W. T. Mills, E. J. B. Allen, J. A. Lee and Socialism in New Zealand
IT is now some years since Professor W. H. Oliver asked whether 'left' could be considered a direction in New Zealand politics. Although Professor Oliver's main concern was to illustrate a point about New Zealand society I have often thought, since reading that provocative essay, that much of what historians have considered the history of socialism in New Zealand could fruitfully be viewed from this sceptical perspective. 1 The somewhat improbable trinity of W. T. Mills, E. J. B. Allen and J. A. Lee tried, at different times, to grapple with the meaning of socialism within the context of New Zealand. They also attempted to work out the ways in which the context not only defined the meaning but the possibility of achieving socialism. Mills and Lee, of course, were active politicians and what they said and thought was usually subordinate to the tactical imperatives of the political situation. Allen, on the other hand, was an activist-intellectual. Each man was articulate, each played out some role within these islands, and together they allow us to take account of the wider context within which the socialist tradition had emerged; for Mills was an American; Allen was English; while Lee was born in Dunedin. 2 It may occasion some surprise that the focus should be on these three men to the exclusion of others with some claim to be considered the ideologues of socialism in New Zealand. Men like Harry Holland, Rod Ross, or Sid Scott of the Communist Party, committed to a simple version of class warfare and faith in nationalization, epitomize what many New Zealanders have thought to be socialism. There is, indeed, a good case to be made for this interpretation, but such a restricted definition usually has been peculiar to the 'left' wing of the Second International and the Third International. The distinguishing characteristics of the Third International, however, were ideological fundamentalism, a deep commitment to revolutionary action, and a strange insensitivity to the aspirations and values of the very 'workers' they claimed to lead (a claim based, in the best Puritan traditions, on purity of doctrine and fervour). 3 Although men such as Holland read widely and thought carefully about their political faith they had little to say relevant to the meaning of socialism in New 112
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Zealand. This is not to say, of course, that ideological fundamentalists have not been important actors on the New Zealand stage or that some groups have not found such revolutionary militance attractive. 4 The meaning of relevance, as distinct from importance, is the subject of this paper. When Mills arrived in New Zealand there was little argument within the labour movement concerning the goal, only about the method. As one delegate to the annual Conference of the Trades and Labour Councils' Federation told a militant miners' delegate, 'we are all Socialists'. 5 While that appears to have been true of most union officials, a bitter and important argument was raging (although the participants were often exploiting the diversity of the socialist tradition to other than ideological ends). Two issues were at stake; first, some members of the ' R e d ' Federation of Labour were unsympathetic to the idea of enlarging the functions of the state. They viewed the state as the instrument of the bourgeoisie and the destruction of bourgeoisie and state was the principal objective of revolutionary socialists. The method — revolutionary unionism — not only pre-supposed that industrial unions were, by definition, revolutionary but assumed that New Zealand's working class could impose its sectional view upon a society which was neither industrial nor, in socialist terms, advanced. 6 Many socialists, of course, disagreed strongly with those who discussed 'the New Zealand situation in the language of the American pamphleteers'. 7 The most articulate by far, however, was the American, W. T. Mills. Mills's contribution to the debate about the meaning of socialism in New Zealand and the methods for attaining that goal can most easily be understood by means of a short biographical profile. He was, it seems, born in a hunter's cabin in the Adirondack Mountains in 1856 and moved with his parents to Iowa in 1868. 8 Like many Americans of his generation he worked at a variety of jobs, saving the money to pay for a college education at Wooster College and Oberlin (both in Ohio). Either f r o m his Quaker parents or the cultural climate in Ohio — a state alive with what one historian has described as protestant pietism — Mills became interested in the relationship between ethics and public life. The major influence on him was almost certainly Charles Grandison Finney, the dominant spirit and founder of Oberlin Theology, who modified the basic tenets of Calvinsim by making 'the well-being . . . or blessedness of the sentient universe the Summum Bonum, or ultimate good; and the voluntary regard for this good . . . the grand element of all virtue.' 9 From this period onwards Mills laboured mightily in the vineyards of Finney's God. In 1888 he published his first book, The Science of Politics, and became joint editor of a monthly journal, The Statesman. In both Mills urged good men to arm themselves with the skills of practical politicians and battle for virtue in the form of prohibition. Even during these years, however, Mills did not seek to preserve the purity of his thought by eschewing action. He was activist incarnate, organizing the successful Intercollegiate
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Association, evangelizing throughout the Midwest and the Pacific Coast, and establishing a correspondence school to train reformers in the arts of practical politics. 10 From his earliest days as a political activist Mills revealed that bewildering combination of visionary zeal and the habits of the huckster. But his strong sense of the realities of 'the sentient universe' soon led him to propound the need not only for efficient organization but for the prohibition movement to become political and to espouse a wide range of reforms. 1 1 He had, of course, come to prohibition through the Social Gospel and after the Prohibition Party's failure in the elections of 1888 The Statesman declared its independence from all parties and its commitment to 'honest politics and economic reform.' 1 2 Men such as Richard Ely, John Bascom and John P. Altgeld now wrote articles and the journal carried essays on subjects as diverse as 'Asylums for the Insane', 'The Farmers Alliance', 'The Kindergarten', 'Child Labor', and, as Mills was nothing if not modern, 'Capital Punishment by Electricity'. Mills's failure at the 1889 Convention of the Prohibition Party to carry the day for a broader programme merely intensified his interest in other issues and especially the 'labour problem'. 1 3 In May 1890 he signalled his own conversion to a new creed when he wrote, 'within a couple of years so many people of well-known religious convictions have identified themselves with the Nationalist Movement, which finds its inspiration in [Edward] Bellamy's Looking Backwards, that the real object of the socialists — the substitution of governmental co-operation for the present wage and competitive system — is becoming better understood'. 1 4 During the next eighteen months he often wrote about the co-operative movement in Britain and the rise of the German Social Democratic Party and he greeted the founding of the People's Party with enthusiasm. 1 5 The Statesman collapsed shortly thereafter and Mills pursued a number of ingenious schemes for making converts and money. He tried his hand at Chicago real-estate speculation (suburbs of 'wowsers' was the aim), presided over the World's Fair Hotel and Entertainment Company (the hotel burnt down), served as a director on the board of the Total Abstinence Life Association of America (which went bankrupt), and kept up his crusade for converts. 1 6 'I am just home from Iowa', he told one friend, 'where I have been trying to save the country.' 1 7 In 1894 he turned his energies to founding an agricultural commune without abandoning the benefits of industrial progress and wrote a long essay in defence of his vision. 1 8 He also organized a People's University (he was the president), and in 1898 tried to win the Democratic nomination for a Congressional District in Chicago. 1 9 Defeated but not despondent, he poured his energies into the People's University and spoke every Sunday to crowded halls on a variety of questions. He helped start The New Time (the predecessor of Charles Kerr's International Socialist Review), joined Eugene Debs's Social Democratic Party, wrote Evolutionary Politics (1898), and in 1901 helped form the American Socialist Party. 2 0
