The magazine for alumni and friends of Massey University.
Issue 14, April 2002

On the Left

Edited by Dr Kerry Taylor and Dr Pat Moloney
University of Otago Press RRP $39.95

Political correctness went out the window when political commentator Chris Trotter delivered the Bruce Jesson Memorial Lecture in Auckland late last year. In itself, and despite his reputation for provocation, this was rather a surprise to his audience. Trotter is one of New Zealand’s few left-of-centre commentators. The late Bruce Jesson was a respected ‘mainstream’ journalist who near single-handedly represented and chronicled the Left. And, these days, the Left can usually be counted on to be politically correct.

Not, apparently, when you take off its lid. Trotter released the Left’s can of worms, shelved in the hope that its label might fade to the point of being unreadable. What he said in his lecture was, in essence, this. Dating from the 1981 Springbok tour, the extra-parliamentary left in New Zealand has been assailed and driven asunder by feminism and Mäori nationalism, leaving “a tragic wreckage of personal and political relationships”.

Holy cows! And as a subsequent flood of outraged letters to The Listener indicated, he didn’t even admit that the demands of these “late arrivals on the left wing block” (not to mention the unemployed movement) might have been inevitable or even overdue. Nor did he acknowledge any righteousness in their causes nor assign any blame for the Left’s failure to anticipate and accommodate them.

All the same, he was probably right. Who can forget the debate on the Working Women’s Charter at the 1978 Federation of Labour conference? I can’t, nor can the only other woman journalist there. The debate had gone on too long, the blokes really didn’t get it, it was time to move on to something more familiar. Frustrated and bewildered, national secretary Ken Douglas took the mike, gesturing behind him at the infamous FOL logo of the muscled hairy arm and the big hammer. “What do you want us to do?” he said. “Put a bangle on it?” Yes, please, muttered the relatively few women delegates and the only two women union members on the press bench.

Of course, greater understanding followed and it all went downhill from there, according to Chris Trotter. To support his point, he quoted from a new book, On the Left, edited by Dr Kerry Taylor from Massey University and Dr Pat Maloney from Victoria University. Trotter cited a conclusion he said was reached “almost reluctantly” by Massey history lecturer Cybele Locke, in a chapter titled ‘Organising the Unemployed: the Politics of Gender, Culture and Class in the 1980s and 1990s’. He said Locke had concluded that the adoption of the New Social Movement’s “non-hierarchical” organising structures fatally weakened the Left at a critical time.

The chapter does indeed look at why left-wing politics became so fragmented during the 1980s. It notes, certainly not with disapproval, that key women organisers in the unemployment movement were influenced by the feminism and Mäori sovereignty movements of the 1970s. “This encouraged them to utilise theories that recognised the way racism and sexism prevented people from gaining equal opportunity… They used non-hierarchical structures as a tool... for encouraging other Mäori and pakeha women to participate more fully within unemployment groups.”

On The Left has other relevant references, including a useful interview by Dr Taylor with Gay Simpkin from the University of Auckland, on feminism and the Left. Better still, in a chapter on the Wobblies (the Industrial Workers of the World) in New Zealand, Fran Shor provides a telling picture of what, perhaps, the argument is all about. The Wobblies, she says, promoted a form of oppositional or alternative masculinism which represented a “virile syndicalism” especially attractive to working class men. She quotes an historian: “For many in the working class, uncertain about their manly status in the workplace, periodic protest, shared among brothers, was a vital way to claim their masculinity, a reward in itself.” In the Antipodes, one clear expression of this was: “A man who won’t stand by his mates is no man at all.”

On the Left editor Kerry Taylor was fascinated by the debate that followed Chris Trotter’s lecture and believes there is more to be argued, assessed and said. He is considering a further book. Yes, please. DB