EASTER, 1921. Eighteen delegates from Marxist study
circles around the country meeting in Wellington, voted to form the Communist
Party of New Zealand and affiliate to the Communist International.
From foundation until the late 1930s the CPNZ mounted
a long and difficult struggle to establish a centralized revolutionary party
and link it with the struggles of the working class, hampered by sectarian
thinking on the one hand and by trade union opportunism and state repression on
the other.
Jim Dyer, a Millerton miner, was elected the party’s
first secretary and branches established in Blackburn and Millerton on the West
Coast, Christchurch, Wellington, Napier and Auckland. A manifesto was issued,
based on the 1903 Bolshevik programme.
The Russian Revolution, and the hostility towards it
from the capitalist press, was a central catalyst for the creation of the CPNZ,
reflecting the widespread sympathy for the revolution among NZ workers.
Labour Party Leader, Robert Semple, said at the time,
"If I were in Ireland, I would be a Sinn Feiner; if I were in Germany, I
would be a Sparticist; if I were in Russia, I would be a Bolshevik".
Despite the prestige of the Bolshevik party and the
line of the Communist International that communists should forge deep
connections with the immediate needs and struggles of the workers, the groups
on the West Coast and Auckland took off on ultra-left and semi-anarchist lines
demanding immediate revolution. In response to the establishment difficulties
the 1924 conference decided to temporarily become a section of the Communist
Party of Australia.
Small though the party was in size and influence, the
capitalist class tried to stamp it out from the start. A number of communists
were arrested and jailed in the 1920s under the War Regulations Continuance
Act, which prohibited printing or import of "seditious" documents. In
1924 the Labour Party expelled six Communist Party members and in 1925 resolved
that the CP would not be allowed to affiliate.
Left Opportunism
In April 1926 the CP launched a monthly newspaper, Worker’s
Vanguard, which quickly expanded its circulation to 2000 copies per issue,
especially among the militant West Coast miners. Party membership rose to 120.
However left opportunist thinking, accompanying the
election of Dick Griffen as Secretary in 1929, repeatedly led the party into
the political wilderness. In 1929 most of the party members in the mines left,
after the Central Committee ordered them to try to push for an export ban on
coal in solidarity with striking miners in Australia. This was far beyond the
level of understanding of rank and file miners union members. In 1931 the
Central Committee opposed the Seamen’s Union placing a ban on a low-wage
Japanese ship and instead unrealistically called for a general strike on the
waterfront to achieve equal rates, which turned the seamen’s leader into a
bitter enemy of the party.
An assesment from the Communist International in 1933
summed up the party’s shortcomings:
"Up to the present, the practice of the Party
shows that the Party chiefly limits its activity to a small circle of
Communists and, standing apart from the struggle of the workers, criticises the
reformists from afar."
The Comunist International also criticised the lack of
collective leadership by the Central Committee over the day-to-day work of the
party. "The weak development of Party sentiment, the absence of Bolshevik
disciplice, is to no small degree responsible for the present situation in the
Party".
Mass Base
While the party failed to maintain a foothold in the
basic industries, the rapid growth in unemployment in the early 1930s gave the
party a renewed chance to exercise effective mass leadership. Unemployment
swelled from 8,703 to 47,096 in the course of 1931. The CP, through the
Unemployed Workers’ Movement, organised relief workers’ strikes, marches,
demonstrations and deputations, and made contact with a new generation of
militant working class leaders.
Weak though the communists were, the capitalists saw
them as a major threat to their programme of wage cuts and labour camps for the
unemployed. So fierce were the attacks on the party that there were few months
when one of its leaders was not in jail. In 1933 the whole Central Committee
was jailed for six months.
Yet despite the state repression, the party grew
strongly. The monthly Red Worker, became the Workers’ Weekly in
1933; sales rose to 7,000 and party membership to 350 by 1935. A second monthly
paper, Working Woman, was launched, while a party-initiated Congress
against War and Fascism in February 1935 was attended by 48 organisations with
a membership of over 20,000.
