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| Patu Squad Anti-Springbok Tour protest 1981 - photo John Miller |
The
Springbok Tour of Aotearoa in 1981 opened up a chapter in our history
when fundamental questions about colonisation and racism in Aotearoa
were directly confronted by mass audiences for the first time. A tiny
Trotskyist group entered this debate with the production of a pamphlet
around a year later titled "Towards a Socialist Polynesia". Written by
Owen Gager, the first professional (as in full time, unpaid) Trotskyist agitator NZ had seen, it
argued that NZ could best be understood as a white settler colony (yet with pretensions of imperialist rule in the South Pacific) very
much in the same mould as South Africa. It was then, the first serious
Marxist attempt to subject the events of the Tour of 1981 to dialectical
analysis, and a critique of the other attempts on the
left to explain these events. It makes the point that white settler
colonies are backward, racist outposts of empire, and that their future
is one of reactionary racism until such time as they are transformed
into socialist republics, in the case of New Zealand, part of a federation of
Socialist Republics of Polynesia.
Before
making a couple of lengthy quotes which convey the substance of the
argument about the white settler colonies and display its power as a
critique of the conventional 'left' views of Aotearoa, some short
account of the Spartacist League and its co-founder, Owen Gager, is
necessary. After all, why would a revolutionary current emerge in such a
backward, and as Gager used to say, petty bourgeois, British white-settler colony?
As
we might expect, left politics in small countries are heavily
influenced by currents in larger countries. NZ as a small, dependent,
colony had is own local minor echoes of Fabian,
anarchist, IWW, Labourite, Stalinist and Trotskyist politics. Apart
from a few sympathisers of Trotsky in the 1930s and a bogus rumour that
rightwing 1950's union boss and dairy farmer Fintan Patrick Walsh was
once a Trotskyist, Trotskyism in NZ originated in the 1960s around a few
key individuals. Notable among them was Owen Gager who as an honours student of
history in the late 1950s wrote a path breaking Marxist critique of the
colonial suppression of the labour movement during the First World War.
In
the 1960s like many intelligent and revolutionary minded youth during
that intense period of decolonisation, the bloody IndoChina war and 'new
left', Gager became highly politically active editing the Victoria
University paper Salient, and founding and editing at least three Marxist or Trotskyist magazines, Dispute, Spartacist Spasmodical and Red.
Gager had discovered Trotskyism and made it his business to find out
which was the best in keeping Trotsky's program alive. In 1970 he joined
up with Bill Logan at Victoria University to form the NZ Spartacist
League. As the name suggests this was a statement of solidarity with the
international Spartacist current based in the US. But as everyone likes
to repeat parrot-like where there are at least two Trotskyists there
must be a split, so around 1972 Logan went off to the US to join the
Spartacists while Gager rejected the Spartacists as pro-US imperialist and left for Australia to co-found the Communist Left, leaving his frustrations with 'petty bourgeois' NZ behind.
Gager
came back to NZ for around a year in 1982 largely as the result of the
ferment stirred up by the Tour in 81. He helped revive the then dormant
Tenants Protection Association in Ponsonby and wrote a number of
pamphlets
including Towards a Socialist Polynesia. One needs to read the
whole pamphlet to realise what a ground-breaking work it was, especially
the 'Leninist' critique of the other left currents, including the Maori
nationalists around Donna Awatere and their chief nemesis, Bill
Andersen. But his main contribution in this pamphlet was to build a
Marxist theoretical framework for understanding NZ's place as a colony
of British imperialism, and its role in the wider Pacific, and in
particular the role of the pan-Pacific proletariat in making a socialist
revolution. Here the concept of the white-settler colony was central to
the argument.
In
the introductory section Gager ties in NZs intellectual and political
backwardness with its colonial history. Any here South Africa is the
appropriate explanatory model. Gager uses Marx's method of taking as his
reference point the actual disruption of the Tour and then going down
to the roots of this conflict in our common history. Of course a reading
of
the complete pamphlet is necessary to grasp the power of the argument.
