The Communist Party of New Zealand (CPNZ) was a communist party in New Zealand which existed from 1921 to 1994. Although spurred to life by events in Soviet Russia in the aftermath of World War I, the party had roots in pre-existing revolutionary socialist and syndicalist organisations, including in particular the independent Wellington Socialist Party, supporters of the Industrial Workers of the World in the Auckland region, and a network of impossiblist study groups of miners on the west coast of the South Island.
Never high on the list of priorities of the Communist International, the CPNZ was considered an appendage of the Communist Party of Australia until 1928, when it began to function as a fully independent party. Party membership remained small, only briefly topping the 1,000 mark, with its members subjected to government repression and isolated by expulsions from the mainstream labour movement concentrated in the New Zealand Labour Party.
During the period of the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s, the CPNZ sided with the Chinese Communist Party headed by Mao Zedong. The party splintered into a multiplicity of tiny political parties after 1966 and no longer exists as an independent group.
History
Background
As the 20th Century dawned, New Zealand was recognised by adherents of International Socialism around the globe as a sort of laboratory test case of social democratic government in practice. One June 1901 pamphlet put to print by J. A. Wayland, proprietor of the mass circulation socialist weekly Appeal to Reason, detailed the ways in which the island nation of 720,000 had already passed extensive legislation for the benefit of wage workers, backed by 200 agents of the "Labour Intelligence Department". While the country was declared "no Utopia", New Zealand nevertheless was said to have "no real want" and "no unemployment problem to solve".
An extensive system of public works were in existence, governed by the principle of "fair work and fair pay." More than 200 employment bureaus dotted the country, connecting every willing worker with a job. Sweatshops were banned, as was systematic home manufacturing, with mandatory labelling of all products made outside of factories. The presence of "tramps" had been eliminated through town allotments of small homesteads to poor workers, granted through easily affordable perpetual leases. The power of eminent domain had been assumed by the New Zealand parliament in 1896, allowing the state to assume ownership of large estates at their assessed price for division into small farms.
State finance had been accomplished by a tax on land values and the establishment of a progressive income tax. The national government itself owned and operated the railways, telegraph and telephone systems, schools, and postal savings banks throughout the country even before the landmark election of 1891. Workers' compensation insurance to protect against injury was required by law, and low cost life insurance had been provided by the state since 1869. Old age pensions were provided to all New Zealanders 65 years of age or older who had been resident in the country for at least 25 years.
"The New Zealanders are collectivists, although they adhere to the old party names of liberals and tories," the American examiners enthused, with the New Zealand Liberal Party reckoned as equivalent to the Fabian socialists of Great Britain. Of these, about 18,000 were killed in battle and another 41,000 felled by wounds or disease – a casualty rate approaching 60%. As casualties continued to mount into 1917, public war-weariness set in, fuelling political discontent.
Others adhered to the theories of Daniel DeLeon, which advocated the use of the ballot box for a revolutionary transformation of society leading to a socialist state governed by revolutionary industrial unions. From 1911, the ideas of syndicalism began to gain a foothold in the Auckland area under the banner of the Industrial Workers of the World, while the anti-political impossibilist ideas of the Socialist Party of Great Britain made their mark upon others. Wartime violence and the 1917 October Revolution in Russia proved a stimulant to revolutionary ideas, drawing members to these groups, leading to their formal affiliation during the summer Christmas holiday of 1918 as the New Zealand Marxian Association (NZMA). Suffering attenuation but surviving the war, this Wellington organisation would constitute the main component of the new Communist Party of New Zealand.
Of the origins of the Communist Party, historian Kerry Taylor writes:
<blockquote>"The foundation of the CPNZ will always remain shrouded in a degree of mystery. No direct record of the event survives — the minutes have long since been lost and no reports appeared in the media at the time.... The precise nature of the discussion and debate is obscure but the delegates had before them the constitution of the Communist Party of Australia and a draft manifesto and constitution drawn up over the previous few months by members of the Wellington Socialist Party."
The CPNZ participated in elections for the first time in 1923, with its inaugural candidate drawing an impressive 2,128 votes in a race for election to the Dunedin city council. Despite the establishment of this new central organ, the organisation remained highly decentralised in its formative years, with branches operating in virtual isolation and the small movement failing to achieve critical mass. A conference was consequently held during the 1924 Christmas break, attended by delegates of the Communist Party of Australia (Hetty and Hector Ross), at which it was decided to make the CPNZ a subordinate section of the larger Australian party.
