A social laboratory? Bonapartism and proletarian socialism in New Zealand, 1840–1914
Michael McClelland
Platypus Review 191 | November 2026
SCRIBBLING IN THE MARGINS of a well-read book, Vladimir Lenin sardonically described New Zealand as “a country of inveterate, backwoods, thick-headed, egotistical philistines, who have brought their ‘civilisation’ with them from England and keep it to themselves like a dog in a manger.”[1] That book was André Siegfried’s Democracy in New Zealand, published in 1914, which concerns itself with various state-led reforms in a tiny island nation then reputed as an “advance guard among nations.”[2] Statesmen then, as have progressive historians since, regarded New Zealand as a unique testing site or “social laboratory” for “experiments” in reform.[3] The story of early New Zealand might be read as an account of the maturation of this testing site, from William Hobson’s annexation of New Zealand following Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s designs for “systematic colonization” to the rule of George Grey during the New Zealand Wars to the reformist legislation of the Liberal government. Indeed, so often has this “social laboratory” metaphor been evoked — from reformer William Pember Reeves’ State Experiments in 1902 to the late historian Erik Olssen’s 2025 book The Origins of an Experimental Society — that the contemporary Left in New Zealand might find it difficult to think of its project other than in exceptionalist, parochial terms. It invites the image of a socialist Jurassic Park.
To say a given figure of speech is “a cliché for a reason” is, itself, a cliché. But seldom is that reason stated. So, for the purpose of this discussion, I will accept the “social laboratory” cliché, taking it to its absolute limits. This will show how the myth attempts to recognize a deeper reality, one that cannot be understood merely in terms of New Zealand’s natural or social environment. One needs global politics, specifically, the way in which the state stepped in to manage the crisis of bourgeois society in the 19th century. Marx termed this condition Bonapartism, after Louis Bonaparte, to refer to the situation in which the bourgeoisie can no longer, and the proletariat not yet rule.[4] Bonapartism does not mean rule by fiat, but something much broader. It is a general condition of contradiction encompassing society and the state, which the working class actively reproduces via appeals to democracy. This situation belongs uniquely to the era of industrial capitalism. As the following account will show, New Zealand, a country whose foundation coincided with capitalism’s first major crisis, offers interesting signposts of Bonapartism throughout its history. The eventual result was Bonapartism’s dialectical image: the development of proletarian socialism. Neither was exceptional in global terms.
Systematic colonization and the Treaty of Waitangi
If references to New Zealand as a “social laboratory” seem evergreen, their rational basis can be located in the nation’s origins, beginning with a familiar figure from historical accounts. His name was Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1796–1862), founder of the New Zealand Company. This was the enterprise that would shepherd the first wave of colonists to New Zealand — a territory that had hitherto been the sparsely-populated province of Māori and various European laborers and merchants.
Born in England in 1796 into a family of reform-minded liberals who fraternized with leading intellectuals of the time, such as Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, Wakefield was a product and heir of late Enlightenment thought. What became his plan for the “systematic colonization” of New Zealand and other territories owed its existence to the spirit of reform sweeping England in his adulthood, producing movements such as Chartism and Owenism.[5] Wakefield, a friend of liberal humanist campaigners, did not seek to perpetuate capitalism’s ills, but lance the boil. The irony that Wakefield’s “systematic” (i.e. planned, not haphazard) migration of settlers from Britain was itself a capitalist venture should not be inflated so as to overshadow its utopianism.
Indeed, Wakefield followed English intellectual trends inspired by utopian socialist thought on the continent. Like the Ricardians[6] of his time, Wakefield was an experimenter in political economy who read Adam Smith avidly (and even published his own annotated version of The Wealth of Nations). As he saw it, capitalism had produced reckless and wayward settlements without the means to sustain civil society. Later in his life, reflecting on the chaotic mishaps of New South Wales, where convicts were dumped without structure or oversight; South Africa, where land was seized without clear legal title or coordinated settlement; and Canada, with its slapdash settlement patterns, Wakefield commented that these efforts presented “an immense amount of practice without any theory . . . immense results without a plan, vast doings but no principles.”[7]
Wakefield argued that handing out land for free to pastoralists led to a coarse, isolated society instead of one rich in life and public institutions. The problem, in brief, was that a shortage of labor could be resolved by selling land at a price that would prevent laborers from becoming landowners too quickly. This “sufficient price” would generate a fund that could be used to finance the emigration of more laborers from the mother country while maintaining a settled population in the colony. Growth would accelerate.