Gager
begins by claiming that settler colonies like South Africa and NZ
maintain a racist division between the indigenous and settler
populations today because the indigenous populations still have some
residue of their original mode of production and live in a semi-wage
labour reserve army. Racism justifies this division while apartheid
legalises it. The Tour served to highlight that in fighting Apartheid in South Africa the Pakeha left faced the reality of racism in
this country; that South Africa showed Aotearoa its future.
" But while expropriation and continued land sales made possible the
rise of commodity production, it was the survival of remnants of the
Polynesian mode of production which made the super-exploitation of the
Maori rural reserve army of cheap labour possible.[3] Pre-capitalist
forms of property in land and traditions of mutual economic support
within tribes provided means of subsistence outside that which could be
bought with wages in the market. This meant that Maori workers could be
paid low wages (below the cost of reproduction of labour power in the
market) and employed as casual or seasonal labour. As land values
dropped further and more land was alienated, the dependence of the Maori
rural reserve army on its own means of subsistence lessened but without
any equalisation of the low wage and the ‘high minimum level” set by
commodity production.
The history of the super-exploitation of the Polynesian workers is
the history of the continued existence of the Polynesian mode of
production within the framework of the dominant capitalist relations of
production. So long as the Polynesian mode of production survives within
the hostile capitalist environment, the wages of Maori workers are
forced below the value of labour power. While the continued possession
of some Maori land may slow down the proletarianisation of the Maori
people, it cannot prevent and has not prevented it. It ensures, on the
contrary, that when Maori workers enter the proletariat, they do so on
the worst terms, as the lowest stratum of the class. This is not the
result of racism, though this process has produced and will continue to
produce racism. It arises rather from the logic of a slow and protracted
expropriation of a pre-capitalist mode of production by the capitalist
mode, at every point representing continuous immiseration of the
indigenous population as the value of Maori land declines and the amount
of land owned is reduced in area and fertility. Similar processes take
place in other Polynesian islands but even more slowly."
"This [the South African case] as we have argued, is similar to the position in New Zealand. In
both cases part of the costs of reproduction of indigenous labour-power
is being met by the traditional labour of those (particularly women)
outside the capitalist mode of production. South Africa’s development
diverged from New Zealand’s in that the CMP displaced the petty
commodity MOP in agriculture by force, a result of British imperialism’s
drive to protect large-scale mining capital. The absence of any
large-scale mineral or other raw material resources in New Zealand meant
that massive capital investment such as in South Africa did not take
place. This held back the development of industry and the rate of
conversion of petty commodity production into capitalist agriculture,
and allowed the survival of comprador small capital dominated by British
finance, shipping and meat exporting capital. These differences
however, are differences of pace and scale, not of substance. An
accelerated concentration of capital in New Zealand and the South
Pacific would utilise existing wage differentials between white and
Polynesian workers to entrench an apartheid-like system. Under capitalism, South Africa represents the future of Polynesia."
The
next step in the argument was to show that the struggles of the
indigenous peoples to defend their mode of production from capitalist
incursion gave rise to a rich history of insurrections and wars, and
after a series of failed national movements, the assimilation of the
indigenous peoples into the reserve army of the proletariat as the best,
most militant, and ultimately the leading layers of the revolutionary
proletariat. Of course, the punch line is
that this revolution must lead to a "Socialist Union of the Pacific".
From Chapter 5 of Towards a Socialist Polynesia
Permanent Revolution in Polynesia
Polynesia
(except Tonga) was annexed by various European powers in the nineteenth
century, and the history of struggle against annexation is long and
bloody.
Throughout Polynesia, King Movements developed as forms of Polynesian
self-government, following European monarchical traditions, initially
under the influence of missionaries. These movements generally lacked
the strength to control European land purchases, and their surrender to
the market made inevitable their surrender to European governors. In
Aotearoa, however, a King Movement developed after annexation rather
than before it, against European opposition and using its monopoly of
physical force in certain areas to control the activities of pakeha
farmers.
