- 07 Dec 2003 07:00
#55083
Chris Trotter examines the background and the legacy of one of New Zealands great civil conflicts. An address given as part of the recent “Cossacks and Comrades†exhibition.
Before I say a word about the Great Strike of 1913, I want to say something about the state of our nation ninety years on. The most important thing to note about the political landscape in 2003 is the astonishing absence of the working class. A million workers, half of them low-paid, many of them working part-time, some struggling to hold down two - even three - jobs, and nearly three-quarters of a million without any form of trade union protection, have become almost completely invisible to the people who run this country. Half the working population of New Zealand has been unceremoniously shunted off the national stage, and the economic, political and social influence of organised labour, which, just twenty years ago, was large enough to guarantee it a central role in the life of our nation, has become a pale shadow of its former strength.
And with the theft of working-class power has come a dark rebirth of exploitation and in many cases outright oppression. Workers are expected to turn up when the boss says so – regardless of family and recreational commitments, and without any hope of penal rates of pay. The many attendant costs of employment – clothing, footwear, transport, and in some - unbelievable – cases, even tea and coffee, have become the worker’s own responsibility. They are expected to sign confidentiality agreements curtailing their freedom of speech, and to piss away their right to personal privacy into a paper cup.
Every morning we hear breathless accounts of the overnight fortunes of the share-markets. Business reporters keep us abreast of the latest sales and purchases. At lunch-time Nation Radio’s “Rural Report†keeps faith with the farming community. But of the silent women who every evening clean the offices of those same reporters we hear not a word. Organised labour has no reserved place in the State broadcaster’s schedule. Working people have no dedicated reporters to keep them up to date with the latest settlements, or the most recent employer outrage. We hear and see the working class only when a wall collapses upon it, which is, I suppose, brutally apt. Because in 1991 a wall did collapse upon New Zealand’s workers, burying them beneath the quick-setting concrete of political hostility, economic brutality, bureaucratic indifference, judicial malice, and the cold-blooded treachery of trade union officialdom.
It is against this background: of the dishonoured, the disenfranchised, and the disowned working people of New Zealand that I deliver this address.
* * * * * *
The present state of the New Zealand working class would shock to the core the men and women who confronted Bill Massey and the New Zealand Farmers Union in 1913. As Dean Parker so eloquently demonstrated earlier this week, theirs was the most class conscious generation in New Zealand history. They read socialist pamphlets, socialist newspapers, and socialist books – in some cases snapping up an entire consignment of socialist literature within days of its unloading on the wharves of the main cities. The Maoriland Worker edited by Harry Holland had a readership in the tens of thousands. Edward Bellamy’s utopian socialist novel Looking Backward sold out almost as soon as it reached Port Chalmers.
The first great demonstration of working class strength had been the Maritime Council which, from the late 1880s, had been responsible for unleashing what can only be described as a tidal wave of unionisation throughout New Zealand. As Bert Roth notes in his wonderful book Toil and Trouble: “New Zealand had about 3,000 members of trade unions in 1888, 20,000 by the end of 1889, 40,000 by mid-1889 and, according to [the Maritime Council’s leader] Captain Millar (although this is undoubtedly exaggerated) 63,000 by October 1890.
This massive assertion of working-class power produced an equal and opposite reaction among employers, who, taking a leaf from the unionists’ own book, banded together in their own “union†for mutual protection. It was this new Employers’ Federation which, with the tacit backing of the conservative government of the day, precipitated the Great Maritime Strike of 1890. “The unions are becoming so oppressive in their actionsâ€, said a spokesperson from one of the leading freezing companies, “we think the present an opportune time to knock down the whole system for we shall never have a better chance.â€
The crushing of the Maritime Strike presents to the historian a series of themes which recur again and again throughout New Zealand history. Briefly, these may be set forth as follows:
• An upsurge in working class consciousness and confidence – expressed in the rapid growth of active trade unionism and socialist political organisation
• A corresponding increase in upper and middle class disquiet – expressed in calls for and the creation of defence organisations by and for “the respectable classesâ€
• The incitement by the employers (almost always with the overt or tacit support of the Government) of a full-scale confrontation between the trade unions and the defence organisations of “the respectable classesâ€.
• The recruitment and deployment by the State of “respectable†citizens as strike-breakers and/or law-enforcement officers
• The crushing of working-class power by the combined forces of the State and “the respectable classesâ€
To this list we must also add the theme of what might be called “political substitutionism†on the part of both classes. This too had its birth in the year of the Maritime Strike. For it was in December of 1890 that the Liberal Party was swept to victory on the votes not only of a defeated – but far from downcast – working class electorate, but also - and this is I believe very important – on the votes of a middle class stunned and far from comfortable with the level of social violence the crushing of the Maritime Council had necessitated.
New Zealanders as a whole, it would seem, do not enjoy confronting one another directly. Perhaps that is on account of our size, or because of the relative homogeneity of the Pakeha population. Whatever the cause, New Zealanders general disinclination to fight one another physically has elevated the Ballot Box – and the political organisation required to dominate it – high above all the other means of responding to serious social conflict. What would otherwise require the use of organised physical force in an ever-escalating cycle of confrontations, both sides of the economic and social divide seek to secure through the kinds of legislative measures that only the control of a parliamentary majority can provide.
The Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act of 1894 stands as the most enduring example of this phenomenon. It was the gift of conscientious middle class intellectuals like William Pember Reeves and Edward Tregear to the large and solid “middle†of the New Zealand trade union movement. Henceforth, it seemed to say, the State shall act as a neutral umpire between the contending classes. Sweet Reason, it was confidently predicted, would achieve far more for the working class than Brute Force. Accordingly, organised labour was cordially invited by the Liberal Party to take its place among the ranks of “the respectable classesâ€.
But the Liberal’s brave attempt at social integration could only work in an economy on the upswing. Moreover, a state in which the workman was truly worth his hire could not help but raise as many socio-economic questions as it resolved – not the least of which was how long it could go on underwriting the standard of living of its working class without, at the same time, undermining the profitability of its employing class? What William Pember Reeves and William Tregear never really grasped was that, under capitalism, there are no “respectable classesâ€. The exploitation of one’s fellow human beings has never been – and never will be – a “respectable†line of country.