===Third Period (1928–1935)=== <!---yes, both words capitalised--->
thumb|left|250px|Map of New Zealand showing towns and cities of importance to the history of the early CPNZ
Previously considered an insignificant adjunct of the Communist Party of Australia in the eyes of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI), early in 1928 the CPNZ received a cable from Moscow requesting that the party dispatch a delegate to the forthcoming 6th World Congress of the Comintern. Twenty-eight-year-old Wellington activist Dick Griffin, a member of the Seamen's Union, was chosen as the party's first-ever delegate to a Comintern gathering in Moscow. Instead of consolidating itself for an envisioned revolutionary uprising, the CPNZ was directed to concentrate its attention on continued agitation and propaganda. In August of that same year he assumed the role of General Secretary of the organisation. The party's previous policies were deemed incorrect and the CPNZ was instructed to attempt to assume leadership of the New Zealand workers movement by working to "expose and destroy all the Labourite, pacifist, social democratic illusions about the possibility of solving social problems...under the existing political and economic regime." This marked the actual beginning of sectarian Third Period tactics in New Zealand.
The CPNZ was beset by rapid membership turnover throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s, with general secretary Griffin accused of operating a personal dictatorship, spurring rank-and-file discontent. The CPNZ was also subjected to unrelenting police operations by the national government, including a July 1929 raid which seized the internal records and literature of the Wellington branch and the subsequent successful prosecution of five members of the governing Central Executive Committee for possession and sale of allegedly seditious literature.
The party was further disorganised by the churn of its rank-and-file members in and out of the party, exemplified by the count of Wellington members booming from 51 in March to 80 by May 1931 before plummeting to just 25 in January 1932.
"Freemanisation"
By the middle of 1933, the Communist Party of New Zealand was in crisis, with its entire Central Committee jailed for publication of the pamphlet Karl Marx and the Struggle of the Masses. The New Zealand-born Fred Freeman was returned to the country to assume the position of general secretary following four years in Moscow at the service of the Comintern.
Comintern policy began to change in 1933 following the victory of the Nazi Party in Germany, leading to eventual advocacy of a so-called Popular Front against fascism by 1935. Under the Freeman leadership the CPNZ took the first tentative steps in this direction late in 1933 when the CPNZ approached the National Executive Committee of the New Zealand Labour Party with a proposal for a joint campaign against fascism. No answer was given. Parallel appeals were made to several key trade unions, including the Miners, Seamen, and Dockworkers, with only the Miners providing a response.
The CPNZ responded to the tacit rejection of their appeal by accelerating their efforts to drive a wedge between the rank and file and leadership of each of these organisations, a tactic euphemistically called the "United Front from Below." The distrust and alienation between the Communist Party and the Labour Party leadership carried over through the November 1935 general election, during which the CPNZ made use of the slogan "Neither Reaction nor Labour" in the campaign.
Popular Front period and World War II
The Communist Party of New Zealand had shown growth over the years of the Third Period, with the party's delegate to the 7th World Congress of the Comintern in Moscow, Leo Sim (pseudonym: Andrews), reporting there that party membership had increased by 600% from 1928 to 1935.
Dissatisfaction with Freeman's commanding leadership style grew in 1935 and 1936 and he landed on the wrong side of the Popular Front-driven Comintern decision that the CPNZ should seek formal affiliation with the Labour Party sooner rather than later. Freeman came to be politically isolated, with the Auckland district of the party, backed by Lance Sharkey of the Communist Party of Australia, leading the charge for his removal as an alleged impediment to the new international line. Freeman was removed from the party leadership late in 1936, suspended from the party soon thereafter for failing to accept this decision, and ultimately expelled late in 1937.
In 1938, CPNZ headquarters were moved from the capital city of Wellington to the booming northern port city of Auckland and a new weekly was launched there in July 1939, People's Voice.
The tide turned in June 1941, following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. At that time, in accord with Soviet foreign policy, the CPNZ became vocal supporters of the war effort, which combined with the country's new status of military allies with the Soviet Union paved the way for the New Zealand party's growth in membership and influence. By 1945 party membership reached its all-time high of approximately 2,000, while circulation of People's Voice topped 14,000 copies per week.
The Communist Party experienced the loss of several prominent members including Sid Scott following Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin at the 20th Congress of the CPSU in February 1956 and the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in November 1956.
As a result of these events, most of the intellectuals the CPNZ had attracted left the party while some erstwhile supporters founded new journals such as New Zealand Monthly Review, Comment, Socialist Forum, and Here & Now.
Sino-Soviet split and factionalism
Next, in the early 1960s, the party experienced more internal strife due to the Sino-Soviet split. The party was divided between supporters of the Soviet Union under Nikita Khrushchev and those who claimed Khrushchev was a "revisionist" and chose instead to follow China under Mao Zedong. Subsequently, the CPNZ under the leadership of Victor Wilcox became the first official Communist party in the First World to side with Mao. The majority of the party and its newspaper The People's Voice adopted Maoism, while supporters of Khrushchev's Soviet Union (mainly Auckland trade unionists) split off to form the Socialist Unity Party. The Communist Party also maintained warm ties with the Indonesian Communist Party and supported Indonesia during the Indonesian-Malaysian Confrontation (1963–1966). It also condemned the Indonesian mass killings that followed the alleged 30 September coup attempt as a right wing coup.