This movement, because of its totally Polynesian character and its
effective control of agricultural production was seen by the white
settler ruling class – who had achieved ‘responsible government’ in
1852, excluding Maori from the vote – as part of an insurrection. Forms
of Maori sovereignty directly confronted pakeha sovereignty, in opposed
forms of government based upon conflicting modes of production. The King
Movement once under attack from the white settler government, lost
effective power because it did not gain military support from all
sections of the Maori population in the land wars. The white
government, protesting its ‘loyalty’ to Britain – so as to use the
British army’s guns to facilitate land expropriation – conceded to the
Maori people the struggle for national independence.
A minority of the King Movement saw itself as opposed to British rule – Te Hokioi,
the King Movement paper, pointed to Haiti’s success in maintaining its
independence – but the majority could not rise to the conception of a
national movement cutting across tribal divisions. Yet the King
Movement, before its suppression, exercised more economic and political
power over both Maori and pakehas within its jurisdiction than any
similar movement elsewhere in Polynesia, learning as it did from similar
movements in other islands.
The defeat of the King Movement had several effects. It confirmed the
white settler government in its role as a dependent satellite of
British imperialism. It led to the rise of Christian churches
independent of the pakeha missionaries, most notably Ringatu, whose view
of the lessons to be learnt from defeat was not only that the pakeha
missionaries were servants of imperialism, but also that the Maori
people were being proletarianised.
“Each tohunga therefore must earn his living with his own hands and
anything that in any way resembles tithing is not tolerated”. “ The
love-feast whish is held in the morning of the second day of a monthly
Ringatu festival, is a feast in the literal sense of the term. When a
large crowd is gathered…the feast is held in the open, the ‘tables’
being laid on the ground in true Maori fashion…The tohunga offers grace,
and the meal is eaten with relish. Truly only the best is provided, the
motive being that it is a love-feast to God. A collection is taken
toward the close of the meal, the money being used for church purposes
only. The collection must not be used for defraying the expenses of the
meal, or making other provision for the entertainment of the gathering.
It is also a rule of the church that the money given must be earned by
the sweat of the brow – interest on investments, proceeds of sale of
land or leases not being acceptable.”[11]
The withdrawal of many North Island Maori from the only white
institutions they had previous links with – the pakeha churches – was
their verdict on the ruling class’s land war. Now, in a period of Maori
political decline new white missionaries have emerged to tie Polynesian
workers to white capitalism.
The formation in 1892 of a Kotahitanga, or union, deriving from the
1835 Declaration of Independence by a confederation of united tribes,
was another effort by Maori in Aotearoa to achieve their own form of
government. While it was claimed that Kotahitanga did not aim to limit
the authority of the British Crown, both the New Zealand and British
ruling classes refused to recognise it. Had its leaders seriously based
themselves on the 1835 Declaration, they could have claimed the
Kotahitanga had more right to existence than the pakeha parliament. They
did not do so. Although the movement later subsided (as was inevitable
because its success relied on pakeha parliamentary approval) it was
nonetheless an expression of Maori lack of faith in capitalist
parliamentarism, and an attempt to develop their own institutions
instead.
By contrast, the so-called ‘Young Maori Movement’ (praised by Donna
Awatere and the Socialist Action League), was an abandonment of the
Polynesian revolutionary tradition, and a surrender to European
parliamentarism, leading to such racist attacks on Maori culture as the
Suppression of Tohungaism Act. With Apirana Ngata’s impeachment in 1934,
it was shown that even the better elements in the Movement, given
opportunities at the highest level, could not work through colonial
parliamentary institutions. The Ratana Movement, in reaction, linked
itself to the Labour Party, in endorsing Tawhiao’s view of the unity of
the working class.
“…in London, Ratana was snubbed by his own High Commissioner, Sir
James Allen, who was happy for the party to perform haka and poi dances
at the Wembley exhibition but laughed when Ratana asked that
arrangements be made for him to meet representatives of the British
Government. This rejection deeply wounded Ratana and, standing on
Westminster Bridge, he prophesied in the words used by Tawhiao: “When
all your stone houses are destroyed in time to come, then will the
carpenters, the blacksmiths and the shoemakers be in power and I will be
the government.”[12] Although their links with the labour movement have enabled the Ratana
Church to play a continuing political role in Maori affairs, again it
has failed to achieve its objectives through parliamentary means.