Wakefield believed that realizing the labor theory of value in the colonies would not just serve their own interests or that of Britain, but all the nations that would trade with them. Wakefield grasped the moral philosophy at the core of Adam Smith’s writing, who wanted to make good on the potential for freedom. This was the potential of bourgeois society per se, a uniquely modern condition that had begun with the small manufacturers and artisanal laborers of urban Europe and spread across the globe.
But Karl Marx would call Wakefield’s plan “absurd.”[8] By his and Wakefield’s time, Smith’s The Wealth of Nations no longer served as a fruitful template. That book had been published in 1776, before the crisis of the industrial revolution all that had once appeared true, including the labor theory of value.[9] Smith could neither have foreseen the rise of England’s manufacturing industries nor the “Hungry Forties” and the Irish potato famine.[10] The working poor in England and vast amounts of Irish laborers left for Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere to survive.[11] Wakefield’s vision for the settlements they would populate, however, went no further than Smith. For Wakefield, an ideal colony was chiefly agricultural: a society potted with small, mixed farms. Like a dam without a spillway, this model could hardly discharge pressure from the floodwaters that were to come.
By recognizing that New Zealand’s foundation right at the start of the tumultuous 1840s is more than a poetic coincidence, one might also recognize how Marx understood Bonapartism: not as the prime cause of, but the state’s unwitting furtherance of the crisis of global capital.[12] Although Wakefield himself was not a ruler but a private entrepreneur, by virtue of his actions he revealed the exigencies of state intervention. He was one of those whom Marx would call a “character mask” for capital.[13]
Yet, in the personal charisma of Wakefield, historians have found it difficult not to see the dual image of a con-man and venture capitalist.[14] Such interpretations are complicated, however, by the fact that he was also a product of the reformist fervor sweeping England. Moreover, the fact that Wakefield sought to profit from his “experiment” was not at odds with traditional political economy and late Enlightenment thought, both of which regarded private vice as public virtue.[15] Even without Wakefield, another quasi-utopian entrepreneur might well have taken his place, allying with the same Benthamites, Whigs, and moderate Radicals to systematize the ongoing settlement of the colonies.
The British parliament, for its part, had been initially reluctant to annex New Zealand, citing humanitarian concerns for the indigenous population. But it was this same concern, in part, that would force its hand as controversies surrounding Wakefield’s rapidly forming settlements emerged. In many parts of New Zealand, British subjects, including Wakefield’s own brother William, were enforcing unscrupulous land sale agreements with iwi,[16] leading to conflict. Finally, London dispatched Lieutenant-Governor William Hobson to meet with Māori chiefs at Waitangi and begin the path to annexation in 1840. By Māori signing the Treaty of Waitangi, the Crown would have right of pre-emption (first right of purchase), meaning land sales would be brokered securely by the state. It would also grant Māori the rights and privileges of British subjects.[17] The Crown had come to see official support of colonization as the lesser of two evils.
The English historian Catherine Hall called the treaty an “experiment.” It was regarded as a new direction in human history, a break from the violence of older colonial systems that had astonished English evangelicals and humanitarians.[18] In American historian David Hackett Fischer’s assessment, “where Americans made many Indian treaties and forgot them, New Zealanders made one treaty and remembered it.”[19] The memory, however, was not to remain a comfortable one. Violence was on its way.