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For Mills, now widely known as 'the pulpit orator of Chicago', socialism equalled industrial democracy and the creation of political institutions more responsive to the will of the people. In How to Work for Socialism (1900) he spelt out carefully the tactics for converting Populists, women, children, unionists, Christians and the supporters of William Jennings Bryan to the new faith. He also claimed that the rise of the Anglo-Saxon race had been achieved through co-operation until the passion for property became dominant (he cited Lewis H. Morgan) and ushered in civilization's second stage. The third inevitable stage was socialism, when 'Property . . . [would] become the servant of humanity'. 2 1 Mills realized, to the disgust of the well-schooled ideologues of the East, that in most states there were too few workers to allow socialism to be surrendered to the working class. Probably influenced by Henry Demarest Lloyd and Eugene Debs, and certainly conscious of the predominantly agrarian nature of the Midwest, Mills joined other 'constructivists' in fighting the 'impossibilists' (who believed that politics was a diversion, reforms were palliatives, industrial unions the embryo of the future, and only the unskilled worker a member of the proletariat). In Illinois, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska and Washington Mills fought the militants with considerable success; he established himself as one of the leading Midwestern socialist evangelists; and in 1904 he wrote the 'constructivist' text, The Struggle for Existence.22 This enormous and influential work was not shaped by the materialistic premises common to most socialists, but by an evolutionary-ethical perspective indebted more to Finney than to Marx. 2 3 Like Lloyd, Mills also used categories of analysis such as 'Monopoly' and 'Tyranny', which some historians loosely refer to as pre-industrial, but such concepts had more meaning for farmers (and, indeed, many workers), than notions of 'surplus value'. The central features of capitalism were, in fact, 'monopoly, tyranny and inequality of opportunity.. . ,' 24 By proceeding in this manner Mills hoped to enlist many others besides workers in the socialist crusade, thus making the Socialist Party a national organization with some prospect of winning political power. This, then, was the 'little man with a fancy beard' who arrived in New Zealand to promote unity. 2 5 Mills provided moderates with coherent arguments with which to rebut the local 'impossibilists' whose ablest spokesman, H. Scott Bennett, met Mills in a series of justly celebrated debates. 2 6 Although Mills did not convince the leading 'Red Feds' of the error of their ways he did arm the moderates with a strong theory of political evolution, of a series of steps that would attract farmers and liberals, help educate sceptics, yet lead inevitably towards socialism. He also armed them with reasons for their belief, which few of them could articulate, that democratic methods were a major historical achievement and that the course of evolution lay along the trajectory of increased political and economic democracy. Mills's wide, if facile, knowledge of socialist theory and the social sciences, together with his prowess as an evangelist, helped revitalize the camp of the local moderates. Mills also
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made an important contribution to the debate about the strategy for achieving socialism, for his experience in the Midwest had convinced him that the vision of a revolution by the class-conscious members of the proletariat had no validity in a predominantly rural and agricultural society. To achieve power labour needed allies, and with promiscuous enthusiasm Mills wooed Single Taxers, Prohibitionists, women and Christians. 2 7 Because of his background and his almost instinctive revisionism Mills recognized the importance of what, for want of a better term, can be described as 'middle-class radicals'. He wooed them with some success not only by speaking their language and emphasizing appealing issues such as land monopoly but because his justification for labour and socialism rested not on a concept of class warfare — as the 'Red Feds' complained 2 8 — but on an evangelical moral tradition. While he helped convince many 'Red Feds' that their insistence on appealing only to the working class would isolate them and make defeat inevitable (a point driven home by the Waihi strike of 1912 and the great strike of 1913), he and many of his 'Unity Campaign Special Workers' helped make 'socialism' palatable to many 'middle-class radicals'; helped show that 'socialism' was Christianity applied. 2 9 Of course, Mills could draw upon a lively Anglo-American tradition. He was deeply versed in the Social Gospel, and he was a spellbinder long practised in using the techniques of revivalism to further the socialist gospel. 30 Indeed, in Dunedin members of the Socialist Party co-operated closely with the United Labour Party, despite Bennett's charge that Mills's party 'kow-tows to the Hon. George Fowlds and the "wowsers" ', and in 1913, despite the Executive of the 'Red' Federation, delegates to the Unity Conference invited the United Labour Party to send two delegates. 31 Mills thus wooed 'middle-class radicals', but not at the cost of alienating workingmen. 3 2 Mills not only helped direct a generation of 'middle-class radicals' — usually protestant, pietist, and in favour of prohibition — towards labour and socialism but helped revive the idea of a farmer-labour coalition as part of New Zealand labour's political strategy. 33 Mills, of course, was influenced less by the 'Lib-Lab' victory of 1890 than by his experience in the United States. For ten years he had laboured mightily in states such as Kansas and Nebraska and had become very popular with radical farmers. Few issues divided more deeply 'constructivist' from 'impossibilist' during this period and few issues so accurately symbolized the debate, for the 'impossibilist' saw farmers as capitalists whereas 'constructivists' viewed them as a species of wage-slaves. Neither viewpoint is entirely satisfactory but the 'constructivists' won the battle by reference to the prophets of the Second International and to political necessity. In New Zealand Mills quickly duplicated his American strategy. He toured the small towns of rural New Zealand with gusto; he organized branches of his United Labour Party in hamlets and villages across the land; and he persuaded many provincial newspapers to carry party material and