By 1908 the IC&A Act, and the arbitrationist system it had spawned, had become a trap for all those workers not fortunate enough to own a trade certificate, or well-educated – or well-connected - enough to get a job in the public service. In the first two years of the IC&A Act the real value of wages was maintained by the Arbitration Court, but by the early years of the new century the Court had learned to take other things into account,and the purchasing power of the workers’ pay packets began to fall. Forbidden by law to strike, the arbitrationist unions were powerless to protect their members’ living standards.
In the five years between 1908 and 1913 all the themes established in the Maritime Strike were repeated but with much greater intensity. The roll call of Red Fed heroes – Pat Hickey, Paddy Webb, Bob Semple, Harry Holland, Mickey Savage, Peter Fraser – is inscribed on the hearts of every New Zealand socialist. And, thanks to the research of Dean Parker, we can now add the names of New Zealand’s “Wobblies†Tom Barker and J.B. King to the Left’s honour board.
Dean’s wonderful article “Red Auckland†paints the picture far better than I could hope to do: “In meeting halls and working men’s clubs, in radical newspaper offices and bookshops, on Sundays outside the Town Hall, the labouring masses began to hear their own exaltation: they ploughed up the prairies, they built the cities, they dug the mines, they made the workshops, they laid the railroad. Why, then, were they powerless? Where did power lie?â€
The Australians and Americans, whose vivid experiences at the hands of the early 20th Century capitalists in their own countries were beginning to add a much stronger flavour to the comparatively bland New Zealand labour movement, were pretty sure that the power to emancipate the working class did not lie in the hands of the judges of the Arbitration Court.
What workers would have, they argued, workers must learn to take – by direct negotiation with their employers if possible, by use of the strike weapon if necessary. And with every success that the Red Federation of Labour notched up, its leaders knew, the resentment and hostility of the employing class would grow. The day would come – and sooner rather than later - when the larger questions of power would be posed, and – one way or the other – answered.
On the other side of the class divide, the sense of a looming confrontation was equally sharp. As Sherwood Young divulged on Wednesday, elements within the Farmers’ Union had been quietly preparing their members for the confrontation they felt certain was gestating in the tightly-knit working-class communities of Auckland and Wellington.
Reading the Camp Gazette it is impossible not to be struck by the radicalism of the “Specialsâ€. In their barely concealed contempt, not only for the strikers, but also for what they regarded as the craven urban bourgeoisie which had capitulated so often to their demands, there is the unmistakable whiff of fascism.
The thirst for action, the ready acceptance of violence as a political tool, the “heroic†identification of their own interests with those of the nation as a whole – all point in the direction of the “radical conservatism†that would emerge to meet the challenge of socialism later in the century.
The clear and direct links between the Government, the Farmers’ Union and elements of the Police and the Armed Forces is also alarmingly reminiscent of the close co-operation between political actors and law enforcement personnel that facilitated the rise of Mussolini and Hitler in the 1920s.
This radicalism of the Right is worth pursuing, for its historical influence has been every bit as strong as the radicalism of the Left. Undergirding the values of “radical conservatism†is the enduring myth which locates virtue in the country and vice in the city. Its lineage is a long one, driving the political fortunes of leaders as distinct as Cincinnatus, Thomas Jefferson and Pauline Hanson. In New Zealand it feeds into a literary and political tradition of particular resonance. Our history has been punctuated by a series of rural crusades to rescue the city from itself.
New Zealand’s poets and novelists (even our socialist ones!) have contributed significantly to the articulation of this myth. Dennis Glover, in Once Were Days, uses the sardonic voice of Harry; the independent, self-reliant, loner, to convey the futility of his younger self’s quest for something beyond the eternal values of the land:
And I was a fool leaving
Good land to moulder,
Leaving the fences sagging
And the old man older.
To follow my wild thoughts
Away over the hill …
Where there’s nothing but the world
And the world’s ill.
Harry appears again, in Thistledown, where a rural image dissolves the transient diversions of urban life:
Once I followed horses
And once I followed whores
And marched once with a banner
For some great cause
Sings Harry
But that was thistledown planted on the wind.
The horses, the whores, and the great causes neatly sum up the country’s jaundiced view of the city and its vices (although Glover neglected to mention booze, the eradication of which drove so many of New Zealand’s small-town congregations to a frenzy a century ago). Cities, Sin and Socialism were one and the same thing in the minds of many God-fearing country folk, and nothing seemed to illustrate their manifold dangers so vividly as the militant trade union.
It was against these indolent and arrogant sons of the city, that “Massey’s Cossacks†– in their own eyes the upright toilers of farm and station - rode to battle in 1913. Said the colonel in charge of the Lyttelton docks: “Let the first charge be a lesson to the workers of New Zealand. Pick your man and put force behind your blow, and if you have to shoot, shoot straight.â€
Cockies on horseback, armed with batons, appeared again in 1932, following the unemployment riots. John Mulgan, in his novel Man Alone, neatly encapsulates the country’s attitude toward the cities in the conversation between his hero, Johnson, and a farmer who has given him a lift out of strife-torn Auckland:
“… it’s the same old trouble, ain’t it? You’re a farming man, ain’t you? Bastards in town always wanting a good time – always wanting something more, more wages shorter hours – makes me sick. Anyone ever worry how long the farmer works? Now things aren’t so good in town and they don’t like it. What d’they do? They listen to a lot of reds, a lot of bloody agitators. If they ain’t Russians, they’re Australians.â€
“The same old troubleâ€: Again and again the country has been forced to teach the city some manners and some morals: 1913, 1932, 1951, 1981, 1991. But each time the job has got harder, and longer, and more costly. In 1936 rural dwellers made up roughly 33 percent of the population; sixty years later they had shrunk to 15 percent. Increasingly the people on the land were forced to depend upon the assistance of fifth columnists in the cities’ leafy suburbs.