Political representation — that core question of the bourgeois revolutions — was carried over to this new colony and, despite being formally granted to Māori, did not bestow with them with its promises. Where their attempts at diplomacy with the British failed — notably via the Māori king movement, or Kīngitanga, in which tribes united and opposed land sales — conflict proceeded. This led to the fraught and protracted New Zealand Wars.[20] These, along with the explosive growth of the colonies, produced a situation that was neither foreseen nor desired. The British, increasingly disillusioned with the costs of imperial (mis)management, began surrendering control of indigenous affairs to settler governments. The shift traced back to Governor-General Robert FitzRoy’s 1844 decision to hand the right of purchase back to the settlers, which bankrupted the colony and provoked conflict. Then the British, replacing him with George Grey, restored Crown control over land sales and imposed order. It was a move from protective paternalism to a policy of racial cohabitation aimed at Māori assimilation.
London had equipped Grey with wider powers than his predecessors. With more troops and funding, he aggressively turned against the Kīngitanga, and land confiscations accelerated, collapsing the Crown’s pretense of guardianship.[21] Historian John M. Ward would later describe Governor George Grey in terms similar to how Marx would describe Bonapartist figures like Louis Bonaparte himself and Otto von Bismarck:
Grey … neither instituted a system nor laid down a consistent policy. He proceeded from decision to counter-decision, from the strictest reserve to calculated indiscretion, and from high-handedness to equivocation in order to preserve a personal ascendancy that he regarded (perhaps rightly) as essential to the well-being of the colony.[22]
This was Grey’s pragmatism, his willingness to rise to the exigencies of each moment of the crisis. It prefigured the delicate balancing act between farmers, the urban middle class, and the working class that would become a key feature of New Zealand statecraft in the 20th and 21st centuries.
As the pace of settlement increased, the Treaty of Waitangi became redundant. Tribes with coveted land saw it confiscated all the more rapaciously. Reprisals occurred — and counter-reprisals. Massacres. It became harder and harder to justify the belief that colonization had begun as anything but an ill and especially that the British ever had Māori interests at heart.[23] By the early 1900s, it was commonly assumed — and lamented by liberals — that Māori were a vanishing race, although the trend fortunately reversed after several decades.
Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration
With the end of George Grey’s tenure and the brutal conclusion of the New Zealand Wars, another tumultuous chapter began as New Zealand entered the Second Industrial Revolution. Indeed, as geographically removed as this small country was from the center of global capital, it could not but partake in world history. True, it was only industrializing in small, halting steps, but it still felt the aftershocks from Britain’s early and rapid industrialization.[24] And while overseas borrowing in the 1870s insulated New Zealand from the worldwide economic depression — a decade when the country’s economic growth and development of infrastructure coincided with a new influx of immigrants — the “long depression” [25] had, by the 1880s, found its way to New Zealand. High unemployment followed, fueling unprecedented union growth and pressure for reform. Analogous to how the Treaty of Waitangi owed its creation to the 1832 Reform Act giving colonial reformers and humanitarians weight in the British Parliament, and likewise with 1840s labor emigration being driven by Chartist unrest, English immigrants who came to New Zealand in the latter part of the 19th century met the local economic crisis with an emerging trade union consciousness brought from the mother country. Moreover, New Zealand’s first major labor struggle in 1890 did not originate domestically but was an extension of the maritime strike that broke out in Australia. But the strike would be suppressed, marking the proletariat’s first major defeat in New Zealand.[26]
Before the New Zealand organized labor movement had really begun, the state was siphoning off their discontents. In the same year as the maritime strike, the New Zealand Liberal party entered office, helped by the ongoing expansion of the urban proletariat and the extension of suffrage in the previous decade. Under the leadership of John Ballance followed by Richard Seddon, the Liberals allied with the trade union movement, introducing ambitious reforms to avoid a repetition of the calamitous 1880s. That government’s legacy would be the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act, the first compulsory system of state arbitration in the world. Proposed in 1891 and passed in 1894, it forced employers to negotiate with trade unions, guaranteeing workers a seat at the table. In addition, the Liberals introduced minimum wages, hours of work laws, workers’ compensation, and pensions.[27] But at the same time, unions had to be registered and, crucially, lost their key bargaining chip as strikes were outlawed.
