Articles by Toby Boraman
New Zealand Journal of History, 2023
International Review of Social History, 2019
Studies of indigenous workers' resistance focus largely on rural workers. In contrast, this artic... more Studies of indigenous workers' resistance focus largely on rural workers. In contrast, this article examines indigenous workers' dissent in an industrialized and largely urbanized setting-that of Maori meat processing workers in Aotearoa New Zealand. I argue that far from being passive victims of colonization and capitalism , Maori meatworkers played an often vital role in the generally extensive informal and formal labour unrest that occurred in the meat industry during the late 1960s to the mid-1980s. However, Maori meatworkers' resistance and solidarity was not universal, but instead varied significantly, both spatially and temporally. The dissent and solidarity that occurred were often a product of the multi-ethnic informal work groups that existed in many slaughterhouses. These workplace-whanau, in which Maori played a pivotal role, functioned similar to extended family networks on the killing floor. Workplace-whanau represented a significant intertwining of indigeneity and class. Nevertheless, as they were often based on masculine bonds, they frequently excluded female workers (including Maori women).
Labour History Project Bulletin, 2023
Counterfutures, 2018
1968 was a year of momentous global revolt against elites in both East and West. This article arg... more 1968 was a year of momentous global revolt against elites in both East and West. This article argues that 1968 is noteworthy not so much for the events of 1968 in themselves, but for helping spawn or revive a broad variety of movements which continue to have wide-ranging repercussions today. This was particularly the case in Aotearoa where, by global standards, events in 1968 were tranquil, yet a prolonged spike in dissent developed afterwards during the long 1970s. Some contend that 1968 was an individualist and cultural revolt that sowed the seeds for neoliberalism. This article argues that such an interpretation neglects the strong collective, socialist, working class, and anti-colonial dimensions of 1968 and beyond. Neoliberalism was more of a reaction to 1968 than
its product.
Journal of Labor & Society, 2017
Studies of labor struggle often concentrate on overt resistance, such as strikes, and neglect the... more Studies of labor struggle often concentrate on overt resistance, such as strikes, and neglect the rich variety of subterranean acts of workplace dissent. The few studies of this informal resistance that exist are largely a-historical and Eurocentric micro-studies that generally argue such dissent lacks radical content. Drawing on two unorthodox Marxist currents, including " autonomist Marxism " , this article presents a historical study of everyday resistance by meatworkers in Aotearoa New Zealand during the 1970s. It is asserted these struggles often hampered profits and production, complemented overt resistance, and were frequently collective rather than individualistic in nature—indeed, in many plants dissent was based on informal work groups of workplace-whanau. These were multiethnic extended family-like informal groupings that were influenced by Maori culture. While capital comprehensively restructured the meat industry in the 1980s and 1990s, it has not meant the " end of resistance " today.
New Zealand Journal of Employment Relations, 2016
During the 1970s, the number of 'non-industrial' (including 'political') work stoppages dramati... more During the 1970s, the number of 'non-industrial' (including 'political') work stoppages dramatically increased in New Zealand. In that decade, hundreds of thousands of workers participated in such stoppages, making up 30 per cent of the total number of workers involved in all recorded stoppage activity, and 15 per cent of the total number of days not worked due to all recorded stoppages. Hitherto these stoppages in their entirety have been overlooked in previous statistical analyses of the period, thus giving the impression that the extent of workplace conflict was considerably lower than it actually was. Further, many if not most of the significant and controversial strikes of the period could be considered non-industrial. Because the vast majority of these stoppages were struggles over wages and working conditions, yet directed against the government, the traditional division between economics and politics in trade union activity is difficult to sustain for the 1970s.
Please note this paper was published with numerous errors, including major formatting errors and editing mistakes, that were made by the journal who published it. Proofs were not sent to the writer before publication. So please download this version (it was the final version sent to the editors) rather than the published version.
Counterfutures, 2016
Leftist publications are inextricably linked to the ebb
and flow of struggle in society. During a... more Leftist publications are inextricably linked to the ebb
and flow of struggle in society. During an era of relatively
high dissidence – the 1970s and to a lesser extent the 1980s
– a vibrant leftist press flourished in Aotearoa. The independent
left produced many of the left’s most prominent and longest-lasting
publications. It performed an indispensable role within
the left – acting as a forum for debate, and publishing a wealth
of information and investigative research. As protest has largely
dwindled since the early 1990s, and society has generally lurched
to the right under the generalised commodification and enclosures
of neoliberalism, the left has wilted. The quality and quantity of
independent socialist magazines has generally diminished. As such
this article is somewhat of a lament for an independent left – and
the left in general – that has seemingly almost vanished, and with
it almost all of its publications.