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messages on a regular basis. He also devised a platform for his Working Farmers' Union which reveals his instinctive and intimate sympathy with small farmers and his intuitive realization that New Zealand, like Kansas or Nebraska, was a colony. Although Mills's platform was deeply influenced by Henry George — graduated tax on unimproved value and all titles on a use-occupancy tenure — this largely reflected George's influence on 'constructivists' in America and moderates in New Zealand (indeed the Land Values League, which leading members of the U.L.P. promoted, affiliated with the party). 34 Mills also advocated that the State act as sole land agent; the establishment of state-owned factories to produce farm implements, seed and stock; the establishment of a State Bank to lend money 'at the actual cost of service'; state-owned creameries, slaughterhouses, cold-storage plants, and coastal shipping service; and a stateoperated export-import agency with a view to eliminating parasitic middlemen and stabilizing markets. 3 5 While New Zealand labour adopted Mills's strategy, for fifteen years ideological fundamentalists were to dominate debates over land policy. In 1912 Mills was the subject of virulent controversy, especially in Auckland, and on more than one occasion 'Red Feds' used direct action to intimidate 'United Campaign Workers' and threatened to 'deal with that little bastard Mills'. 36 Events helped persuade many 'Red Fed' leaders to see the wisdom of Mills's ways but one of the major ideologues of revolutionary unionism in Britain, after living here some years, arrived at similar conclusions and began to elaborate Mills's intuitive appreciation of New Zealand's colonial status. From the date of his arrival in 1913 E. J. B. Allen made himself unpopular with men such as Robert Semple by pointing out that Mills was the architect of the strategy which now absorbed the energies of leading 'Red Feds'. 3 7 Allen's mana as a revolutionary theorist, however, rendered him immune to character assassination. Although born into a comfortable English family and educated at Oxford, where he specialized in languages, Allen joined M. H. Hyndman's Social Democratic Federation during his student days. In 1903 he followed the Scottish de Leonites into the Socialist Labour Party (S.L.P.) which, according to one historian, 'by its unprecedented insistence on purity of doctrine, its disregard and even contempt for the cult of numbers, and its almost fanatical propaganda for the revolutionary role of industrial unionism, came to play a role totally unrelated to the material resources at its command.' 3 8 Allen wrote for the party's newspaper, The Socialist, defending 'impossibilism' or, in other words, the tactic of destroying 'the various movements of the working class . . . '. He also emerged as one of the party's London leaders. 39 Allen hurled himself into several sectarian disputes but began to show impatience with the 'hair-splitting' of the 'impossibilists' as he became more deeply involved in promoting industrial unionism. He helped found and formulate the strategy for the Advocates of Industrial Unionism 4 0 and championed a latitudinarian policy towards new members, boasting,
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to the discomfort of the popes of the party, that activists for the A.I.U. were being recruited from the Clarion Fellowship, the Independent Labour Party and the Social Democratic Federation. When the S.L.P. rejected growth in favour of purity Allen resigned. 'The S.L.P. will only appeal to . . . [the workers'] minds', he warned, 'as one of the political sects out of four or five claiming to be the party of the working class' and hence would merit the contempt visited upon 'the spasms and gyrations of the Plymouth Brethren . . . the strict Baptists of the total immersion, and the Bible Christians.' 4 1 In an essay on 'Anarchist Communism' he hit still harder at the S.L.P. and then, with a tiny band of followers, formed the Industrial League. He now devoted himself to the promotion of industrial unionism and in 1909 published a brief but widely read defence of revolutionary industrial unionism in which he also spelt out the tactics of direct action (including the sit-down strike and working-to-rule). 42 In 1910 he joined Tom Mann's Industrial Syndicalist Education League and moved to Huddersfield as an organizer and propagandist for this highly successful organization. 4 3 In the same year Allen wrote an important article on 'Working Class Socialism' which provides a model of 'left' socialism that Allen would •later modify but not abandon. He began this essay by arguing that the state in all of its roles (judiciary, employer, or army for instance), was the instrument of the class enemy. 'Our rulers obtained what they wanted by the exercise of force . . . . Direct action is the only way for the workers to achieve their emancipation, and the industrial union will be the training ground.' Later he declared that 'The industrial union movement is a declaration of the Social War'; the only valid form of organization which allowed workers to survive under monopoly capitalism; a state within a state, 'the embryo of a working-class Republic', and 'a bulwark alike against a State bureaucracy or a military despotism'. Allen never lost this suspicion of bureaucracy or his vision of a free society. The union movement, by making the individual worker conscious of the power that his class can wield, creates the desire for power in his mind. He begins to despise his condition as a wage-slave who is bought and sold . . . like coal . . . or a bale of shoddy. The revolutionary worker longs for room to develop his creative faculties, to exercise the social power he is entitled to, for a greater freedom in every way; and the industrial union shows him the way . . .; and by its voluntary discipline . . . and by forcing on him his responsibilities . . . gives him that sense of moral responsibility to his fellows that fits him for the task of controlling society. A general strike, he believed, would usher in the millennium. 44 It is not known why Allen came to New Zealand in 1913 but he was soon employed as assistant editor of the Maoriland Worker and wrote regularly for the paper. In the aftermath of the waterfront strike he justified strikes, even when lost, because of 'the feeling of class solidarity . . . and revolutionary thought that is invariably generated . . . \ 4 5 Like other revolutionary socialists in New Zealand however, defeat politicized
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him. 'The action of the Massey Government in pouring armed strikebreakers . . . into the town has awakened a SPIRIT OF BITTERNESS and resentment which will find no satisfaction until the Massey Government is driven from office and the Reform Party put down and out as a political force . . ,'. 4 6 Allen also wrote a series of articles stressing, on the basis of British experience, the imperative need for unity and the necessity for organizing into unions the 'industrial Goths and Vandals', the rural workers who, as in 1890, had served as strike-breakers. 47 But Allen did not consider unity worth any price and argued that 'it must be unity that aims at emancipation from the wages system or it will be of no avail'. 'A well-conditioned servile class may be a material improvement for the workers . . . but it is not the ideal of the Socialists'. 48 And then the war came; Allen followed Hyndman, supporting both the war and conscription, and lost his position on the Maoriland Worker. In the interests of unity, however, he appears to have held his tongue and sheathed his pen, apparently finding work as an unskilled labourer in Auckland. 4 9 In 1919 Allen returned to the fray, speaking as one of Labour's Sunday orators on Quay Street and writing for both the Maoriland Worker and the Auckland Labour News.b0 In his various essays for Labour News he touched often on the implications of trying to achieve socialism within a colonial economy. For instance, in two detailed defences of the Auckland Labour Representation Committee's (L.R.C.) scheme for municipal farms and municipal milk, he partly justified the policy on the unusual grounds that the domestic price for milk and its by-products had to be isolated from 'the American and European markets and their fluctuations'.51 In these years he also rejected the classical economists' concept of comparative advantage, arguing, for instance, that New Zealand ought to produce wheat even if the cost per unit exceeded the foreign cost. Profitability he deemed outmoded and socially inefficient as a criterion of utility (the essence, of course, of the socialist case against the allegedly 'free market'). 