What’s it like when Auckland leftists gather with Sue Bradford to discuss a new left-wing party? Gabi Lardies finds out.
It was a dark and stormy night (last Tuesday) when radical leftists gathered at Auckland Irish Club in Morningside. Outside, the bowling greens were empty. Inside, the bar was open, serving pints of beer and cans of pink Pals. The left of the building is arranged like a pub, with barrels to stand at, bar leaners, stools and a pool table. There were paper plates of tiny savoury pastries (vegetarian) and miniature summer rolls (vegan, gluten free) and their attendant dipping sauce.
But the people made their way past the heavy, green, velvet curtains to the right hand side, where chairs were lined up in rows facing a small stage under fluorescent overhead lights. A long fabric banner with the words “TAX THE RICH” appliquéd onto it was pinned to the wall behind the stage, connecting two huge Guinness posters.
It was a good turn-out, about 50 people. The current activist uniform, camo or cargo pants with a warm jacket and a keffiyeh draped around the shoulders, was scattered throughout. The occasion: discussing whether Aotearoa needs a new radical left-wing party. It’s not a new idea: the night’s key speaker Sue Bradford has been on about it for at least five years, but possibly over a decade.
The activist-turned-Green MP-turned-academic-turned-community leader made her way on stage carrying one of those woven plastic bags that Auckland’s it-girls like to take to Herne Bay. Her hair was in its signature style, swooping down from a dramatic side parting over her right eye. She took her place at a table next to Elliot Crossan, a much younger activist who identifies as an ecosocialist. He’s the chair of System Change Aotearoa, the group who put together the event.
I took my place at the very edge of the second row, near the exit and not too far from the snacks. I was cold outside, and when I sat, the cold seemed to make its way deeper in. Around me, people kept their jackets, beanies and mittens on. Vivian, another member of System Change, stood behind the podium to get the proceedings going. “Sue Bradford needs no introduction,” they said, “but I’ll give her one anyway.” The crowd tittered.
Then it was time for Bradford. “I do feel like I’m entering where angels fear to tread,” Bradford began. For someone who’s been arrested heaps of times and lives in the public consciousness chanting and holding placards on the street, she was subdued. Within the first minute, she dispelled any assumptions that she was starting this potential radical-left party. “I’m certainly not – it’s not that I wouldn’t like to,” she said, “but there’s some big questions we really have to continue to face up to.”
Instead of a heartfelt call to radical action, a promise that the left was going to rise up, a tilting towards revolution, all that lofty exciting stuff that radical-left event speeches often turn to, Bradford detailed the many challenges anyone forming a radical-left party would have to overcome. From what I gathered, the radical left would first have to join together, overcoming such differences as whether Trotsky was better than Stalin. Then there’s a problem of numbers, with Bradford explaining that a new party would need to start with at least three or four hundred people. This is to make the party visible, she said, so it’s not seen as “some small, struggling left sect as so many of us have been involved in in the past or currently – not that there’s anything wrong with that”.
Importantly, there’s the question of money. Quite a lot of it would be needed. Even Bradford doesn’t think that “a small group of keen activists, with little or no money, even with really good social media skills and other kinds of organisational skills, can build a mass organisation successfully.” Unfortunately neither Bradford or anyone else in the room knew where to get that kind of dosh. I wouldn’t say she was cynical, but there certainly were touches of resignation. At 72, I guess she’s been around the block of theoretical unfulfilled leftist revolutions a few too many times.
I’m not sure any of this is what the crowd wanted to hear. Many had their arms crossed – perhaps because of the cold – and some fiddled with their phones, hands or feet. They listened with a faint sense of approval, but nothing Bradford said seemed to ignite much energy.
I buttoned up my jacket. In my notebook I wrote “no heater :(” and then drew the white tiny UFO microphone that Crossan diligently held up to Bradford. It was about the size of a baby’s head, with three shiny aluminium legs, and I believe it was the microphone for the livestream, but I cannot officially confirm. Behind me, someone crocheted with baby-pink yarn.
There was a time when I would have frothed over an event like this. But now I’ve been to enough that they’ve all begun to feel the same, and I can’t help but feel that nothing ever happens apart from a small group of similar people, who all agree with each other, talk to each other and then agree they need to talk to each other more. At the point you think that maybe they will do something practical, they vehemently disagree on the smallest of details and the whole thing falls over.
No doubt Bradford has seen this too – it’s another obstacle she listed. “We can have great purity within left activists – purity about every issue, about all the different politics and all the issues,” she said looking around the room. “If you’re starting off trying to get everything pure and perfect from day one, you can take years trying to achieve that purity, and in the meanwhile, nothing is really happening.”
That seems to be the space that many radical left groups haven’t managed to move beyond. A brave and cynical journalist might consider that the core of these groups always seem dominated by middle-class white people who are highly educated and love reading dense books that are really old and long. That journalist might wonder whether some of these groups are more interested in carrying out complex thought experiments and holding virtuous political opinions than actually engaging with the real world.
Bradford has never really been one of those activists though. In her decades of work, she’s been a doer. Peoples Centres, unions, education, pickets, rallies, policy change through parliament, a think tank – her biography is very thick. You could talk about her work and its effects without once needing to say “Marx” – which isn’t to say she’s not educated or smart, only to say that so much of what she’s done has been tangible, rather than bookish.
Half an hour into the event, my butt was numb. The chairs had a tidy aesthetic, I would say perhaps a Kmart mid-century style, but they did not have cushions. It was time to quietly stand up and head to the snack table. It was dinner time after all. I grabbed as many pastries as seemed socially acceptable (two – I am not that brave journalist) not knowing I still had an hour and a half of listening ahead of me.
After Bradford finished up, Crossan took the lectern. “Now you get to have a veteran followed by a wide-eyed young optimist,” he said. By this point I was very cold and hungry, but I’m pretty sure he mainly agreed with everything Bradford said in upbeat cadences and a few more lighthearted jokes taking aim at Labour and the Green party for being centrist capitalists. (Though the biggest laugh of the night came when Bradford said that Green Party conferences were vegan affairs. I’m not sure if vegans were the butt of the joke or if I missed something, given the food on offer.)
The audience seemed to wake up for the final segment – question time. There were a lot of questions, about half of them comments, and all of them rather long. A whole hour was spent on questions, and the only note I took appears to say “2x tiny quiche”. I noticed the lady in front of me was writing in a notebook too, but ignoring the lines, writing huge text on an angle so she could only fit nine or so words on a page. Chaos, I thought.
A couple of people pledged their allegiance to the yet-to-exist party, but Bradford was less conclusive in her answers. She never really said a radical left-wing party would be formed, but rather that, “we do have to be a little cautious, and keep thinking and talking,” and before her final kia ora, “let’s see where it goes.” It seems more meetings are in order.