The New Zealand revolutionary tradition, such as it is, had its birth in the West Coast mining town of Blackball, a century ago.
But that wasn't the tradition which Cabinet Ministers and high-ranking trade union officials turned out to celebrate in Blackball last weekend. They were there to celebrate the myth of Blackball - not the reality.
The myth of Blackball casts the strike of February-June 1908 as "the birth of the Labour Party''.
It was anything but. In 1908, Labour's founding conference was still eight years away.
The only political party that came to Blackball in 1908 was the Socialist Party. It arrived there in the swags of a trio of seasoned agitators from across the Tasman: Pat Hickey, Paddy Webb and George Hunter.
The Blackball branch of the Socialist Party, which Hickey and his comrades lost little time in setting up, predates the famous strike by several weeks.
That the political aspect of the Blackball insurgency predated its industrial expression was no accident.
The three Australian agitators had come to the town with the express purpose of making trouble - not just for the owners of the Blackball mine, but for the whole system of compulsory industrial conciliation and arbitration for which New Zealand was internationally renowned.
The "Arbitration System'', as it was known, forbade strikes and lock-outs, requiring instead that workers and employers settle their differences by negotiation, or, if that proved impossible, by referring their dispute to the Arbitration Court.
The socialist movement, to which Hickey, Webb and Hunter belonged, scorned Arbitration.
Whatever its original intentions, in the eyes of a growing number of active unionists, it had become a legal leg-iron on the aspirations of the working class.
The Blackball socialists, like the gold miners at Waihi, derided Arbitration as "unjust, unfair and unsatisfactory'', and would certainly have agreed with the delegate from the Painters Union who, in 1902, described the Industrial Conciliation & Arbitration Act as "the biggest curse that labour had ever put on it''.
The dispute over "crib time'' (the 15 minutes in which the Blackball miners were expected to eat their lunch before returning to the coal-face) became a cause celebre not because the Blackball miners' meal-break was 15 minutes shorter than the norm, but because, rather than submit the matter to arbitration, the workers voted to stage an illegal strike.
It was not the first such strike. Illegal stoppages had occurred in both 1906 and 1907, but it was the first such strike in the strategically vital coal industry.
Coal was the oil of its day; the indispensable fuel which powered New Zealand's steam-driven society.
If the Arbitration System could be overturned underground, in the mines, then the coal miners' union would have the power to bring the entire economy to a shuddering halt.
That the Blackball miners won their illegal strike produced what trade union historians Bert Roth and Janny Hammond describe as "an electrifying effect on unions throughout the country''.
Within months, the various miners unions had united in a single federation - the NZ Federation of Labour: an avowedly revolutionary union movement, swiftly nick-named the "Red Feds''.
For five years, the "Red Feds'' pushed back hard against the Arbitration System. And, with every successful strike, the threat they posed to the existing economic order grew.
Inevitably, the showdown came. In the "Great Strike'' of 1913, the new conservative Prime Minister, William Massey, backed by the para-military formations of the militant Farmers' Union - 'Massey's Cossacks'' - smashed the "Red'' Federation and restored the employer-friendly Arbitration System.
The Labour Party, formed three years later in the depths of World War 1, was very far from being the culmination of the revolutionary movement, which had its birth at Blackball in 1908.
In fact, the new party represented its repudiation. The revolutionary path had failed: henceforth, the New Zealand working class would follow the "parliamentary road'' to socialism.
To prevent the Blackball Miners' Strike from becoming an alternative historical touchstone - a reminder of what militant trade unionism and revolutionary socialism could achieve - the founders of the Labour Party shrewdly incorporated it into the creation-myth of their new, moderate, political movement.
So, at Blackball last weekend, the labour movement's big-wigs weren't so much marking militant trade unionism's first great break-out, as celebrating its recapture.
Reformists legislate for a 30-minute meal-break. Revolutionaries take it for themselves.
- Chris Trotter is editor of the New Zealand Political Review.