5 2 Allen envisioned a world of self-sufficient 'working-class Republics [with] a free-trade in our various surpluses' (the need for self-sufficiency being in inverse relation to the number of 'working-class Republics'). 53 He also recognized that although New Zealand 'is an almost complete miniature of the older capitalist countries' 54 it was distinctive and 'happily placed in as much as there is not yet fully developed a purely parasitic class in society . . .'. More to the point, many of the parasites living off the New Zealand ' "wage-slave" and "mortgage c o c k a t o o " ' lived abroad, especially in Britain. 55 These remarks of Allen's have been isolated from articles directed, almost invariably, to other ends. But scattered and isolated though these insights are they consort easily with Allen's major attempt to relate his conception of revolutionary socialism to the New Zealand reality. In Labour and Politics, a pamphlet published by the Auckland Labour Representation Committee in 1922, 56 Allen urged that each nation's socialists, despite the Third International, had to 'formulate their own
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plan of campaign to win their freedom from the economic, social and political domination of the property-owning class, both local and European, who control the means of life'. Tactics could only be effective, he held, if related to each nation's 'own stages and circumstances of social evolution . . .'. Having struck a blow for relativism he asserted that 'Australia and New Zealand offer the best chance of the workers being able to abolish the wages system of slavery and establish a co-operative commonwealth by the use of peaceful constitutional means.' He had no intention of minimizing his revolutionary objective but argued that 'We cannot slavishly accept the formula of any country, either European or American.' Allen's major thesis was, however, that 'Capitalism is not fully developed in New Zealand.' The total population hardly equalled that of a 'fair sized' town in Britain or America; 'apart from the miners, watersiders and railwaymen, there are no large bodies of workers concentrated into large masses that raises to red heat their class feeling and . . . antagonism'; and thus the class struggle, while still important, had to be preached before it could be fought. Most industries in New Zealand, Allen proceeded, were small and the industrial sector was of little importance. This, together with 'the comparatively easy avenues of escape' to a suburban shop or a 'three acre' farm, he pointed out, 'blurs the vision of the worker as far as the class struggle is concerned'. Nor, he held, is there an 'alchemy in the form of organisation which makes an unclass-conscious worker into a revolutionist'. Worse, working-class conservatism was often a result of precipitate action and subsequent defeat, of allowing 'theories and. . . tactics to march ahead of their material environment, and . . . [preaching] 'One Big Union' and 'Direct Action' as though they were an 'Open Sesame' to the New Zealand worker's emancipation.' No union or combination of unions in New Zealand, he went on to say, could 'win out in opposition to the Government'. And this all meant that not only could unions in New Zealand not achieve revolution by direct action but that they could not hope to win nationalization or 'joint control'. 'Even a successful strike does not affect the question of "ownership" of the means of production and distribution', he warned, and in most cases 'an analysis of the wage gains show but poor results against the increased prices all the workers as well as the strikers have afterwards to pay'. These pessimistic remarks led Allen to his main point, 'that to get a revolutionary working class the prime essential is propaganda. Propaganda is essentially the function of a Political Party'. Indeed, he waspishly concluded, without political power 'One Big Union' was illegal; 'how is the anti-political going to accomplish it?' One further quotation illustrates the tactics that Allen thought appropriate to New Zealand during the post-war years. Physical force is the weapon of the barbarian. We have to act on the assumption, difficult as it may sometimes be, that our masters are civilised. We have to endeavour to settle our disputes in a peaceful, civilised manner. We preach and
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argue and debate, and then test the public opinion by the ballot. That is political action, it is the diplomacy of the revolutionary labour movement. On the plane of political action we carry on our educational campaign, . . . the criticism and analysis of capitalist society, and show our fellow workers and other honestminded citizens [a fulsome bow to Mills], the desirability and necessity of fundamental change. By the peaceful method of the ballot . . . we register the amount of public opinion that is with us. We convert our fellow wage-slaves from being the passive adherents of the present social system to intellectual revolutionists who propagate unceasingly the necessity for change. The object of the exercise was socialism — public or common ownership, worker control, functional democracy — but only if a government tried to disfranchise the working class or rob labour of its gains would 'direct action' or insurrection be a sensible tactic. Although we have not conveyed the full range of Allen's small output in this period, Labour and Politics, together with his occasional comments about New Zealand's economy and society, indicate the extent to which he kept his vision yet modified his tactics. Allen had accepted many of Mills's strategies but not his revisionism, and by 1926 he was upset because 'Parliamentary Democracy has. killed the virile activity of Proletarian Democracy'. 5 7 Nevertheless, on the foundations provided by Mills and Allen the third subject of this article built still further. J. A. Lee had lived in Auckland during 1912-13 and had heard both Mills and Bennett. Little is known of Lee's response to the ferment of these years, although he read widely in the vigorous literature of socialism, but it can safely be said that he accepted Mills's evolutionary strategy (shared, of course, by the Fabians), the commitment to political action, and a Fabian conception of the goal and the method for getting there. During the war he read most of the Fabian pamphlets and subscribed to The New Statesman, the paper of the Independent Labour Party, and Sinn Fein, and during 1918-19, while convalescing in England after being wounded in France, he read some of the major works of J. A. Hobson, described by some as a radical liberal and by others as a socialist. 58 Lee apparently met Allen in 1922, for he was President of the Auckland L.R.C. when it published Labour and Politics, but they saw little of each other for some years because Lee belonged to the 'in-group' whereas Allen had been cast into outer darkness during the war. The problem described by Allen as that of 'relativity' interested Lee greatly, however, and in 1927-28 they began to meet frequently (Allen joined Lee's campaign committee and Lee used some of the £200 donated by Ernest Davis to pay Allen regular wages). 59 Except with regard to land policy Lee made little contribution to the transposition of international socialism into New Zealand terms until the late 1920s. But the debate over land policy was not entirely irrelevant to the issue of 'relativity'. First, as Mills and Allen hinted, there was the problem of stabilizing land values without 'fixing' prices. Others too, saw the validity of the point but only in 1926-27 when the Party agreed to
