redrave

NZ: Time for decolonisation!

2012-02-15T18:49:00.000-08:00

The debate about foreign ownership is mainly about who owns and controls NZ’s economy. It is linked to another debate about rising social inequality. For the NACTs [National/ACT Govt] and the NZ comprador ruling class NZ’s growth had always been determined by its ‘dependency’ on Britain, the US and Australia. The best NZ can hope for is to be competitive in the global economy so that ‘growth’ will enrich the compradors and buy off working class discontent. For the left the issue has always been economic independence; how to become self-sufficient and egalitarian in sharing the national wealth. But it is a myth to say that NZ has been decolonised, egalitarian and even ‘imperialist’. NZ was always foreign owned and controlled since its European settlement. Inequality in NZ cannot be understood unless you understand why NZ is a capitalist semi-colony. The colonial institutions have become semi-colonial institutions. NZ is formally a sovereign nation yet its semi-colonial dependence is even more obvious today than any time in its history now that China looms as an emerging imperialist power. NZ’s decolonisation is still ahead of us. Our task is to fight for that independence, not as a capitalist nation, but as a socialist republic.

Simon Collins series of articles in the NZHerald provides plenty of evidence for the social effects of rising inequality in NZ. We get first hand information about the extent of poverty and its impact on health, education and on the lives of the poor. The first article reported Dr Fiona Cram’s research that shows that, despite the ravings of Michael Laws about ‘feral families’, poverty and discrimination are the main causes of ‘Maori Child Abuse’. Collins claims that inequality is recent. This is the result of historical amnesia. The post-war boom revived the myth of NZ as egalitarian, founded by the liberals in the 1890s. Fabian reformers like WP Reeves Labour Minister in first Liberal Government of the 1890s and socialists like Harry Holland, leaders of the First Labour Government in the 1930s, are cited as the epoch-making giants of social democracy that allowed NZ to abolish the evils of social classes.

In reality, NZ was always an unequal society and the 1890s and 1930s were but short bursts of social reform in an otherwise bleak history of racial and class inequality. It has taken the period since the 1970s to reawaken NZ to the existence of classes, and the continued impoverishment of many working class families. This is because crises are the norm in NZ. The first was the Long Depression of the 1880s which brought the colony to virtual collapse and a Liberal Government backed by workers and landless farmers stole millions more acres of Maori land to settle the landless and expand the mines. The second was the Great Depression of the 1930s that saw the real unemployment rise to 30% and thousands of poor farmers walk of the land. This brought the Labour Party to government for 14 years on a program of economic regulation and protectionism. The current crisis began in around 1973 during the Third Labour Governments term with the oil crisis. This brought the post-war boom to an abrupt halt and proved yet again that the booms were hot air balloons in the long downturns in NZ history.

End of the Postwar Boom

But this time the downturn was more permanent. NZ had exhausted its ability to develop behind tariff barriers to protect local manufacturers from overseas competition. Local firms like Watties and Fletchers were now national monopolies and had to expand offshore or die. Foreign branch plants like Borthwicks, ICI and Lever Bros were dominant in their sectors and demanding the right to repatriate profits to their multinational headquarters. The global downturn in pastoral exports now converged with the demand by capital to open up the economy to the global market. NZ manufacturing had outgrown the local market and to survive had to compete internationally. The National Party under Muldoon had tried desperately to insulate the economy from the global crisis and globalisation. Then as if to prove that the Labourite ‘classless society’ was a myth, it was the Labour Government that was forced to undertake the shock therapy of killing off its own protectionist heritage. This proved that historically the ideal of class equality was always dependent upon the capitalist class profitability. Equality was a luxury that only the bosses could afford.

The rise in inequality that resulted from Rogernomics, Ruthonomics and the return of National to office in 2008, proved beyond doubt that NZ remains essentially a semi-colony in which the imperialist powers plunder raw materials and labour power to extract their super profits. NZs economy is devoted to ‘rip, shit and bust’ - ripping out raw materials, depositing shit across the rest of society, and going bust as it gets deeper in debt. Its role is as a provider of raw materials and food for the imperialist countries. The period between 1935 and 1970s when NZ was a ‘rich’ country is an aberration. Economic nationalism was always a temporary refuge in response to depression and war. The 100 years before 1935 and the 40 years since the oil shock of 1973 proves that in the long run NZ is a weak, dependent semi-colony on Britain, the US, Australia and now China. That’s the story. It explains why ‘protectionism’ was short-lived so that since 1973 NZ has rapidly slid down the developed OECD countries league into so-called ‘third world’ status.

