Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following for their assistance along the way: 1.) in the US, the archivists at the Kheel Center at Cornell University; 2.) in Canada, Mark Leier and Jeremy Mouat; 3.) in New Zealand, Kerry Taylor, Pat Maloney, Melanie Nolan, and the archivists at the Alexander Turnbull Library; and 4.) in Australia, Verity Burgmann, Joy Damousi, the archivists at the State Library of Victoria, and, last, but not least, the faculty and staff in the History Department at the University of Melbourne.

The impact of global capital on the circulation of labor at the beginning of the twentieth century is a well-acknowledged component of the history and experience of the working class. Especially in the Pacific Rim area, Australian and New Zealand scholars acknowledge this migratory movement across the Pacific and the Tasman. Some of the most recent formulations of this phenomenon can be found in studies of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in Australia and of syndicalism and guild socialism in New Zealand. All these studies emphasize the migratory role in the mining and transport industries where young men with radical ideas could travel from North America to New Zealand and Australia. As New Zealand historian Jack Vowles contends: “Working class migration was extensive across the Tasman and the Pacific, particularly among sections of the working class most likely to be infected with socialist ideas . . .”¹

Certainly, much is known about prominent left agitators who crossed the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand through biographies of Harry Holland and Michael Joseph Savage, two labor leaders who would achieve their prominence in the trade union movement and the New Zealand Labour Party.³

Beyond historiographical difficulties in tracing the wanderings of these agitators in the early twentieth century Pacific Rim, there are problems inherent in defining the meaning and role of any agitator and determining the political parameters of the left in the labor movement in this particular historical period. Traditional Marxist-Leninist approaches to left agitators rely on the doctrinaire conceptualization of a vanguard class-conscious revolutionary bringing such consciousness to less conscious and narrowly focused working masses. A more dynamic Marxist perspective on the agitator can be seen through the application of the Gramscian analysis of organic intellectuals. As explicated by US cultural historian George Lipsitz, “organic intellectuals must initiate a process that involves people in social contestation. . . . Organic intellectuals generate and circulate oppositional ideas through social action. . . . Most significantly, they challenge dominant interests through education and agitation that expose the gap between surface harmonies that seem to unite society and the real conflicts and antagonisms that divide it.”⁵

This educational role of the agitator is further elaborated in the work of Paulo Freire. Friere substitutes a more dialogical political pedagogy for what he calls a banking concept of pedagogy. Such a banking concept, evident in the Marxist-Leninist position, is also found in the more positivist sociological models of agitation and the agitator, such as Herbert Blumer's approach to social movements, where the agitator is viewed as an instrument of arousing people to action by raising discontent and new aspirations. I believe a more dialogical and dialectical approach to the agitator, along the lines suggested in Friere's work, can be found in the American anthropologist, James C. Scott. Scott's perspective in Domination and the Arts of Resistance on the role of the charismatic articulator whose message resonates with people's anger and aspirations accords more with Freire and my understanding of how left labor agitators during this period attracted attention. Such an approach also corresponds to the recorded memories of a young woman who would become an important activist in the Australian left circles, Edna Ryan. Explaining why the IWW speakers made such an impression on her and others in the Sydney Domain during the First World War, Ryan recalls: “They were popular people. They said to the working class what the working class believed and understood.”⁶

Another way of conceptualizing this approach between the agitator and the audience reflected in Ryan's previous statement, and the dialogical perspectives of Scott and Freire, is through considering the discursive boundaries of the public sphere, especially in this period when class conflict in daily life was an articulated and lived experience and people gathered on the public stage to discuss and debate critical matters. In effect, left agitators promoted a proletarian public sphere where working class solidarity and emancipation were enacted in competition with bourgeois and respectable plebian norms. By looking at the public sphere through the lens of American radical feminist social philosopher Nancy Fraser, one can better understand how left agitators were counterpublic catalysts who projected, in Fraser's words, “alternative styles of political behavior and alternative norms of public speech.” Such “subaltern counterpublics,” according to Fraser, “invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests and needs . . . (functioning) as spaces of withdrawal and regroupment . . . (and) as bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed towards wider publics.”⁷

Of course, the oppositional counterpublic was often circumscribed and contradicted by gendered and ethno-cultural discourses that re-articulated the political pedagogy of left labor agitators into less contestatory activities. Leela Fernandes's recent study of the politics of gender, class, and culture in the Calcutta Jute Mills directly appropriates Fraser's insights concerning the counterpublic and complicates them.⁸