Labour History, Nov 2012
Internationally, the New Left is frequently regarded as an archetypal middle-class movement that ... more Internationally, the New Left is frequently regarded as an archetypal middle-class movement that had little concern with the working class. Yet in New Zealand, the New Left's most prominent organisations were working-class youth groups or joint worker-student groups. Furthermore, when a major upturn in workplace antagonism occurred during the late 1960s and the 1970s, many New Leftists attempted to form links with these recalcitrant workers. New Leftists not only supported workplace disputes, but also organised in working-class inner-city suburbs. Signifi cantly, some New Leftists attempted to come to grips with the changing class composition of the time. They usefully broadened class analysis to include many white-collar workers, although much of their analysis was inconclusive. However, other New Leftists dismissed the working class, narrowly defi ned as manual workers, as backward and reactionary. Moreover, the New Left tended to perceive workers' struggles as peripheral in importance, as it primarily focussed on protesting against the Vietnam War, the nuclear threat, US military installations and apartheid. Overall, the New Left had an ambiguous and complex relationship with class-struggle.
Labour History Project Bulletin , 2021
Labour History Project Bulletin, 2021
Unfortunately, an earlier version was mistakenly published. As it contained a few errors, here is... more Unfortunately, an earlier version was mistakenly published. As it contained a few errors, here is the final publication that didn't make it to print. In the 1980s it seemed like most workplaces in Kaikorai Valley in Dunedin, where I grew up, were shut down one by one. The biggest closures were that of the Roslyn Woollen Mill in 1981 and the Burnside meatworks in 1988. At the former, 503 mostly female workers lost their jobs in what was then the biggest nationwide closure of a textile mill, while in the latter over 1000 workers, mostly males, were laid off. 1 It seemed that at least one, if not two, people in the overwhelming majority of families I knew had been thrown onto the scrapheap. De-industrialisation cast a long shadow over that community. It was a grim and tough time. I later learnt my experience was hardly unusual, as restructuring-particularly of blue-collar industries-had galling, traumatic impacts on so many other communities throughout the country in the 80s. For many, especially in single-industry towns or suburbs, it had even greater and lasting impacts. Automation. Computerisation. Restructuring. Rationalising. Downsizing. Efficiency. Flexible production; these were some of the catch-words used in the 1980s to rather benignly describe the vicious brutality of 'destructuring' (destroying industry and jobs), as it was then called by some unionists. 2 This piece shall argue that de-industrialisation and its twin, neoliberalism, were brutal and violent attacks by capital and the state on the working-class in order to restore profitability, make business more internationally competitive, and generally enrich the capitalist class at the expense of the working-class. In the words of New Zealand Meatworkers' Union official Ken Findlay, 'it was corporate terrorism.' 3 This article is a broad, sweeping overview, and does not capture the complexity and variety of responses to destructuring. Hence, many comments will not apply to certain unions, exclude many valuable and important struggles (for example, I have overlooked many campaigns, and instead focussed on strikes), will sweep over tensions, and overlook the disproportionate impacts of destructuring on Māori, Pasifika and women. I have left out the oral history quotations I used in my talk due to lack of space. Finally I have not researched the period from the mid-1980s onwards in-depth yet, so my comments there are highly preliminary and exploratory. An even bigger defeat than 1951? Resistance to destructuring was widespread: the 1980s was one of the most strike-prone decades in Aotearoa history. Numerous strikes were undertaken over redundancy claims, or attempts to resist wage cuts and declining working conditions. In general, destructuring was especially resisted by blue-collar workers-in other words, those most affected by it. Hence blue-collar Māori, Pākehā, Pasifika, males and females were often at the forefront of struggle. By the mid to late 1980s, however, white-collar workers in the state sector also protested en masse against comprehensive state destructuring and job losses, including large, token strikes versus the State Sector Act 1988. Despite hundreds of amazing, inspiring struggles over a wide variety of causes, and many notable successes, ultimately that movement was unable to resist destructuring in a sustained way. Overall, the 1980s was a momentous and bleak decade for the labour movement. The movement began to decline in size and bargaining power as unemployment mounted and conditions eroded. As one of my interviewees for a broad project on strikes in the 1970s and 1980s commented in 2013, 'it's a long retreat. Since the middle 1980s, that's sort of 25 years [now 35 years] is it?...This is the longest retreat of the working class in the history of capitalism. It really is…I always used to think that the 1950s was this terrible time of red baiting and working-class retreat but that was nothing.' It is a lasting
Labour History Project Bulletin, 2018
Labour History Project Newsletter, 2009
Labour History Project Bulletin, Apr 2015
Book Chapters by Toby Boraman
Power At Work: A Global Perspective on Control and Resistance, 2023
Assembly-line workers were frequently at the forefront of the major wave of workplace conflict th... more Assembly-line workers were frequently at the forefront of the major wave of workplace conflict that occurred in high-income countries during the long 1970s. They subsequently bore much of the burden of de-industrialisation, automation, neoliberal de-regulation, and globalisation in the long 1980s. Meat processing workers suffered from such a fate, as a wave of plant closures rippled around the world from Argentina to Australia, the United States, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and beyond. Aotearoa/New Zealand presents an almost classic example of these global transformations, although with some local twists, as shall be highlighted in the case study presented in this essay – briefly set within a global backdrop – of startling reversals in power relations in that industry during the 1970s and 1980s.