Semi-colony inequality

The definition of a semi-colony is a country that is owned and controlled by imperialism but which is politically sovereign or independent. But what does political sovereignty amount to when the key sectors of the economy are foreign owned and controlled? It means that the nation state is nothing but the agent of imperialism and the national capitalist class a comprador class of agents of imperialism. That means that foreign capital owns the key sectors of the economy. The value that is created by the working class is largely exported as profits. The biggest drains are the Big four Banks owned by Australian banks which made $32billion in profits in 2011.

Brian Gaynor reports: “The Bank of New Zealand was sold to National Australia Bank (NAB) for $1.5 billion in 1992. Since then BNZ has distributed $5.2 billion in dividends to its Australian parent and is now worth an estimated $7.2 billion based on its 2010 net earnings of $602 million and a price/earnings ratio of 12. Thus NAB paid $1.5 billion for BNZ and the latter has delivered total shareholder value of $12.4 billion to its Australian owners since late 1992. .. Telecom was sold to overseas interests for $4.25 billion in 1990 and since then has made distributions to shareholders, in the form of dividends and capital repayments, of $14.6 billion... an estimated $8.8 billion of these $14.6 billion distributions went to overseas shareholders.”

Gaynor summarises the situation: “A prosperous free enterprise economy is based on a high domestic savings rate and a strong productive sector that is well governed and mainly domestically owned. Australia and other above-average growth countries have these characteristics but New Zealand doesn't. Our low savings rate and under-investment in productive assets have hindered long-term stability and growth. For example, almost all the assets owned by the 10 largest ASX listed companies at the end of 1987, which had BHP in the top spot and Westpac at number 10, are still Australian-owned, whereas our largest listed companies at the end of 1987 were as follows: Fletcher Challenge (paper, forest and energy assets in foreign ownership), Brierley Investments, NZI (Australian-owned), NZ Forest Products (Graeme Hart-owned), Bank of New Zealand, Petrocorp (bought by Fletcher Challenge and on-sold to overseas interests), Lion (Japanese-owned), Carter Holt Harvey (Graeme Hart), LD Nathan (merged with Lion and now Japanese-owned) and Robt Jones Investments (Hong Kong-owned). Almost all of the assets owned by the next 10 largest NZX companies in December 1987, with the notable exception of the pre-split Fisher & Paykel, are also overseas-owned. These include Magnum (with its major operations Dominion Breweries and Countdown supermarkets now foreign-owned), Progressive Enterprises (Australian-owned), Wilson & Horton (Australian-owned) and INL (assets sold to Fairfax).”

So it’s this foreign ownership that determines how the relations between classes in NZ work. Income or wealth inequality is a symptom of this. The ruling class wealth increases in relation to its role as agents of international capital which requires NZ to be competitive. This means cutting costs, at all costs. The old class of national industrialists like Fletchers, Watties, Lion Breweries, Fisher and Paykel etc have been replaced as the dominant fraction of the ruling class by the upstart vulture capitalists, notably Brierley, Fay and Richwhite, Bob Jones, Alan Gibbs, Infratil’s Morrison, and CHH’s Hart, who have asset stripped uncompetitive firms and restructured them as international corporations. The second rank comprises the financial and property parasites who speculate on already produced value. Most of their combined wealth is invested offshore and is part of NZ’s biggest exports – profits. So while NZ industry has been restructured it is mainly at the expense of the working class.

Jobs, wages, taxes, social spending all have to be cut. As industry is restructured plants are closed down and many jobs are lost. Government legislates for reforms to implement these cost cuts. Thus since the deregulation of the economy under Labour in the 1980s we have seen these policies pursued by every government, cementing in the ‘openness’ of the economy. None of this was a surprise and was predicted by Marxists in the 1970s and 1980s. Today, it is an indictment of the lack of any serious political left in this country that a NZ Herald journalist Simon Collins has to rediscover the colonial causes of inequality in a series of articles. Yes it is colonisation that is the structural cause of poverty and discrimination and Maori child abuse.