Bracketing out these contradictions and complications, I believe that highlighting the role of left labor agitators working in the proletarian public sphere as counterpublic catalysts moves us beyond pigeonholing such agitators in the ghetto of institutional labor history and into the larger context of how the public sphere was constituted at the time. Certainly the changes in the relations of capital and labor at this time of the second industrial revolution had a profound impact on working class mobilization. However, as Kenneth Tucker argues in his study of French revolutionary syndicalism, “worker movements were as much struggling to define their relationship to the emergence of new forms of instrumental and communicative knowledge as they were responding to the loss of occupational autonomy through the rise of capitalism.”¹¹

In order to understand and underscore the role of left labor agitators in the public sphere of the early twentieth-century Pacific Rim, I want to highlight two of the more important itinerant proletarian leaders in New Zealand and Australia during this period. Although one was born in New Zealand and one in Canada, both spent formative moments in North America engaged in radical labor activities before intersecting at a key moment in the history of working class mobilization in New Zealand. Both then went to Australia where their left positions started to diverge in fundamental ways. Although both considered themselves Marxists, one was clearly a syndicalist with socialist leanings while the other was a socialist with syndicalist leanings. Those leanings eventually led one to the Labor Party in Australasia while the other became involved with the Communist Party in Australia and the Soviet Union. While one wrote partial memoirs of his experience in the labor movement, the other left no memoirs beyond a brief overview of his time in the Soviet Union. Hence, tracking each of these individuals along their various paths has led to documentary gaps as well as doctrinal disputes. While I want to pay attention to the biographical record, the ideological trajectory is what interests me more, especially in the period from 1905–1920, a period that saw the emergence of the Industrial Workers of the World and a period also called by the American cultural historian, Christopher Lasch, the “syndicalist moment.”¹²

The biographical background of John Benjamin King, born in Canada in 1870, is almost nonexistent. Unlike Patrick Hodgens Hickey, whose entry by Erik Olssen in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography fills in many biographical details (minus however the Australian experience), King has not yet received the kind of attention to my knowledge that would give us some understanding of his upbringing. What I've gathered about King comes from Canadian, New Zealand, and Australian historians interested in the IWW. From those sources King is identified as a one-time copper miner in Greenwood British Columbia who became “prominent (in 1910–11) as a member of the Vancouver local of the IWW . . . (and later) appointed IWW organizer for the city.”¹⁴

Hickey's trans-Pacific journeys included a short stint as a teenage prospector in Alaska and then a round the world trip that took him to Ireland, New York, Alaska, Utah and Western Australia before he returned to New Zealand in 1907. Hickey's travel stories are contained in letters to his sister, Mary, which are gathered in a collection of Hickey papers at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington. While those letters help to identify Hickey as a member of the Western Federation of Miners in the United States, one of the key industrial unions behind the formation of the IWW in 1905, no New Zealand historian had managed to locate the specifics of Hickey's interactions with the WFM and IWW. By looking at Hickey's letter from Utah and identifying the address as Bingham Canyon, I could then turn to Philip Mellinger's book on Race and Labor in Western Copper and track down the existence and location of the minutes for the Bingham Canyon local union. Working my way through the cramped writings of the minutes, I was able to find the first mention of Hickey in the minutes of July 15, 1905. After September 16, 1905 I found no further reference to Hickey. Interestingly, while Hickey wrote to his sister that he had been elected to office in the local union, the minutes show that he was appointed to a number of union tasks, nominated for the finance committee and delegate to the state union convention, but not officially elected to any office.¹⁸

Whatever the disjunction between wh

When Hickey returned to New Zealand, he had an opportunity to put into practice the rhetoric of the WFM Preamble and the emergent discourse of the IWW. Newly hired with other young migratory miners at the Blackball mine in January of 1908, Hickey quickly took advantage of a number of outstanding grievances between the miners and the company. Among the grievances was a question of the allotment of time for meals. Directly defying a supervisor's order and circumventing an appeal to the Arbitration Court, Hickey and the local union struck after the company fired him and seven other members of the local Socialist Party active in the union. Eschewing a negotiated settlement, the miners mobilized local and national support for a strike that was seen by all sides as a challenge to state control and discipline of an increasingly disorderly working class.²¹