The suburban horror of the irreverent and pleasure-seeking masses – so uncomfortably close by – has always defined our urban political landscape. Periodically, militant middle-class movements have sought to make over the lower orders in their own image. Moral crusades, dedicated to self-help, self-discipline, and the regeneration of the family, have – according to Steven Eldred-Grigg – sought the imposition of “particular values drawn from a puritan philosophy and adapted to a capitalist and laisser-faire economic outlook.â€
Can you think of a better summation of the political mission of Ruth Richardson, Jenny Shipley, Muriel Newman, Peter Dunne or Don Brash?
Neo-liberalism’s Cossacks may not ride horses, or carry batons, but their blows are just as forceful, and they shoot just as straight.
And always, in the bloody aftermath of “the respectable classes†visitations of righteous retribution upon the cities’ socialist sinners (can it really be nothing more than a coincidence that three of the New Right’s leading lights – Richard Prebble, Jenny Shipley and Don Brash – are children of the manse?) the New Zealand working class – almost instinctively - has turned to the “political substitutionism†that always seemed to offer a so much safer road to the Big Rock candy Mountain.
Writing in The Maoriland Worker in the weeks after the collapse of the 1913 strike, Harry Holland summed up the reasons for the Red Fed’s defeat: “The odds against us were too great, the requisite tactics too little understood, the method of organisation too incomplete to meet the forces of the employers, the farmer scabs, the armed and legal power of the State.â€
This was a sober and extremely realistic assessment of the movement’s weaknesses, but it was not, by any interpretation, a call to abandon the whole notion of militant trade unionism by taking up the cross of parliamentary socialism. Few outside the IWW argued against the idea of transforming the legal environment in which unions operated by parliamentary means, but, at least initially, the founders of the New Zealand Labour Party also followed a “dual strategy†of pursuing legislative change inside the House, while simultaneously agitating for it out on the streets.
“We of the Labour Party come to endeavour to effect a change of classes at the fountain of powerâ€, declared Harry Holland in his maiden speech to Parliament.
We come proclaiming boldly and fearlessly the Socialist objective of the Labour movement throughout New Zealand; and we make no secret of the fact that we seek to rebuild society on a basis in which work and not wealth will be the measure of a man’s worth. We do not seek to make a class war. You cannot make that which is already in existence. We recognise that the antagonisms which divide society into classes are economically foundationed, and we are going, if we can, to change those economic foundations, to end the class war by ending the causes of class warfare.
Such is the “unfinished business†of the New Zealand Left: to bring to a successful conclusion the grand transformative project to which syndicalists and socialists alike committed themselves in the early years of the 20th Century.
But, as the years passed, the Red Fed leaders who, under Labour’s banner, had breached the walls of Parliament in 1919, began to regard the syndicalist’s revolutionary tradition as irritatingly Quixotic. And for the syndicalists – edged ever closer towards the wings of the labour movement’s stage by the combination of the Communist Party’s aggressive sectarianism and Labour’s indefatigable moderation – the heady days of 1913 were gradually transformed into the stuff of folklore. The grand deeds of the New Zealand labour movement’s heroic age, remembered over pints of ale at the occasional reunion.
Not that either the revolutionaries or the reformists had the slightest chance of reconstituting the militant working class movement of 1913 in an environment dominated by the cataclysm of World War I, the Influenza Epidemic, and the seemingly permanent recession into which New Zealand stumbled in the 1920s.
In one of those poignant historical ironies, the flower of both the strikers and the specials private armies ended up intermingled on the rolls of honour of a thousand New Zealand war memorials. Massey’s Cossacks died on the hillsides of the Dardanelles. The conscripted strikers in the Flanders mud.
And Massey, the man who oversaw both tragedies reigned on and on, a bigoted Orangeman who hated Catholicism almost as much as he hated socialism, and whose policies bound New Zealanders ever tighter to the bosom of Mother England. The latent fascism, so evident in the Special’s encampments of 1913, lingered also, slowly poisoning the social and intellectual life of rural and provincial New Zealand, and seeping remorselessly into the wealthy suburbs of the major cities. It was just as well the General Election of 1935 was fought under first-past-the-post rules, because a proportional system would almost certainly have turned New Zealand over to a coalition of vengeful cockies, selfish businessmen and suburban fascists.
Fourteen years of moderate social democracy only strengthened the determination of these reactionary elements to even the score with the social forces that had usurped their political hegemony. One union in particular, the Waterside Workers, seemed to embody everything that had gone wrong with New Zealand since Labour came to power. Led by Jock Barnes, in whom the militant flame of 1913 still burned with a dangerous brilliance, the Watersiders had cocked an irreverent snook at the new shibboleths of the Cold War, and refused to kow-tow to the authoritarian leadership of the by now thoroughly domesticated trade union movement.
The destruction of the Watersiders by the new National Government was accomplished by the imposition of what can only be described as full-on antipodean fascism. The reactionary vision of Massey’s Cossacks was finally accomplished in a stunning political apotheosis.
And what of Labour? Poor, decrepit and discredited Labour. Drained of every passion but the passion for office; satisfied that its half-hearted social-democratic commonwealth was the best that could be achieved by the workers of hand and brain; bullied by the British, the Americans and the Australians into red-baiting the best of its followers out of the movement; the best that the little draper who had inherited the Labour leadership from Fraser’s icy grip could offer was to say that he was “neither for nor against the Watersidersâ€.
With the descendants of Massey’s Cossacks in charge of the country, Labour’s only contribution was to pour the cold water of its neutrality over the last flickering ember of the great movement that had been born in Blackball, martyred at Waihi, tested in 1913, and vindicated in 1935.
Nineteen-Fifty-One marked the end of three-quarters of a century of independent working class struggle. Three-quarters of a century in which working people themselves had set the political agenda on their own terms and for their own ends. The labour movement would survive the destruction of the Watersiders and their allies, but it would never recover from it. For the next forty years union leaders would reiterate what was universally affirmed as “The Lesson of 1951†– that the trade union movement “couldn’t take on the Government and winâ€.