Social Democracy bankrupt

That the Labour Party is now a Blairite party is evident in David Cunliffe’s comments on Collin’s articles. He criticises Collins for not coming up with solutions. Cunliffe’s solutions are a tame recycling of Blairite reformism. It boils down to NZ becoming more ‘competitive’ which means that workers have to be even more exploited. This is a recipe for increasing inequality as the share of value expropriated by the capitalists compared to that retained as wages by the working class constantly increases.

Revolutionary communists argue that social democracy is being exposed as bankrupt by the global economic crisis and will split as the left leaves the bankrupt Labour Party to join a new revolutionary Workers Party. Workers of the world are ready for revolution. All we need is the revolutionary party and program that opens to road to socialism.

Class Struggle 98 Dec 2011 Feb 2012

2012-02-15T15:02:00.000-08:00

Class Struggle 98 December 2011-February 2012

Defend Iran Against Imperialism and Zionism!

2012-02-01T00:30:00.000-08:00

Western imperialism, and the United States in particular, are in an unrelenting crisis. In the bloody game for world domination, US imperialism has just lost Iraq, which is aligning closer to Iran. It has also practically lost Pakistan—all in one mere year!—and it will likely lose Afghanistan as well, despite 9 years of occupation and war.

This is not an accident, but a reflection of the economic decline of US imperialism. As we are seeing, the military decline of the US has finally started to catch up with its economic decline. In a nutshell, the latest aggression of western imperialism against Iran is an attempt by the US to reverse its own economic decline by overthrowing the present regime in Iran and replacing it with a US puppet regime. Why? Controlling Iran is critical for controlling oil, both because of Iran’s plethora of land-based pipelines, and because of its strategic position next to the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important shipping route for oil and gas.

Of Course It’s About Oil

Iran sits in the middle of the world theater when it come to oil and the plundering of the natural resources of southern and central Asia. Everything that passes by sea from Iraq or Kuwait, or through Iran from western Asia, to anywhere else in the world, and vice versa, must pass through the Strait of Hormuz, which is essentially part of Iran’s territory. This includes 80-90% of the world’s oil. Thus, any imperialist country that controls Iran also has its foot on the transit of world oil. One does not need to be Einstein or a Marxist to understand that the latest stiff embargo and sanctions against Iran is not about its nuclear program, but about overthrowing the present regime of the Mullahs and putting a pro-American puppet regime in its place.

Iran is a semi-colony. If the US does attack Iran, either directly or via its Zionist muscle, revolutionaries must defend Iran, and call for Iran’s victory, despite its reactionary regime. A victory for Iran in such a conflict would shake up the entire imperialist/capitalist world order. It would encourage the struggle of the working class and the oppressed throughout the world. In particular, it would encourage the Palestinians in their struggle for liberation from the Zionist yoke.

We don’t know whether Iran is actually developing nuclear weapons, as western imperialism and the Zionists claim. But even if it is, its stock of missiles is a joke compared to the thousands of missiles in the hands of the US and Europe, not to mention the unknown number of nuclear weapons that Israel refuses to admit are in its possession. The US’s nuclear arsenal alone is large enough to destroy all life on Earth a million times. What we do know is that a Pakistani scientist sold the Iranians some of the technological know-how needed to build a nuclear weapon. Specifically, Iran got the plans for the kind of centrifuge that can refine nuclear materials to a weapons-grade concentration, as well as the plans for constructing bombs.

This illustrates that for the right price, plans and possible materials for nuclear bombs can leak from Pakistan and possibly other countries. In addition, countries and organizations can get the parts and material for nuclear weapons for the right price, as an unknown quantity of these was stolen or smuggled from the former Soviet Union. Thus, one problem that imperialism faces is the trend of proliferation of nuclear weapons to many semi-colonies. Such proliferation is inevitable in the coming decades. India, Pakistan, North Korea (which is technically still a deformed workers’ state), and Iran are just the beginning. With today’s technology, one can put an entire nuclear bomb in a suitcase. Thus it is inevitable present and future technology will bring upon us wars that will become nuclear wars. If western imperialism does not start it, the country under its attack will do so. Then many countries will push the button, and it will be bye-bye to civilization, and possibly the human race. Only a socialist revolution can prevent this horrifying development.

