Some time ago I wrote a piece entitled Is It Over? as I grappled with the possibly bleak implications of my research. I fretted that everyone was running blind towards a brick wall, or worse that they’d struck it full force and didn’t even know. I’ve settled since, and don’t fret so much, but my outlook has scarcely improved. In some ways I think my worry has been vindicated. Our red wave didn’t materialize, movement infrastructure was built up and degraded and forgotten in short order. People quietly crawled back into the fold of the parliamentary and municipal left, or eke out an existence commenting on its margins. A lot happened in the interim between then and now. Bloody terror attacks, destructive natural disasters, minds broken, a plague, a war, a social crisis straddling it all. There is great chaos under the heavens, conditions are dire.

That accounting never materialized, even if glimmers of recognition sparkled in the night from time to time. Today we stand by the same brick wall, winding up to charge headfirst into the tunnel we painted on it all over again. Be serious. Look around at the wreckage. Projects lie abandoned or slowly creaking out of existence. One organisation stands among the socialist left in robust health, but just as before its gains cannot account for the losses around it. Another screamed into life and grew with such vigor that it eclipsed its own capacity and crashed in flames as quickly as it rose. The overall scale and health of the socialist left has scarcely changed. There has been a substantial shifting in its organizational composition, yes, but it is so much deck shuffling.

The accounting is unavoidable, one way or another. It is a necessary process that will happen, the question is whether we do so with honesty or mythology. Any socialist left will tell stories of itself to explain how it arrived where it is, that can’t be helped. We cannot but wonder what led us to the situation we are in, for we are always acting on the graveyard of what was. We have no choice, no matter how we blind ourselves, but to notice the bones beneath our feet. What we have a choice in is whether that story is told with vague allegory and half-remembered legend or with honest clarity. Where are we? How did it get to this point? Who is here and who is gone? Why? No matter how small or fractured, we are capable of asking these questions and grasping for an answer. If we ever want to build real infrastructure, build real capacity, become a movement-in-being rather than a movement-in-waiting, then we have to.

I don’t know if it’s still possible, but I know it must be done. And every so often I see a flicker of desire, even if in absence of a full consciousness of the task. That task looks like a full accounting of the totality of projects and organizations as they exist, and their history. It looks like an assessment of the full breadth of tactics and strategies as they are actually being used, why they are used, their justifications, how long they have been used, their efficacy. It looks like an understanding of the ideological and political landscape as it stands, why it looks like it does, why people are drawn to this or that tendency, the implications on strategy and tactics, mapping the complicated relational web of activists and organisations. It looks like understanding the place of the socialist left in New Zealand society and history. In short, it looks like the socialist left being able to recognize itself in the mirror. To be able to touch its features and understand itself in totality. That is what an accounting of the present situation is. That is what might put the socialist left as a whole on a footing to engage with the wider society it finds itself a part of. To truly embody that which could be, rather than wallow in that which is. To manage its own books with full political independence and a clarity of purpose.

This is by no means an easy feat. However, it is one that can happen, bitter as it might be. Even in a state far more decayed than exists at present, it is possible. Were there one solitary person left, it would be possible. Hard, but possible. It’ll take awhile, but only in recognition of a problem can it hope to be solved. From this task, in and of itself, a wellspring of activity and projects might burst forth in a spirit of reconstruction and rediscovery. One might hope that such an accounting may imbue a renewed vigor, a kind of socialist renaissance as a movement-in-waiting sees itself for the first time in many years and desperately grasps the ephemera of yesteryear. That is, in the best of all possible worlds, anyway. We don’t live in that world, but that does not mean the task is not worth the attempt. At best we might see ourselves with realistic eyes, and flex our feeble muscles with a sense of understanding that has not existed for some time.

I can’t publish this and hope the task is taken up. I do not have that influence, and the world isn’t that kind nor that simple. This task will take many hands and minds, and it almost certainly won’t be undertaken with a unity of purpose in one grand project. Facing reality I can hope at best that it will emerge in a patchwork of projects scattered across a fractious ecosystem of radicals and fellow travelers. Perhaps, at some point, there will be recognition of fellow interests or a realization that said patchwork all seems to be facing the same direction. But that will take time, patience, decorum, and understanding. All things we may not have, and may not be able to afford. We will face reality either way, but the question becomes whether it will be on our terms. We do not know whether conditions will permit our patient reincorporation of our past into our present. A great bloody tide is here, whether we know it or not. We may not have the strength to cling to the rocks until it passes. It remains to be seen if we can pull ourselves together to undertake the task necessary to give us that strength. Divided, fractious, and ignorant of ourselves or our past, we cannot hope to reconstitute or face the future we seem locked into.