearoa Left is in, we need to seriously think about the logistics and material realities of how we organise and what we’re organising for. And by organising we mean how we act and think and are collectively—in groups, in organisations, in communities. All of this we need to approach with intentionality. We can’t afford to take anything for granted. We need to be aware of the sorts of interpersonal and organisational habits we’ve inherited from wider society that might be holding us back—whether obvious things like patriarchal microaggressions or racist assumptions, to less obvious things like an aversion to structured meetings or not thinking about the logistics of decision making. We need to be constantly asking ourselves what the purpose or goal of any activity we engage in is and whether or not we are actually seeing any measurable results.

But what are we actually organising for?

We in Organise Aotearoa are Decolonial Communists. We want to create a world where we have done away with capitalism and colonisation and replaced them with a classless society that is based on tikanga, kaitiakitanga and the principle of ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs’. We believe this can only be achieved through a revolutionary overthrow and replacement of all our current dominant political and economic structures.

In terms of organising a decolonial communist revolution, our goal is to build into what’s called a dual-power situation. This is where the organised political and economic institutions of our movement have achieved a level of strength and independence that they can be said to constitute a competing power within society, capable of contesting the power of the political and economic institutions of the capitalist class (ie the market, the state, etc). Dual power represents a temporary situation when the capitalist class’s monopoly of power has been disrupted, a situation that will inevitably lead to a clash and thus revolution. However, despite its transitory nature as a precursor to revolution, it is useful to talk of dual power as a goal because of the way in which it frames the act of revolution.

The key goal of organising for a dual power situation is to build an ecosystem of institutions that will eventually be capable of independently exerting power. This is very different from, for instance, building a party that aims to capture parliament or building an organisation that aims to influence or transform the state. The key short and medium-term goals in this sort of thinking are to build resilience and self-reliance within our communities and organisations, to build solutions that stay within the people’s control. This both protects against later governments simply reversing progress made under their predecessors, and also allows us to prefigure and practice running the sort of society we actually want.

At the time of writing we still have not formulated our actual strategy for how we’re going to build dual-power in Aotearoa. However, in our view there are six key sites of struggle. These are:

Constitutional Transformation

The movement to replace the Westminster system with one based on Te Tiriti and He Whakaputanga is the strongest vehicle for political revolution in this country. Beyond the moral imperative of respecting the right to self-determination of tangata whenua, there’s also the simple fact that Te Tiriti, and te ao Māori more broadly, contain the lessons and historical political concepts of an actually existing communist society, albeit one with a very different material base. That said the movement as it currently exists is dominated by moderate, reformist elements who would be happy with a constitutional transformation centred on corporate iwi and a brown-washed version of capitalism. It is imperative that working class and anti-capitalist elements in the movement be strengthened.

Unionism

As communists, it should be no surprise that we support rebuilding the union movement, as it represents the strongest vehicle for self-organisation available for the working class. However, the unions as they currently exist are overly focused on working within the current framework for collective bargaining. They’re making important gains for working conditions in specific industries and sectors but also leaving behind smaller worksites and more precarious workers and utterly failing to build up any sort of culture of class consciousness or collective action in the industries they are active in. Broadening the movement to be more member-led and more inclusive of a wider range of industries—perhaps even including those sections of the working class currently left behind, like the unemployed—would be key for building up worker self-organisation and moving it beyond reformism.

Justice

The New Zealand justice system is the frontline of both colonisation and the class war. Organising in this space is necessary to both protect working—class Māori and racialised communities from being further truamatised and disrupted by the state as well as to give the working class an opportunity to develop our own solutions for harm that are transformative and restorative rather than punitive and ineffective.

Housing

The ongoing housing crisis is one of the sharpest class contradictions in Aotearoa. Through organising tenants and renters unions, as well as investigating non-traditional forms of accessing and managing housing (such as squatting or land trusts), a revolutionary movement might not just provide some relief for one of the most pressing concerns for many working class kiwis but also bring into their control one of the most important aspects of any society. Through building ties with hapu, working in the housing space can also provide a powerful onramp for moving this country towards Land Back.

Internationalism

It goes without saying that our society exists in a global system. International solidarity is not just a moral imperative but also a recognition of this reality. However, moving solidarity work from performative actions (as powerful as that can be) towards something more material, is a crucial necessity for the Left. Within OA we are becoming increasingly focused on solidarity within Oceania, in particular building ties with the Free West Papua movement. We believe organising in a Pan-Oceanic way could be the future of the Left here as it acknowledges both the reality of Pacific countries and people’s intertwined history and existences as well as the necessity of combating ongoing imperialism and colonialism within the region.

Ecology

Ecology is, admittedly, a site of struggle that we haven’t thought too deeply about in OA. However, a general understanding of the climate crisis as resulting from a rupture between humanity and papatūānuku resulting from extractive economic practices form a general backdrop to much of our thought.

Conclusion

The revolution is not just going to be a matter of getting the correct ideas. It’s also, crucially, going to be a matter of logistics and a matter of how people are organised. At this point in history the key task for the Left is learning how to actually organise ourselves in a way that builds something new.