Building on the Blackball experience, Hickey and other left-wing agitators, mostly former Australian miners, Paddy Webb and Robert Semple, touted the industrial unionism of the IWW in their development of the New Zealand Federation of Labour over the next several years. They were aided in their advocacy of industrial unionism by the agitation of fellow Aussie socialist émigrés, Harry Scott Bennett and Robert Ross. While all of these men were still wedded to a position of industrial and electoral action, a position reflected in the work of Daniel De Leon and the De Leonite wing of the IWW, they, nonetheless, articulated a view of direct action that helped foster syndicalist counterpublics, and erode the legitimacy of the state mediated arbitration courts that had been institutionalized in Australasia at the turn of the century. All through 1911 articles in the Maoriland Worker, edited by Ross with help from Hickey, and the Social Democrat, edited by Scott Bennett, promoted industrial unionism and a more overt form of revolutionary syndicalism. With the discontent at workplaces growing in this period, as well as disenchantment with compulsory arbitration, the diffusion of such syndicalist sentiments led to union factions that strongly identified with the direct action wing of the IWW.²²

In fact, King, along with Edwin Sayes, wrote several articles for the Social Democrat that espoused revolutionary industrial unionism and a form of syndicalist internationalism. Arguing that in addition to demonstrating “how workers could organize industrially to prevent local or national scabbery . . . , it is necessary to be affiliated with other revolutionary industrial organizations of the world, so that the entire working class of the world could act simultaneously upon all questions concerning their welfare.” Engaging in such internationalism would prevent “the employing class from pitting the workers of one country against those of another.”²³

When King arrived as a veteran IWW organizer in Auckland in late 1911, he found an inner city described by Erik Olssen as consisting of thirty-nine percent immigrant with fifty-nine percent of those immigrants male. Attracting the kind of young, single, restless, and rough men to whom the Wobblies appealed, Auckland was, thus, the perfect location for the development of a syndicalist counterpublic. Auckland's inner-city ambience, not unlike that found in mining and logging communities around the Pacific Rim, engendered forms of class conflict and solidarity in the public sphere that resonated with the IWW message. Moreover, as Tom Barker noted: “At the time Auckland, being so far away from the world, had very little entertainment. People had to make their own interests and, so, for the time and place, Auckland was a very active place politically.”²⁴

King soon began a tour of mining towns on North Island in March and April of 1912, settling at Waihi, a mining community that would shortly become a lightening rod of working class mobilization and a site for discursive debates that would unite and then divide Hickey's socialism from King's syndicalism. During his time in Waihi, King taught an economics class to thirty or so miners and managed to become part of the Waihi strike committee when a breakaway scab union of engine drivers threatened the solidarity of miners. At the May 1912 Red Fed Conference in Wellington called in the midst of the Waihi strike, King and Hickey began as allies in proposing a resolution condemning organized scabbery at Waihi. In Erik Olssen's stirring and meticulous account of what transpired, Hickey's confrontational attack on the leadership of the Red Feds was eventually tamed while King's rhetoric bristled with Wobbly appeals to a general strike. When King and Hickey were later elected to a rules revising committee, both favored the adoption of the IWW Preamble. However, King and Hickey diverged on key issues such as state ownership of the mines, compulsory unionism, and parliamentary politics. Hickey welcomed nationalization and participation in electoral campaigns since these activities were fundamental ideological components of his brand of socialism. On the other hand, King denounced nationalization as “state enterprises . . . owned by capitalists,” and eschewed parliamentary politics for direct economic action. When King offered a resolution denouncing any form of electoral action, Hickey countered with an amendment that would allow the Federation to select candidates for office. Hickey's amendment was passed in a close vote that followed on the rejection of King's resolution.²⁵

While Hickey went on to work for unity of the labor movement in New Zealand, King, facing a parliamentary inquiry about his actions and statements at Waihi, left for Australia in August of 1912. King was immediately instrumental in reorienting the Sydney local of the IWW into a syndicalist and antielectoral orientation. By 1914 with the appearance of the first issue of Direct Action, the Australian IWW newspaper, King was listed as the General Organizer and a “convincing and earnest expositor of scientific organization and Marxian economics.” As a lecturer on Marxism and economics, King was said to possess the ability of “making a dry subject interesting.” King especially stressed in these lectures “the effects of mechanization on the working class and how this was deskilling workers and turning them solely into tenders of machines.”²⁶

As an organizer, agitator, and pedagogue, King's movements, as noted in Direct Action, took him to various locations throughout Australia. From January to June of 1915 King agitated and organized in Freemantle and in other working class communities of Western Australia. During these travels, King attempted to implement the revolutionary pedagogy articulated in the pages of the IWW newspaper: “It is the function of the IWW to educate the workers of the world into right ideas concerning the economic relationship of the workers of the world . . . The workers can never be emancipated without first being inspired and permeated with new ideas . . .”²⁸

