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Making Rebels 1 Making Rebels The New Zealand Socialist Party, 1901-1913 By Mark Edward Dunick A thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History Victoria University of Wellington 2016 i Abstract The New Zealand Socialist Party (NZSP) was the first radical socialist party in this country. The decade in which it existed was a time of rapid social change. The NZSP began in 1901 as a reaction against the Liberal Party which dominated New Zealand politics at the time. In its first five years the party had two main branches in Wellington and Christchurch, but it grew rapidly after 1907 with the expansion of industrial unionism. The NZSP was overshadowed by the Federation of Labour and never developed a coherent national organisation. As the working class began to organise nationally to challenge the Massey Government, the NZSP failed to adapt to the new political situation and dissolved in 1913. The party began as a group of marginal outsiders, but as society changed and class became an important political factor, the NZSP played an important role in spreading new ideas and educating a generation of socialists. When the NZSP ended in 1913 the ideas it had promoted were widely accepted among New Zealand’s organised working class. Cover photo Delegates at the New Zealand Socialist Party, fourth annual conference, 1911 in Dunedin. Photograph taken by Muir and Moodie. Roth, Herbert Otto, 1917-1994 : Photographs. Ref: 1/1-002591-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://natlib.govt.nz/records/22304421 ii Acknowledgements Thank you to Jim McAloon, for always being helpful and encouraging while supervising this project, for always pointing me in the right direction when I got lost, for lending me books, and for showing me how to be a historian. Thanks to the Polish Educational and Charitable Trust for providing a scholarship and financial assistance. The wonderful librarians at the Alexander Turnbull Library and the Hocken Library in Dunedin were always helpful, as were David Verran at Auckland Public Library and Erin Kimber at the MacMillan Brown Library in Christchurch. Thanks also to Malcolm and Violet for hosting us in Dunedin, and my family for the same and lots more in Christchurch. Thank you to Charlotte Drene and Toby Boraman for photographing faraway documents for me. Thanks to my fellow History postgraduate students at Victoria for making the year so enjoyable. And finally, thank you to Catherine, for encouragement, proof reading, and love. I could not have managed without you. iii Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter One 13 Chapter Two 51 Chapter Three 89 Conclusion 134 Bibliography 138 1 Making Rebels: The New Zealand Socialist Party, 1901-1913 In February 1908, Edward Tregear, head of the Department of Labour, wrote a memo to his Minister, J.A. Millar, describing the rise of the radical socialist movement. I was lately in the Town Hall of Wellington when three thousand people were there to greet Keir Hardie … The immense majority were with him in his utterances, one and all. I went from the Town Hall to a small Socialist Hall – there were present about 150 people, men and women. They were not 150 voters merely – each was a preacher, a worker for the cause, an earnest furious adherent. By pamphlets, by street preaching, by coaxing argument, night and day these men were gaining adherents; their ranks grow and grow as all deadly earnest causes grow. It is the only religion of “Hope for the World” they know … I went to Christchurch. At another socialist meeting the same fervour, the same propaganda, the same determination to make others believe what they believe were manifest. No easy “go-as-your-please” of trade-unionism can fight this spirit. They will win the trades unions as surely as day follows night.1 Tregear was reporting the activities of the New Zealand Socialist Party (NZSP). He warned the Minister that the growth of militant socialism was the greatest of many threats to social stability and the Liberal government. Tregear urged Millar not to underestimate the strength of the new left wing movement, describing it as “a new religion. It is worked and will be worked by fanatics”.2 Both Tregear and Millar saw themselves as moderate socialists who 1 Edward Tregear, to J.A. Millar, Memo, Re: Labour in New Zealand, 10 February 1908, Hall Jones, William, 1851-1936, MS-Papers-5755-04, Alexander Turnbull Library (ATL), p.6. 2 Ibid., p.5. 