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stabilize prices by means of scientific marketing and bulk-purchase agreements, was any sort of solution spelt out (and Lee did not accept it as adequate). 6 0 More important however, the debate over land policy underlined what Mills had known, that New Zealand was not an industrial society but predominantly agricultural and pastoral. Not only that, whereas socialist theorists had always assumed that the maturation of capitalism would bring in its train larger and larger farms, that the tendency towards monopoly would be as evident in agriculture as it appeared to be in industry, this process had obviously not occurred in New Zealand in either the agricultural or the industrial sector. In three long letters to the National Secretary, written between 1923 and 1925, Lee spelt out clearly the inadequacy of nationalization of land and, indeed, its irrelevance. Instead, he believed, co-operation had first to be fostered because production had to be socialized before it was feasible to nationalize land. Besides, as Mills and the American 'constructivists' had clearly recognized, an evolutionary strategy for socializing production and distribution could be made attractive to farmers and thus help the Party escape the wilderness to which exclusive reliance on working-class support condemned it. 6 1 By 1928 the party had accepted a land policy to Lee's tastes (although others in the party had seen the same point as early as Lee and done as much to effect the changes). But the onset of depression together with rising unemployment after 1926 intensified the contradictions between inherited ideology and the New Zealand reality. First, where Lee, like most of his colleagues, accepted J. A. Hobson's theory of underconsumption and his claim that the problem could be solved by redistributing wealth from rich to poor, as the depression worsened it became clear that New Zealand's well-to-do did not possess enough wealth, at least in liquid form, to render redistribution worthwhile. According to one Commission New Zealand's middle classes were in such straitened circumstances by 1930 that the Government could not even finance unemployment insurance by taxation. 6 2 Second, whereas from 1926 until 1929 party spokesmen, including Lee, emphasized excessive immigration and technological change as the causes of unemployment the same Commission showed conclusively that immigrants, most of whom were skilled, constituted but a small proportion of the unemployed. The vast majority of the unemployed, indeed, were unskilled labourers whose jobs had not been taken over by machines. 6 3 Even more striking, and Lee skirted this problem in 1927, the depression in New Zealand was not a function of domestic productivity but of low export prices. In 1927 he had noted that borrowing abroad could stave off retrenchment, but concluded that borrowing would only compel more vigorous retrenchment in the long run. 6 4 This paradox of a nation producing sufficient to feed, clothe and house its people but unable to do so because the British housewife could not afford to buy our products became the central nagging question. And, of course, the importance of British housewives and money-lenders in the
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New Zealand equation distinguished New Zealand from the traditional socialist model of a capitalist society. Inherited socialist theory offered no solution to these paradoxes. Socialists of all persuasions assumed the existence of a mature industrial society dominated increasingly by giant corporations and monopolies, dependent for their economic health on their ability to export profitably increasing quantities of manufactured goods and capital while importing unprocessed raw materials. Socialists had assumed, in short, that socialist forms would grow within the legal and institutional framework of capitalism until, at some point, capitalism would collapse or be destroyed and the principal contradiction in capitalist society — between individual appropriation and social production — would be resolved. New Zealand just did not fit the equation; far from exporting capital and manufactured goods it imported both and exported primary produce; far from its economy being dominated by industry it was dominated, if at all, by banks, breweries, stock and station agents, and insurance companies (often owned abroad); far from concentration and consolidation having characterized our economic development for the past century the critical sectors of the economy were dominated by the family farm and the small firm. Most trade unions had less than 100 members and most factories employed less than ten persons. New Zealand was less a mass-production industrial society than an economic colony. 6 5 No socialist theorist had studied the strategies for realizing socialism within a colonial economy because almost all of them believed that socialism would come only in societies where capitalism had reached its highest form of development. While developments in Russia had challenged this belief little was known outside the Soviet Union of the relevant debates. 6 6 Yet the debate over Russia which occurred during the 1920s was important, for Lee's contribution to policy debates was shaped by his belief, and he was following Karl Kautsky, that the Soviet Government had attempted too much too quickly and so had become a dictatorship. 6 7 Equally important in shaping Lee's views was his belief that the depression was less a crisis of capitalism than one of capitalists too ignorant to realize how easily the worst features of the depression could be ameliorated. This meant, in other words, that there was nothing automatic or inevitable about the collapse of capitalism and the arrival of socialism; the former had to be engineered, the latter planned. These realizations, together with the paradoxes of New Zealand's situation (which the 1928 election brought into sharper focus) led Lee to search for a more realistic set of socialist objectives and a strategy for realizing them within a democratic community. In the course of 1929-30, clearly influenced by policy debates in Britain and Australia, he concluded that maximum economic insulation must be the first step on the road to socialism in New Zealand and the escape route from the depression. 'A solution . . . requires more than a mere distribution of purchasing power [the answer given in the 1920s], we must be able to stay the violent price fluctuations, must be able to
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determine that increases in purchasing power are not so used as to create exchange crises. For we are only a small people in the world economy and such standards as we create we shall have to insulate against the shocks which can be dealt by larger outside systems.' Given insulation through control of finance and credit, and apart from a reference to exchange controls the means for achieving this were vague, a Labour Government could achieve price stabilization and planned industrial growth. The solution to unemployment and the problems posed by colonial status was neither increased agricultural productivity nor its classical justification, the concept of comparative advantage, but the encouragement of secondary industries. Labour, of course, had championed industrial development in the 1928 election and both the notion of self-sufficiency and the desire for secondary industry can be traced back easily to the 1880s and 1890s, but for Lee these policies had acquired a new meaning. For, placing his weight upon Hobson's calculus of social welfare, he no longer cared whether industries were efficient because industrialization would help make insulation effective, thus protecting New Zealand from international capitalism, and ensuring that gains in welfare could not be destroyed by falling export prices. 'If a high price is the difference between a rice standard and our own', he wrote, 'it is a price I shall pay cheerfully.' 