System Change Aotearoa

System Change Aotearoa Chair, Elliot Crossan, provides a perspective for our special edition of The Commonweal.

The following article was solicited for The Commonweal Special Edition: What is to be done? published in March 2025.

You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.

These words, spoken by Angela Davis eleven years ago, contain the most important message that NZ socialists need to hear in 2025. The radical left far too often approaches questions of strategy and organisation with a pessimistic, defeatist mentality. Too often we act as if change is simply not possible in this country. It is urgently necessary for us to shake off this mentality.

David Seymour behaves as if it is possible for his party to radically transform Aotearoa. Before the pandemic ACT was a party reduced to one solitary MP, surviving thanks to its pact with National in Epsom, having received a mere 0.5% of the party vote in 2017.

Half a decade later, Seymour is setting the terrain on which the central political struggles of our time are fought. ACT’s Treaty Principles Bill is polarising the nation in a similar way to how the Brexit debate polarised the UK. A myriad of other attacks on Māori are sneaking through the legislative process under the cover of this most incendiary Bill. ACT has transformed itself in half a decade; what was a dying party in 2019 is now the driving force behind reactionary politics in Aotearoa today.

Last year saw the Coalition’s austerity programme—the harshest per-capita budget cuts in our nation’s history—combine with the Reserve Bank’s steep increases in the Official Cash Rate between 2021 and 2023 to throw Aotearoa into an economic downturn more severe than any comparable developed country is currently experiencing. Whilst our public services are being aggressively squeezed, ACT is again seizing the initiative; Seymour has stated that his priority for this year is to privatise the healthcare system, and is lobbying for a mass sell off of state housing. ACT is acting as an advance guard, clearing the way for National to pose as ‘moderate’ while the Coalition as a whole implements an extreme right-wing agenda.

This rapid intensification of New Zealand neoliberalism, alongside a vicious backlash against decades of progress towards a partial, inadequate honouring of Te Tiriti o Waitangi by the Crown, is only possible because of determined organisation on the right. 1999-2019 was a period of relative social peace in Aotearoa, marked by successive governments taking a ‘moderate’ approach and staying in the ‘centre ground’ in the wake of the neoliberal revolution of 1984-1999. Instead of giving up hope of seeing its agenda implemented in those lean years, ACT used that time to organise and plan—meaning the party was ready once crisis struck to advance the agenda of the most pitiless wing of the NZ capitalist class.

Aotearoa is now well within the throes of the social and economic crisis that the right spent 20 years waiting for. On the left, we were not ready. We were not prepared to advance socialist politics when the time came. Some valiant attempts to organise were made, but on the whole we were scattered and divided when the moment arrived.Yet ready or not, we do not have a choice. The time has come in which we can either make the case for radical change—for a socialist transformation of society in order to bring about social, economic, environmental and Treaty justice—or surrender to the radical right. We can either act with courage and determination, or give in to defeatism and despair.We must choose the former option. We must fight back. To do so, we must urgently address the division and disorganisation on the socialist left.

System Change Aotearoa is seeking to re-energise the conversation about the need for a new socialist party. We are not declaring ourselves to be this party; we are not interested in being another small sect which thinks it holds all the answers yet is unable to grow to anything like the scale needed in this time of crisis. We wish to talk to and work with other organisations and activists across the country to create something serious and lasting.

We acknowledge that multiple different political projects in tension with one another is not necessarily a bad thing in a period where the left is grappling with strategy. We can and must work together in solidarity across different parties and projects; we can be honest about political disagreements while respecting each other’s commitment to the kaupapa.

A number of activists have recently joined the Labour Party in order to try and reclaim it as the party of the working class in Aotearoa. System Change believes that this strategy is unlikely to work, as the lack of any existing socialist faction within the Labour caucus, and the tight control that the incumbent caucus has over leadership elections, candidate selections, and policy formation, means that there is no opening for a left-wing leadership of the party to emerge. We believe that the working class needs an independent voice in politics, and that this aim can only be achieved through the formation of a socialist party that is united on the basis of the struggle against capitalism, rather than by operating within a party which is dominated by those who seek merely to tinker around the edges of the fundamentally broken system.

However, the stakes are simply too high for anyone to pretend that they alone have the sole answer to all of our problems. We support any and all shifts to the left made by the Labour Party, and hope to work alongside activists who are pursuing a different overall strategy to us. The same goes for those working within the Greens and Te Pāti Māori, and for those who are against the concept of parties altogether.

One area where the left needs to work together regardless of party affiliations or lack thereof is in building a mass movement against austerity and privatisation. This is because, in the face of the biggest neoliberal assault that the working class of Aotearoa has faced since the early 1990s, a mass anti-austerity movement is sorely lacking. The past year has seen huge protests take place against the government’s attacks on Te Tiriti, the Fast-track Approvals Bill, and the Coalition’s complicity in the Gaza genocide. We wholeheartedly support each of these movements, and will support the advancement of each struggle in turn. Yet the response to the Coalition’s economic agenda has been muted.

This is particularly a problem for socialists, because it is through the struggle of workers to topple the capitalist system that we believe a better world can emerge. The 2010s saw the return of mass socialist and working—class politics in a myriad of different forms across Europe and America, as a direct consequence of the neoliberal paradigm beginning to fragment in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. The austerity policies imposed across the western world in this period represented a ruling class squeeze on workers’ living standards; this combination of economic crisis and austerity exposed the notion that neoliberal capitalism could act as a rising tide, lifting all boats, to be a lie. As a result, mass movements emerged in the streets resisting cuts and demanding an alternative. These movements found their political expression in sudden explosions in the popularity of previously obscure socialist politicians such as Sanders, Corbyn, and many others.