When Tom Barker, as editor of Direct Action, was arrested a second time for running material construed by the authorities as undermining the war effort, King and the IWW mobilized their extensive following in Sydney and then throughout Australia to urge Barker's release. Denouncing Barker's arrest in the Sydney Domain before thousands, King attacked the capitalist system in the following incendiary language: “It is the mission of the working class to make this world a hell for the capitalist class and every shirker that belongs to it. I do not mind seeing them roasting and toasting on the gridiron.”³¹

The same Bob Ross in the pages of The Socialist noted the arrival in December of 1915 of Comrade P. H. Hickey in Sydney. Shortly thereafter, Hickey made his way to Melbourne and began to lecture immediately for the Victorian Socialist Party in 1916 on a number of issues from “Labor and Socialism in New Zealand” to “The War and the Pope” to “Australia's Need: Industrial Organisation” to “The Future of the Australian Labor Party.”³³

Hickey continued to support industrial unionism in his various activities. In one article he argued that “resolutions alone will not convert men to the principles of industrial unionism or in any appreciable degree hasten the coming of One Big Union. Industrial Unionism must be supported by clear logic, convincing argument and persistent agitation.”³⁵

One clear indication of this divergent path came ironically in Hickey's support for Tom Barker's release from prison. In the May 11, 1916 edition of the Call, Hickey noted that he has “known (Barker) for some years” and while “wide apart on Labor tactics and organization as the poles . . . Barker is too good and too loyal a member of his class to be caged in the Bastille for twelve months.” In the aftermath of the outlawing of the IWW by the Hughes government with the passage of the Unlawful Associations Act, Hickey wrote in the pages of the February 1, 1917 edition of The Labor Call that “the term IWW is being freely used by the daily press as a sort of bogeyman to scare timid capital and incidentally poison the unthinking against the Labor movement in general.” When Prime Minister Hughes accused Hickey of being a member of the IWW, he took the issue to court and received apologies and costs from Hughes and the newspapers that had published Hughes's accusations.

By 1918 ensconced on the Central Executive of the Victorian branch of the Labor Party, Hickey published a direct attack on the IWW with the help of the Queensland section of the Australian Workers Union, a union whose leadership was extremely antagonistic to the IWW even though some of the rank-and-file were still attracted to the outlawed organization. Insisting that the IWW was composed of “irresponsible persons” engaged in “disjointed, planless, stupid effort to . . . terrorize . . . the employing class,” Hickey defended his own socialist banner of solidarity against such syndicalist wreckers.³⁷

Beyond the explicit vitriolic rejection of the IWW, Hickey's pamphlet implicitly represents the critical distinction in the ranks of labor and the left between respectable and disreputable modes of agitation and activism with the IWW, representing what Andrew Metcalfe identified as the “larrikin mode of class struggle.”³⁹

Hickey's critique of IWW strategy and tactics was paralleled by radical Australian women who saw such masculinist posturing by the IWW as exclusionary and self-defeating. Labor activist and feminist, May Brodney, “claimed that although she supported the views of the IWW on industrial unionism, she rejected their tactics of sabotage and dismissed their program of direct action as an ‘infantile form of vandalism.'” Margaret Thorp was similarly not impressed by the IWW's tactics of direct action and sabotage and was opposed to the use of force to bring industrial peace. According to Thorp, “it's the whole miserable system we have to change and there are various methods of hastening the revolution without resorting to unworthy means.”⁴²

The greatest divergence between the political journeys of Hickey and King were to mark the last years of each man's public life. In 1919, Hickey became editor of the newspaper of the Queensland Railways Union. By 1920 Hickey had returned to New Zealand to edit the Maoriland Worker. After a political falling-out with his old comrades on the paper, Hickey tried his hand at the printing business. Unable to forswear Labor politics, Hickey unsuccessfully ran for a parliamentary seat. Peripatetic as always, Hickey moved back after five years to Australia and Melbourne where he was selected by the ALP for a safe seat in 1930, only to die on the eve of the election.⁴³