Ironically, however, the party’s success renewed the
left-opportunist tendencies among the leadership. The party contested the 1935
General Election with the slogan "neither reaction nor Labour",
urging workers to cast invalid ballots labelled "Communist" where no party
candidates were standing. The communists were swept aside by the landslide for
what most workers saw as a real socialist party; electoral support collapsed
from a 1931 high in Auckland Central of 6.2% to 1.9%, paper sales halved and a
third of the party’s membership quit.
United Front Against Fascism and War
Shocked at the realisation that it had greatly
isolated itself from the masses of workers, the CP reversed its policy for a
united front against fascism, which had been put forward by the 1935 conference
of the Communist International, and recognised "that under present
conditions the Labour Government represents a blow against the forces of
reaction". The support however was "unconditional". In the 1938
General Election the CP did not even stand candidates against Labour.
Outside the electoral arena the Party threw itself
into extensive mass work against fascism. In 1936 they organised material aid
for the Spanish Republic against the fascists in 1936 and sent members, like
Alex McClure and Tom Spiller, to join the International Brigades. In 1937 the
party organised a boycott of Japanese goods following Japan’s invasion of
China.
By 1938 party membership had been rebuilt to 1935
levels. The party had finally broken through its isolation from industrial
workers, with branches in the railways and on the wharves in several centres.
In September 1939, the CP came out in support of the
Communist International’s line that the war between the British-French alliance
and Germany was an imperialist war that had to be opposed.
This was not a popular analysis in the climate of the
time, but support continued to grow. In May 1940 the party’s weekly, now called
the People’s Voice, with a circulation of 10,000, was declared illegal
and the party press confiscated. New papers sprung up in the main centres
immediately. Party members were harassed and imprisoned, but the organisation
remained intact.
In 1941 when the Nazi’s invade the Soviet Union, the
character of the war changed to an all-out struggle between fascism and
democracy and the party mobilised behind the war effort. In Print,
edited by the poet Ron Mason, emerged as the unofficial paper, with circulation
climing to 14,000, while party membership rocketed to 2,000 by the end of the
war. In 1946 communist candidates gained 21% of the votes in the Wellington
City Council elections. In Auckland there were large numbers of CP members on
union executives and many of the main trade unions had CP members as presidents
or secretaries, and there were party branches on Victoria and Otago university
campuses.
Cold War and Revisionism
The success of the party during the war had been from
its work in building progressive united front organisations and the trade
unions, rather than carrying out independent political work. This right
opportunism, the flipside of the earlier left adventurism, left it ill-prepared
for the onslaught of the Cold War.
In particular party leaders were influenced by the
CPUSA, whose leader Browder, had argued that the 1943 agreement between
Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin had ushered in an epoch of long-term
collaboration between capitalism and socialism and that class conflict should
therefore be minimised. This led the NZ party to underestimate the reactionary
role of the Labour Party.
The party’s trade union work was also limited to
taking positions, rather than building party organisation on the job and
mobilising workers in class struggle. Communists were often elected to
positions because they were good unionists, rather than representatives of the
party. This made the party’s influence vulnerable to electoral disputes in the
trade unions.
The US anti-communist propaganda campaign to halt the
advance of socialism in Europe and Asia, was taken up with gusto by Labour
Prime Minister Peter Fraser. At the 1947 Federation of Labour Conference, he
warned against revolutionary threats which, aided by foreign forces, sought to
ruin NZ and plunge the country into poverty and misery. Fraser was strongly
supported by the former-communists who made up the leadership of the FOL
In 1948 the right in the trade union movement made a
clean sweep of all major positions in the Auckland Trades Council and in 1949
the Labour government prepared an assault on the Auckland Carpenters’ Union,
the centre of the CP’s influence outside the maritime unions. After a long and
bitter struggle the union was deregistered and broken, and a scab union set up
by the government in its place.