It was, of course, a false lesson - born of the need to pull some semblance of decency over the shameless collaboration of the Federation of Labour with the National Government’s campaign to destroy the militants. The true lesson of 1951 was that if the 20,000 members of the TUC were able to force Sid Holland’s government into the extremities of the Emergency Regulations, then the 400,000 members of the FOL could have broken it in two. That it did not do so was not because it believed that it couldn’t, but because it believed that it shouldn’t.
As James K. Baxter so wisely put it: “Political action in its source is pure, human, direct, but in its civil function becomes the jail it laboured to destroy.â€
Reabsorbed into the machinery of the Keynesian welfare state, the New Zealand trade union movement quickly ceased to regard itself as anything more than one of the three “social partners†- alongside the employers and the state. Such militancy as there was tended to be driven from below as workers struggled to maintain their standard of living in the face of New Zealand’s fluctuating economic fortunes. The working class radicalism of the Red Feds and the Wobblies, was now represented by the Moscow-aligned Socialist Unity Party, which, in between railing against the depredations of multinational corporations, and despatching sympathetic union officials on tours of the Eastern Bloc, routinely encouraged workers to vote for the Labour Party. The SUP, joked the cynics, would rather keep control of the losing side, than lose control of the winning side. Revolutions were for other people.
Right-wing people.
Because, following the false dawn of the early 1970s, when Norman Kirk, acutely conscious of his own mortality, crammed twelve years’ worth of change into a miraculous eighteen months, and Labour, for the first time since the 1930s seemed ready to wake the fitful sleepers of these shaky isles, politics in New Zealand turned down a very dark road indeed.
From the mid-1970s the radical conservatism that had its birth on the Auckland Domain and in the Police Barracks on Buckle Street in 1913, was no longer confined to the countryside. It had infiltrated and contaminated every town and city, every workplace, every home. In 1975 “Rob’s Mob†– it’s very name an incitement to political vigilantism – tore up Kirk’s fragile garden with malicious glee, and by 1981 was ready to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Afrikaner Broderbund. And, had the Red and Blue Squads failed in their duty to contain the anti-tour protesters, Muldoon was prepared to swear in the provincial Rugby clubs as special constables. Massey’s Cossacks would have metamorphosed into Muldoon’s Stormtroopers and antipodean fascism would, once again, have received official sanction. New Zealanders owe the 1981 Police Commissioner, Bob Walton, a debt of gratitude they scarcely understand. For it was he who convinced the Prime Minister that his regular police officers were more than equal to the task of maintaining law – as well as order.
But Muldoon’s authoritarian populism was too blunt, and, curiously, too democratic an instrument to serve the purposes of the new breed of radical conservative that was now emerging from the high-rise buildings of Queen Street and The Terrace. Inspired by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, they glimpsed the possibility of turning back the economic clock to the 1880s – a time before the IC&A Act and the Welfare State. Back to the “golden age†of unfettered capitalism - before rising union density put paid to the laisser-faire dream.
The vector of this new disease would be the defiant individualism and cultural rebelliousness of the middle-class Baby Boomers. And the Labour Party, shorn at last of its proletarian locks by the Delilahs of common-room and classroom, would be its host.
But what the so-called “New Right†did not grasp, was that, as they heaved the hands of history’s clock backwards to Capitalism’s golden age, they were, at the same instant, reconstituting the very conditions that gave birth to the heroic age of democratic socialism. They may not have been interested in the dialectic, but the dialectic was interested in them.
The fightback began in the Labour Party, where all those who remembered and/or revered the progressive traditions of the New Zealand working class rallied against the New Right cuckoos that had invaded the social-democratic nest. And, through Labour’s ties with the trade union movement, the resistance steadily spread outwards into the working class communities of the major cities. At the level of the rank-and-file a mood of rebellion gathered strength.
But at the summit of the labour movement, the old shibboleths still held sway. Labour was better than National. The unions must seek a “constructive engagement†with the new Labour regime. And always, in answer to the young firebrands’ demands for an all out war against the New Right, the trade union leadership sang the same old refrain – inspired by the false lessons of 1913 and 1951: “You can’t take on the Government and win.â€
Underpinning the leadership’s caution and compromise was another factor – the fear of losing the unqualified preference clause. The brief taste of voluntary union membership that they had experienced in 1983-84 had made them desperate for the legislative protection only Labour could provide – and they would endure just about anything to keep it – and Labour – in place.
How the men of 1913 would have sneered at the craven performance of their successors. And how they would have wept to see the systematic demolition of a century of working class achievement by the very party they had formed to give strength to the industrial wing of the labour movement.
But the treachery of 1991 would have come as no surprise to them, because their own experience would have taught them that cowardice is habit-forming. What would have gladdened their hearts, however, was the reaction of the New Zealand working class itself to the new National Government’s Employment Contracts Bill.
In their tens of thousands they poured onto the streets, and in stop-work meeting after stop-work meeting passed near unanimous resolutions in favour of a General Strike. How the ghosts of Tom Barker and J.B. King would have smiled to hear the call for the deployment of organised labour’s ultimate weapon. Somehow, through all the years of moderation and betrayal, the idea of the “Great Strike†had survived. The tragedy, of course, was that in 1991 there were no leaders to match Harry Holland, Pat Hickey or Tom Barker. The tinder was dry, but the Council of Trade Unions contemptuously refused to strike the spark.
So we end where we began, in a country where the working class is politically and organisationally invisible. In 2003, the business of the Left is not so much unfinished as undone, and waits now for the men and women with enough courage and enough strength to do it all over again.
Because the history of the past ninety years, if it has taught us anything at all, teaches us that one cannot have a genuine Labour Party – or even a NewLabour Party – without the active support of an independent and militant trade union movement.
The New Zealand radical tradition calls upon all those who still believe a better world is possible to reach again for the political and industrial tools that can build it, and to keep close to their hearts the simple truth that concludes the great anthem of the Industrial Workers of the World:
In our hands we hold a power greater than their hoarded gold,
Greater than the strength of armies multiplied a thousand-fold,
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old –
When the union makes us strong.