'The only way to safety', he wrote, is Along the line of Secondary Industry [where] lies employment, lies prospect of increased population, a wide field for our diverse talents, the squaring of a lop-sided economic system, and the greater chance of insulating New Zealand so that we can advance beyond the real wage standard of other countries. Along the line of manufacturing development lies freedom from dependence on overseas finance. Along this road of expanded population and expanded consumption of local production lies the prospect of a growing market for primary produce at a stabilised and profitable price. There is no road to high wages for workers or farmers if internal prices are based upon world conditions, except an improvement in world conditions. There is no way to local high wages if these wages are used to purchase imports to create exchange crises. We must pay our debts, we must liquidate our overseas debts. Only the curtailment of borrowing and imports will do that. Lee had, as it were, rejected Allen's preference for international specialization in favour of self-sufficiency because New Zealand could count on no other nation. 6 8 Many of the ideas in Lee's paper were vague and remained vague for years to come but, to some extent, almost all of his subsequent contributions to policy debates can be considered footnotes to it. But in 1930-31, as he began to propound his new plan (and those whose sympathies lay with J. T. Lang in Australia or with Sir Oswald Mosley in Britain would have found little in this policy to cause dissent), he came under attack from one Malcolm Brown for having replaced nationalization with insulation, industrialization, and credit expansion. Such criticisms aroused his ire
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but he knew, in all probability, that his new policy lacked any clear ideological direction and that it divested socialism of its millennial overtones. Socialism in this sense was concerned with policy priorities and strategies of change but no longer expressed the alienation of the working class. 69 Although he was not indifferent to the religious significance of socialism nor to the alienation of the working class from the New Zealand community, and indeed briefly appears to have believed that conventional revolution was possible in New Zealand, 7 0 he never surrendered his hardwon insight that only maximum insulation and self-sufficiency held out the hope of freeing New Zealand from the anarchy of international capitalism. Not that insulation and self-sufficiency constituted socialism, but in the context of New Zealand they were the indispensable foundations for socialism. One clear implication of this insight was the confirmation of the widespread popular feeling that in New Zealand the banks constituted the major source of economic power in private hands. Mills, thanks to his experience in the Midwest, clearly understood the role of 'Wall Street' in exploiting the producer-dominated states and the United Labour Party's land policy reflected this suspicion of banks and bankers. The suspicion, of course, had strong indigenous roots (especially among small farmers and skilled workingmen). Allen arrived at the same conclusion. When British bankers were reported to have said that they would refuse to accommodate a Labour Government he promptly wrote that no socialist government could survive unless it nationalized the banks. Such a policy was even more urgent here because 'New Zealand is in pawn to wealthy parasites of the Old Country, more so than it is to the local specimens of the same parasitic species'. 71 Lee accepted both arguments; not only were credit and finance the nervous system of the economy but the banks subordinated New Zealand interests to British or Australian requirements. Besides, only by controlling financial and credit policy within an insulated economy could industrial growth be fostered. Failure to take these steps would mean that Labour's ability to achieve its socialist goals would remain dependent on export prices and the approval of bankers and bondholders. 7 2 Mills, Allen and Lee played an important role in defining a possible meaning for socialism within New Zealand. The trajectory isolated here did not lead into a cul de sac nor did it lead away from socialism. Indeed, many major socialist and communist theorists since the Second World War, in grappling with the prospects for socialism in under-developed economies, have followed a similar path. 7 3 Even readers of the New Statesman and Nation, during the early 1930s while never finding such a clear and forceful statement of an alternative to deflationary economics, could have read G. D. H. Cole and J. M. Keynes defending economic nationalism and the irrelevance of revolutionary rhetoric as a substitute for a detailed strategy for achieving socialism. 74 Only Mills of these three, however, can claim to have won his points so successfully that almost all socialists in New
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Zealand ultimately accepted them. Allen and Lee, and they possibly worked together closely in the critical years of 1928-29, followed Mills on the major questions of strategy and elaborated one approach to the problem of the meaning of socialism in New Zealand. During the 1930s, however, the policy of maximum insulation and industrialization did not win the support of all members of the Labour Party, some of whom, like Walter Nash, doubted the feasibility and desirability of economic nationalism, and many of the disputes and squabbles within the parliamentary party in the 1930s revolved around the latent question of insulation (for Lee preferred, probably for political reasons, to debate the issue in terms of credit policy although he knew that credit expansion without insulation, and a vigorous commitment to the development of industry, would prove disastrous). Time, however, has rendered the alternative strategies suspect and the policy of insulation, although vague, ambiguous at some points and poorly developed, has proved to be the most fruitful socialist analysis of New Zealand's predicament in a capitalist world. For, and this was Lee's central insight, without the maximum degree of insulation socialism in New Zealand was impossible. Whether or not one decides, as a result, that socialism is or is not a practical objective for New Zealand it is difficult to disagree with the economist, C. G. F. Simkin, that 'insulationism . . . compels respect as a serious and effective attack upon a major social problem, and more especially as an advance upon the methods used to deal with the last depression'. 7 5 ERIK
OLSSEN
University of Otago.
NOTES 'W. H. Oliver, 'Reeves, Sinclair and the Social Pattern', in The Feel of Truth, ed. Peter Munz, Wellington, 1969, pp. 179-80. ^Others, such as Lloyd Ross and Mark Silverstone, may have contributed to this discussion but too little is known about the views of either man. 3 See Peter Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, London and New York, 1966; Julius Braunthal, History of the International, 1914-1943, London, 1967, II; and Walter Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, 1900-1921, London, 1969. 4 See for example P.J. O'Farrell, Harry Holland: Militant Socialist, Canberra, 1964 and P. G. Morris, 'Unemployed Organisation in New Zealand. 1926-1939', unpublished M.A. thesis, Victoria University, 1949. 5 Report and Proceedings of the Trades and Labour Councils' Annual Conference, Wellington, 1910, pp. 16-17. 6 Not all affiliates accepted such views; for an attempt at a balanced profile of the 'Red' Federation of Labour see the author's brief essay, 'The "Red Feds" ', New Zealand's Heritage, Part 74, pp. 2066-72. 7 J. T. Paul, Labour and the Future, Dunedin, 1911, p. 17. 8 For information about Mills's early life I am indebted to Professor John M. Gates of Wooster College, Ohio, and Ms. Gertrude Jacob of Oberlin College, Ohio, for copies of files on Mills possessed by the Alumni Records' Department of both colleges. 9 F. G. A. Beardsley, A Mighty Winner of Souls: Charles G. Finney, New York, 1937, p. 147.