The history of the Maori people in Aotearoa has been a history of
struggle for its own form of government. So long as the Polynesian mode
of production continued to have vitality, traditional leaders basing
themselves on the survival of Maori social relations tried, always
unsuccessfully, to persuade white settler governments to tolerate forms
of Maori self-government. When traditional leadership failed, now
leaders emerged – often as apparently ‘religious’ leaders in a society
where distinctions between religion and politics are not clear cut –
giving expression to the proletarianisation of the Maori people and
their links with other workers outside the framework of parliamentary
politics. The refusal of Maori to fight imperialist wars have been the
direct result of the emergence of this formally religious, but
proletarian in reality, tradition – mass actions with little echo and no
support from the ‘official’ pakeha labour movement.[13]
As the old social relations of the Polynesian mode of production
fused with the social relations of the Capitalist mode, as the Maori
people became fully proletarianised, the early forms of proletarian
ideology lost their religious shell and took on the form of
self-government in opposition to imperialism and colonial racist
parliamentary rule. The New Zealand colonial ruling class has and will
refuse to concede the demand for self-government, but this demand will
be achieved in spite of the ruling class, by smashing it. The King
Movement and the Kotahitanga were imitations of European class
institutions, their monarchies, their parliaments. It is necessary to go
beyond European class society and its imitation.
The Polynesian people, their land having been expropriated, now
constitute a section – potentially the most revolutionary section
because of their tradition as an oppressed nationality – of the working
class. The struggle for self-government has now become the workers’
struggle for power: instead of Kings and parliament, workers’ councils
are on the agenda. The tradition of the Maori people, a tradition of
armed struggle and revolutionary aspiration, now fuses with the
international working class culture, developed by Marxism and its
tradition of revolution to form the science and culture of the
Polynesian socialist revolution.
This struggle has always had an international dimension. The King
Movement of the Waikato drew on the lessons of Tahiti, Hawaii and Haiti
in the nineteenth century. Today, as the Spartacist League predicted
fifteen years ago, the Polynesian islands which have been conceded
formal independence by imperialism, experience as a result the crisis of
the nation-state in holding back the development of the forces of
production, in its most acute form.
Political independence only deepens the economic dependence of the
Polynesian island states, accentuating the dependence of the national
economies themselves on the remittance of wages of Polynesian migrant
workers in New Zealand. Therefore, the achievement in the less developed
island states of what has proved impossible in the most developed
island with its white culture – the objectives of the King Movement and
Kotahitanga –shows that these forms of independence do not halt the
pauperisation, immiseration and proletarianisation of the Polynesians by
the Capitalist mode of production.
In Polynesia, the less developed island states are to Aotearoa what
Transkei and Ciskei are to South Africa – reserves of cheap labour-power
which can be forced back into poverty during any economic downturn in
the sacred name of respect for ‘national sovereignty’. But the
Polynesian proletariat has outgrown ‘nationalism’, which is another name
for starvation behind national frontiers, and which intensifies
imperialist exploitation instead of abolishing it. Samoa, the Cook
Islands, Niue and to a certain extent Tonga, are New Zealand
semi-colonies whose colonial dependence can be ended only by socialism.
Tahiti, Eastern Samoa and Hawaii, are victims of the final ruse of
imperialism – incorporation of the colony into the metropolitan
imperialist state. We demand for them the right of secession!
What is needed is a Socialist Union of Polynesia! The revolutionary
tradition of Samoa, Hawaii, and Tahiti – the history of uprisings
against imperialism – must now directed beyond independence to
socialism. Now that large numbers of Polynesian workers have been
concentrated in Auckland and other parts of Aotearoa, it is there that
they will exchange experiences and prepare for united revolutionary
action. This pamphlet has concentrated on Polynesia since (with the
exception of Tahiti and Hawaii) it is largely within the sphere of
interest of New Zealand as a small imperialist power. A Socialist
Polynesia would, however be only a step toward a Socialist Union of the
Pacific."
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