The conditions in Aotearoa were not the same in the 2010s. While workers in the majority of advanced economies were suffering, New Zealand capitalism was held up as a model of a ‘rockstar economy’. The austerity policies of the Key-English government were mild in comparison to what was seen in Europe.The opposite is true in the 2020s. The ruling class of New Zealand have chosen this moment to manufacture a crisis and use it to redistribute wealth upwards. We should therefore prepare for the possibility that, just as mass anti-austerity movements and left-reformist politics emerged overseas in the 2010s, similar phenomena will occur here this decade.

As Marxists, the revival of reformist social democracy in the form of the Sanders-Corbyn phenomenon is not our end goal. However, both the revival of mass street politics, and a return to the days when socialist ideas found expression in mainstream political discourse, will undoubtedly create openings for more revolutionary ideas to proliferate. It is the norm, rather than an aberration, that working—class movements resisting capitalism in times of crisis turn first towards reformism for answers, before some begin to look for revolutionary solutions. Marxists in Aotearoa should therefore view the potential emergence of anti-austerity movements, and a revival of left-reformism in one form or another, as hugely positive developments which could, under the right circumstances, help revolutionary socialist politics to thrive.We are not just observers of history; we are participants. We cannot sit idly by and hope that the material conditions inevitably lead to the outcomes we wish to see. It is therefore a vital task in 2025 for socialists to try and build organisations and movements specifically dedicated to opposing the Coalition’s agenda of privatisation and austerity.

In 2024, System Change worked with community groups in Tāmaki Makaurau to organise small rallies against the government’s attacks on Whaikaha (the Ministry for Disabled People), against the ‘traffic light’ benefit sanctions system, and against policies which have increased homelessness. We attempted to tie these issues together as part of the capitalist agenda to make the rich richer. We aim in 2025 to work with other activists in Tāmaki Makaurau and across the motu on the task of turning these small protests into mass mobilisations against the government. We also aim to engage in a dialogue with like-minded socialist activists and organisations on how to put class politics into the centre of the political debate more broadly.

Make no mistake—what is happening in Aotearoa today is a vicious class war. The ACT Party is acting as the Coalition’s ‘radical flank’ in an extremely effective way, pulling the entire political debate as far to the right as possible. One effect of the Treaty Principles Bill—though this is by no means its only purpose—is to, in the words of Steve Bannon, flood the zone with shit. NZ First’s xenophobic and transphobic rhetoric plays the same role. The Coalition are baiting the left into using all of our energy defending marginalised communities, creating a culture war to divide the working class against itself, and pre-empting any attempts to mobilise en masse against a government which operates totally and unambiguously in the interests of the super-rich.

Let 2025 be the year in which we stop dancing to Seymour’s music. That does not mean abandoning our defence of Te Tiriti, and it does not mean giving an inch of ground to the hateful rhetoric and policies of the three-headed right-wing monster. What it does mean is attempting to set the agenda ourselves by mobilising a broad-based working class coalition to fight against racism and austerity, and to fight for a better world for all.Let this be the year in which tens of thousands of us march for an end to the housing crisis; for better wages and conditions for all workers; for universal, well-funded public services; for public ownership; for dignity for beneficiaries and disabled people; and for the corporate elites to pay for it.

In Aotearoa, as across the world, the rapidly-radicalising capitalist class are driving society into the ground with their insatiable desire for even more wealth and power than they already have. Austerity-era neoliberal policies are rapidly accelerating already extreme levels of inequality. Techbro billionaires such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are financing far-right parties in order to channel the growing anger in society towards whichever minority is the latest scapegoat. We must not let them succeed. They can only be stopped when the working class is organised and ready to fight for an alternative. It is our task to lay whatever groundwork we can for this alternative.

Above all other crises looms the impending breakdown of our planet’s ecosystems. The capitalist drive for endless profit is quite literally threatening the future of organised human life on earth. We must remember that, amidst the optimistic rhetoric of the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels made the observation 177 years ago that throughout history, class struggle has: ‘each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.’ The climate crisis presents us with the very real possibility that the common ruin of both the capitalist class and the working class will occur within our lifetimes. The urgency of this impending catastrophe must sit at the back of our minds in every conversation about strategy and organisation.

For those of us who believe that building a new socialist party is the way forward, we simply do not have time to sit around and wait for someone else to do it. Unlike ACT, we do not have the luxury of being able to wait around for the fruits of a 20-year strategy to ripen. We do not have time for infighting. We need to have these conversations now, we need to unite, and we need to act decisively to bring about the change our society so desperately needs.

The strategic priorities of System Change Aotearoa are thus:

Work with other activists, organisations and community groups to build a mass movement against austerity and privatisation, while advancing demands for wealth redistribution and stronger workers’ rights.

Do whatever we can to strengthen existing movements for Te Tiriti, Palestine and the environment, while highlighting the fact that the global ruling class is to blame for imperialism and environmental destruction.

When the time is right, join with others across the motu to create a mass socialist party which can fight to change the system once and for all.

History will not absolve us if we fail to bring about the end of capitalism, and instead live to witness the end of the world.