History, necessity, and the New Zealand Wars: a reply to Chris Trotter

There's an interesting contrast between two posts that Chris Trotter has recently made to his blog. In a post he made a couple of weeks ago called 'As Auckland goes, so goes the country' Trotter excoriates the bourgeoisie that established itself in Auckland in the nineteenth century. Trotter holds up Thomas Russell, the man who made large sums of money by speculating on lands confiscated from Maori after the invasion of Waikato, as a symbol of the mendacity of this capitalist class, which was as happy to pay Pakeha workers in the cities miserably low wages as it was to expropriate the land of Maori communities in the countryside.

It would be difficult to read 'As Auckland goes, so goes the country' without concluding that Chris regards the dispossession of Maori in the aftermath of the wars of the nineteenth century as an act of obvious injustice which ought to be condemned by historians. In a post he made last week, though, Trotter tries to argue that the loss of Maori land and sovereignty was ultimately a progressive phenomenon, and that historians and activists who have drawn attention to the dispossession and disempowerment of Maori have played a counterproductive role, despite their good intentions.

How can we understand the apparent contradiction between Trotter's posts? I would argue that it is a reflection of a wider contradiction amongst Western socialists, a contradiction that can even be found in the work of the most famous socialist of all, Karl Marx. In some of his best-known texts Marx salutes the progressive features of capitalism and hails the destruction of pre-capitalist societies by the industrialists and imperialists of the West, even as he draws attention to the negative aspects of capitalism, and predicts the ultimate downfall of the system.

The Communist Manifesto is a good example of Marx's conflicted attitude to capitalism: the text is best-known for its call for working class revolution in the advanced countries of the West, but it opens with pages of praise for the revolutionary features of capitalism, a system which Marx believes is abolishing 'the idiocy and backwardness of rural life' and bringing civilisation to 'the most barbarous of nations'. The Manifesto makes a coded reference to the Opium Wars which Britain had recently waged against China, in a successful effort to get that country to open its doors to trade. In articles written at about the same time as the Manifesto, Marx calls Britain's colonisation of India 'revolutionary'.

For much of his life, Marx believed that the imposition of capitalism was a prerequisite for the achievement of the socialist system he believed was superior to capitalism. He supported the imperialists who brought capitalism, with its factories and its railways and its splintering of communally-owned lands, to 'barbarous' countries like India and China, because he thought that capitalism represented a step forward for these countries. Only once they had passed through a 'stage' of capitalist development would nations like India and China be ripe for socialist revolution.

Towards the end of his life, Marx began to lose faith in his optimistic vision of socialist revolution following inevitably from capitalist development. He was upset by the failure of the Paris Commune of 1871 to inspire a socialist revolution across Western Europe. He was disturbed by the conservative hostility to revolution of an increasingly comfortable upper layer of skilled workers in nations like Germany and Britain.

In a series of texts written over the last decade of his life, Marx modified, and in some cases repudiated, his earlier praise for imperialism as a progressive force. In a preface to a Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto written the year before his death, for example, Marx deplored the way that capitalist 'development' was leading to the destruction of Russia's communally-owned peasant farms, and suggested that Russia did not need to experience all the horrors of capitalism before it could become socialist. For the late Marx, the communal forms of property that existed in societies like Russia, the Iroquois Federation, and Java could become the building blocks of an agrarian, indigenous socialism. But Marx never quite managed to reconcile his late enthusiasm for pre-capitalist societies with his early praise for imperialism, and his magnum opus, Capital, remained an unfinished, fragmentary work.