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10 See 'Editorials', The Statesman, III (November 1887), 54-55; 'Prospectus of American School of Polities', ibid., (October 1887), 24-27; 'Recent Events', ibid., 29; 'College Echoes', ibid., IV (April 1888), 239. " ' F r o m Walter Thomas Mills', ibid., IV (April 1888), 216-17. 12 'Editorials\ ibid., IV (December 1888), 179. 13 ibid., V (April 1889), 48; and Canadian Voice, IX (March 1889), (cited in ibid.). '«'Economic and Social Notes', The Statesman, VII (May 1890), 120-21. 15 ibid., (January 1890), 238-40; 'Editorials', ibid., (August 1890), 305-7 and'Economic and Social Notes', ibid., 308-9. "See an advertisement for Walter Thomas Mills and Co., Building, Land and Investment Commissioners in The Statesman, VIII (October 1890). For the hotel see W. T. Mills to 'Dear Friend', 10 January 1893, T. C. Richmond mss., Wisconsin State Historical Society. For his venture in life insurance see William F. Singleton to T. C. Richmond, 14 June, 8, 11 and 18 July 1893, Richmond mss. 17 Mills to T. C. Richmond, 9 November 1893, Richmond mss. 1 '•The Product-Sharing Village, Chicago, 1894. "Mills to Richmond, 21 March 1898, ibid and 'The People's University', The New Time, II (March 1898), ix. 20 Mills to Richmond, 14 and 16 March 1898, Richmond mss; 'Now Ready: Evolutionary Polities', New Time, II (March 1898), viii; also Mills's comments in 'The Unity Convention at Indianapolis', International Socialist Review, II (July 1901), 36-39. 'Even before the party was organized', one historian has written, 'W. T. Mills foreshadowed the gradualist approach in Evolutionary Politics...', T. D. S. Bassett, 'Socialist Political Action', in Donald D. Egbert and Stow Persons, Socialism and American Life, 2 Vols, Princeton, 1952, II, 286-87. 21 How to Work for Socialism, Chicago, 1900, Pocket Library of Socialism, p. 31. 22 The only published comments about Mills during this period are by Ira Kipnis in The American Socialist Movement, 1897-1912, New York, 1952, pp. 147, 176-80, and 373-74. Kipnis gives a jaundiced view, however, as he argued that socialism failed in the United States because the 'Right Wing' captured the party and Mills, thus, was one of his betes noires. 23 For a perceptive review see 'Book Reviews', International Socialist Review, V (August 1904), 121. The Christian Socialist, VII (June 1910), on the other hand, described the book as 'the greatest American work on scientific socialism'. 24 The Struggle for Existence, seventh edition, n.d., p. 161. 25 The description is from David A. Shannon, The Socialist Party of America, New York, 1955, p. 27. Mills, who had been engaged by the Australian Labour Party for some seven months, was invited to New Zealand by the executives of the New Zealand Labour Party and the Trades and Labour Councils' Federation (see Report and Proceedings of the Trades and Labour Councils' Annual Conference, Wellington, 1911, p. 4 and Voice of Labour, 9 June 1911, p. 9, cols. 1-4). 2 <>[W. T. Mills and H. Scott-Bennett], The Bennett-Mills Debate on the Unity Scheme, Wellington, 1912. 27 See 'Land Monopoly and How to End It', New Zealand Times, 25 July 1912, p. 13, cols. 1-10. His actual policy — 'Free hold in Use' — had as much in common with the second Labour Party's 1927 policy as it did with Henry George's policies. Mills lectured for the New Zealand Alliance during the 1911 referendum but otherwise cultivated prohibitionists quietly; Voice of Labour, 6 April 1912, p. 10, col. 1. Instances of his attempt to appeal to women can be found either in the Housewives' Union or the Voice of Labour, 22 September 1911, p. 3, cols. 1-3 while his vigorous attempt to woo Christians can be illustrated either by articles, such as 'Political Meetings on Sundays', New Zealand Times, 23 July 1912, p. 4, cols. 1-3, or the space devoted by the Voice, which he edited for six weeks during 1912, to the views of prominent American exponents of Christian Socialism and the Social Gospel (such as Walter Raushenbusch). 28 Proceedings of the Annua! Conference of the Federation of Labour, Wellington, 1912, p. 48. 29 For his basic theoretical statement see 'Religion and Socialism' in The Struggle for Existence. 30 For a report which reveals his skilful use of Biblical allusion and metaphor see Voice of Labour, 16 June 1911, p. 4, cols. 1-3. 31 Arthur McCarthy [Treasurer of ULP] to John Robertson M.P., 7 May 1912, McCarthy mss, Hocken Library. For Bennett's charge see The Bennett-Mills Debate on the Unity Scheme, p. 7 and for the events at the Unity Conference of January 1913
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see the report of the proceedings, Basis for Unity, Wellington, 1913, pp. 11-18. 32 It is easily forgotten that the 'Red Feds', with their atheism and revolutionary rhetoric, alienated many of their own rank and file to whom Mills could appeal. For instance, when he and Webb addressed the timber workers in 1912, Mills won the day; see Southland Timber Yards and Sawmills Industrial Union of Workers, Annual Report, Invercargill, 1912, p. 4. 33 In 1911 the Labour Party contested only urban seats. 34 For the Otago Branch see New Zealand Times, 22 July 1912, p. 4, col. 3. 35 See 'The New Zealand Farmer', Voice, 23 February 1912, p. 10, cols. 2-3 and 'The Land Question', p. 13, cols. 2-3 and 'Land Monopoly . . .', New Zealand Times, 25 July 1912, p. 13. Prior to the Unity Conference of Easter 1912 Mills apparently enjoyed almost complete freedom in enunciating policy, so long as he opposed 'Red Fed' syndicalism. After the Unity Conference he was bound by the policy resolutions passed there, most of which were broad in nature, and he was responsible to the ULP Executive. Before the argument over policy towards the 1913 Unity proposals, however, Mills continued to enjoy a free hand. 36 'The Red Terror', Voice, 3 November 1911, p. 6, cols. 3-4; p. 7, cols. 1-2, and p. 8, col. 1. 37 Allen, 'Robert Semple: Revolutionist', Auckland Labour News (ALN), 1 August 1921, pp. 5-6. 38 Lee, 'Obituary', John A. Lee's Weekly, 4 July 1945, p. 16. For the sectarian background see Kendall, p. 63. 39 'S.L.P.ism\ The Socialist, V (January 1907), 1. 40 'The Advocates of Industrial Unionism', ibid., p. 8; 'London A. of I.U.', ibid., V (April 1907), 8; and 'Why and Where the SLP is Growing', ibid., VI (December 1907), 2. 41 'The Industrial Union', ibid., VI (March 1908), 8. 