In 1951 the capitalists turned to the waterfront
unions, and with fascist-like regulations starved and batoned the wharfies into
submission. The CP had warned of the impending assault a year before, but
failed to appreciate the urgency of the situation, and once the dispute
started, despite tremendous and heroic work, the party consistently tailed
behind the isolationist leaders of the waterside workers union. Despite the
unparalleled opportunity for political work, the party gave up its independent
communist agitation and propaganda, submerging itself into trade union work
connected with the strike.
Perhaps the clearest lesson of 1951 was that the state
is a weapon used by the capitalist class to dominate the working class. Yet
little over a year later the Central Committee drafted a new programme which
called for a peaceful transition to socialism. Despite its title, the path in
New Zealand’s Road to Socialism had actually been penned in Britain the
year before.
"Parliament will be transformed into a genuine
instrument of the people," claimed New Zealand’s Road.
Party members were dedicated fighters for the working
class throughout the 1950s and 60s, involved in many local campaigns to improve
workers daily lives as well as the long and difficult struggle to unify the
trade unions. The party’s unceasing opposition to imperialist aggression paved
the way for the mass movements that arose in the 1960s and 1970s.
Disintegration
The revisionist right opportunism of the 1950s had led
to bureaucratic organisational methods within the party, particularly an
over-centralized leadership. The leadership tailed overseas programmes rather
than making any effort to develop a genuine analysis of New Zealand conditions.
This was most evident in the failure to recognise the colonial dispossession of
Maori.
By 1963 party membership had declined to 400, and the
over-concentration of power in the leadership encouraged factionalism. The
party leadership split between left and right opportunism in 1966, in the wake
of the Sino-Soviet dispute, with the revisionists leaving to form the
pro-Soviet Socialist Unity Party. Left-opportunism was left to run riot in the
Communist Party.
Following the massacre of communists in Indonesia in
1965, the Party decided to create a secret parallel organisation within the
party. Inner-party democracy was suspended. There were no conferences and no
elections. House meetings were banned, so it became difficult to recruit. But
when the parallel was eventually abandoned, there was no return to democratic
methods in the party.
With an increasingly isolated leadership, party
positions became increasingly eratic. In the late 1960s, in place of political
work in the working class, the leadership extolled anything "youth"
engaged in, from anti-war demonstrations to trivial issues, like the
"liberation of Albert Park". Trade union officials and trade union
work was denounced as "bureaucratic." In 1969 the party effectively
denounced the whole Seaman’s Union, perhaps New Zealand’s most class-conscious,
as sell-outs. In the early 1970s the Peoples Voice featured ultra-left
headlines like "We ARE in revolutionary times HERE" and "WHY BEG
FOR WAGE INCREASES? Workers have the strength to seize what they want".
The party oscillated back and forth between theories
of national-democratic and socialist revolution, without any genuine analysis
of New Zealand capitalism. Each time a section of the party left or was
expelled following a change in line, the new leaders proclaimed with an
optimism rooted in religious fervour rather than science that the party had
grown stronger.
Party Reconstituted
The death-throws of the opportunist leadership came in
1993, when the Central Committee announced (what many had charged them with for
years) that it was abandoning Marxism-Leninism for Trotskyism and intended to
merge the party with the Socialist Workers Organisation. Many veterans and
supporters inside and outside the party were outraged by this decision, which
amounted to an internal coup and a final degradation of a heroic tradition, and
so decided to reconstitute the communist party on a firm ideological basis.
Learning from the experiences of other parties in
dealing with the collapse of revisionism, the Communist Party of Aotearoa was
reconstituted on the basis of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, drawing its cadre from
the most militant sections of the disintegrated old party. Already, the party is
laying down deep roots among the masses where this has never been done
adequately before.
The CPA is determined to draw the best from its
militant past and, learning well from its mistakes, to confront the task of
leading the working class to socialism with a seriousness and determination
that has hitherto been sadly lacking.