Chris Trotter can perhaps be described as a classical social democrat, of the sort that dominated the Second International that Marx's old ally Engels helped to set up in 1889. Classical social democrats like Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein observed the steady rise in prosperity in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe, and decided that the increased stability and wealth of capitalism made it possible for workers to 'tame' the system, by extracting reforms from it. Ultimately, Kautsky and many other Second Internationalists believed, capitalism could be made to evolve into socialism, as workers won control of the levers of the state and of industry from bosses. The Second International disintegrated in 1914, when Europe's ruling classes went to war, the workers of the continent followed them, and the notion of capitalism as a stable progressive system seemed suddenly bankrupt. The ideas of the International have nevertheless had a long afterlife; it might be argued, for instance, that they found their way into the programme of New Zealand's first Labour government, and that they influenced the popular Alliance Party in the 1990s. It is not surprising that the leading theorists of the Second International were hostile to Marx's late criticisms of imperialism and his late claim that 'primitive' societies could achieve socialism without first experiencing capitalism. After the death of Engels in 1895, Kautsky became Marx's literary executor, and began to repress the great man's 'heretical' late texts.

Kautsky was both a sophisticated intellectual and a compassionate man, and he was well aware of the suffering that capitalism caused, in the industrial West as well as the 'barbarous' countries of the East and South. He wrote often about the greed of factory-owners and bankers, and about the misery of those who worked for the bourgeoisie in factories and on plantations. But Kautsky was convinced that, despite all the suffering it caused, capitalism played a necessary and progressive historical role. It destroyed old and 'barbarous' forms of life and brought peoples together in the working classes of new industrial cities, where they could form trade unions and socialist parties that could campaign for a better future.

Chris Trotter's belief that the defeat of Maori in the wars of the nineteenth century was ultimately progressive, despite the injustice and suffering it involved, seems to me to echo the views of Kautsky and other Second Internationalists, and the attitude that Marx expressed in texts like The Communist Manifesto.

Trotter is no fool: he is well aware of the dubious motives of men like Thomas Russell, and he knows that Pakeha rule and capitalist economics were imposed upon the Maori of regions like the Waikato at the point of a gun. Yet he believes that the 'unitary state' and united working class allegedly achieved by Pakeha victory in the wars of the nineteenth century were essential for the development of New Zealand, and for the development of the New Zealand left. Trotter believes that the union movement of twentieth century New Zealand, with its 'homogenous' character and base in the big industrial cities of the country, was ultimately a product of the nineteenth century wars, and he rails against 'revisionist' historians and politically correct politicians who have allegedly weakened and divided the workers' movement by stirring up Maori grievances based in the wars.

Yet, as we have noted, Trotter's view of history sometimes forces him to perform somersaults. He can slam Thomas Russell and the nineteenth century bourgeoisie as the greedy racists they so obviously were; but he must also applaud and defend Russell and his ilk, as the unwitting agents of progressive change. The contradiction at the heart of Trotter's thought has led to a great deal of confusion amongst his readers, and perhaps limited his influence on the New Zealand left. Many Kiwi leftists have enjoyed and appreciated Trotter's shrewd analyses of the New Zealand bourgeoisie, and his denunciations of the neo-liberal economic and social policies that have done so much damage to our country over the past quarter century; they are bewildered, and perhaps even offended, though, when they read Trotter attacking Maori activism and tino rangatiratanga in language that might come from the mouth of Don Brash.

Trotter's recent blog post might be read as an attempt to cure the contradiction which has plagued his thought. Entitled 'Apologising for Victory', the piece, which was published in the weekly Independent as well as on Trotter's blog, sets out to prove that the defeat and dispossession of Maori in the nineteenth century was inevitable, even though it was also, in the short-term at least, unjust. If Trotter can prove that there was no possible alternative to Maori losing their sovereignty and much of their land, then he can prove that there is no real contradiction in his view of history. If Maori were doomed to defeat at the hands of Pakeha, and New Zealand was predestined to follow the path it took in the twentieth century, then it makes little sense to rake over the ashes of conflicts like the Waikato War, and to talk about reviving a Maori sovereignty that had became obsolete long ago.

