POWER FROM BELOW

Green co-leader Chloe Swarbrick once spoke of building political power from below. But the Green Party she co-leads has chained itself to Labour's timid centrism.

 

THERE MUST BE a general election soon because I'm being told by opponents of the present government, things will be so much better once Labour is returned to power. Better starts, if not now, after November 7. The left, such as it is, keeps circling the same dead end: the belief that present electoral politics, if only infused with enough moral urgency or staffed by enough well-meaning people, can be the engine of social transformation.

But when she became the new co-leader of the Green Party in March 2024, Chloe Swarbrick spoke of the Labour Party as one of 'the legacy parties that do not represent the future of New Zealand.' She went on to tell reporters that government decisions 'have been often constrained by systems designed to give power and privilege to the few. But this system is man-made, and it can and must be remade.'

Swarbrick was pointing to the central limitation of electoral politics in a neoliberal state. Elections become rituals of managed competition between parties that share a commitment to the same economic order. In New Zealand, the choice between National and Labour is not a choice between competing social projects but between two managerial factions of capital. Around them orbit smaller parties that have already pledged their allegiance to one or the other, reinforcing the gravitational pull of the duopoly. The result is a political system that offers the appearance of competing viewpoints and policies while foreclosing the possibility of structural change. Voters sense this, which is why disillusionment deepens with every election cycle. People are not apathetic; they are exhausted by a system that asks them to choose between variations of the same status quo.

The tragedy is that the left has internalised these limits. Instead of building independent power, it has surrendered to the logic of parliamentary respectability. The unions have been hollowed out, social movements have been absorbed into NGO structures dependent on state funding, and parties that once flirted with radicalism have become administrators of neoliberal continuity. Even Chloe Swarbrick, who once spoke urgently about the need for economic and political transformation, now leads a Green Party that has tethered itself to Labour’s cautious centrism. The party that once imagined itself as a disruptive force has become another component of the parliamentary machinery, committed to  the status  quo.

Yet it was also Chloe Swarbrick who also spoke of the importance of building an extra parliamentary movement. But while she recognised that parliamentary politics is structurally constrained, that governments operate within a framework designed to preserve capitalist stability, and that meaningful change requires pressure from outside the parliamentary chamber, her horizon remained narrow. A 'grassroots movement,' she said, would mean more Green members, more Green councillors, more Green MPs, and ultimately a Green-led government. The movement she imagined was not a force capable of reshaping the state from below but an electoral pipeline designed to feed the party with personnel. It was a vision of mobilisation that begins and ends with the ballot box.

But an extra-parliamentary organisation is not an optional supplement to electoral politics. Without independent social power, left-wing governments become administrators of the very system they once criticised. They inherit a state apparatus designed to constrain them, a civil service steeped in neoliberal orthodoxy, and an economic structure that punishes deviation. In such conditions, electoral victories become symbolic rather than transformative. The left wins office but loses power.

To capture the state from below is to reverse this dynamic. It is to build movements that can reshape the terrain on which governments operate.  It is to treat elections not as the culmination of political struggle but as one moment within a broader project of social transformation. This requires patience, organisation, and a willingness to confront the limits of parliamentary politics rather than retreat into them.

New Zealand’s political landscape is bleak precisely because this work has not been done. The left has ceded the field to parties that promise stability rather than change. But the conditions for rupture exist: rising inequality, collapsing public services, climate crisis, and widespread disaffection with the political class. Swarbrick glimpsed the possibility of a movement capable of reshaping the state, but her party has chosen the safer and conservative path of parliamentary accommodation. 

If the left is serious about transformation, it must stop treating elections as the primary vehicle for change and start building the social forces that make change possible. State power is not captured by winning seats; it is captured by altering the balance of power in society itself. Only then can the state be remade from below rather than managed from above.