Solidarity forever, solidarity forever, solidarity forever
‘Tis the union makes us strong.
Before I say a word about the Great Strike of 1913, I want to say something about the state of our nation ninety years on. The most important thing to note about the political landscape in 2003 is the astonishing absence of the working class. A million workers, half of them low-paid, many of them working part-time, some struggling to hold down two - even three - jobs, and nearly three-quarters of a million without any form of trade union protection, have become almost completely invisible to the people who run this country. Half the working population of New Zealand has been unceremoniously shunted off the national stage, and the economic, political and social influence of organised labour, which, just twenty years ago, was large enough to guarantee it a central role in the life of our nation, has become a pale shadow of its former strength.
And with the theft of working-class power has come a dark rebirth of exploitation and in many cases outright oppression. Workers are expected to turn up when the boss says so – regardless of family and recreational commitments, and without any hope of penal rates of pay. The many attendant costs of employment – clothing, footwear, transport, and in some - unbelievable – cases, even tea and coffee, have become the worker’s own responsibility. They are expected to sign confidentiality agreements curtailing their freedom of speech, and to piss away their right to personal privacy into a paper cup.
Every morning we hear breathless accounts of the overnight fortunes of the share-markets. Business reporters keep us abreast of the latest sales and purchases. At lunch-time Nation Radio’s “Rural Report†keeps faith with the farming community. But of the silent women who every evening clean the offices of those same reporters we hear not a word. Organised labour has no reserved place in the State broadcaster’s schedule. Working people have no dedicated reporters to keep them up to date with the latest settlements, or the most recent employer outrage. We hear and see the working class only when a wall collapses upon it, which is, I suppose, brutally apt. Because in 1991 a wall did collapse upon New Zealand’s workers, burying them beneath the quick-setting concrete of political hostility, economic brutality, bureaucratic indifference, judicial malice, and the cold-blooded treachery of trade union officialdom.
It is against this background: of the dishonoured, the disenfranchised, and the disowned working people of New Zealand that I deliver this address.
* * * * * *
The present state of the New Zealand working class would shock to the core the men and women who confronted Bill Massey and the New Zealand Farmers Union in 1913. As Dean Parker so eloquently demonstrated earlier this week, theirs was the most class conscious generation in New Zealand history. They read socialist pamphlets, socialist newspapers, and socialist books – in some cases snapping up an entire consignment of socialist literature within days of its unloading on the wharves of the main cities. The Maoriland Worker edited by Harry Holland had a readership in the tens of thousands. Edward Bellamy’s utopian socialist novel Looking Backward sold out almost as soon as it reached Port Chalmers.
The first great demonstration of working class strength had been the Maritime Council which, from the late 1880s, had been responsible for unleashing what can only be described as a tidal wave of unionisation throughout New Zealand. As Bert Roth notes in his wonderful book Toil and Trouble: “New Zealand had about 3,000 members of trade unions in 1888, 20,000 by the end of 1889, 40,000 by mid-1889 and, according to [the Maritime Council’s leader] Captain Millar (although this is undoubtedly exaggerated) 63,000 by October 1890.
This massive assertion of working-class power produced an equal and opposite reaction among employers, who, taking a leaf from the unionists’ own book, banded together in their own “union†for mutual protection. It was this new Employers’ Federation which, with the tacit backing of the conservative government of the day, precipitated the Great Maritime Strike of 1890. “The unions are becoming so oppressive in their actionsâ€, said a spokesperson from one of the leading freezing companies, “we think the present an opportune time to knock down the whole system for we shall never have a better chance.â€
The crushing of the Maritime Strike presents to the historian a series of themes which recur again and again throughout New Zealand history. Briefly, these may be set forth as follows:
• An upsurge in working class consciousness and confidence – expressed in the rapid growth of active trade unionism and socialist political organisation
• A corresponding increase in upper and middle class disquiet – expressed in calls for and the creation of defence organisations by and for “the respectable classesâ€
• The incitement by the employers (almost always with the overt or tacit support of the Government) of a full-scale confrontation between the trade unions and the defence organisations of “the respectable classesâ€.
• The recruitment and deployment by the State of “respectable†citizens as strike-breakers and/or law-enforcement officers
• The crushing of working-class power by the combined forces of the State and “the respectable classesâ€
To this list we must also add the theme of what might be called “political substitutionism†on the part of both classes. This too had its birth in the year of the Maritime Strike. For it was in December of 1890 that the Liberal Party was swept to victory on the votes not only of a defeated – but far from downcast – working class electorate, but also - and this is I believe very important – on the votes of a middle class stunned and far from comfortable with the level of social violence the crushing of the Maritime Council had necessitated.
New Zealanders as a whole, it would seem, do not enjoy confronting one another directly. Perhaps that is on account of our size, or because of the relative homogeneity of the Pakeha population. Whatever the cause, New Zealanders general disinclination to fight one another physically has elevated the Ballot Box – and the political organisation required to dominate it – high above all the other means of responding to serious social conflict. What would otherwise require the use of organised physical force in an ever-escalating cycle of confrontations, both sides of the economic and social divide seek to secure through the kinds of legislative measures that only the control of a parliamentary majority can provide.
The Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act of 1894 stands as the most enduring example of this phenomenon. It was the gift of conscientious middle class intellectuals like William Pember Reeves and Edward Tregear to the large and solid “middle†of the New Zealand trade union movement. Henceforth, it seemed to say, the State shall act as a neutral umpire between the contending classes. Sweet Reason, it was confidently predicted, would achieve far more for the working class than Brute Force. Accordingly, organised labour was cordially invited by the Liberal Party to take its place among the ranks of “the respectable classesâ€.
But the Liberal’s brave attempt at social integration could only work in an economy on the upswing. Moreover, a state in which the workman was truly worth his hire could not help but raise as many socio-economic questions as it resolved – not the least of which was how long it could go on underwriting the standard of living of its working class without, at the same time, undermining the profitability of its employing class? What William Pember Reeves and William Tregear never really grasped was that, under capitalism, there are no “respectable classesâ€. The exploitation of one’s fellow human beings has never been – and never will be – a “respectable†line of country.