Trotter is hardly the first writer to suggest that nineteenth century Maori suffered a decisive and inevitable defeat at the hands of Pakeha. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the inevitability of Maori defeat was taken for granted by Pakeha. James Cowan's monumental history of the nineteenth century wars, which was a standard work for decades after its publication in 1922, presents Maori as noble but melancholy savages, who were doomed to lose battles like Rangiriri and Orakau and destined to disappear from Kiwi society as the twentieth century wore on. In recent decades, a series of scholars have challenged Cowan's assumptions. James Belich's book The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict, for example, examines a number of campaigns and battles, and demonstrates that Maori fighters and organisers frequently performed far better than Cowan and other scholars of his time had allowed. Belich and other 'revisionists' have shown that anti-Maori forces were defeated in important battles, that these reverses prompted panic in colonial governments, and that it was a combination of the presence of large British expeditionary forces and a certain amount of luck which eventually allowed the colonists to prevail.

Contemporary scholars have also exposed the differences between London and governments in Auckland and Wellington over the necessity of the wars against Maori. The Foreign and Colonial Office in London was sometimes less enthusiastic than Auckland and Wellington businessmen and politicians about the prospect of war, and about the dispatching of thousands of British troops to obscure battlefields in the Waikato and Taranaki. Even the British commanders entrusted with prosecuting many of the wars were sometimes less than keen about their task. General Cameron, who led the invasion of the Waikato in 1863, sympathised with his Maori opponents, and tried whenever possible to limit the scope of his army's operations.

Trotter ridicules the idea that the British-appointed governors who prosecuted the wars against Maori might have chosen to honour rather than tear up the Treaty of Waitangi, and insists that any British government which refused to give its full backing to the wars that Russell and co organised would have been thrown out of office by voters. Even if Britain had abandoned Aotearoa to its indigenous inhabitants, Trotter believes that other imperial powers would have descended and launched their own settlement programmes:

Britain’s colonial rivals would never have permitted 268,000 square kilometres of prime real estate, located conveniently in the temperate zone of the Southern Hemisphere, to remain in indigenous hands.

If Britain didn’t have the stomach to rob the Maori of their patrimony, you may be certain that France, Germany, Spain or the United States would have "taken up the White Man’s burden" with alacrity. And while, for Pakeha, a French Nouvelle Zélande may well have been an improvement on Mother England’s (as the recent hit comedy Le Sud wittily confirms) it would still have been a disaster for Maori.

Britain certainly wished to cling to its southernmost colony during the 1860s, but the Old Country's politicians and bureaucrats did not necessarily think that expropriating Maori and enriching Thomas Russell and his cronies was the only way to hold onto New Zealand. In many parts of its empire, Britain was happy to allow indigenous people to retain to much of their land and run most of their own affairs, as long as they relinquished control of strategic assets like ports, large towns and mines, and ritually recognised British sovereignty and superiority. White colonies like Rhodesia, Australia, and New Zealand were the exception, not the rule, in the empire.

In Fiji, one of its most important Pacific possessions, Britain was happy to run a minimalist administration, leaving most land in indigenous hands and letting chiefs run their own villages. New Zealand attempts to flood Fiji with white settlers were frustrated by British administrators in Suva, who were aware of the way Maori were losing their land.

Britain initially chose to underwrite the war against Maori, but by the end of the 1860s it had run out of patience and withdrawn its troops, leaving the government in Wellington unable to press home victories in the Waikato and Taranaki and seize areas like the King Country and southern Taranaki. Even after the formal 'opening' of those areas to Pakeha in the 1880s, a situation that the historians Richard Hill and Mark Derby have called 'dual sovereignty' persisted in many rural areas of the North Island.

Trotter's argument that Britain was inevitably and irrevocably committed to the wars of the Pakeha bourgeoisie is, then, problematic. It is easy to imagine London's pragmatic, penny-pinching bureaucrats refusing to grant requests for troops from their obscure and unprofitable colony before the end of the 1860s, and instead brokering some sort of deal which guaranteed British control over New Zealand ports and other important assets in exchange for Maori control of swathes of the country's hinterland.

