Students Look at Labour

• "The New Zealand Labour Party" by Louise Overacker, in American Political Science Review, September, 1935.
• "Twenty Years of Compulsory Unionism" by R. M. Martin in V.U.C. Political Science, September, 1956.
• "Communism and the Labour Party: is Co-operationo Possible?" G. D. H. Cole, published with a preface by the N.Z. Student Labour Federation, 1956.

Student ventures in political thought are rarely taken seriously except by students. But the revival of interest in socialist theory in the British Labour movement has been largely stimulated by pamphles and articles emanating from the Universities, and it looks seriously as if some similar trend may be at work in New Zealand.

It is 18 months since the appearance of Miss Overacker's article on the New Zealand Labour Party in America's best known political science periodical, and yet so far there has been no New Zealand comment on it. Graduate of a leading U.S. College, she did the research for the study chiefly at V.U.C. under a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1954. And the result is worth reading for more reasons than that in a notably erudite footnote it quotes a pamphlet by one of "Salient's" editors.

It is a clinical analysis of the labour Party, its history, constitution, sources of support, and the behaviour of its leaders in victory and defeat Particularly valuable is Miss Overacker's treatment of Labour's dual personality from the uneasy union of Red Feds and Moderates that gave birth to the amorphous and contradictory thing it is today. Her answer to Labour's problems is "a rank-and-file awakening" which will depend, she suggests, on the eventuality of another Depression.

Ross Martin's article on compulsory unionism in New Zealand is a boildown from a M.A. thesis. Although it comes to no conclusion on the rights and wrongs of the issue it discusses, it presents the facts in such a way that already the Carpenters' Union have picked the article up and reprinted it in their journal. (The Union is hotly opposed to compulsory union membership.)

While not as exhaustive as his thesis. Mr. Martin's article lays bare the assence of the present situation in the industrial labour movement, and the background and potentialities of the groups favouring and opposing the status quo. With the rejection by the Australian Labour Party of its old policy of compulsory unionism at its conference this month, this article has acquired a new topicality, and deserves careful attention.

Prof. Colo's pamphlet first appeared as an article in the New Statesman last year. The freeze-up in the direction of a new cold war situation following on Suez and Hungary alter the situation with which he deals, but the heart of the matter is as pointed now as when it was written.

Cole's line is the one he has been gently plugging since his "People's Front" twenty years ago—that both the Kremlin and Transport House varieties of Socialism are branches of a single tree, and that while one variety may suit one nation, another may suit another. This does not, of course, prevent him from fiercely attacking the barbarous dictatorship of Stalinism or the surrender to big business interests of Western Labour leaders.

The S.L.F.'s introduction relates Cole's remarks to the New Zealand scene, and makes some additional points which are worth reading.

—C.B.