Of course, the US accusations against Iran are nothing but hypocrisy. It was the US that gave the Shah of Iran the secrets and material for the bomb in the first place, so he could build two nuclear plants to provide electricity for his country—all while Iran was sitting on top of one of the largest reservoirs of oil in the world! (Asia Times, Jan. 19, 2012.) The point is that for the right pro-imperialist regime (Israel, Brazil), US imperialism has no problem with supplying the material for the bomb.

The Imperialist Bloc of China and Russia Is Also a Target

Behind the embargo and sanctions against Iran looms the conflict between US imperialism and the imperialist bloc of China and Russia. While formally Iran is considered an “independent” country, in reality it is falling into dependency on China, and thus it is becoming a Chinese semi-colony. This is what is really alarming the US. China’s trade with Iran reached $30 billion in 2010. China is also heavily buying oil from Iran. Around 22% of China’s total oil imports consist of Iranian oil. China has clearly told the Americans that they can go to hell with their sanctions. According to Asia Times (Jan. 18, 2012), “Washington taunted Beijing on Thursday by slamming sanctions on Chinese firm Zhuhai Zhenrong Corp for allegedly selling refined petroleum products to Iran. But China voiced ‘strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition’ and expressed its intent to carry on ‘normal cooperation with Iran in energy, the economy and trade.’ China has also reached a deal in regard to Iran’s largest oil field, Yadavaran. China has an oil pipeline that starts in the Caspian Sea next to Iran. The pipeline extends to Kazakhstan and then to Western China. China already gets 15% of its oil and natural gas from Iran. In addition to oil and gas, China has automobile and fiber optics factories in Iran, and it is working on expanding the Tehran subway. Anyone who thinks that China will let go of any of this is crazy.

Not only is the strategy of Chinese imperialism to have Iran as its semi-colony, but China has also recently firmly planted its feet in the neighboring Gulf countries, just as the fortunes of the US are declining there. Saudi Arabia supplied 45.5 million tonnes of crude oil to China in 2011—a 13% increase from 2010. Qatar and other Gulf kingdoms are also shifting their exports from the US to China. According to Asia Times, “Qatar is a major supplier of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to China, and in the first 11-month period in 2011 it shipped 1.8 million tonnes, an increase of 76%. Trade with the UAE exceeds $36 billion and the sheikhdom is emerging as a major trans-shipment point for Chinese exports to Africa and Europe.”

While the US was imposing sanctions on Iran, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao was touring the Gulf states. That is, China’s answer to US meddling in Iran was to consolidate its grip not only on Iran, but also on the Gulf countries. Indeed, Saudi Arabia was eager to bring Wen into the country despite China’s relationship with Iran. This was a huge snub to the US by Saudi Arabia. The list of Wen’s achievements is impressive, as the Gulf states rushed to make record-breaking deals with China. As Asia Times reported on January 21, 2012: “Wen witnessed in Saudi Arabia the signing of a contract between China Petrochemical Corporation (Sinopec) and Saudi Aramco to build an $8.5 billion refinery with 400,000 barrel-a-day capacity in Yanbu on the Red Sea coast by 2014, with the two sides holding 35.5%-62.5% stakes respectively.” And in Qatar, Chinese accomplishments were just as impressive. On January 24, 2012, the same source reported that “Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, who visited Doha last week, disclosed at a press conference on Friday: a) China proposes to invest in the manufacturing of ‘downstream oil products, which are most urgently needed by Qatar’; b) China and Qatar signed an agreement to jointly build a refinery in Taizhou, Zheijiang, in China; c) Chinese companies propose to participate in infrastructure projects in Qatar; and d) China and Qatar are discussing a ‘long-term, stable and comprehensive cooperative partnership’ in natural gas.”

