Platypus Affiliated Society - By way of example

Michael McClelland provides a piece from the Platypus Affiliated Society for our Special Edition of The Commonweal: What is to be done? Published in March 2025.

I’ve been invited to write for this special edition of the Commonweal concerning ‘tactics, strategy, goals, or—in short—What is to be done?’ I was approached as a representative of the Platypus Affiliated Society, an organisation that is educational in character. Platypus exists to investigate obstacles that foreclose the possibility of a future emancipatory movement. We admit openly that these are not trivial but existential in significance, resulting from the failure of the historical Left. Our starting point is the recognition that no mass working class movement for socialism exists today, and that, consequently, any discussion of building a party in its absence amounts to a moot point.

The most precise way to frame this problem is abstractly: theory and practice are in crisis. The Left, unable to reckon with its history, shows no sign of escaping its cycle of repeating past failures. Given these premises, any attempt to propose ‘tactics’, ‘strategies’, or ‘goals’ is inherently constrained, if not fundamentally paradoxical.

Take the two major catchments of the organisation-building Left—either ‘sectarian’ and isolated or ‘coalitionist’ and inclusive—who claim sharp differences in method. Despite their mutual distrust, they appear, from the perspective of socialism’s historical high point, as equally irrelevant. To wit, no matter how ambitious or well-intentioned, such groups, in the absence of a class-conscious base, have little choice but to structure themselves around their external limitations. Practically, this means they’re forced into either a tactical position—adopting the language of ‘resistance’, NGO-ism, and pressure tactics upon the state—or a merely speculative stance that projects today’s programme onto tomorrow’s movement. As though to make up for the above deficiencies, such groupings may attempt to legitimate themselves via slogans—whether the ‘vanguard party’, the ‘party of the whole class’, or others—borrowed from a time when there existed international class consciousness. That is, a time which cannot be compared with the present, only contrasted.

In addition to facing the above obstacles, groups that, conversely, aim to begin humbly and from below—be they anarchists, unionists, community organizers, or good old-fashioned liberals—struggle to build the needed movement up at the base level without facing yet another conundrum. They risk misjudging the depth of the problem, whether this means underestimating the number of ideological obstacles that have accumulated, or overestimating the possibility of there even being such a thing as a ‘fresh start’.The dilemma, in short, is that whereas one simply has no way of going out and ‘making’ the party, so are we all obstructed from ‘making’ the movement.

This much should not be surprising. Nor does it answer the questions of this edition of the Commonweal: In addition to today’s ‘tactics’, ‘strategies’, and ‘goals’, I’ve been asked to reflect on tomorrow—‘what is to be done?’—which, by the very question, does not allow ‘no’ as an answer. ‘Well’, you might ask, ‘if something is to be done, and no-one is capable of doing it, what then?’

I don’t know. What appears to one person as too little choice can appear to another as too much. What one sees as a pile of wreckage, another regards as a path to be cleared, but even so, there appears no tool with which to readily cut through the multitude of obstacles, leaving one to clear the path with one’s bare hands. Facing a job so big, with so many possible starting points, one begins to doubt, then becomes indecisive, and finally is paralysed.

I see this as a helpful metaphor to pin down that abstract, slippery concept known as New Zealand. Although some are entranced by this nation’s peculiarities—its small population, its dependency on (and need for protection by) foreign countries, its distance from them, its relatively short history—what appear as unique properties belonging to New Zealand can equally be regarded as external limitations stemming from its relation to the outer world. The latter description summarises in high-minded terms what seems obvious, even stupidly true: when all the campaign banners have fallen away, the prospects for transforming this country in the direction of socialism appear slim in global capitalism. In international terms, there might be little significance for what Lenin called this ‘country of inveterate, backwoods, thick-headed, egotistical philistines, who have brought their “civilisation” with them from England and keep it to themselves like a dog in a manger’.

Indeed, the question might not be ‘what is to be done?’ but what is to be done here, and, more importantly, so what? Socialism in America or Europe would mean socialism in New Zealand, and not the other way around. From Lenin’s historical standpoint, that of revolution, who would we be kidding?

