Workers’ anthems

Politics in New Zealand and Australia is not going the way socialists and communists would like. New Zealand’s ruling coalition, voted in last year, continues to propose and enact policies that benefit only the rich and malign the native Māori population; and in Australia, under a left-wing Labor government that came to power in 2022 after nine years of centre-right Liberal rule, tax cuts for the rich have only recently been halted and the dole is still not tagged to inflation. In these times one might wonder what left-wing literature can do, as Dougal McNeill does in Forms of Freedom: Marxist essays in New Zealand and Australian literature. He certainly finds value in literature, even if he seems to contradict himself between the beginning and end of the book – in the introduction literature is “valuable to the political work required in the struggle for freedom”, but in the conclusion, “what literature offers is modest, limited but nourishing all the same”. It doesn’t help that McNeill reckons “having a passion for poetry is probably a hindrance to success in [Australasian] public life”. (He omits the former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark’s numerous arts funding initiatives).

Still, he provides a detailed and useful recount of literature’s role in the Marxist movements in Australasia. Robert Burns’s “A Man’s a Man for a’ That” was a workers’ anthem from 1890 to 1930, according to McNeill, though “none of the worker-poets of the Australasian socialist movement could follow their master in this lyrical high-wire act”. The only poet to succeed, he argues, is Hone Tuwhare, because he used Māori as a second register — note that the lack of Indigenous language in Australasian literature is because of governmental efforts to smother it.

McNeill’s historical contexts are helpful: he describes, for example, how Communist parties around the world supported the Soviets’ takeover of Hungary in 1919, setting the scene for the dissent forcefully expressed by the Christchurch writer and activist Elsie Locke in her essay “Looking for Answers”. But his approach to literary critique recalls that of NCEA (the New Zealand high school examination system) – “technique, explain”. McNeill says the water imagery in the essay “turns our attention back to the beginning of the essay, and the way Locke evoked its purpose”.

As literature has little value in Australasian structures of power in the author’s view, it cannot accrue significant cultural capital. But Australasian literature may also serve as a form of “liberation” for readers and writers, “assert[ing] art’s autonomy from and resistance to capitalist logic”.

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