Tūtira Mai: Making Change in Aotearoa New Zealand, 2021
Overview of social movements in Aotearoa just before covid. Critique of the absence of the labour... more Overview of social movements in Aotearoa just before covid. Critique of the absence of the labour movement in social movement studies. Provides example of successful and innovative struggles by precarious fast-food workers. (Proof version with some minor errors).
'Libertarian Socialism: Politics in Red and Black', eds. Dave Berry, Ruth Kinna, Saku Pinta and Alex Prichard, 2012
'On the Left: Essays on Socialism in New Zealand', eds. Pat Moloney and Kerry Taylor, 2002
Books by Toby Boraman
The 1960s have been dismissed as a joke, a time when naive young people believed they could chang... more The 1960s have been dismissed as a joke, a time when naive young people believed they could change society by wearing beads and placing flowers in their hair. This is a myth. The 1960s and-to perhaps a greater extent-the 1970s were characterised by a widespread political revolt. Social control-such as war, patriarchy, racism, sex roles, the police, schools, the work ethic, union bureaucracies and political parties-and authoritarian values in general came under attack during these decades. In particular, the late sixties and early seventies were a time of an often exhilarating freedom and creativity when many people tried to roll back authority and create a world that was more cooperative and less hierarchical. This effervescent rebellion shattered the myth that Aotearoa/New Zealand was an ethnically harmonious egalitarian utopia. It ultimately failed to transform capitalism in a fundamental manner, but it did have considerable impact. From the early to mid-1970s, watered down leftist and anti-authoritarian values permeated throughout society. The relatively high level of working class self-activity from the late 1960s to the mid-late 1970s created a surge of interest in radical ideas. One of these ideas was anarchism (for a local introduction to anarchism, see Buchanan 1999). It has often been commented that the social movements of the sixties and seventies were imbued with an anarchic spirit. Many of the themes of anarchism, such as a stress upon participatory democracy, a rejection of centralisation and authoritarianism, a belief that the means need to reflect the ends, and a Cartoon from the Earwig Free Blurb, n.d., c. 1972. A touch of ANARCHY Introduction RABBLE ROUSERS AND MERRY PRANKSTERS vi championing of collective self-emancipation, self-realisation and workers' selfmanagement, were prevalent in these movements. The innovative revolt of the sixties and seventies frequently challenged leftist orthodoxies. Owen Gager, then a prominent Trotskyist who was on the fringe of the anarchist milieu of the early to mid-1960s, regretfully comments, "I stayed with an 'orthodoxy' in the midst of a revolution that was destroying all orthodoxies." The rebellions of the sixties and seventies were often independent from, and hostile to, the two major leftist orthodoxies of those decades: Leninism and social democracy. To be more specific, radicals of the sixties and seventies often attempted to create a non-hierarchical alternative to both the mini-bureaucracies of the Leninist parties and the vast social democratic bureaucracies of the trade unions and the Labour Party. Anarchism and libertarian socialism-which I consider to be a broader term than anarchism; it encompasses not only anarchists but also libertarian Marxists and other anti-authoritarian socialists who are not involved in any party-tend to be written out of history. Leftist historians are inclined to minimise, or overlook, the anarchistic tendencies of many social movements. All too often, they solely focus upon the Labour Party. Alternatively, if they are a little more adventurous, they focus on the Communist Party of New Zealand (CPNZ). Groups or tendencies that are further to the left of Labour or the CPNZ are dismissed as "infantile," "disorganised," "adventuristic" or simply "not serious enough." Given the literature currently available, one could easily assume that an anarchist tendency never existed in Aotearoa in the fifties, sixties and seventies. Yet this book documents a small but vibrant anarchist and broader libertarian socialist current during this period. This tendency has been marginal-as with other radical movements in Aotearoa-but it is more important than many presume. For example, anarchists have played pivotal roles in the anti-nuclear movement of the early sixties, the anti-Vietnam War and anti-US bases movement of the late sixties and early seventies, the unemployed movement of the mid-to late seventies and the peace movement of the early eighties. In addition, a theme of this book is that anarchists and other anti-authoritarian leftists developed a relatively new and influential form of politics in the sixties and seventies. They sought to combine protest with having fun. They were rabble rousers and merry pranksters. They rejected the dour puritanism of the traditional left, and instead took an imaginative, carnivalesque and joyous approach to politics. At best, they mixed the libertarian socialist