Culture and the Left in New Zealand, 1930-1950

Abstract

This thesis looks at the activities and impact of the left in New Zealand culture in the 1930s and 1940s. Its subject is a series of left-wing cultural activities which developed in the mid-late 1930s and early 1940s: the Left Book Club, Co-operative Book Societies in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin, a Progressive Publishing Society, and left-wing theatre. These activities were, in immediate terms, the product of the political context of the late 1930s, the Popular Front period of heightened political activity and political consciousness among artists and intellectuals, of the emergence of a range of political-cultural activity as part of a broadly-based, and broadly defined, anti-Fascist movement. They represented, to varying degrees, experiments in a socialist or 'popular' culture. Yet they succeeded in establishing not a popular culture, nor a 'culture of the left', but in exerting a very significant influence on the cultural infrastructure in New Zealand in this period. In considering the question why these organisations failed to realise a socialist cultural ideal, their development is situated within the context of political, social and cultural changes in this period: changes in the political context, from Popular Front to Cold War; changes in social terms within the left itself and the wider audience to which they catered; and the expansion of the cultural infrastructure in this period, of which these activities were both an expression and a stimulus. Differences also emerge in the nature of these organisations in the different centres, suggesting differences in the nature of the left and labour movements which in turn reflect in part the social structure of each city. The discussion is prefaced by an outline and analysis of the writing of H. Winston Rhodes in Tomorrow magazine - a series of articles of cultural criticism which express the central themes of left-wing cultural theory in this period. This discussion serves to establish the political/cultural context out of which these activities emerged, and focuses on the problems, theoretical, and as these organisations illustrate practical, which are inherent in the concept of 'creating' a socialist or 'people's' culture. A secondary theme is the relationship between this left-wing cultural movement, and the nationalist impulse which has generally been perceived as the significant cultural development in this period. This is discussed with reference to the critical statements of cultural nationalism of the 1930s-1940s, and in so far as these two cultural movements represented alternative responses to the cultural and political climate of the 1930s.