Introducing: Blueprints

Building and sustaining left-wing independent media organisations has always been, and will always be, a key strategic task for those of us working toward a socialist future. In the early twentieth century, the Shearers Union created the Māoriland Worker, the most radical of the early left-wing papers. It reported on developments in the labour movement and kept fledging militant groups connected. During the Women’s Liberation Movement influential magazines such as Broadsheet and Race Gender Class sought to elevate and examine the political and social lives of marginalised groups in Aotearoa to better organise together. Whilst the start of the Māori renaissance in the 1970s was in no small part down to groups like the Māori Organisation On Human Rights (MOOHR) and the Te Hokioi newsletter, which disseminated their radical thinking and tried to coalesce a political movement. As Toby Boraman has said, left media is designed under the idea that ‘agitation, based on information, brings lasting converts to socialism.’

1/200, for the last two years, has been trying to fill the vacuum in Aotearoa New Zealand, bringing a consistent left-wing analysis to current affairs. As Generation Left enters political maturity, spaces where we can critique and deepen our understanding of the world are invaluable. But how to change the world ? Another key strategic task is to find, train and support leaders of the community into positions of power. The knowledge, experience and skills to do this, though, do not occur organically, or if they do, not often enough for us to overcome the entrenched power structures we are trying to dismantle.

And so we are excited to launch a new podcast for 1/200

It will be a series looking back over the political history of Aotearoa, telling the stories and strategies of movements, campaigns and organisations that have been active in changing it but focusing on how it happened. History never repeats itself, of course, and there will be no one super strategy that we find and distribute. As the title of a book by US labor organiser Jane McAlevey, there are ‘no shortcuts.’ 

However there is also nothing new under the sun, and history does produce echoes. We hope that by telling these stories we can be better prepared today. The histories shouldn’t be locked away in PHD theses or books, but available to everyone in a digestible form and so we are producing each episode in a narrative driven format, to make the stories immersive and engaging. You won’t often hear us as interviewers- we just ask the question, how? How it felt to be there, how they made decisions about tactics, coalitions and strategy, what people saw as the facts on the ground, how did they know they were doing the right thing, and why.

Though comparisons to bigger countries can often be unhelpful because we simply don’t have the people or resources to sustain many of the organisations that they do, it is instructive to do so in the context of what parts of a Left infrastructure do we need to build to help us achieve transformation. Founders of the Sunrise Movement in the US went through the Momentum training academy, as did many leaders of Black Lives Matter and there are dozens of other non-profits doing educational work. In the UK, NEON, an off-shoot of a think tank, develops and supports community campaigns with a variety of training sessions. We have had a few attempts at this in Aotearoa, Campaign Bootcamp was around for a year, whilst Kotare has offered social change education based around Tiriti since 1999. But nothing systematic nor long lasting has emerged. Perhaps simply because there is not enough funding for it.

I was involved with the Extinction Rebellion group in Aotearoa and it was my first serious attempt at engaging in politics. As we stumbled from tactic to tactic, I became frustrated that we seemed to be making so many mistakes. I didn’t know it at the time, but many of these mistakes are the same ones that people (mostly Pākehā) have been making for decades. I read up about past movements and campaigns, and felt that these lessons should be readily available. It didn’t feel to me like good strategy was the preserve of army generals or veteran activists- just a bit of context, a sprinkle of history and some understanding of power analysis should enable us to make better strategy.

There are many definitions of strategy that range from the pompous ‘strategy is the art of choice that binds means with objectives’ to the poetic ‘strategy is an equation of ends and means so sturdy that it triumphs despite serial setbacks’ but one of the best that we find was made by Marshall Ganz, a veteran US organiser and educator. He suggests we ask ourselves, how can we use the resources that we’ve got, to build the power we need, to get the decision maker to give us what we want. This is what we’ll be asking our guests.

For our first series we have been lucky enough to speak to a range of amazing people who have done some amazing things. We’ll hear how the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective, who never wrote a single part of their strategy down, spent 5 years campaigning to decriminalise sex work by tightly focusing on parliament and building a broad alliance of organisations. Union Organiser Simon Oosterman will tell us about the Super Size My Pay campaign he ran in 2003, which led to the world’s first Starbucks strike. We’ll learn how Pania Newton and her cousins who formed SOUL exhausted every legal means to defend their whenua at Ihumātao. The core team behind Chlöe Swarbrick’s win in the 2020 election will explain why they focused their strategy primarily on building a positive and inclusive community, and we’ll speak to their Green Party counterparts in Queensland, Australia, who’ve been patiently building a left-wing consensus in the heart of mining territory for 5 years by picking fights with the polluting and tax avoiding mining industry.

It feels to us as if there is no excuse not to have our history recorded, not to know easily what was tried, what worked and what didn’t, and why. Rosa Luxemburg thought that ‘the revolution will proceed step by step’ and so we hope this podcast can jump us all a couple ahead. Please like, share and subscribe!

Huw Morgan is a socialist currently based in Tāmaki Makaurau and the producer of Blueprints, a podcast about political strategies