Becoming known internationally as the “land without strikes,” New Zealand had reason to reflect on its newfound stability. It was in this era that the ongoing national “experiment” appeared to become conscious of itself, with William Pember Reeves, a Fabian and principal architect of the Industrial Conciliation Act, popularizing the “social laboratory” metaphor. Some observers might have been astonished at how straight-faced the Liberals were — despite their name — in administering policies bordering on autocratic. But what experimenter could achieve decisive results without carte blanche, without the shrewdness to filter out interferences? Reeves was no idealogue, but a man who referred to his socialism merely as “experimental and practical.”[28] As had been the case in the administrations of Louis Bonaparte and Otto von Bismarck, Reeves and other Liberals were directed less by a coherent ideology than by pragmatic concerns. French author and politician Albert Métin would summarize it as "socialism without doctrines."[29] But from a Marxist point of view, especially in the context of this cataclysmic, “high” era of capitalism, such responses to the crisis of capital were not without precedent. Bonapartism defined the tactics of statecraft. Exception was the norm.
The 1893–1906 leadership of Richard Seddon, whose autocratic style earned him the nickname “King Dick,” is illustrated via John Morley's remark on Cromwell: "He was never much of a democrat, but the same may be said of many of those whom democracy has used to do its business.”[30] But Seddon and the Liberals’ attempts to ameliorate the contradictions of capitalism by enacting reforms would only reproduce them. New, radical industrial unions would form. One did not require the radicalism of Lenin — who, calling Seddon “a representative of Australasian imperialism [i.e., Bonapartism],” saw him as “buying the workers by social reforms” — to recognize this.[31] A member of the Legislative Council (then New Zealand’s upper house) would matter-of-factly proclaim that they “vaccinated the people with liberal measures to prevent them having the smallpox of socialism when adults.”[32]
The vaccine could not be administered fast enough. While Liberal reforms strained to contain proletarian discontents, a new wave of labor unrest approached New Zealand’s borders. When, at the turn of the 20th Century, the Industrial Workers of the World were forming and the phenomenon of the mass strike were energizing debates in the Second International, a radical anti-arbitration movement took root among miners on the west coast of New Zealand’s South Island. The “land without strikes” would no longer fit its name, and renewed union militancy would give rise to the first proletarian socialist organization in the country: The New Zealand Socialist Party.[33] In 1909, the Federation of Labour (or “Red Feds”) was formed, borrowing the famous opening lines of the preamble to the Constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World, “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.” They became key agitators in the Waihi Strike of 1912 and the Great Strike of the following year.
Both were crushed, but the failure of the Great Strike prompted New Zealand socialists to self-consciously associate themselves with Marxism for the first time. From the Unity Conference between the Federation of Labour and the (craft union) Trades and Labour Councils emerged a new Social Democratic Party. Despite the party’s Marxist clothing, however, Lenin and the Bolsheviks remained relatively obscure among the union militants, since Marxist literature from Europe, including the movement’s debates and controversies, had not flooded New Zealand to the same extent as America or even Australia.[34]
Thus, the organized working class in New Zealand did not receive the critical self-consciousness then emerging in the Second International via the infamous “Revisionist Dispute.” Whereas Rosa Luxemburg would argue that reformism’s attempts to ameliorate capitalism only evidenced the deepening of contradictions and thus the need for their overcoming via revolutionary leadership, proletarian socialism in New Zealand would not recognize the proof of this dictum in their own opposition to arbitration. The critical self-consciousness of the European and American socialists was postponed down under. World War I, on the other hand, could not be forestalled. Its impact on the socialist movement was international, producing splits in proletarian socialism in New Zealand as well. But unlike in Germany and Russia, where these splits produced the conditions for the German and Russian revolutions, there would be few attempts to clarify what underlying conditions in social reality had caused the crisis. Instead, when the New Zealand Labour Party rose from the ashes of the “Red Feds” in 1916 and claimed “Marxism” as its inheritance, it did so at the expense of evaluating proletarian socialism’s results and prospects in New Zealand. It did so at the expense of Marxism itself.