By 1908 the IC&A Act, and the arbitrationist system it had spawned, had become a trap for all those workers not fortunate enough to own a trade certificate, or well-educated – or well-connected - enough to get a job in the public service. In the first two years of the IC&A Act the real value of wages was maintained by the Arbitration Court, but by the early years of the new century the Court had learned to take other things into account,and the purchasing power of the workers’ pay packets began to fall. Forbidden by law to strike, the arbitrationist unions were powerless to protect their members’ living standards.
In the five years between 1908 and 1913 all the themes established in the Maritime Strike were repeated but with much greater intensity. The roll call of Red Fed heroes – Pat Hickey, Paddy Webb, Bob Semple, Harry Holland, Mickey Savage, Peter Fraser – is inscribed on the hearts of every New Zealand socialist. And, thanks to the research of Dean Parker, we can now add the names of New Zealand’s “Wobblies†Tom Barker and J.B. King to the Left’s honour board.
Dean’s wonderful article “Red Auckland†paints the picture far better than I could hope to do: “In meeting halls and working men’s clubs, in radical newspaper offices and bookshops, on Sundays outside the Town Hall, the labouring masses began to hear their own exaltation: they ploughed up the prairies, they built the cities, they dug the mines, they made the workshops, they laid the railroad. Why, then, were they powerless? Where did power lie?â€
The Australians and Americans, whose vivid experiences at the hands of the early 20th Century capitalists in their own countries were beginning to add a much stronger flavour to the comparatively bland New Zealand labour movement, were pretty sure that the power to emancipate the working class did not lie in the hands of the judges of the Arbitration Court.
What workers would have, they argued, workers must learn to take – by direct negotiation with their employers if possible, by use of the strike weapon if necessary. And with every success that the Red Federation of Labour notched up, its leaders knew, the resentment and hostility of the employing class would grow. The day would come – and sooner rather than later - when the larger questions of power would be posed, and – one way or the other – answered.
On the other side of the class divide, the sense of a looming confrontation was equally sharp. As Sherwood Young divulged on Wednesday, elements within the Farmers’ Union had been quietly preparing their members for the confrontation they felt certain was gestating in the tightly-knit working-class communities of Auckland and Wellington.
Reading the Camp Gazette it is impossible not to be struck by the radicalism of the “Specialsâ€. In their barely concealed contempt, not only for the strikers, but also for what they regarded as the craven urban bourgeoisie which had capitulated so often to their demands, there is the unmistakable whiff of fascism.
The thirst for action, the ready acceptance of violence as a political tool, the “heroic†identification of their own interests with those of the nation as a whole – all point in the direction of the “radical conservatism†that would emerge to meet the challenge of socialism later in the century.
The clear and direct links between the Government, the Farmers’ Union and elements of the Police and the Armed Forces is also alarmingly reminiscent of the close co-operation between political actors and law enforcement personnel that facilitated the rise of Mussolini and Hitler in the 1920s.
This radicalism of the Right is worth pursuing, for its historical influence has been every bit as strong as the radicalism of the Left. Undergirding the values of “radical conservatism†is the enduring myth which locates virtue in the country and vice in the city. Its lineage is a long one, driving the political fortunes of leaders as distinct as Cincinnatus, Thomas Jefferson and Pauline Hanson. In New Zealand it feeds into a literary and political tradition of particular resonance. Our history has been punctuated by a series of rural crusades to rescue the city from itself.
New Zealand’s poets and novelists (even our socialist ones!) have contributed significantly to the articulation of this myth. Dennis Glover, in Once Were Days, uses the sardonic voice of Harry; the independent, self-reliant, loner, to convey the futility of his younger self’s quest for something beyond the eternal values of the land:
And I was a fool leaving
Good land to moulder,
Leaving the fences sagging
And the old man older.
To follow my wild thoughts
Away over the hill …
Where there’s nothing but the world
And the world’s ill.
Harry appears again, in Thistledown, where a rural image dissolves the transient diversions of urban life:
Once I followed horses
And once I followed whores
And marched once with a banner
For some great cause
Sings Harry
But that was thistledown planted on the wind.
The horses, the whores, and the great causes neatly sum up the country’s jaundiced view of the city and its vices (although Glover neglected to mention booze, the eradication of which drove so many of New Zealand’s small-town congregations to a frenzy a century ago). Cities, Sin and Socialism were one and the same thing in the minds of many God-fearing country folk, and nothing seemed to illustrate their manifold dangers so vividly as the militant trade union.
It was against these indolent and arrogant sons of the city, that “Massey’s Cossacks†– in their own eyes the upright toilers of farm and station - rode to battle in 1913. Said the colonel in charge of the Lyttelton docks: “Let the first charge be a lesson to the workers of New Zealand. Pick your man and put force behind your blow, and if you have to shoot, shoot straight.â€
Cockies on horseback, armed with batons, appeared again in 1932, following the unemployment riots. John Mulgan, in his novel Man Alone, neatly encapsulates the country’s attitude toward the cities in the conversation between his hero, Johnson, and a farmer who has given him a lift out of strife-torn Auckland:
“… it’s the same old trouble, ain’t it? You’re a farming man, ain’t you? Bastards in town always wanting a good time – always wanting something more, more wages shorter hours – makes me sick. Anyone ever worry how long the farmer works? Now things aren’t so good in town and they don’t like it. What d’they do? They listen to a lot of reds, a lot of bloody agitators. If they ain’t Russians, they’re Australians.â€
“The same old troubleâ€: Again and again the country has been forced to teach the city some manners and some morals: 1913, 1932, 1951, 1981, 1991. But each time the job has got harder, and longer, and more costly. In 1936 rural dwellers made up roughly 33 percent of the population; sixty years later they had shrunk to 15 percent. Increasingly the people on the land were forced to depend upon the assistance of fifth columnists in the cities’ leafy suburbs.
