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chapter 3: a workingman’s paradise?

The influence Josephs had on the development of anarchism in New Zealand can be seen when his activities are placed in context. Before his arrival, there was simply no organized anarchist movement in New Zealand, and unlike its nearest neighbour Australia (which had anarchist groups as early as 1886), self-proclaimed anarchists were few and far between. As a result, the traces of anarchism in New Zealand before his arrival in 1904 come from an often-hostile press, concerned police, or in the form of a few eclectic individuals such as Arthur Desmond and Alexander Bickerton (of whom more later). And although workers’ self-activity and anti-authoritarian voices are audible throughout the development of New Zealand society, I do not want to confuse “the history of the revolutionary anarchist movement with the universal history of anti-authoritarian thought”—even if such a history would be both fascinating and fruitful.1 The pages herein deal primarily with those who, as Barry Pateman puts it, have crossed the river of fire, and identify as such.

Despite an upsurge of new unionism where workers “began to see themselves as representatives of a class rather than a craft or trade” (culminating in the national Maritime Strike of 1890), New Zealand at the turn of the twentieth century has predominately been viewed as a ‘Workingman’s Paradise.’2 The arcadian imagery of New Zealand that was sold to its early immigrants—a ‘land of milk and honey’ where natural abundance and the innate moderation of its inhabitants would abolish the necessity for social organization and its by-products of wealth, power, and status—has lingered on, partly because the workers who packed up and left the Old World did not want to admit that their sacrifices had been in vain, and also because “powerful mechanisms prevented the formation of alternative and contrasting visualisations.”3

Historical narratives are one such mechanism. In Miles Fairburn’s The Ideal Society and its Enemies, casualized labour relationships and mobility between employment; the prevalence of the individualist, nomadic, and transient single male; and a minimal development of working class communities (or cohesive social organization in general), are upheld to illustrate that New Zealand society, at least before 1890, was relatively free of hierarchy and class divisions.4 One historian even goes so far as to ask whether New Zealanders “have or have had a bourgeoisie and a proletariat, and a struggle between the two.”5 Relatively progressive laws, coupled with perceived egalitarian attitudes of the population, led historians and contemporaries alike to promote the country as an equal society: a land without strikes.6 From 1894, when legislation was introduced that outlawed strike action and forced unions and employers into negotiated industrial awards governed by the Arbitration Court (known as the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act, or ICA), until a strike by Auckland tramway workers in 1906, there were no recorded strikes in New Zealand.

Yet such a view conveniently precludes the existence of class struggle outside of strike action, and essentially dismisses the possibility of an anarchist movement in New Zealand. The notion that the colony was free of class and hierarchy also neglects the fact that New Zealand’s western culture was founded on the destruction, exploitation, and colonization of the local indigenous population and their resources. And while it is true that before 1904 explicitly anarchist activity is minimal, it hides the fact that from the arrival of its very first settlers in the early-nineteenth century, New Zealand has been a capitalist society—divided by class and informed by social relations of production and accumulation in both urban and rural New Zealand. Hierarchy, gender division, the subordination of all aspects of life to work, and the constant reproduction of capital is intertwined with such relations, and whether those relationships were casualized, sporadic, or isolated does not negate their existence. Even if workers had managed to avoid the wage relation for a short time (and worked for themselves), wage relations dominated the wider society in which that labour was per-formed. “Capitalism is not just a social system that exploits people through work,” but does so through its ability “to turn all of life into work for its own reproduction.”7 In other words, individuals—directly or indirectly—were always dominated by capitalist relations. As one of the world’s youngest colonies, New Zealand was no exception.

It is clear that the global reproduction of capital was a driving factor in the colonization of New Zealand. Capitalist relations were “trans-planted quite deliberately by the sponsors of the New Zealand Company,” an organization that competed with the British government in the quest to monopolize New Zealand pastures. In response to the American and Australian example, and in order to give capital the opportunity to accumulate in New Zealand, the director of the company, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, repeatedly argued that:

the ruling authority should put a high price on virgin land so that the labourer would have to work a considerable time before he could save enough to become a landowner… before he withdrew[from the labour market] he would have to work long enough to provide capital accumulation for the original landowning employers and to save a sum to provide a fund to bring out other wage workers to take his place.8

Accordingly, land prices were kept high to ensure a class of labourers, agricultural mechanics, and domestic servants would be available for exploitation by landowners who remained home in England, helping to cement “not a subsistence but a capitalist economy.”9 This economy, geared to provide British capital with fruits from New Zealand’s “quarry of stored-up natural resources,” relied on the suppression of Maori and the labour power of the working class.10 As a result, New Zealand soon featured the evils many immigrants thought they had left at the docks: wage labour, want in a land of plenty, strikes, and unemployment. The withdrawal of labour as acts of protest broke out in 1821, 1840, and again in 1841, and as early as 1877, large meetings of the unemployed could be found on the street corners of the colony.11

If class was solely based on income (which it is not), one could also point out that between 1903 and 1904, 0.5 percent of the New Zealand population owned 33 percent of its wealth.12 Stevan Eldred-Grigg in New Zealand Working People notes that many landowners earned £20,000 to £30,000 a year, often tax free, while the wages of a farm labourer were £41 per year. Female nursemaids working the same estate house sometimes earned as little as £13 annually. While an idle few pocketed huge fortunes, such as Sir George Clifford and his £512,000 worth of assets (over 30,000 times the average working wage), the majority worked, and worked hard—a simple commodity in the eyes of some employers. “I just look on them as I do on a bag of potatoes,” claimed one factory owner.13 Again, it was worse if you were female. When the Wellington Domestic Workers’ Union asked the Arbitration Court for the hours worked by maids to be reduced to sixty-eight a week, they were turned away.