The Isolation of Iran Is a Myth

What we are seeing is that the US and Europe are getting weaker because of their economic crisis. That is not to say that China can avoid the deepening crisis of global capitalism. But while the US and its meek allies in Europe can only scream “sanctions and embargo,” China is strengthening its economic grip on Iran and the Gulf states. This is the real history. The declining powers talk war as the ascending imperialist power (China) takes control over the disputed areas. Even Afghan President Hamid Karzai announced in front of 2,000 tribal leaders that he plans to get closer to Tehran. The reality is that the road from Tehran to China is getting shorter by the day as China increases its influence in Central/South Asia. That means that when US leaves Afghanistan, China will get in there in a big way. It already has projects in Afghanistan, such as copper, while the US wastes its resources fighting “terrorists” there.

Similarly, as Pakistan increasingly snubs the US, the Chinese are taking over. Historically, Pakistan was allied with Saudi Arabia against Iran, i.e., against the Shiite regime that was perceived as a threat to the Sunni elite in Saudi Arabia. In 2011, however, Pakistan largely broke from the US sphere of influence and joined the Chinese-Russian economic web. Today, Iran and Pakistan are lining up together against the U.S. in the world trade war, and the Iran-Pakistan natural gas pipeline is a done deal—with the blessing of the Chinese. Thus, Pakistan is another country that is going to ignore the sanctions against Iran.

In short, it is a total myth that Iran can be crushed by the embargo and sanctions. It is surrounded by “friends” who need its oil, while to its north, Russia is watching out for its interests. Russia recently engaged in a revealing exercise in self criticism in regard to Libya. It announced that it was a bad mistake for Russia to abstain when the UN Security Council voted to allow NATO to bomb Libya. That will not happen again, said the Russians. This is a signal that Russia will not tolerate NATO bombing of Syria and Iran, because these countries are under the influence of the Russian-Chinese imperialist bloc.

Bye Bye Petrodollars

The Western imperialist aggression against Iran only brings Iran closer to Russia and China. Iran trades with Russia now in rials (Iran’s currency) and rubles. Now all Iran’s new deals with China are made with yuan (renminbi) and rials. Iran is making similar moves in oil deals with Japan and India. The reality is that less and less Iranian oil is traded with petrodollars.

That also means that the Gulf countries in general are trading less and less with petrodollars. For example, the yuan has started to make itself known in Doha. “The China-United Arab Emirates (UAE) currency swap deal which was signed during Wen Jiabao’s visit to Abu Dhabi last week already brings the yuan to the Emirates. The deal with the UAE is worth US$5.5 billion and the Chinese central bank statement said that it aims at ‘strengthening bilateral financial cooperation, promoting trade and investments and jointly safeguarding regional financial stability.’ ” (Asia Times, Jan. 24, 2012.)

India is also snubbing the US by spending around $12-14 billion for oil in Indian rupees which “would subsequently be converted into a separate designated currency.” Tehran’s ambassador to Moscow, Seyed Reza Sajjadi, summarized the new emerging petrodollarless world order when he stated recently that Iran’s trade with Russia “is based on our national currencies. We started this work long ago. Iranian businessmen are buying products in Russia and are using the rouble as [payment] currency. . . . The US dollar has no [economic] support base. . . . There is a similar interest on the Russian side.”
We are in the center of a trade and currency war between Western imperialism and the Chinese-Russian Eastern imperialist bloc. Iran is the big prize. Right now it is in the hands of the Eastern imperialist bloc. Anyone who thinks that this bloc will drop Iran because of the embargo and sanctions needs to wake up. What we are seeing is that the petrodollar is losing to the ruble and the yuan. The sanctions and embargo will only strengthen the position of China in the Middle East and the Gulf countries.
Iran indeed feels protected to the point that it can laugh at the European sanctions. Europe (read Germany, England and France) wanted to delay the start of the embargo until July 1 in order to allow the weak links in the South to find an alternative oil supply. Iran answered by saying, in effect, “We don’t care about supplying Europe. We are locking Europe out by starting European sanctions against us now!” Iran said that there are anxious clients who will buy the oil that Iran supplies to Europe.
(Financial Times, Jan. 26, 2012.)

