#tongan

I make my own artwork

Not sure if it’s the angle making my thighs look massive or if being back at the gym is doing its thing.

Ruha Fifita’s Ko e Mataliki ‘o e Mo’ui is a world unto itself. The pattern is magnetic. It offers an entrancing composition that pulls you in with its firm confidence. There is something instinctively comforting within its rhythm, as if the design breathes in and out, generating its own atmosphere. This is the kind of work you can disappear into for hours, discovering new pathways, new shapes, new constellations of meaning every time you return to it. It is both intricate and vast, a universe meticulously rendered.

Fifita, a Tongan–New Zealand artist, works across disciplines ranging from visual art, performance, to choreography, and serves as a cultural ambassador for Tongan creative traditions. Her practice is grounded in lineage and collective knowledge, often drawing on the deeply collaborative process of making ngatu (Tongan barkcloth). Through natural materials and traditional techniques, she activates histories that speak across generations.

This piece reached me in a particular way: it invited me into a heritage I do not know firsthand but feel eager to honor, even from a distance. The work carries a generosity, a sense of invitation rather than exclusion, allowing viewers to step into a cultural narrative that predates them.

Rioters and looters wander the streets of Nuku’alofa in 2006. Photo: John Ewen / CC-BY-SA-2.5

It’s no mystery that working people across the world are having a tough time. We are having to deal with stagnating wages, a housing crisis, increasing cost of living, political instability, and a general feeling of unease. For Pasifika workers, there are even more problems to deal with: sending money back home, visa troubles, racism in and out of the workplace, and conservative communities dominated by church leaders. It could seem like everything is ‘fucked up beyond all recognition’. But it doesn’t have to be this way: a better way is possible.

The movements for democracy in the Pacific have had ebbs and flows. It has had to compete against European and American colonialism, as well as domestic infighting between democratic and anti-democratic forces. Across the Pacific, workers and toilers lack parties of their own, and are forced to align with whichever ruling class party abuses them the least. They have had their democratic aspirations squandered by corrupt or weak liberal governments, and in the worst cases (such as Fiji), have had them smashed and stolen from them by military gangs.

In Tonga, the democratic movement struggles to make substantial progress. This is in spite of democratic reforms which were undertaken since 2010, and despite the democratic movement being elected to power through the 2010s. Why is it that even though ‘pro-democracy’ parties are elected to power in the Pacific, little progress is made in terms of democratic reform? It is because these parties are not parties of and for workers and toilers. They are instead parties of the ruling class: the government bureaucrats, the chiefs, the nobles, the generals, the admirals, and the police.

Together, these forces act to restrain the aspirations of workers and toilers for democratic reform. They act against movements fighting for transparency in government, national ownership of utilities and industry, increased wages for workers, an end to foreign military presence, women’s freedom, and more. Because workers and toilers lack a party of their own, they are unable to fight back against these forces.

But the people are not stupid, they can tell they’re being played for fools. This is why many in Tonga question the leadership of the so-called Democratic Party. But without a viable alternative, they instead vote for independents, or splinter parties run by corrupt politicians. The corrupt and inept leadership of the democratic movements of the Pacific need to be overturned, and replaced by revolutionary socialist leadership.

Revolutionary socialism is the complete transformation of society, politics, and the economy. It overturns the system of private property and market economics that dominates the globe, and puts in its place a social, co-operative economy, governed democratically by working people. It replaces a government run by church ministers, nobles, chiefs, and politicians, with a government run by working people themselves. Socialists are democrats because we aim to establish a radically democratic system, called Socialism/Communism. This is a system built on popular sovereignty, the rule of the working class.

The struggle for revolutionary socialist leadership in the Pacific is going to be a long struggle. The Pacific does not have a long tradition of socialist politics to draw from, it must instead draw from the political traditions of the rest of the world – not as a model to follow directly, but as an example of how the working class can struggle for power. This is why we’re launching Temokalati (Democracy): to act as a platform of revolutionary socialists in and around the Pacific.

Temokalati has two main purposes: to promote revolutionary socialist politics in the Pacific, and to inform the rest of the world of what Pasifika democrats are struggling for. But while we support, promote and highlight struggles in the Pacific, we aim to ‘connect the dots’ and help people understand that the struggle for democracy in the Pacific is not a lone struggle. It is instead part of a global struggle for revolutionary change and transformation.

The Pacific democrats of the past have promised democratic reform, but have only been able to provide peanuts. They are not capable of providing real democratic change for workers in the Pacific, because they aim to take control of the capitalist machinery on behalf of foreign imperialists, whether they reside in Canberra, Washington D.C, or Beijing. These imperialists, who reside in the ‘Pacific rim’ (the regions surrounding the Pacific, such as Australia, China, S.E. Asia, and the U.S.), want to keep Pasifika workers oppressed and exploited.