THE WRITE STUFF

US left wing journalist Abby Martin.

At a time of reactionary politics and complacent centrism, does left wing journalism still matter? 

 

In 2025, when the New Zealand left has often appeared scattered, exhausted, and politically irrelevant, it’s easy to wonder whether writing—blogging, columns, essays—still matters. This is something that has weighed on my mind this year, perhaps more so than at any other time. 

There might be a world to win, but right now, the National-led government is determined to enforce the interests of capital. Meantime, Labour shows no signs of emerging from its managerial centrism, and the commentariat treats inequality as something that's just 'there'  — like the weather — rather than the result of a failed economic system in decline. Against that backdrop, the socialist blogger, like yours truly, can feel we are shouting into a gale. But, at times like this, I have to remind myself that history is full of moments when the written word mattered most precisely when the left was at its weakest. Perhaps the question isn’t whether writing makes a difference. It’s whether we understand the kind of difference it makes.

Marx wrote Capital in the British Museum reading room, isolated, impoverished, often in ill-health, and politically marginal. His movement had collapsed, his allies were scattered, and the revolutions of 1848 had been crushed. If he had judged the value of his work by immediate political impact, he would have stopped. Instead, he wrote for the future—meticulously, obsessively, with the conviction that clarity itself was a form of struggle. His writing didn’t change the world in 1859. But it changed the world.

Rosa Luxemburg, who has had a profound influence on my political thinking, wrote from prison, often unsure whether her letters or essays would ever reach the outside world. She wrote anyway. She wrote because analysis is a weapon, because clarity is a form of solidarity, because the act of naming injustice is itself a refusal to accept it. She wrote because she believed that even in the darkest moments, someone, somewhere, would pick up the thread.

The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci wrote in a fascist jail cell, denied access to political texts, his health failing. He wrote because he understood that the ruling class maintains power not only through force but through ideas—and that counter-hegemony must be built long before it becomes visible. His notebooks were not pamphlets for the masses. They were seeds.

The left in New Zealand today is not imprisoned, exiled, or banned. But it is demoralised, fragmented, and often voiceless in mainstream debate. That is precisely why writing matters. Not because a single blog post will topple a government, but because political consciousness is cumulative. Because every argument that punctures the neoliberal consensus creates space for the next step forward . That's because the left’s greatest defeats have always been followed by periods of intellectual reconstruction, and those periods were sustained by people who wrote when it felt pointless.

The blogger and columnist in 2025 faces a unique challenge: the digital landscape is saturated, attention is fractured, and the algorithm rewards outrage over analysis. Social media is evidence of that.  But this is not a reason to retreat. It is a reason to sharpen. The left does not need more content; it needs clarity, courage, and narrative. It requires writers who refuse to accept the framing of the political centre, who expose the ideological scaffolding behind every 'common sense' policy, who insist that inequality is not natural, that austerity is not inevitable, that the market is not a neutral arbiter of value. That there is, indeed, a world to win.

Writing matters because it builds memory. In a political culture where every crisis is treated as unprecedented, the columnist can trace the through-lines: the decades of privatisation that hollowed out public services, the bipartisan worship of 'fiscal responsibility, 'the media’s fixation on personalities over structures. Without memory, the left cannot learn. Without learning, it cannot rebuild.

Writing matters because it builds community. Even a small readership can become a nucleus of shared understanding, a space where people recognise their own frustrations articulated with precision. Every movement begins with people realising they are not alone. A column can do that. A blog can do that. A single sentence can do that. This blog, probably because it's been around for years, has built up a reasonably sizeable readership both here and overseas. It now has as many readers in the United States as it has in New Zealand.

Writing matters because it builds confidence. The left in New Zealand has been told for decades that its ideas are unrealistic, outdated, or extreme. But the crises of the 2020s—housing, climate, inequality—are crises of the very system we were told to trust. When a socialist writer names these failures plainly, without apology, they help others rediscover the legitimacy of their own anger. They help people see that the problem is not their expectations, but the system that denies them.

And writing matters because it builds the future. Not in the sense of manifestos that instantly reshape politics, but in the sense that ideas accumulate, arguments sediment, and narratives shift. The right understands this. That is why it invests so heavily in think tanks, media platforms, and ideological repetition. The left cannot afford to abandon the terrain of ideas simply because the present feels bleak.

Optimism, then, is not a mood. It is a discipline. Rosa Luxemburg wrote that  'the most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening'. Gramsci insisted on 'pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.' Marx wrote for a world that did not yet exist. None of them waited for favourable conditions. They created the conditions.

The socialist columnist in 2025 is not writing into a void. They are writing into a long tradition of struggle, into a future that is not yet visible, into a political landscape that can shift faster than anyone expects. The left has been declared dead many times. It has always returned. But it returns only when people keep thinking, keep arguing, keep imagining.

Writing is not everything, but it's a start. Without it, there is nothing. And as left wing US journalist Abby Martin says: 'Everything you do matters. If our words didn’t matter, they wouldn’t spend billions to smother them.'