Trotter's claim that other colonial powers would have seized New Zealand and inundated it with settlers if Britain withdrew is also problematic. Trotter names Spain, the United States, Germany and France as would-be possessors of New Zealand. In the 1860s, though, Spain was a basket case, the United States was consumed by civil war, and Germany did not even exist as a unified nation, let alone an imperial power. When Germany did eventually colonise parts of the Pacific, it showed little interest in reconstructing these possessions along European lines. German farmers and traders were actively discouraged from settling in Samoa by the colonial dministration there.

Only France might have been expected to colonise a New Zealand abandoned by Britain in the 1860s, and it is by no means certain that the French would have been interested in expropriating Maori and flooding their new colony with large numbers of settlers. The massive redistribution of farmland which occurred during the French revolution meant that French peasants were less likely to want to travel to the other side of the world in search of land than their British cousins.

Trotter downplays the importance of nineteenth century Tonga, which managed to avoid colonisation, by suggesting that the country consisted of little more than a few 'specks of land' in a corner of the vast Pacific. In fact, Tonga was an exceptionally fertile country with two of the best harbours in the Pacific and a highly strategic location at the centre of a great deal of sea traffic. Tonga's King Tupou the first kept his nation's independence by building the institutions of a modern state, including a well-drilled army, and playing rival imperialist powers off against each other. For half a century, the Kingdom of Hawaii was able to perform the same feat.

Tonga and nineteenth century Hawaii offer proof that Polynesian peoples could build their own states, negotiate their own way into the modern world, and resist Western imperialism. On a smaller scale, the Maori King movement which ruled parts of the North Island from the 1850s to the 1880s offers the same lesson. The Kingitanga established a set of institutions and a pan-tribal consciousness that survived military defeat and have persisted to the present day.

The King movement's economic legacy is also important. The Marxist sociologist Dave Bedggood has used the term 'Polynesian mode of production' to describe the hybrid economic system that flourished in the Waikato Kingdom in the 1850s and early 1860s, and which later thrived in the famous mini-state of Parihaka. The inhabitants of the Waikato Kingdom and of Parihaka held and worked their land in common, but exported their products to Pakeha capitalist enclaves like Auckland. They thus participated in the capitalist economy without sacrificing traditional forms of social organisation. The mills that dotted the Waikato and the Maori-owned schooners that arrived in Auckland and other cities laden with fruit and vegetables testified to the success of the Kingitanga's socialistic economic system.

Perhaps the weakest part of 'Apologising for Victory' is Trotter's attempt to attribute the 'Maori renaissance' of recent decades to the machinations of a few Pakeha intellectuals who have gone 'soft', become 'revisionists', and decided to divide Kiwis along racial lines. In truth, it is Maori themselves who have been behind land rights marches, the language revival movement, the campaign for kohanga reo, the protests against the confiscation of the seabed and foreshore, and the many other political and cultural aspects of the Maori renaissance. Contrary to Trotter's suggestions, Maori were never 'assimilated' into a 'united' New Zealand in the twentieth century: they held on to their history, to their marae, and to important parcels of land. Even if the King movement and other expressions of the desire for tino rangatiratanga were defeated militarily in the nineteenth century, they left enough of a legacy to ensure the reemergence of Maori as a major force in New Zealand society in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

It seems to me that Chris Trotter has failed to demonstrate either the inevitability or the ultimately progressive nature of the defeats that Maori suffered in the nineteenth century. The contradiction at the heart of his thought remains unresolved. Instead of trying to turn history into teleology, Chris might consider abandoning the rather Eurocentric vision of socialism held by his Second International forebears, and instead investigating Marx's late, wonderfully open-minded, determinedly anti-imperialist writings. Chris may discover that the sort of socialism that Marx advocated for 'undeveloped' countries like nineteenth century Russia has a great deal in common with the Polynesian mode of production pioneered by the King movement in the Waikato a century and a half ago.