2 supported the Liberal government and its long and stable alliance with the labour movement. The ‘earnest’ and ‘furious’ men and women of the NZSP, the first nationally organised radical socialist group in the country, were determined to break that alliance. Formed in 1901, the party was a loose network of idealists, organisers and thinkers who spread socialist ideas during a decade of social transformation. In 1913, when the NZSP dissolved, the Liberals had collapsed and the organised working class was a major force in New Zealand society. Tregear, as President of a new Social Democratic Party, found himself aligned with the radical socialists he once feared, and Millar had sided with Massey’s right wing Reform Party. The decade in which the NZSP existed was characterised by rapid social changes. The nature of work changed as industrialisation spread and employment practices evolved. Piece rates were replaced by hourly wages and skilled workers in small workshops were replaced by less skilled workers in larger factories. These developments were associated with increased workplace conflict and the rapid rise of the trade union movement. Between 1895 and 1900 union membership in New Zealand increased from 8000 to nearly 18000, and by 1913 it was over 71,000. By the end of 1911 an organised working class existed in the cities and some smaller industrial towns. Although different areas developed in different ways and at different speeds, between 1911 and 1913 the threat of an independent working class political movement alarmed both employers and the state.3 As working class politics developed, the NZSP spread socialist ideas and provided a base for militants to network, educate themselves and discuss politics. The NZSP grew into a network of radical socialists who discussed and spread a range of different views. 3 Erik Olssen, ‘The Origins of the Labour Party’, New Zealand Journal of History (NZJH), Vol. 21, no.2, April 1987, pp.79-96. 3 British ethical socialism emerged in the 1890s, and its adherents saw socialism as primarily a moral issue rather than an economic one. They were radicals opposed to capitalism, but they believed socialism was an ethical philosophy that promised a new way of life. They promoted self-improvement and community building, and were active in local trade unions, utopian communities and a range of clubs and cultural groups, including the Independent Labour Party. Although many were not Christian, ethical socialists often adopted evangelical Christian methods, with a focus on conversions, fellowship and even secular socialist churches.4 Many of the Clarion settlers who founded the NZSP had a background in ethical socialism. The scientific socialism of Karl Marx was the most influential theory among revolutionary socialists in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. Marxists believed class struggle and class conflict played a central role in history and understanding how economic forces influenced society and politics was vital to the workers movement.5 The core concepts of Marxist political thought were that economics and society could be understood by using scientific socialist methods, the working class were the agents of change, and they needed to organise themselves independently of other classes in order to achieve a free and truly democratic society.6 Anarchism, like Marxism, emerged from the nineteenth century European socialist movement. Anarchists were opposed to both capitalism and the state and advocated a stateless self-managed economy directly controlled by organisations of workers and peasants which would enable genuine individual freedom within a socialist society.7 They did not form 4 Mark Bevir, The Making of British Socialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), pp.217-218. 5 Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp.38-39. 6 Ibid., p.44. 7 Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt, Black Flame; The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism (Oakland: AK Press, 2009), pp.44-47. 4 political parties or contest elections, instead they adopted a wide range of often contradictory methods ranging from opposition to organisations of any kind, through to building mass organisations and syndicalist unions.8 Supporters of revolutionary syndicalism also believed in the primacy of class struggle, but they believed the most effective strategy in the short and long term, was to organise workers at the point of production and take direct action against the employers in order to bring down the capitalist system. They focused on organising workers and had little use for political parties. Syndicalism emerged in the 1890s as a response to the economic changes brought about by the spread of electrical power and the internal combustion engine. Many skilled occupations were replaced with technology which required easily replaceable unskilled workers. Syndicalism appealed to both transient casual workers and also to workers in industries like coalmining and railway working, which had been transformed by the new technology.9 Syndicalism came to New Zealand via the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The IWW was formed in the United States in 1905, and several key figures in the NZSP gained experience in the IWW and associated unions before they came to New Zealand.10 The NZSP did more than any other organisation to introduce these new ideas to the New Zealand working class.
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