Why left needs more than just a good offer

The National

6 days ago

It wasn't just about voting Yes or No. It was about asking new questions: about power, about institutions, about care and community, about who decides and who benefits.
This was politicisation in action, a moment where people started to see their own lives not only as private struggles but as part of a wider system that could be challenged, shaped, changed. And it was
inspiring, truly gorgeous to see. Moments like that don't happen often, but they matter. Because without politicisation, even the best ideas struggle to land. No-one builds a new world on an old common sense.
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Too often, we focus on the visible tips of the iceberg: candidates, slogans, manifestos. But without attending to the deeper cultural and ideological groundwork that allows those things to resonate.
The question, although it is central obviously, isn't just what is on offer. It's whether people have the tools, the context, the disposition to receive it, and to act on it.
A strong political project can't just drop from the sky and expect to gain traction. It has to meet people where they are … and recognise where they are not. A growing part of the electorate is disengaged, distrustful, unsure. They don't identify with political structures. They don't feel addressed.
For many, the spaces that used to support political meaning-making – unions, political parties mainly – have been hollowed out. What's been lost isn't just organisational capacity, but ideological anchoring.
It's important to say: this is not an argument against political parties. Parties remain essential vehicles for change, especially in representative democracies.
But parties can't do it all. We're expecting too much from them if we think they can. They depend on a political culture that is already in motion.
If they treat politicisation as a given, they will just be screaming into the void. We're often told that a good offer – the right policies, the right leader, the right tone – should be enough.
But that only works if people are already prepared to hear it. If they're not, no amount of rhetorical polish will compensate. Because people may be angry, but that doesn't mean they're politicised. And the two are not the same.
Politicisation is not a mood. It's a shift in worldview. It's the slow, uneven process by which people come to see injustice as structural, not accidental, and to believe that collective action might actually make a difference. That process doesn't happen by magic. It happens through experience, connection, and struggle.
This is not a new insight, but it's one we often skip over. In his article entitled What Politicising Means, French political scientist Éric Darras lays out a framework for understanding politicisation as a process, not a status. According to Darras, to politicise means four things:
Generalising a personal or local grievance into a shared problem — seeing it not as your private misfortune but as a structural issue that concerns others;
Defatalising what was once thought natural or inevitable – recognising that things could be otherwise;
Identifying a source of power or oppression – not necessarily to cast blame, but to map the forces shaping your life;
And finally, gaining a sense of political capacity – the feeling that collective action might actually shift something.
This is cultural work. It doesn't begin on the debate stage or end at the ballot box. And it can begin anywhere. For some, it might happen in a picket line. For others, in a housing campaign, a community kitchen, a tenants' meeting, a sports club, even at home.
Darras describes three broad modes of politicisation. First, the classic route: engagement with formal democratic institutions (voting, party membership, following political news).
Second, the insider-adjacent path: experts, lobbyists, professionals who interact with power without necessarily being elected. And third, the most diffuse and often the most creative: grassroots politicisation through protest, mutual aid, community work, digital activism, often outside or alongside institutional channels.
That last one is where counter-hegemony lives. It's where new ways of seeing and naming the world begin to take root. But it requires care. Without time and space to reflect, relate and organise, political imagination withers, even in the face of crisis.
The idea that a party or a candidate will do the heavy lifting of politicising the public is, at best, wishful thinking. At worst, it misunderstands what politics requires. Parties are crucial. Institutions matter.
But they're not magical. They are only as strong as the political infrastructure around them: the networks of people and practices that keep political imagination alive between elections.
That kind of collective engagement doesn't guarantee victory, but without it, victory becomes almost impossible. The energy of 2014 didn't come from a party apparatus alone. It came from the activation of thousands of people who, for the first time, felt that politics included them.
This doesn't mean everyone has to do everything. But it does mean that we should stop treating politicisation as someone else's job, or as a given. If we want a serious, durable, democratic left, we need to treat politicisation as strategic work.
That means: Supporting political education — not as formal instruction or jargon-heavy analysis, but through clear, concrete efforts to help people understand what's broken and why it doesn't have to be this way.
Building or sustaining spaces where people can connect their stories to bigger structures: community organising, mutual aid groups, local campaigns, alternative media.
(Image: Colin Mearns)
Valuing relationships. Most people don't go to their first protest or meeting because they read a pamphlet. They go because someone they trust said, 'Come with me.'
Acknowledging that politicisation takes time. It's not a single moment of awakening. It's a process, a practice. And here's something political parties and elected politicians can do, right now.
If you care about change, name what's going wrong. Explain it. Say it plainly. Take every opportunity to answer the questions people keep asking, the ones that echo again and again in frustration, in fear, in anger. Where is our money going? Why does everything feel like an inexorable slide downward? Why do we work harder, pay more, and still fall behind?
That is political education, too. If you're trusted with a platform, use it not just to persuade, but to illuminate. Because when people begin to see the system clearly, they begin to move.
There's a danger that this line of argument sounds soft, like something for people with lots of time on their hands.
But politicisation is not a luxury: it's the basic condition for democratic politics to function.
We're living through a period of intense pressure – economically, socially, ecologically. People are navigating burnout, precarity, loneliness. In that context, the ability to think politically, to make meaning, to connect, to act, is fragile. If we want to do serious politics, we have to take that seriously.
We need parties. We need unions. We need radical proposals. But none of it works if we don't rebuild the muscle of politicisation, in all its messy, ordinary, everyday forms.