Conclusion
New Zealand socialists of the early 20th century missed a crucial lesson: their ability to pressure the state into implementing reforms did not replace but made plausible the conditions for the dictatorship of the proletariat. Even were they successful at its implementation, however, it remains doubtful that they would have changed the course of socialism globally. Commenting on Australian socialism’s relation to the wider world, Lenin regarded it as “ridiculous” to consider transplanting the framework of “an undeveloped, young colony, populated by liberal British workers” to “countries where the state is long established and capitalism well developed.”[35] For him, South Pacific “experiments,” however unhindered they were in their socialist or capitalist aims, were merely local exceptions that proved the global rule.
Writing in the final pages of Das Kapital, Marx observed that Wakefield’s colonies did not reveal anything new but rather showed “the truth as to the conditions of capitalist production in the mother-country,” meaning the latter’s contradictions that required displacement.[36] In this way, we can afford to take the “experimental and practical” Reeves at face value. Like Wakefield, Grey, Seddon, and so many others within New Zealand (and global) history, Reeves sought to locate the pressure release valve for the crisis the industrial revolution had unleashed. It was in accepting the terms of the crisis that Lord Melbourne, writing in a letter to Viscount Howick in 1837 called colonization a “fatal necessity.”[37] New Zealand’s “experiments” have shown not how great have been the solutions, but how great — and how fatal — the need. |P
[1] V. I. Lenin, “Notebook ‘Nu’”, in Lenin Collected Works, vol. 39 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), 496-540, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/ni-nu/siegfried.htm>.
[2] André Siegfried, Democracy in New Zealand, trans. E.V. Burns (London: G. Bell and Sons, Ltd., 1914).
[3] William Pember Reeves, State Experiments in Australia and New Zealand (London: G. Richards, 1902); John A. Lee, "New Zealand: A Social Laboratory," in Socialism in New Zealand (London: T.W. Laurie, 1938); Jane Kelsey, The New Zealand Experiment: A World Model for Structural Adjustment (Auckland, NZ: Auckland University Press and Bridget Williams Books, 1995); and Erik Olssen, The Origins of an Experimental Society (Auckland, NZ: Auckland University Press, 2025).
[4] Friedreich Engels references this idea in his introduction to the 1891 printing of The Civil War in France. <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/intro.htm>.
[5] Chartism: A working class mass movement for parliamentary reform in the United Kingdom which presented the People’s Charter to Parliament in 1839. Owenism: a 19th century utopian socialist movement founded by Robert Owen.
[6] A type of socialism which drew on the economic ideas of David Ricardo and Adam Smith, particularly the labor theory of value. It developed in Great Britain from the 1820s to 1840s.
[7] Edward Gibbon Wakefield, A View of the Art of Colonization (London: John W. Parker, 1849), 41-42, quoted in Richard Charles Mills, The Colonization of Australia (1829-42): The Wakefield Experiment in Empire Building (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1915).
[8] Karl Marx, “A Superannuated Administration—Prospects of the Coalition Ministry—&c.,” in Marx and Engels on Bonapartism: Selected Journalism, 1851–59, edited by Spencer A. Leonard (Sublation Press, 2023), 214.
[9] As Friedrich Engels would write in 1843, “The nearer the [political] economists come to the present time, the further they depart from honesty. . . This is why Ricardo, for instance, is more guilty than Adam Smith, and McCulloch and Mill more guilty than Ricardo.” See Engels, “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy” (1843), in Marx & Engels Collected Works, vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 420.
[10] The “Hungry Forties,” of which the Irish Potato Famine was a component, was a major potato crop failure which affected northwestern Europe in the 1840’s.
[11] For a history of the conditions motivating such voyages, and the voyages themselves, see Tony Simpson, The Immigrants: The Great Migration from Britain to New Zealand, 1830–1890 (Penguin Random House New Zealand, 2012).
[12] Marx, “Eighteenth Brumaire.” See also Spencer A. Leonard, “Introduction,” in Marx and Engels on Bonapartism: Selected Journalism, 1851–59.
[13] Karl Marx, Capital (1867).
[14] For a historiographical appraisal of this tendency in the literature, see Olssen’s The Origins of an Experimental Society.
