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Book Review
| Nolan, M (ed.), Revolution: The 1913 Great Strike in New Zealand, Canterbury University Press, Christchurch, 2005. pp. 318. NZ $37.95 paper.
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| This edited volume focuses on the tumultuous industrial events that took place in New Zealand immediately prior to World War I. The collection is based on papers that were originally presented at a Trade Union History Project seminar held in Wellington in 2003 and provides another example of the important contribution that this project has made to New Zealand social and labour history. |
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An edited volume of the events of 1913 (and in some places early 1914) is very timely. As Melanie Nolan notes in her introduction, the 1913 Great Strike has received less attention that the events of 1890 and 1951. This is particularly significant because of the central role attributed to the events of 1913 in interpretations of New Zealand history. Central amongst these is Erik Olssen's argument that the defeat of 1913 lay the groundwork for the formation of the New Zealand Labour Party in 1916 and the social democratic agenda of the 1935 first Labour government (The Red Feds: Revolutionary Industrial Unionism and the New Zealand Federation of Labour 1908–1914, Oxford University Press, Auckland, 1988). In this regard many of the contributions to this volume offer the opportunity to reflect on Olssen's argument first outlined almost 30 years ago. |
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The volume is structured as follows. It opens with a very useful chronology of events by Peter Franks, which clearly illustrates the complexity and multi-faceted nature of the industrial and political conflict of the time. In the editorial introduction, Melanie Nolan not only reviews the role attributed to the events of 1913 in the New Zealand historiography but also provides an overview of contemporary international views of New Zealand as a social laboratory in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. To my mind the explicit attempt to place the 1913 strike in an international context, although not entirely successful, is one of the most significant aspects of this collection. |
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The great set piece of this collection, and presumably the seminar, are the contributions by two of New Zealand's most well respected historians – Erik Olssen and Miles Fairburn. Olssen's chapter uses the experience of two socialists from Auckland, Tom Barker and Michael Joseph Savage (who was to become the first Labour Prime Minister), travelling to Wellington during the dispute as an opportunity to restate many of the central themes of the argument he outlined in Red Feds. Fairburn, who has long railed against class-based interpretations of New Zealand history, uses the opportunity to attack two central planks of 'left wing' interpretations of the strike – first, that the Massey government and employers were intent on smashing the unions well before the strike started and second that it was the inherent radicalism of the rank and file unionists, as opposed to their leaders, that sparked the events of 1913. While I disagree with much of what Fairburn has to say, here and elsewhere, there are two lessons that I think his analysis offers. First, his analysis points to the need for historians to adopt a more sophisticated view of agency and second, he highlights some of the potential problems of post-Thompsonian labour history, highlighted elsewhere by Johnathan Zeitlin's attack on 'rank-and-filism'. |
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One of central features of 1913 strike was the high level of violence and the coercive use of state power to crush the strike. Of particular significance was the drafting of special constables, often referred to as 'Massey's Cossacks', to break the strike, man the docks and keep public order in both Auckland and Wellington. Many of the specials were farmers and their involvement in subduing the strike not only provided graphic illustration of the breakdown of the lib-lab alliance forged in the late nineteenth century between urban workers and small holders, but also set the stage for the ongoing antagonism between farmers and independent unionism, which would animate New Zealand labour history throughout the twentieth century. Issues of violence also played a central issue in shaping public opinion about the strike. The chapters by Hill, Anderson, Crawford and Taylor deal with various aspects of these issues. Hill, who focuses on the role of the police in the dispute, provides a cogent counter to Fairburn's view that the state did not set out to crush militant unionism from the beginning (as does the later chapter by McAloon which focuses on the reformation of the capital class in NZ between 1890 and World War I). Crawford highlights the vital role played by the military in recruiting and training the specials. Anderson focuses on the use of crime as a form of protest in Wellington. His analysis shows that while violence was regularly used against the specials, there were very few incidences of violence being used against strike breakers or employers. Moreover, he shows that striking workers were aware of the role that perceptions of violence played in shaping public opinion. Taylor's analysis focuses on portrayals of the strike and violence in the popular press. It has often been argued that the strikers were depicted as 'foreign' militant revolutionaries, intent on using violence to overthrow a classless society; Taylor's focus on a broader range of newspapers reveals the existence of a range of competing discourses. |
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Another important feature of the 1913 dispute was the failure of striking workers to convince the majority of unionists to join in a general strike. Franks' chapter examines the reactions of craft unions to the call for a general strike and provides a much more complex picture than the traditional view. Grant's chapter deals with perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the 1913 strike – the failure of the Seamen's union to join the strike. Taylor traces the continued existence of a revolutionary militancy in the aftermath of the strike and the role it continued to play in the Waterside Workers Union. All three chapters point to the internal complexity of the labour movement and the dangers of making simple generalisations. They also provide the kernel of an alternative, if largely underdeveloped, critique of Olssen's thesis about the consequences of 1913 for the labour movement in New Zealand. |
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There is much in the volume which will be of interest to scholars both with an interest in New Zealand and more generally. Taken together the collection provides a nuanced and empirically informed view of this important historical event. For Australian readers I think that this volume will also help illuminate some of the reasons for some of the important differences in how arbitration functioned in the two countries. It also illustrates the strong connections between labour movement thinking across national borders during this period. It is striking, for example, to consider the number of protagonists in the 1913 strike originally from Australia, and the number who subsequently became involved in union politics across the Tasman. Beyond this the events of 1913 in New Zealand also offer important insights into the rise and fall of syndicalism as an international phenomenon. It is clear that the 1913 general strike took place in the context of an international wave of industrial militancy and that the actions of workers in New Zealand were informed by ideas and people from other countries. |
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The final two chapters of the book pick up this issue. The chapter by MacRaild traces industrial militancy and the concept of the general strike in the UK. The final chapter by Derby provides a fascinating account of one of the founders of the Industrial Workers of the World, W.E. Trautmann, who appears to have been born in New Zealand. While both chapters are interesting in their own right, they do not really help place what occurred in New Zealand in its international context. The other thing I think was lacking from this volume was a broader historical narrative. The closest thing to this is Nolan's excellent chapter on gender. One of the strengths of Olssen's original analysis in Red Feds was his acute and fine-grained understanding of changes taking place in New Zealand capitalism at the time. This appreciation of how economic forces were re-making work, how it was organised, and the relations between groups in society, underpinned his understanding of the actions of workers. Without something similar the book struggles either to effectively ground these events in the history of New Zealand or to place the New Zealand experience in its international context. |
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| University of Sydney |
NICK WAILES | |
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