The suburban horror of the irreverent and pleasure-seeking masses – so uncomfortably close by – has always defined our urban political landscape. Periodically, militant middle-class movements have sought to make over the lower orders in their own image. Moral crusades, dedicated to self-help, self-discipline, and the regeneration of the family, have – according to Steven Eldred-Grigg – sought the imposition of “particular values drawn from a puritan philosophy and adapted to a capitalist and laisser-faire economic outlook.â€
Can you think of a better summation of the political mission of Ruth Richardson, Jenny Shipley, Muriel Newman, Peter Dunne or Don Brash?
Neo-liberalism’s Cossacks may not ride horses, or carry batons, but their blows are just as forceful, and they shoot just as straight.
And always, in the bloody aftermath of “the respectable classes†visitations of righteous retribution upon the cities’ socialist sinners (can it really be nothing more than a coincidence that three of the New Right’s leading lights – Richard Prebble, Jenny Shipley and Don Brash – are children of the manse?) the New Zealand working class – almost instinctively - has turned to the “political substitutionism†that always seemed to offer a so much safer road to the Big Rock candy Mountain.
Writing in The Maoriland Worker in the weeks after the collapse of the 1913 strike, Harry Holland summed up the reasons for the Red Fed’s defeat: “The odds against us were too great, the requisite tactics too little understood, the method of organisation too incomplete to meet the forces of the employers, the farmer scabs, the armed and legal power of the State.â€
This was a sober and extremely realistic assessment of the movement’s weaknesses, but it was not, by any interpretation, a call to abandon the whole notion of militant trade unionism by taking up the cross of parliamentary socialism. Few outside the IWW argued against the idea of transforming the legal environment in which unions operated by parliamentary means, but, at least initially, the founders of the New Zealand Labour Party also followed a “dual strategy†of pursuing legislative change inside the House, while simultaneously agitating for it out on the streets.
“We of the Labour Party come to endeavour to effect a change of classes at the fountain of powerâ€, declared Harry Holland in his maiden speech to Parliament.
We come proclaiming boldly and fearlessly the Socialist objective of the Labour movement throughout New Zealand; and we make no secret of the fact that we seek to rebuild society on a basis in which work and not wealth will be the measure of a man’s worth. We do not seek to make a class war. You cannot make that which is already in existence. We recognise that the antagonisms which divide society into classes are economically foundationed, and we are going, if we can, to change those economic foundations, to end the class war by ending the causes of class warfare.
Such is the “unfinished business†of the New Zealand Left: to bring to a successful conclusion the grand transformative project to which syndicalists and socialists alike committed themselves in the early years of the 20th Century.
But, as the years passed, the Red Fed leaders who, under Labour’s banner, had breached the walls of Parliament in 1919, began to regard the syndicalist’s revolutionary tradition as irritatingly Quixotic. And for the syndicalists – edged ever closer towards the wings of the labour movement’s stage by the combination of the Communist Party’s aggressive sectarianism and Labour’s indefatigable moderation – the heady days of 1913 were gradually transformed into the stuff of folklore. The grand deeds of the New Zealand labour movement’s heroic age, remembered over pints of ale at the occasional reunion.
Not that either the revolutionaries or the reformists had the slightest chance of reconstituting the militant working class movement of 1913 in an environment dominated by the cataclysm of World War I, the Influenza Epidemic, and the seemingly permanent recession into which New Zealand stumbled in the 1920s.
In one of those poignant historical ironies, the flower of both the strikers and the specials private armies ended up intermingled on the rolls of honour of a thousand New Zealand war memorials. Massey’s Cossacks died on the hillsides of the Dardanelles. The conscripted strikers in the Flanders mud.
And Massey, the man who oversaw both tragedies reigned on and on, a bigoted Orangeman who hated Catholicism almost as much as he hated socialism, and whose policies bound New Zealanders ever tighter to the bosom of Mother England. The latent fascism, so evident in the Special’s encampments of 1913, lingered also, slowly poisoning the social and intellectual life of rural and provincial New Zealand, and seeping remorselessly into the wealthy suburbs of the major cities. It was just as well the General Election of 1935 was fought under first-past-the-post rules, because a proportional system would almost certainly have turned New Zealand over to a coalition of vengeful cockies, selfish businessmen and suburban fascists.
Fourteen years of moderate social democracy only strengthened the determination of these reactionary elements to even the score with the social forces that had usurped their political hegemony. One union in particular, the Waterside Workers, seemed to embody everything that had gone wrong with New Zealand since Labour came to power. Led by Jock Barnes, in whom the militant flame of 1913 still burned with a dangerous brilliance, the Watersiders had cocked an irreverent snook at the new shibboleths of the Cold War, and refused to kow-tow to the authoritarian leadership of the by now thoroughly domesticated trade union movement.
The destruction of the Watersiders by the new National Government was accomplished by the imposition of what can only be described as full-on antipodean fascism. The reactionary vision of Massey’s Cossacks was finally accomplished in a stunning political apotheosis.
And what of Labour? Poor, decrepit and discredited Labour. Drained of every passion but the passion for office; satisfied that its half-hearted social-democratic commonwealth was the best that could be achieved by the workers of hand and brain; bullied by the British, the Americans and the Australians into red-baiting the best of its followers out of the movement; the best that the little draper who had inherited the Labour leadership from Fraser’s icy grip could offer was to say that he was “neither for nor against the Watersidersâ€.
With the descendants of Massey’s Cossacks in charge of the country, Labour’s only contribution was to pour the cold water of its neutrality over the last flickering ember of the great movement that had been born in Blackball, martyred at Waihi, tested in 1913, and vindicated in 1935.
Nineteen-Fifty-One marked the end of three-quarters of a century of independent working class struggle. Three-quarters of a century in which working people themselves had set the political agenda on their own terms and for their own ends. The labour movement would survive the destruction of the Watersiders and their allies, but it would never recover from it. For the next forty years union leaders would reiterate what was universally affirmed as “The Lesson of 1951†– that the trade union movement “couldn’t take on the Government and winâ€.