At almost the exact time of Hickey's death, King was to leave for the Soviet Union for a six-year sojourn. How he got to that voyage is part of the tragic story of the repression of the IWW and the splintering of the syndicalist left. As a consequence of the state repression of the IWW in 1916 in the midst of the first campaign around the conscription referendum, King was first charged with forgery in September of 1916 and then arrested in October of 1916 as part of the famous case of the IWW Twelve, a case that galvanized defense committees from the ranks of labor and the left and was recounted in contemporary accounts and historically memorialized in Ian Turner's 1967, Sydney's Burning. Without reviewing all the ins and outs of the case against King and his fellow Wobblies, his argument against the charge of seditious conspiracy resulted in the following pre-sentencing statement: “I have known that the moment I made the slightest attempt to better the conditions of the working class, that moment I was conflicting with the laws of the pirates—the capitalists. . . . I am not the cause of class strife, I am the product of it.”⁴⁴

After his release on August 30, 1921, King and a few other prominent Wobblies joined the Communist Party, but split with it shortly thereafter. Forming the Industrial Union Propaganda League (IUPL) and republishing Direct Action with Tom Glynn, King went back on the lecture circuit. Trying to navigate through the treacherous waters of left splinters and splits during this time, the IUPL rejoined the Communist Party. Nonetheless, King and other ex-Wobblies retained their suspicions concerning the positions of the Communist Party, especially related to what were then the boring-from-within tactics of the Party. In responding to the idea of capturing political machinery of the unions and the state, King asserted: “One doesn't want to capture a mad dog before shooting it.”⁴⁶

Like other left agitators in the 1920s, King was alternatively attracted to and repelled by the Communist Party and the Soviet Union. Eventually, his desire to be part of what was presumed to be a great experiment in a worker's state led King to the Soviet Union in the 1930s. When he returned to Australia in 1936 to laud that experiment and his involvement in it at a talk for the Friends of the Soviet Union in Sydney, he was met with ridicule from the Sydney Morning Herald, a paper that had also ridiculed the IWW. The paper excoriated his transition from the “go-slow” approach of the Wobblies to the “fast worker” program of Stalinist Russia. Whether the barbs of a capitalist newspaper his home or not, King could not sustain his faith in the Communist Party or the Soviet Union. He quit the party and drifted out of political activism and the public record.⁴⁷

On the other hand, both King and Hickey occupied the public stage at one of the most critical moments in the history of working-class mobilization. As left-wing labor agitators, they traveled across the Pacific and the Tasman organizing for their particular ideological understanding of industrial unionism in North America, New Zealand and Australia. Although their paths crossed and deviated from each other, they enacted the role of couterpublic catalyst at a time when socialism and syndicalism appeared on the historical agenda and workers eagerly absorbed the printed material and public debates they sponsored and that proliferated during the early twentieth century. The left currents that Hickey and King represented in labor obviously had to contend with the specific political opportunity structures and ideologies available in the historic moment and within a particular national context. As noted by Kenneth Tucker, “social movements such as syndicalism had many different discursive strands in them, and their social and institutional context, as well as internal political struggles, often influenced their direction.”⁴⁸

Beyond the Australasian borders, revolutionary syndicalism often conjured up those forces that were well prepared to suppress syndicalism. As Gerald Friedman has noted in his study of French syndicalism: “The syndicalists' reliance on mass strikes undermined the basis for their success because in the long run such strikes antagonized state officials and drove frightened employers to mobilize collectively in self-defence.”⁴⁹

In comparison to Australia and the United States, the level of repression visited on the IWW in New Zealand was not severe. But then, that repression occurred in the context of mobilizing a population for war and regulating labor relations for the benefit of that war.⁵⁰

In fact, the orientation of the vast majority of New Zealand socialist and labor leaders had been towards parliamentary politics even in the midst of the discourse about industrial unionism and revolutionary syndicalism. Hence, there was limited and historically constrained syndicalist opposition to electoral politics in New Zealand. This may help to explain Hickey's continuing commitment to such labor parties in Australia and New Zealand. In addition, Hickey's involvement with the Australian and New Zealand labor parties placed him in the camp of those whose ambivalence about the relevance of the Russian revolution undermined their militant opposition to the political system and established their antagonism to the emerging communist movement.⁵²

On the other hand, King's commitment to the revolutionary syndicalism of the IWW after its severe repression during World War One in Australia may have led to his erratic relations with the Communist Party.⁵³

With the advent of new forms of mass communication and mass consumerism, the proletarian counterpublic, so assiduously cultivated by Hickey and King, appeared to suffer serious erosion. Reinforced by wartime repression and postwar “red scares,” such proletarian counterpublics were undoubtedly marginalized and splintered. It may be that such left labor agitators as Hickey and King were “a brilliant last flowering of a tradition coming to an end with the introduction of the phonograph, motion pictures, and radio.”⁵⁵