Later, when Mao died, the Communist Party of New Zealand began to follow the lead of Enver Hoxha's Albania, which they considered to be the last truly Communist country in the world. Members of the CPNZ national leadership who continued to uphold the line of the post-Mao Chinese Communist Party including Wilcox were expelled, and formed the Preparatory Committee for the Formation of the Communist Party of New Zealand (Marxist–Leninist).
Meanwhile, other former members of the CPNZ in Wellington, where the party branch had been expelled en masse in 1970, founded the Wellington Marxist Leninist Organisation, which in 1980 merged with the Northern Communist Organisation to form the Workers' Communist League (WCL).
While the CPNZ never had mass influence or real political power, it pursued a Leninist vanguard party approach that involved trying to influence and penetrate the Labour Party, the New Zealand trade union movement, various single-issue protest groups and public opinion on foreign policy, industrial activity, opposition to New Zealand's involvement in the Vietnam War, Māori rights, the anti-Apartheid movement, feminism, and nuclear disarmament, and anti-colonial activism in the Pacific region; issues in which communists and non-communist left-wing elements found common cause.
Decline and legacy
After the collapse of communist rule in Albania, the Communist Party of New Zealand gradually changed its views, renouncing its former support of Stalinism, Maoism, and Hoxhaism. Instead, under the leadership of its last general secretary, Grant Morgan, it developed a state capitalist analysis of the Stalinist states. The party now believed that the Soviet Union had never been socialist at all, not even in Stalin's time. Opponents of this change departed and established the Communist Party of Aotearoa (a Maoist group) and the Marxist–Leninist Collective (a Hoxhaist group).
The Communist Party of New Zealand eventually merged with the neo-Trotskyist International Socialist Organization on 2 November 1994. The resultant party, known as the Socialist Workers Organization, evolved into the small but highly active Socialist Worker (Aotearoa). However, most of the ISO members split off again and resumed their own organisation. A number of SW members also split from the organisation in 2008 to form Socialist Aotearoa. The SW voted to dissolve itself at its conference in January 2012.
Membership
::{| class="wikitable" border="3"
|-
! Year
! Membership
! Notes
|-
! align="center" | 1926
| align="center" | 120
| align="center" | <small>Per Taylor, "The Communist Party of New Zealand and the Third Period," p. 284.</small>
|-
! align="center" | 1927
| align="center" | 105
| align="center" | <small>Per Taylor, "The Communist Party of New Zealand and the Third Period," p. 284.</small>
|-
! align="center" | 1928
| align="center" | 79
| align="center" | <small>Per Taylor, "The Communist Party of New Zealand and the Third Period," p. 284.</small>
|-
! align="center" | 1929
| align="center" |
| align="center" | Decline due to loss of West Coast miners.
|-
! align="center" | 1930
| align="center" | 62
| align="center" | "All-time low." <small>Per Taylor, "The Communist Party of New Zealand and the Third Period," p. 284.</small>
|-
! align="center" | 1931
| align="center" | 81
| align="center" | Actually a Jan. 1932 count. <small>Per Taylor, "The Communist Party of New Zealand and the Third Period," p. 284.</small>
|-
! align="center" | 1932
| align="center" | 129
| align="center" | Year end figure. <small>Per Taylor, "The Communist Party of New Zealand and the Third Period," p. 284.</small>
|-
! align="center" | 1933
| align="center" |
| align="center" |
|-
! align="center" | 1934
| align="center" | 246
| align="center" | <small>Per Taylor, "The Communist Party of New Zealand and the Third Period," p. 284.</small>
|-
! align="center" | 1935
| align="center" | 280
| align="center" | June count. <small>Per Taylor, "The Communist Party of New Zealand and the Third Period," p. 284.</small>
|-
! align="center" | 1936
| align="center" | 353
| align="center" | Actually a Dec. 1935 count. <small>Per Taylor, "The Communist Party of New Zealand and the Third Period," p. 284.</small>
|}
Electoral results (1935 and 1946–1969)
The party contested a number of elections with the following results:
- Sidney Wilfred Scott, party editor
- Gordon Harold Anderson, trade unionist
- Clement Gordon Watson, party editor and soldier
Footnotes
Further reading
Archival holdings
- "Inventory of the Records of the Communist Party of New Zealand, 1924–1972." Manuscripts and Archives Collection A-9, University of Auckland Library, Auckland. <small>—Finding aid.</small>
- "Communist Party of New Zealand, Otago Branch: description," Collection #MS-0675. Hocken Collections, University of Otago, Dunedin.