[15] Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776). The phrase “private vice as public virtue” is a paraphrase of Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1714).
[16] A Māori word meaning “nation” or “people” which refers to the largest social structures in Māori society. Often translated to “tribe.”
[17] As the Report of the Select Committee on Aborigines, appointed by the House of Commons, stated in 1837, colonization had always had dire consequences for indigenous people, and the Colonial Office wished to avoid wars in New Zealand by placing fetters on European settlers and traders’ rapaciousness. As John M. Ward comments, this 1837 report was what specifically led to the Aboriginals Protection Society and the Treaty of Waitangi: “[T]he reports of the Committee appointed by the House of Commons to investigate the plight of Aboriginal peoples [. . .] profoundly shaped the development of the Imperial government's native policy in New Zealand.” John M. Ward, Empire in the Antipodes: The British in Australasia, 1840–1860 (London: Edward Arnold, 1966), 202.
[18] Catherine Hall, “Imperial Man: Edward Eyre in Australasia and the West Indies,” in The Expansion of England: Race, Ethnicity and Cultural History, ed. by Bill Schwarz (London: Routledge, 1996), 147, quoted in Olssen, The Origins of an Experimental Society.
[19] David Hackett Fischer, Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies: New Zealand and the United States, 2012, quoted in Olssen, The Origins of an Experimental Society, ch. 3.
[20] The New Zealand Wars were a series of armed conflicts between some indigenous Māori tribes and the British colonial government fought between 1845 to 1872.
[21] Siegfried, Democracy in New Zealand, 30–31.
[22] Ward, Empire in the Antipodes, 64–65.
[23] Spencer Leonard (ed.), Marx and Engels on Bonapartism, 214
[24] W. B. Sutch, Colony or Nation? Economic Crises in New Zealand from the 1860s to the 1960s, ed. Michael Turnbull (Sydney, Australia: Sydney University Press, 1966).
[25] Ibid.
[26] Sutch, The Quest for Security in New Zealand, 1840–1966 (Wellington: Oxford University Press, 1966), 71. For more, see Reeves, State Experiments in Australia & New Zealand.
[27] R. S. Milne, Political Parties in New Zealand (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 29–30.
[28] Siegfried, Democracy in New Zealand, 99.
[29] Albert Métin, Socialism without Doctrines, trans. by Russel Ward (Chippendale, Australia: Alternative Publishing Co-operative, 1977).
[30] William Downie Stewart, introduction to Democracy in New Zealand, by Siegfried, 1914, p. xi.
[31] Lenin, “Notebook Nu.”
[32] M. S. Grace, quoted in W. B. Sutch, The Quest for Security in New Zealand (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1942), 79.
[33] Sutch, Colony or Nation?, 32–33. See also Frank Hanlon, “Industrial Unionism: Aim, Form, and Tactics of a Workers’ Union on IWW Lines” (1913), in Industrial Unionism (Wellington: Rebel Press, 2007) <https://rebelpress.nz/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/industrialunionism.pdf>.
[34] As the Communist Party of New Zealand would recall in a pamphlet circulated in 1981, “the movement, though militant, was full of reformist ideas. . . . The ideas of Lenin and the Bolsheviks . . . were not known yet in New Zealand.” Communist Party of New Zealand, The Communist Party of New Zealand: A Brief History (1981) 4, <https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/new-zealand/cpnz-history.pdf>.
[35] V. I. Lenin, “In Australia,” Pravda, no. 134 (June 13, 1913) <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/jun/13.htm>.
[36] Karl Marx, “Chapter Thirty-Three: The Modern Theory of Colonisation,” in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Vol. 1 (1887), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch33.htm>.
[37] “If we really are in that situation that we must do something . . . it is only another proof of the fatal necessity by which a nation that once begins to colonize is led step by step over the whole globe.” Lord Melbourne to Lord Howick, Dec. 16, 1837, Grey Papers: Melbourne 115/1, quoted in Peter Adams, Fatal Necessity: British Intervention in New Zealand, 1830–1847 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1977), 71.