If Iran stops supplying oil to Greece, Italy, Spain and other countries in southern Europe that have no alternative source of supply, these countries will slide even deeper into economic depression, and the European crisis will fly through the roof along with oil prices.

We are not saying that the dollar and US imperialism have been beaten. Weakened is not the same as beaten. The US is still the most powerful imperialist power. It will take time before the dollar stops being the main international currency. Thus, the sanctions will still hurt Iran. The rial is sliding dramatically against the dollar, causing significant inflation in Iran. The ruling class and the Mullahs are not seriously affected. They can find alternative oil buyers, and they can trade in yuan and rubles. But the Iranian working class has no escape from the inflation. The Iranian workers are pawns in the increasing tension between Eastern and Western imperialism. They are the ones who will pay the price of the global crisis of capitalism, which is ultimately the cause of the embargo and sanctions.

The Way Forward for the Working Class

As China’s global influence increases, and it attempts to use the broken backs of its workers as a stepladder to the height of imperialist world power, the workers and villagers are fighting back and confronting the state and its cops. Their Iranian brothers and sisters can follow their example. They can fight inflation by striking for a sliding scale of wages pegged to inflation. They can take over the oil industry and the oilfields, nationalizing them without compensation. That means overthrowing the reactionary, capitalist Mullah regime and replacing it with a workers’ government. The best way for the Iranian workers to confront US imperialism is to fight it without hindrance from the oppressive regime of Ayatollah Khamenei and company.

In the US and Europe, workers must take action to smash the embargo and sanctions against Iran. As sanctions are an act of war, the working class in Europe and the US has a class duty to fight to defeat their own ruling class’s imperialist war machine! They should combine their own class struggles with actions against the imperialist sanctions and embargo. The main enemy is the banks and the ruling class at home. This means that workers must fight against the racism and chauvinism employed against Muslims, which is used to poison the mind of the workers and pacify them while imperialism carries out the embargo and sanctions. Down with all anti-Muslim propaganda, government spy programs, and anti-immigrant laws!

The ruling class in the US is using nationalist chauvinism and racism not only to develop support for a possible war against Iran, but to hurt the workers in the US as well. They are using the threat of “terrorism” from Iran and the Arab world as an excuse to curb workers’ rights in the US. Under the new law signed by Obama, the FBI can grab anybody, including any American citizen, and incarcerate them indefinitely for having a “loose” connection to “terrorists” and to the “enemy” behind them—Iran, for example—without filing charges or producing any evidence to back them up. This means that the US is becoming a dictatorship under the cover of the “democratic” two-party system.

We, the American working class, must fight this and other reactionary laws that curb democratic freedoms, such as the right to assemble and protest in public places, the right to express our political opinions, and the power of organized workers to go on strike. By defending Iran against imperialism, we also defend the democratic rights of the workers and anyone who fights this reactionary Congress and President. Down with the new American dictatorship! For a fighting workers’/labor party that fights for a workers’ government! For a militant, worker-led mass struggle to overthrow the dictatorship of the Democrats, the Republicans, and Obama. They are the ones who conspired to allow the police and the FBI to detain anyone permanently without trial. They are the ones behind the brutal repression of Occupy and the indiscriminate killing and incarceration of Black and Latino youth. The main enemy is at home—not in Tehran and Beijing!

Adopted by HWRS January 29, 2012

30 years ago: Owen Gager on 'Towards a Socialist Polynesia'

2012-01-28T15:49:00.000-08:00

Patu Squad Anti-Springbok Tour protest 1981 - photo John Miller

The Springbok Tour of Aotearoa in 1981 opened up a chapter in our history when fundamental questions about colonisation and racism in Aotearoa were directly confronted by mass audiences for the first time. A tiny Trotskyist group entered this debate with the production of a pamphlet around a year later titled "Towards a Socialist Polynesia". Written by Owen Gager, the first professional (as in full time, unpaid) Trotskyist agitator NZ had seen, it argued that NZ could best be understood as a white settler colony (yet with pretensions of imperialist rule in the South Pacific) very much in the same mould as South Africa. It was then, the first serious Marxist attempt to subject the events of the Tour of 1981 to dialectical analysis, and a critique of the other attempts on the left to explain these events. It makes the point that white settler colonies are backward, racist outposts of empire, and that their future is one of reactionary racism until such time as they are transformed into socialist republics, in the case of New Zealand, part of a federation of Socialist Republics of Polynesia.