Well, it all depends on how you look at it. If we set aside all of New Zealand’s peculiarities, the remaining kernel, the most abstract, is the most significant. The New Zealand example is useful as an example, a microcosm for the Left, as a spatial metaphor for a problem that is essentially historical, a particular manifestation of a problem that is universal in character.

Certainly, some have recognised the potential for this device, if merely for the purposes of triumphalism. Most obvious is the social democratic point of view, which has more or less imagined the path to socialism as a series of baby steps—in which case, the smaller the country, the easier the steps. Assuming all bets are off, we can’t ignore the evidence commonly given for this point of view, such as the history of this country’s union movement and its first Labour government. But here we risk accepting the fraught terms of mainstream progressive historiography—a tendency the Left has often uncritically embraced, much like its approach to progressive politics in general (itself the inevitable result of the loss of its historical working-class base).

In this imagination, New Zealand is a petri dish, a way of ‘testing out’ capitalism or socialism. You name it: the ‘Wakefield plan’, the Treaty of Waitangi, arbitration and conciliation, the massive mid-20th-century welfare state, Rogernomics, and more. But a petri dish is only useful to the scientist insofar as it demonstrates what exists out in the wild. We might do well to remember that so many ‘innovations’ down under owed their existence to the dynamics of capital abroad and the resulting global political response: What was ‘systematic colonisation’ if not an attempt to resolve the unrest industrial capitalism had wrought upon England via Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s repurposing (i.e., reification) of Adam Smith? The Treaty of Waitangi an attempt by the Crown to avoid repeating the disaster of Australia? The ‘land without strikes’ an effort to prevent the labour unrest rocking other countries? Michael Joseph Savage’s welfare state no less a response to the global Great Depression than the New Deal? Roger Douglas’s neoliberal reforms an attempt to adapt to the economic shocks that began in the 1970s?

Conditioned to expect countries to appear as glistening, fully-formed pearls, some on the Left might, upon realising that capitalism’s ‘national characteristics’ in New Zealand are no less extensions of the global economic and political order, become melancholic—unaware of the irony that their insistence to be convinced of the plausibility of socialism in one country involves comparison with every other. But ‘every analogy is lame’.All comparisons are limited, all are conditioned by what they are not.

If the Left exists as nothing but froth upon history, we can, at least, recognise in it what forces have coalesced. Even the foam of the waves that lap at our shores are the product of international currents; indeed, of lunar cycles. In the same way, every layer in the ongoing process of capital accumulation begins to turn invisible forces into visible results. Echoing this, the neurotic self-doubt that afflicts the Left might be turned outwards, made productive, even if just to record the memory of failure so that future generations can retrieve it.

Were one to proceed from this foundation, one would hardly need to be troubled by the limiting factors of distance, size, isolation, and all else that might plausibly arrest the development of class consciousness in our corner of the world. Nor would the failures of the past appear as a burden. Wisdom is knowing what you don’t know. Doubt, then, can yet be used for purposes other than neurotic self-paralysis.

Who knows, after all? Doubt, that most radical form of questioning—the one thing we can all agree on—might prove the most effective organizing tool of all. Through appealing to activists, students, and the working class alike on the basis of failure, one might have the upper hand over all hitherto efforts: it would, at least, appear honest. This convenient byproduct, furthermore, would allow for contrast, not comparison, with the NGO-ists, career politicians, and academics who have grafted themselves onto ‘socialism’ via their claims to have defeated doubt once and for all.

I don’t expect success. That much I know.

In Platypus, we wear the badge of Marxism not proudly, but warily, since, from the standpoint of the present, Marxism appears to have been falsified. But so, too, might we redeem Marxism, since history poses—tasks—this potential for overcoming. After all, we, too, are guided as much by our wants as the fact that the present leaves us wanting. These wants, if we can recognise them for what they are, pile up like a monumental scrap-heap on the road to revolution. They are the tasks left behind by yesterday.

‘What is to be done,’ then?

Well, you asked!