There is no doubting the fact that early colonial New Zealand was a considerable improvement on the Old World, that individualism was the prevalent ideology, and that some immigrants did find relative freedom when compared with their past lives. “It is clear that there was a high degree of transience and that the working class was fragmented in New Zealand,” writes Melanie Nolan, “fragmented by sex and race into pockets, and by the smallest of workplaces and communities.”14 But this does not equal a society without class. Likewise, the colony may have been free of recorded strikes for a short period, but it was never without capitalist relations—locally or globally. No amount of state liberalism in the form of women’s suffrage, pensions, or law-locked unions could ever abolish hierarchy, class, and gender divisions. In reality, these reforms were the direct response of capital to the resistance of New Zealand workers in the late 1880s, and while they certainly improved some aspects of working life, they simply helped file down the rough edges of capitalism’s chains. As Edward Tregear, ex-Secretary of the Labour Department, wrote: “there had been a feeling (perhaps unconscious) that they [the Government] had to settle every [Parliamentary] Session with how few bones could be thrown to the growling Labour Dog to keep him from actually biting.”15

Alongside class divisions and an overarching state, Victorian ideology, religion, and the interests of the press heavily influenced the ‘Britain of the South.’ Although its power was watered down due to the lack of any official church, and despite some clergymen supporting liberal causes, religion—in a range of denominations—played a strong role in maintaining certain standards of behaviour in the colony. Churches were often a voice for moral controls over the wider population, and helped to push through parliament “some of the empire’s strictest Sabbatarian laws.”16 Likewise, for a population that depended on newspapers for much of its information, the press tended towards the prevailing views of the status quo and were often open to expressing the views of the mainstream Protestant churches—churches that were generally suspicious of socialism. In the eyes of most clergy, anarchism was seen as “a dangerous atheistic creed.”17

Yet despite such factors (or because of them), there existed an anti-authoritarian instinct that Eldred-Grigg insists came close to the spirit of anarchism:

Anarchism was deeply rooted in the instincts of working people. Bureaucracy, the state, the whole business of government, seemed alien and inimical. Dislike of government was linked with a strong preference for a world of ease, a world where people chin-wagged rather than hectored, where spaces were small and relationships close. Working people frequently felt contempt for what a union leader described as ‘that political box of tricks called Parliament’… anarchism was not so much a political movement as a feeling that the state and big business represented the world of ‘them’ not ‘us’.18

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s slogan ‘Property is Theft’ was so popular in 1890, writes Eldred-Grigg, “that one wealthy landowner took pains to repudiate it as ‘cant’ [mere jargon].”19 Whether it was used in full sincerity is open to debate, but at the very least, the men and women whose lives revolved around labour, or who did not own property, knew that New Zealand was far from a workingman’s (or woman’s) paradise.

Those who owned the country’s newspapers certainly strove to portray the harmony of capitalist social relations in the colony, and despite a few exceptions, anarchist thought was either reported negatively or overwhelmingly denounced. As early as 1840, the seemingly delayed colonization of New Zealand was said to be promoting ‘anarchy’ by some commentators: “unless immediate steps be taken to establish the complete administration of British law in New Zealand, it is greatly to be feared that the large and respectable body of Her Majesty’s subjects who have lately proceeded thither will be placed in a state of anarchy, and subjected to great evils accordingly.”20 Reports of the 1848 French Revolution carried the exploits of ‘anarchist leaders’, and as well as tirades on the Paris Commune, the year 1871 featured a local letter in the Evening Post titled “Revolutionary Anarchism” that confusedly advocated the ideas of Italian Republican Giuseppe Mazzini.21 Sensationalist articles in the early 1880s, such as “Anarchism, Socialism, and Nihilism,” “Nihilism: What is It?,” and “Socialists in London,” painted the ideas of Bakunin, Johann Most, and other “extreme anarchists” in a negative light, warning the good citizens of New Zealand that “the quarrel of the Anarchist is with human society itself, and that is a quarrel that may be prosecuted as fitly in New Zealand as in Paris or Chicago.”22

Anarchism as a scourge against society was a reoccurring theme. In 1894, Wellington audiences enjoyed a public lecture on “Anarchism: Its Origin and Aim” by Liberal politician and lawyer, Sir John George Findlay. Although he shared Proudhon quotes with his listeners and mentioned anarchist “writers of such ability in literature and science as Kropotkin and Reclus,” Findlay peppered his presentation with rhetoric designed to darken the imagination. Anarchists were part of “the horde of idle loafers who form the dregs of every State… whose degradation and poverty are but the wages of their own intemperance and idleness”; while anarchism itself “aims at annihilation of all external authority and is avowedly a declaration of war against every social institution… to destroy by every possible means this cursed growth we call society.” “The blind enthusiasts,” concluded Findlay, “would hasten on the wheels of human progress by the bomb, the pistol, and the dagger.” In their growth, “the death of society” drew near.23