a community of which you were a member. Besides pamphlets and books, Josephs’ shop stocked papers such as The Herald of Revolt from Glasgow and The Agitator from Home Colony, Washington State, US. Beyond your neighbourhood, beyond New Zealand, there were others thinking like you and offering support and solidarity. You and your friends were not alone.
This book reminds us of those tiresome but still critical questions that reverberate across the years, questions that need to be addressed even now. Who can and should anarchists work with as they mount their attacks on capitalism? What tactics should we use, and how malleable and flexible can they be, yet still remain anarchist? How can anarchists adapt to the national situation they find themselves in, while still remaining internationalists in outlook and practice? Above all, what is it that makes people anarchists and not syndicalists, or libertarian communists, or individualists, or whatever? Make no mistake—they saw a difference and the very least we can do is to explore it. To ignore their self-perception leads to the danger of building a reductive and one-dimensional view of history. These complexities and differences are ignored at cost to us and with some arrogance to them.
Josephs’ life gives us pause to reflect on an equally critical matter. As we have already mentioned, it was Josephs who brought so much current anarchist propaganda to New Zealand. It is hard to judge what was already available, but probably very little. We do know that some people had moved organically towards some definition of anarchism. What Josephs did was bring accepted written anarchism to New Zealand—Kropotkin, Goldman et al set the parameters of anarchist communism and, perhaps, formalized what people had been thinking and doing for all those years. Just how people move to anarchist ideas without the help of these writings continues to be a rich area for research and discussion. Some concentrated understanding of how people framed the written word would also bear fruitful examination. All those pamphlets folded and put in a pocket to read at work, at home, in the pub, or on the bus. Did they simply re-enforce what these people already felt—that marvellous shock of recognition when your feelings and thoughts are validated by the written word? Did they confuse the reader? Did they make them too self-critical or puzzled? We need to ask how these readers processed what they had read in the light of their own experiences. They were not empty vessels waiting to be filled by the word. A dialogue of sorts took place between each one of their ideas and experiences and the written idea. Finding that dialogue and tracing how it developed just might lead us to consider how anarchist ideas and practice progressed. The published word aimed at a public audience can only take us so far, and the very last thing we should do is mistake it for a finished history. Anarchists often make themselves rather than being made.
New Zealand has a rich history of anarchism and a rich present of practice. Some comrades have recently shown exemplary courage and resilience when faced by the might of the state. Many are working tirelessly in their communities, taking on the countless repressions and cruelties that make up the personality and practice of capitalism. Such courage and resilience echoes that shown by Josephs and his comrades all those years ago. We are extremely lucky to have Jared Davidson to remind us of it.
“To us in New Zealand Anarchism seems a far-away peril.
That is an illusion. Wherever there is private property and any
sort of Government, there may appear the Anarchist.”
Otago Witness, 27 November 1901
introduction
Philip Josephs—a Latvian-born Jewish tailor, recent arrival to New Zealand by way of Scotland, and self-proclaimed anarchist—took to the floor of the 1906 Wellington May Day demonstration amidst orchestral outbursts and a flurry of motions. “This meeting,” moved Josephs, “sends its fraternal greetings to our comrades engaged in the universal class war, and pledges itself to work for the abolition of the capitalistic system and the substitution in New Zealand of a co-operative commonwealth, founded on the collective ownership of the land and the means of production and distribution.”1 The motion, as well as highlighting his involvement in the radical milieu of New Zealand’s capital, conveys the key concepts of his anarchism: internationalism, class struggle, and free communism.
However, if readers were to form an understanding of anarchism based on the newspapers of the day or from the accounts of New Zealand’s labour movement by certain historians, a very different conclusion would be drawn. On the occasions it is mentioned, anarchism is used hysterically by the press to denounce or decry; by labour leaders in order to show the fallacy of their opponents’ positions; and by Labourist historians to symbolise wayward ideas or acts of extremism—painting a nightmarish picture of anarchist practice in the vein of Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday.2
Unfortunately, this is not a trend restricted to New Zealand. Anarchism as a philosophy and a movement has long been misrepresented,as French anarchist Daniel Guérin notes:
Those who would slander anarchism serve up a tendentious interpretation of its doctrine. Anarchism is essentially individualistic, particularistic, hostile to any form of organization. It leads to fragmentation, to the egocentric withdrawal to small local units of administration and production. It is incapable of centralizing or of planning. It is nostalgic for the ‘golden age.’ It tends to resurrect archaic social forms. It suffers from childish optimism; its ‘idealism’ takes no account of the solid realities of the material infrastructure. It is incurably petit-bourgeois; it places itself outside of the class movement of the modern proletariat… and finally, certain commentators take care to rescue from oblivion and to draw attention only to its most controversial deviations, such as terrorism, individual assassinations, propaganda by explosives.3
Yet as Vadim Damier illustrates, anarchism was a global working class movement, one “that spread to countries as different as Spain and Russia, France and Japan, Argentina and Sweden, Italy and China, Portugal and Germany,” and “was able to attract hundreds of thousands, indeed millions, of wage workers.” Anarchists “not only took an active part in the most important social upheavals and conflicts of the twentieth century, often leaving their own indelible imprint on these events, but also in many countries they formed the centre of a special, inimitable, working class culture with its own values, norms, customs, and symbols.”4 Against this reality of anarchism as a socialist movement, a focus on ‘its most controversial deviations’ reaffirms the stereotype of the anarchist terrorist, dressed in black and wielding a bomb—dangerous, mal-content, and against civilisation itself. “‘God’s Own Country’ is not safe from the vagaries of the person who believes in the bomb as opposed to argument,” bellowed one New Zealand daily paper in 1907.5
Although highly exaggerated, this newspaper article contained one truth: God’s Own Country—the ‘Workingman’s Paradise’ that was New Zealand in the early years of the twentieth century—had anarchists in its midst. To describe them as a coherently organized movement would be another exaggeration, but nonetheless, those that subscribed to anarchism in New Zealand were a valid part of the wider labour movement, imparting uncredited ideas, tactics, and influence. Likewise, anarchist agitation and the circulation of radical literature contributed significantly to the development of a radical working-class counterculture in New Zealand.
Yet unfortunately, these radicals have fared badly in labour historiography—even more so than their communist counterparts who, at least, are mentioned, even if they are “frequently dealt with by a very brief, generally dismissive, characterisation, often little more than a caricature.”6 New Zealand anarchists and their commitment to social change deserve more than the relative silence that currently represents their struggle.
Indeed, the most substantial work to date on anarchism in New Zealand during the twentieth century’s turbulent teens is the indispensable thirty-two-page pamphlet, “‘Troublemakers’ Anarchism and Syndicalism: The Early Years of the Libertarian Movement in Aotearoa/New Zealand,” by Frank Prebble. Drawing on snippets of primary and secondary sources, his research was pioneering in that it was the first work specifically on anarchism—highlighting a definite strand of libertarian praxis in New Zealand that has long been overlooked. Yet as Prebble notes in the introduction, “this pamphlet is not complete, much of the information is very fragmentary and a lot more work needs to be done.”7
Apart from the relatively small number