Our History: The Commonweal

Martin Crick explores the original Commonweal first published in New Zealand in 1903. This article was first published in April 200 for volume one of our publication of the same name.

Before the name was adopted by early socialists in New Zealand, the Socialist League had been publishing under The Commonweal masthead since 1885.

By the turn of the 20^th century there were only a few hundred active socialists in Aotearoa: a Socialist Church and a Fabian Society in Christchurch, Fabians also in Dunedin, a Socialist League in Wellington. However, the arrival of 190 men and women  from the UK in 1900  , who intended to form a co-operative colony, almost doubled that number. New Zealand at that time was seen by progressive forces worldwide as a sort of laboratory test case of social-democratic government, thanks to the reforms of the Seddon government. The colony was backed by William Ranstead, the financial supporter of the Clarion, a hugely popular socialist weekly magazine published in England. The colony was never established and the ‘Clarionettes’, as they were known dispersed throughout New Zealand. Soon disillusioned with this supposed socialist utopia, and realising the need for an independent party of labour, they helped to establish the first New Zealand Socialist Party.

The first branch was set up in Wellington in July 1901. The party represented most shades of socialist thought from Marxists, Fabians, parliamentary socialists, to syndicalists and anarchists, and was loosely organised. Soon after other branches were formed in Auckland and Christchurch. Tom Mann was an early organiser for the Party. Mann along with Ben Tillett, who also visited Aotearoa, had been organisers of the successful 1889 London dock strike. By 1903 the Party had established a journal called the Commonweal, based in Wellington and edited by Robert Hogg.

Robert Hogg in 1907 holding a copy of The Commonweal.

Wellington became the centre for a group of anti-parliamentary socialists. Hogg declared in the first issue of Commonweal:  'Our aim is revolution, not reform, because we mean to abolish the foundation of all existing institutions.' He continued:

‘The paper is the organ and advocate of an aggressive political party which takes the field for the first time in the April municipal elections in this Empire city, but which will remain in the field till it has captured the government of New Zealand, abolished poverty and wage slavery, and turned Maoriland into a Cooperative Commonwealth, where each shall be for all and all for each, where, in the words of grand old William Morris, - All mine and all thine shall be ours, and no more shall any man crave For riches that serve nothing but to fetter a friend for a slave.’

At its peak the NZSP numbered some 3000 members. Commonweal merged with the newly- founded Maoriland Worker in 1911, and the NZSP, after unity discussions with a number of other labour organisations, merged into the Social-Democratic Party in 1913, to become the New Zealand Labour Party in 1916. For further information look no further than Wellington comrade Mark Dunick’s Master’s thesis Making rebels: The New Zealand Socialist Party 1901-1913. There he says that ‘the New Zealand Socialist Party played an important role in spreading new ideas and educating a generation of socialists’, and its journal Commonweal was influential in that role.