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In memory of Edna Davidson
I especially want to acknowledge the relatives of Philip and Sophia, who embraced me and the project with open arms—and even bought me lunch. Caroline Josephs, Naomi Gillmore, Helen Dukes, Stacey Dukes, Philip Bourke, Joe Stanley, Ivy Raff, Sue Hillman, Jessica Cook, Lindon Richards, and Carol Baillie provided valuable information on the lives of their extraordinary ancestors or helped me to find long-lost cousins. It was amazing to meet some of you in person, and I sincerely hope this work serves the family well.
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As well as providing previously unpublished biographical information on Josephs, I hope to convince the reader of three main claims. Firstly, before the arrival of Josephs in New Zealand, the “broad anarchist tradition”—defined by Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt as a revolutionary form of libertarian socialism against social and economic hierarchy (specifically capitalism and the state), in favour of international class struggle and revolution from below, in order to create a socialist, stateless social order—had next to no organized presence.12 There were anarchists and various forms of anti-authoritarian ideas in New Zealand before Josephs, but it was his activity within the New Zealand Socialist Party and his formation of one of New Zealand’s first anarchist collectives, the Freedom Group, that ensured a level of organized anarchism previously lacking in the wider labour movement.
Finally, New Zealand anarchists, and Josephs in particular, were rooted in the international anarchist movement. Josephs’ birth in Latvia, his ongoing radicalisation in Glasgow, Scotland, and his almost two decades in New Zealand before he left for Australia, highlights the transient nature of labour. His distribution of international anarchist literature, and personal networking with overseas revolutionaries and groups such as Freedom Press (UK) and the Mother Earth Publishing Association (USA), illustrates the doctrinal diffusion and sharing of information so vital to informal, intercontinental anarchist networks. This sharing went both ways. Josephs’ activities, the perceived bankruptcy of the Liberal Government’s state-socialist legislation, and accounts of New Zealand strikes popped up on the pages of various anarchist journals abroad, lending weight to the notion that anarchism
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