Owen Gager, 5 April 1939–15 June 2026

A necessary link

By Bill Logan

6 September 2026

Photo by John M. Miller, 1971

Owen Gager, who died recently in Melbourne, was central in the development of revolutionary Trotskyism in New Zealand, and, for a time in the 1960s, a significant figure in New Zealand intellectual life.

Owen was a difficult, often exasperating man. But he, more than anyone else, created the political and intellectual ground from which our tradition emerged in New Zealand.

Owen came to maturity in a particularly drab period and in a most unlikely setting: a small country at the end of the world in the 1950s, with a complacent public culture, a provincial university environment and a left dominated by Stalinist orthodoxies, Labourite gradualism and economic nationalism. Indeed nationalism and protectionism was the common sense of the left—and theory was an imported luxury.

After a brief encounter with the Communist Party as a student, the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 had a huge impact on Owen, as it did on significant layers around the world. He broke with Stalinism, rapidly read everything available by Trotsky, came to see himself as a Trotskyist, and set out—through writing, argument and intellectual provocation—to make revolutionary Marxism a living force in New Zealand.

Jonathan Hunt knew Owen at Auckland university, and in later years as a Labour politician described him as “one of the most intelligent men I have ever met, and the ultimate anarchist” (Carroll du Chateau, "How Auckland’s Intellectual Left of the Sixties Took Over the Country", Metro, June 1987). (Owen actually introduced me to Hunt at a demonstration in Wellington in 1967, when Hunt was still a very new MP. Afterwards Owen rather characteristically remarked: “He’ll make a good Labour politician—he has a mind of monumental complacency and microscopic imagination.” He was in fact to become a senior cabinet minister, and later, speaker of the House and High Commissioner in London.)

From university in Auckland, Owen moved to Christchurch where he and Bruce Jesson became friends. Austin Mitchell, an English academic who spent some years in New Zealand before returning to become a British Labour MP, taught political science in Christchurch—finding it conservative and conformist, but discovering within it “a hotbed of the left”, including Gager and Jesson. Gager was “probably New Zealand’s only Trotskyist at the time” and he worried that Jesson would catch slips in his lectures on the Russian Revolution (Austin Mitchell, “Author and politician Austin Mitchell returns to paradise”, The Press, 14 February 2016).

Bruce Jesson later became a leading republican-nationalist public intellectual, and wrote of this time in his column in Metro (October 1992). He remembered Owen as “a skinny, untidy man, excitable and with a high-pitched voice, a fierce debater and a fluent writer, a man of genuine intellectual ability and a cantankerous personality”. Of Owen’s magazine Dispute, which ran for nineteen issues from 1964 to 1968, Jesson said that it carried, at its best, “the most provocative and intelligent articles then being published in New Zealand”.

Dispute maintained a sustained critique of New Zealand’s highly protected and regulated economy, with inefficient manufacturers “coddled at the expense of consumers and farmers”. The argument was that New Zealand’s long-term economic interest—and that of international socialism—required opening the country to international economic forces (Bruce Jesson, Metro, October 1992). In this, Dispute anticipated, and perhaps even influenced, certain convictions behind the Labour Party’s “free market” reforms of the 1980s. Yet it prepared a different political conclusion: that the logic of capitalism could not be deformed to suit a workers’ party, but must be overturned.

In “Notes on Dispute as a Journal of Poetics” (ka mate ka ora no.12, 2014), literary scholar and International Socialist Organisation leader Dougal McNeill calls the journal “ambitiously polemical, scornfully high-cultural, politically radical,” and “simultaneously internationalist and concerned with the components of the national culture.” He describes Owen as “one of the great, uncelebrated figures of New Zealand intellectual and political radicalism”: a voracious reader, prolific writer and “inspirational and highly divisive figure”.

Owen’s working methods could be chaotic. He was impossible to organise, prickly and socially awkward, with a tendency to leave enemies (real and perceived) behind him as he travelled around the country and back and forth to Australia.

In Christchurch the Socialist Labour Movement formed in 1966 as New Zealand’s first self-declared Trotskyist group. Small, short-lived and ill-defined, the differences which emerged within it were to lay the basis for the main trends of Trotskyism in the country for the next period.

Its political differentiation reflected an international pattern, defined by the division in international Trotskyism between Michel Pablo and his opponents. The Pabloites were inclined to adapt to various forces which ultimately accepted the international imperialist order—Stalinists, labour parties, petty-bourgeois and nationalist radical movements. Owen increasingly identified with the anti-Pabloites, who insisted on the centrality of the struggle for a consciously revolutionary leadership of the working class. The Pabloite tendency in the Socialist Labour Movement aligned with the American Socialist Workers Party, and their opposition, led by Owen, attached themselves to the Spartacist League of the United States as the most consistent anti-Pabloites. Owen wrote to the Spartacists in January 1967 to declare his enthusiastic agreement with their Declaration of Principles and his solidarity with them.

This was a crucial choice. Owen and his tiny band of co-thinkers, working as the New Zealand Spartacist League, defended the centrality of the working class. In opposition to the class-collaborationist politics of the SWP and its New Zealand offshoots, they established the basic political orientation that made it possible for independent, revolutionary working-class politics to emerge in the country: at that time, Spartacism.

Owen was a remarkable personal force. I met him briefly in 1966 as a seventeen-year-old first-year university student, when he took me seriously enough to argue with me. I remember asking him, rather naively, what Trotskyism was and what place Dispute had in his plans. He moved his base to Wellington the next year, and he became a friend despite the difference in age and political development. During the annus mirabilis of 1968, he worked full-time nights as a newspaper proofreader and studied English literature, while maintaining an extraordinary level of activism—demonstrations, writing, serving on the students’ association executive and performing as a star attraction at campus meetings. His frail, bird-like appearance concealed huge energy.

I was finally recruited in 1970, but over the next two years differences accumulated. Owen’s politics were uneven and his positions subject to change. He was prone to refusing to accept jointly developed perspectives or decisions, and he gave no weight to the development of a collective leadership.

He understood the working class must dismantle bureaucratic leadership to think and act in its own interests, but he failed to see that bureaucratic leadership over the working class was maintained through the Labour Party by its capacity, however episodic and inadequate, to defend class interests. His position on the class character of the Labour Party—that it was a bourgeois party through and through—was the subject of prolonged dispute within our group, and it was this difference more than any other that polarised the group, leading to his departure in March 1972. He later worked with others in the Communist Left in Australia and New Zealand. In more recent years he identified with anarchism more than Trotskyism.

The account we published after the 1972 split, “The Development of the Spartacist League (New Zealand)”, is a good account of the range of political differences, but in retrospect it was insufficiently appreciative of Owen’s brilliance and flair, and of his indispensable contribution in bringing the struggle against Pabloism to these unlikely shores. Clarity of programmatic difference is critical, but it does not require political ingratitude.

Owen was not a disciplined organisation-builder, nor were all his judgements sound. He defied collective decisions. He could be abrasive and politically erratic. But he shook things up. And by insisting that revolutionary politics had to be internationalist, theoretically serious and hostile to every pressure to conciliate the fashionable radical movements of the day, he set some of us in the direction of the international Spartacist tendency and later the International Bolshevik Tendency.

Revolutionary continuity is not a smooth chain of organisational successions. It is made through political fights, documents, journals and recruits, and is often carried forward by people whose paths are contradictory. Owen Gager was one of the people who made such continuity possible in this corner of the world.