She Says She Wants A Revolution.

Heads Up: Jeremy Corbyn’s greatest mistake was to give the ruling elites and their enablers advance warning that he was coming for their power, their purse, and their privilege. Candidate for the Green Party co-leadership, Chloe Swarbrick, appears to share Corbyn’s naïve assumption that those who own the system will sit idly by while a genuine left-wing leader organises a revolution at the ballot box to take it from them.

CHLOE SWARBRICK WANTS A REVOLUTION. Her “announcement speech” has been hailed as a “once in a generation” oratorical triumph. I wouldn’t go that far, but there’s no disputing that Swarbrick took full advantage of the media’s interest in her candidacy for the Greens’ co-leadership to lay her programmatic cards on the table.

“Conventional, incremental politics has failed to rise to the challenges we face”, Swarbrick declared, “those intertwined climate, inequality, biodiversity and housing crises.”

So far, so good left-wing boilerplate. But, it was in the next few sentences that the young MP’s revolutionary intent was revealed:

“What is possible in politics is only ever defined by the willingness of those in power. As Co-leader, I want to show everyone in this country the power running through their veins to choose our future. We cannot leave politics to the politicians.”

Opined the Green politician.

And it is here that the problems confronted by all revolutionaries begin: with those beguilingly inclusive words; “everyone in this country”.

There was a time and place – late-eighteenth century France, to be precise – when appealing to “everyone in this country” made a certain kind of sense.

When the King, supported by an aristocracy encompassing approximately 1 percent of the population, ruled over everybody else, most notably a rightless and impoverished peasantry comprising 90 percent-plus of the population, “everyone in this country” (who wasn’t a king or an aristocrat) had a strong and direct interest in transforming their society.

But that was more than 200 years ago. The power that runs through the veins of New Zealanders, today, does not, alas, run uniformly. Some Kiwis are better equipped to choose their futures than others. Indeed, there are hundreds-of-thousands of New Zealand citizens so bereft of cultural, social and economic capital that speechifying to them about choosing their futures could be seen as grossly insensitive.

Swarbrick is a highly intelligent person, with an impressive and oft-demonstrated capacity to marshal facts and figures in support of her arguments. It is strange, therefore, that her announcement speech largely fails to address the manifest power differentials in the society she is proposing to transform. Especially when she goes out of her way to preface her call for a grass-roots uprising with the eminently sensible – and accurate – statement:

“What is possible in politics is only ever defined by the willingness of those in power.”

Like the willingness of farmers to shoulder the not inconsiderable cost of cleaning-up their rivers and streams and reducing their greenhouse-gas emissions.

Like the willingness of small business owners to pay a capital gains tax.

Like the willingness of big businesses to redistribute the lion’s share of corporate surpluses from their shareholders to their employees.

Like the willingness of landlords to shoulder the costs of upgrading their properties, and empowering their tenants.

Like the willingness of those whose salaries place them in the top quintile of income-earners to pay higher taxes.

Except, of course, the willingness of all the above groups to redefine politics in ways that not only make them poorer, but also undermine their ability to set the boundaries of acceptable change, is NIL.

These New Zealand socio-economic interests are no more willing to surrender their power and privilege than were their British counterparts when the Labour Party membership elected a leader determined to govern “for the many, not the few”.

That last was a powerful rhetorical flourish – adapted from the final verse of Percy Bysshe Shelly’s incendiary poem “The Masque of Anarchy”.) Too powerful, as it turned out.

Jeremy Corbyn’s greatest mistake (apart from his failure to back Brexit) was to give the ruling elites and their enablers advance warning that he was coming for their power, their purse, and their privilege. Corbyn’s political destruction is thus attributable to his naïve assumption that those who owned the system would sit idly by while he organised a revolution at the ballot box to take it from them.

Clearly, Swarbrick has not learned the lessons embedded in the depressing saga of Corbyn’s rise and fall.

“I will grow the Green movement to achieve tangible, real-world, people-powered change - as I have since I first signed up - but now, at even greater scale.”

That’s telling ‘em, Chloe!

“I will challenge this Government’s cruel agenda and communicate the imagination, potential, and the necessary hope to mobilise for the sustainable, inspiring and inclusive Aotearoa that I see reflected every day in our communities”

And that’s telling them even more!

“They” will not move immediately to remove the potential threat that is Chloe Swarbrick. Like the British ruling-elites, New Zealand’s defenders of the neoliberal status-quo will wait to see if the putative Green co-leader’s revolution at the ballot-box amounts to anything more than yet another middle-class firebrand’s pipe-dream.

There’s no denying that “they” have every reason to be sceptical. After all, Jim Anderton’s Alliance had promised something very similar thirty years ago. It’s unashamedly socialist component, the NewLabour Party, had also set out to make its followers “local body members, councillors and mayors” They, too, promised “more [Alliance] MPs in Parliament and ultimately, our nation’s first [Alliance-led] Government.”

Didn’t happen. With the notable exception of Anderton’s proletarian redoubt of Sydenham, the Alliance did well (even, like Swarbrick, capturing Auckland Central) where, thirty years later, the Greens still do best. Those central-city electorates composed of university students and young professionals. Where it mattered, however, in the electorates of the poor and marginalised, the Alliance failed miserably. Against their most formidable competitors, Labour voters, and those who didn’t vote at all, Alliance candidates struggled to reclaim their deposits.

Just how steep a mountain Swarbrick has set herself to climb is evident in the votes received by Labour and the Greens in the electorates where citizens’ life choices are most seriously constrained. Let’s look at Mangere. Labour: 61.40 percent; Greens: 7.85 percent. Or, Mana. Labour: 62 percent; Greens: 9.8 percent.

It is always possible, of course, that Swarbrick, unlike Anderton, will succeed in heating the blood of enough New Zealanders to turn those stats around. That in 2025 there will be a Green tsunami that lifts unabashed insurgents into council chambers and mayoral offices all across New Zealand. That the polls will register a massive shift from Labour to Green and, month after month, confirm Swarbrick’s preferred prime minister status. It is possible that, against all the odds, her revolution at the ballot-box progresses from pipe-dream to probability.

If that is the case, however, then Swarbrick’s troubles will only just be getting started. Every weapon the Establishment possesses will be pointed in her direction, and every right-wing journalistic scalp-hunter will be powering-up his keyboard.

By the time the Powers That Be were through with Corbyn, working-class Brits were cursing his name. By the time our own elites are through with Chole Swarbrick, she’ll either be a broken political doll – or New Zealand’s first Green prime minister.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 5 February 2024.