emphasis on fomenting a class-based revolution from below with the counter-cultural emphasis on individual transformation and self-expression. This history is a broad historical narrative of anarchism and libertarian socialism in Aotearoa from the mid-1950s to the early 1980s. It is part of a continuing effort to reclaim the hidden history of resistance to capitalism and authority. It is intended to be descriptive rather than analytical. The conclusion, however, contains some brief analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the anarchist movement. Based 1956; an anarchist tendency emerged slightly later. This early period was noteworthy for the beginnings of the protest movement that later was to flourish during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The second chapter covers this latter period. During this time, the anti-Vietnam War movement was at its height, and the rampaging anarchic exuberance of many long-haired youth disgusted conservatives. The third chapter examines the anarchist involvement in the "new social movements" of the early 1970s to the early 1980s, when, after the decline of the protest movement, movements such as the Tino Rangatiratanga movement-which can be loosely translated as Maori self-determination-and women's liberation re-emerged and challenged the status quo. The fourth chapter explores the anarchist and situationist groupings of the period 1973-82. These divisions are arbitrary, and many movements and groups overlap them, but nonetheless I believe they are useful to roughly classify a lengthy and complex part of our history. Note to the Second Edition I have made a few very minor corrections to the text. Otherwise, the text is exactly the same as the first edition.-Wellington, April 2008. INTRODUCTION ix This book is partially based upon a much broader and lengthier thesis. However, this work is not merely a truncated version of my dissertation. It contains much new material and is more committed to the "history from below" tradition. When I began this research, I thought I would be lucky to find anything at all about anarchism and libertarian socialism in Aotearoa. After many years of painstaking research-and much of the material contained in this work was very difficult to locate, especially as anarchists left hardly any records behind-I happily found my assumption was false. This work would have been an impossible task without the kind and generous assistance of many people who shared their memories with me. A big hearty thanks to:
Conference proceedings by Toby Boraman
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Articles by Toby Boraman
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Please note this paper was published with numerous errors, including major formatting errors and editing mistakes, that were made by the journal who published it. Proofs were not sent to the writer before publication. So please download this version (it was the final version sent to the editors) rather than the published version.
and flow of struggle in society. During an era of relatively
high dissidence – the 1970s and to a lesser extent the 1980s
– a vibrant leftist press flourished in Aotearoa. The independent
left produced many of the left’s most prominent and longest-lasting
publications. It performed an indispensable role within
the left – acting as a forum for debate, and publishing a wealth
of information and investigative research. As protest has largely
dwindled since the early 1990s, and society has generally lurched
to the right under the generalised commodification and enclosures
of neoliberalism, the left has wilted. The quality and quantity of
independent socialist magazines has generally diminished. As such
this article is somewhat of a lament for an independent left – and
the left in general – that has seemingly almost vanished, and with
it almost all of its publications.
Book Chapters by Toby Boraman
Books by Toby Boraman
Conference proceedings by Toby Boraman
its product.
Please note this paper was published with numerous errors, including major formatting errors and editing mistakes, that were made by the journal who published it. Proofs were not sent to the writer before publication. So please download this version (it was the final version sent to the editors) rather than the published version.
and flow of struggle in society. During an era of relatively
high dissidence – the 1970s and to a lesser extent the 1980s
– a vibrant leftist press flourished in Aotearoa. The independent
left produced many of the left’s most prominent and longest-lasting
publications. It performed an indispensable role within
the left – acting as a forum for debate, and publishing a wealth
of information and investigative research. As protest has largely
dwindled since the early 1990s, and society has generally lurched
to the right under the generalised commodification and enclosures
of neoliberalism, the left has wilted. The quality and quantity of
independent socialist magazines has generally diminished. As such
this article is somewhat of a lament for an independent left – and
the left in general – that has seemingly almost vanished, and with
it almost all of its publications.