It was, of course, a false lesson - born of the need to pull some semblance of decency over the shameless collaboration of the Federation of Labour with the National Government’s campaign to destroy the militants. The true lesson of 1951 was that if the 20,000 members of the TUC were able to force Sid Holland’s government into the extremities of the Emergency Regulations, then the 400,000 members of the FOL could have broken it in two. That it did not do so was not because it believed that it couldn’t, but because it believed that it shouldn’t.
As James K. Baxter so wisely put it: “Political action in its source is pure, human, direct, but in its civil function becomes the jail it laboured to destroy.â€
Reabsorbed into the machinery of the Keynesian welfare state, the New Zealand trade union movement quickly ceased to regard itself as anything more than one of the three “social partners†- alongside the employers and the state. Such militancy as there was tended to be driven from below as workers struggled to maintain their standard of living in the face of New Zealand’s fluctuating economic fortunes. The working class radicalism of the Red Feds and the Wobblies, was now represented by the Moscow-aligned Socialist Unity Party, which, in between railing against the depredations of multinational corporations, and despatching sympathetic union officials on tours of the Eastern Bloc, routinely encouraged workers to vote for the Labour Party. The SUP, joked the cynics, would rather keep control of the losing side, than lose control of the winning side. Revolutions were for other people.
Right-wing people.
Because, following the false dawn of the early 1970s, when Norman Kirk, acutely conscious of his own mortality, crammed twelve years’ worth of change into a miraculous eighteen months, and Labour, for the first time since the 1930s seemed ready to wake the fitful sleepers of these shaky isles, politics in New Zealand turned down a very dark road indeed.
From the mid-1970s the radical conservatism that had its birth on the Auckland Domain and in the Police Barracks on Buckle Street in 1913, was no longer confined to the countryside. It had infiltrated and contaminated every town and city, every workplace, every home. In 1975 “Rob’s Mob†– it’s very name an incitement to political vigilantism – tore up Kirk’s fragile garden with malicious glee, and by 1981 was ready to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Afrikaner Broderbund. And, had the Red and Blue Squads failed in their duty to contain the anti-tour protesters, Muldoon was prepared to swear in the provincial Rugby clubs as special constables. Massey’s Cossacks would have metamorphosed into Muldoon’s Stormtroopers and antipodean fascism would, once again, have received official sanction. New Zealanders owe the 1981 Police Commissioner, Bob Walton, a debt of gratitude they scarcely understand. For it was he who convinced the Prime Minister that his regular police officers were more than equal to the task of maintaining law – as well as order.
But Muldoon’s authoritarian populism was too blunt, and, curiously, too democratic an instrument to serve the purposes of the new breed of radical conservative that was now emerging from the high-rise buildings of Queen Street and The Terrace. Inspired by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, they glimpsed the possibility of turning back the economic clock to the 1880s – a time before the IC&A Act and the Welfare State. Back to the “golden age†of unfettered capitalism - before rising union density put paid to the laisser-faire dream.
The vector of this new disease would be the defiant individualism and cultural rebelliousness of the middle-class Baby Boomers. And the Labour Party, shorn at last of its proletarian locks by the Delilahs of common-room and classroom, would be its host.
But what the so-called “New Right†did not grasp, was that, as they heaved the hands of history’s clock backwards to Capitalism’s golden age, they were, at the same instant, reconstituting the very conditions that gave birth to the heroic age of democratic socialism. They may not have been interested in the dialectic, but the dialectic was interested in them.
The fightback began in the Labour Party, where all those who remembered and/or revered the progressive traditions of the New Zealand working class rallied against the New Right cuckoos that had invaded the social-democratic nest. And, through Labour’s ties with the trade union movement, the resistance steadily spread outwards into the working class communities of the major cities. At the level of the rank-and-file a mood of rebellion gathered strength.
But at the summit of the labour movement, the old shibboleths still held sway. Labour was better than National. The unions must seek a “constructive engagement†with the new Labour regime. And always, in answer to the young firebrands’ demands for an all out war against the New Right, the trade union leadership sang the same old refrain – inspired by the false lessons of 1913 and 1951: “You can’t take on the Government and win.â€
Underpinning the leadership’s caution and compromise was another factor – the fear of losing the unqualified preference clause. The brief taste of voluntary union membership that they had experienced in 1983-84 had made them desperate for the legislative protection only Labour could provide – and they would endure just about anything to keep it – and Labour – in place.
How the men of 1913 would have sneered at the craven performance of their successors. And how they would have wept to see the systematic demolition of a century of working class achievement by the very party they had formed to give strength to the industrial wing of the labour movement.
But the treachery of 1991 would have come as no surprise to them, because their own experience would have taught them that cowardice is habit-forming. What would have gladdened their hearts, however, was the reaction of the New Zealand working class itself to the new National Government’s Employment Contracts Bill.
In their tens of thousands they poured onto the streets, and in stop-work meeting after stop-work meeting passed near unanimous resolutions in favour of a General Strike. How the ghosts of Tom Barker and J.B. King would have smiled to hear the call for the deployment of organised labour’s ultimate weapon. Somehow, through all the years of moderation and betrayal, the idea of the “Great Strike†had survived. The tragedy, of course, was that in 1991 there were no leaders to match Harry Holland, Pat Hickey or Tom Barker. The tinder was dry, but the Council of Trade Unions contemptuously refused to strike the spark.
So we end where we began, in a country where the working class is politically and organisationally invisible. In 2003, the business of the Left is not so much unfinished as undone, and waits now for the men and women with enough courage and enough strength to do it all over again.
Because the history of the past ninety years, if it has taught us anything at all, teaches us that one cannot have a genuine Labour Party – or even a NewLabour Party – without the active support of an independent and militant trade union movement.
The New Zealand radical tradition calls upon all those who still believe a better world is possible to reach again for the political and industrial tools that can build it, and to keep close to their hearts the simple truth that concludes the great anthem of the Industrial Workers of the World:
In our hands we hold a power greater than their hoarded gold,
Greater than the strength of armies multiplied a thousand-fold,
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old –
When the union makes us strong.
Solidarity forever, solidarity forever, solidarity forever
‘Tis the union makes us strong.
- By Potemkin
- By ingliz
- By Supermom
- By KurtFF8