42 'Anarchist Communism', ibid., VI (April 1908), 4 and 'A Desirable Disclaimer', ibid., (June 1908), 6. The history of the Industrial Union League is largely unknown although according to Kendall, p. 71, Allen had been editing the AIU's paper and tried, unsuccessfully, to capture it for the new League. See also B. Pribicevic, The Shop Stewards Movement and Worker Control, 1910-1922, Oxford, 1959, pp. 12-13. Allen's pamphlet was entitled Revolutionary Socialism, Notting Hill, [1909]. Tom Mann claimed that Allen helped crystallize his views; see Mann, Tom Mann's Memoirs, London, 1923, p. 195. 43 See information about Education League speakers and organizers in Industrial Syndicalist, I (September 1910), 2-3; Kendall, pp. 144-46, 338-39 n. 40 and Pribicevic, Shop Stewards, pp. 2-3. 44 Industrial Syndicalist, I (November 1910), 10-15. 45 'Some Limitations', Maoriland Worker (MW) ,17 December 1913, p. 8, cols. 2-3. 46 'The Situation in Auckland', MW, 7 January 1914, p. 2 col. 3. 47 'The British Labour Movement', ibid., 14 January 1914, p. I, cols. 5-8 and ibid., 21 January 1914, p. 1 cols. 4-8. On rural workers see 'The Agricultural Workers', ibid., 6 May 1914, p. 5 cols. 2-3 (although the telling phrase is Pat Hickey's in his article on 'Our Irresistible Army', ibid., 11 March 1914, p. 5, cols. 4-5). "â&#x20AC;˘ÂŤ'Labour Unity', ibid., 10 June 1914, p. 5, col. 4. 4 'See 'Violence', MW, 11 May 1921, p. 8, col. 4 and 'Labour and Revolution', ALN, 1 November 1920, pp 3-5. 50 Most of his articles for the MW followed conventional socialist lines, portraying the Massey Government as a puppet of the capitalists and the Peace Settlement as an instrument of reaction, see 'Burning Men Alive', MW, 2 March 1921, p. 7, cols. 2-3; 'Sane Labour', ibid., 30 March 1921, p. 7, col. 4; 'Violence', ibid., 11 May 1921, p. 8, col. 4 and 'It's our wages they want', ibid. 17 August 1921, p. 2, col. 3. 5i'The Milk Supply', ALN, 1 November 1918, p. 5 and ibid., 1 December 1920, pp. 13-14. s 2 'All Power to the Workers', ibid., 1 October 1920, pp. 13-14. 53 'The Politics of the Furure', ibid., 1 November 1921, pp. 3-5. 54 'The Class War in New Zealand', ibid., 1 November 1920, pp. 3-5. 55 'The Spiritual Necessity for Socialism', ibid., 1 February 1921, pp. 6-7. 56 Many Labour Party leaders were obsessed with the need for working-class unity, the Alliance of Labour and the New Zealand Workers' Union having rejected political action, and Allen's pamphlet was first and foremost an attempt to disprove the thesis that socialism would only be achieved through industrial action.
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" ' B o o k Review', ALN, 1 February 1926, p. 9. 58 Most of this information is based on letters from Lee to the author and his copy of Hobson's Work and Wealth, London, 1918, which he had annotated. 59 Lee to author, 13 October 1975. 60 The best discussion of this complex issue is by R. J. M. Hill, 'The Quest for Control: the New Zealand Dairy Industry and the Guaranteed Price, 1921-1936', unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Auckland, 1974. ÂŤ'Lee to Walter Nash, 1 February 1923, cit. Hill, p. 110 and in slightly less detail by O'Farrell, Harry Holland', p. 141. See also Lee to Nash, 4 and 18 June 1925, cit. O'Farrell, pp. 145-46. 62 R. M. Burdon, The New Dominion: A History of New Zealand between the Wars, Wellington, 1965, p. 127. 63 'Unemployed in New Zealand', Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives, 1929, H-11B and 1930, H-11B. "New Zealand Parliamentary Debates, 213, 1927, pp. 498-99. 65 The thesis was effectively propagated in the 1950s and 1960s by the New Zealand Monthly Review and, most notably, by W. B. Sutch in The Quest for Security in New Zealand 1840 to 1960, Wellington, 1966, and Colony or Nation? Economic Crises in New Zealand from the 1860s to the 1960s, ed. Michael Turnbull, Sydney, 1966. In 1924-25, however, the Labour Party had emphasized the view that New Zealand was the victim of financial imperialism (see, for instance, Walter Nash's Financial Power in New Zealand, Wellington, [1925]). The argument was not long central to a diagnosis of capitalism in New Zealand, however. 66 Richard B. Day, Leon Trotsky and the Politics of Economic Isolation, Cambridge, 1973, offers an incisive analysis of the debate. 67 Lee only once discussed the issue in these terms when he said that the outcome of the war had led him to revise Kautsky's estimate of the costs of Soviet Communism; see 'Medievalism is Defeated in Asia', John A. Lee's Fortnightly, 1 December 1948, pp. 8-9. 68 'Roads to Prosperity' (xeroxed copy in author's possession, the original having been lent by Lee). The paper is undated but internal evidence suggests that it was written in October or November 1930. This paper is probably identical to another paper by Lee, cited by Sutch in The Quest, p. 173n. and entitled 'The Problem'. Lee also expressed the same views more briefly in a talk to the Auckland Fabian Society, reported in New Zealand Worker, 5 November 1930, p. 8 and elaborated on in a letter to the editor, ibid., 3 December 1930, p. 8. 6, I t has been pointed out, however, that the adoption of such a policy in Britain (where Mosley advocated it), would have entailed a revolutionary redistribution of political and economic power; see Ross McKibbin, 'The Economic Policy of the Second Labour Government, 1929-1931', Past and Present, LXVIII (August 1975), 95123. 70 'The revolution is here', he told his wife, after making a public declaration of 'social war' on the Government; see Lee to Mrs Lee, 5 April 1932, Lee mss (kindly lent by Lee). 7 ''Something to Think About', ALN, 1 November 1922, p. 3. 72 The thesis was elaborated most fully in Money Power for the People, Auckland, 1937 and Socialism in New Zealand, London, 1938. It was also clearly stated in the official statement, written by Lee, Labour Has a Plan, Wellington, 1934. 73 See, for instance, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy in Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. For a critique see Peter Clekak, Radical Paradoxes: Dilemmas of the American Left, 1945-1970, New York, 1974, ch. 5. 74 See Keynes, 'Proposals for a Revenue Tariff', New Statesman and Nation, I, New Series (7 March 1931), 53-54, or Cole, 'The Future of the Labour Party', ibid., II (7 November 1931), 564-65. Lee subscribed to this journal. 15 Insularionism and the Problem of Economic Stability, Melbourne, 1946, p. 4 (reprinted from The Economic Record, June 1946).