Before making a couple of lengthy quotes which convey the substance of the argument about the white settler colonies and display its power as a critique of the conventional 'left' views of Aotearoa, some short account of the Spartacist League and its co-founder, Owen Gager, is necessary. After all, why would a revolutionary current emerge in such a backward, and as Gager used to say, petty bourgeois, British white-settler colony?

As we might expect, left politics in small countries are heavily influenced by currents in larger countries. NZ as a small, dependent, colony had is own local minor echoes of Fabian, anarchist, IWW, Labourite, Stalinist and Trotskyist politics. Apart from a few sympathisers of Trotsky in the 1930s and a bogus rumour that rightwing 1950's union boss and dairy farmer Fintan Patrick Walsh was once a Trotskyist, Trotskyism in NZ originated in the 1960s around a few key individuals. Notable among them was Owen Gager who as an honours student of history in the late 1950s wrote a path breaking Marxist critique of the colonial suppression of the labour movement during the First World War.

In the 1960s like many intelligent and revolutionary minded youth during that intense period of decolonisation, the bloody IndoChina war and 'new left', Gager became highly politically active editing the Victoria University paper Salient, and founding and editing at least three Marxist or Trotskyist magazines, Dispute, Spartacist Spasmodical and Red. Gager had discovered Trotskyism and made it his business to find out which was the best in keeping Trotsky's program alive. In 1970 he joined up with Bill Logan at Victoria University to form the NZ Spartacist League. As the name suggests this was a statement of solidarity with the international Spartacist current based in the US. But as everyone likes to repeat parrot-like where there are at least two Trotskyists there must be a split, so around 1972 Logan went off to the US to join the Spartacists while Gager rejected the Spartacists as pro-US imperialist and left for Australia to co-found the Communist Left, leaving his frustrations with 'petty bourgeois' NZ behind.

Gager came back to NZ for around a year in 1982 largely as the result of the ferment stirred up by the Tour in 81. He helped revive the then dormant Tenants Protection Association in Ponsonby and wrote a number of pamphlets including Towards a Socialist Polynesia. One needs to read the whole pamphlet to realise what a ground-breaking work it was, especially the 'Leninist' critique of the other left currents, including the Maori nationalists around Donna Awatere and their chief nemesis, Bill Andersen. But his main contribution in this pamphlet was to build a Marxist theoretical framework for understanding NZ's place as a colony of British imperialism, and its role in the wider Pacific, and in particular the role of the pan-Pacific proletariat in making a socialist revolution. Here the concept of the white-settler colony was central to the argument.

In the introductory section Gager ties in NZs intellectual and political backwardness with its colonial history. Any here South Africa is the appropriate explanatory model. Gager uses Marx's method of taking as his reference point the actual disruption of the Tour and then going down to the roots of this conflict in our common history. Of course a reading of the complete pamphlet is necessary to grasp the power of the argument.

Gager begins by claiming that settler colonies like South Africa and NZ maintain a racist division between the indigenous and settler populations today because the indigenous populations still have some residue of their original mode of production and live in a semi-wage labour reserve army. Racism justifies this division while apartheid legalises it. The Tour served to highlight that in fighting Apartheid in South Africa the Pakeha left faced the reality of racism in this country; that South Africa showed Aotearoa its future.

" But while expropriation and continued land sales made possible the rise of commodity production, it was the survival of remnants of the Polynesian mode of production which made the super-exploitation of the Maori rural reserve army of cheap labour possible.[3] Pre-capitalist forms of property in land and traditions of mutual economic support within tribes provided means of subsistence outside that which could be bought with wages in the market. This meant that Maori workers could be paid low wages (below the cost of reproduction of labour power in the market) and employed as casual or seasonal labour. As land values dropped further and more land was alienated, the dependence of the Maori rural reserve army on its own means of subsistence lessened but without any equalisation of the low wage and the ‘high minimum level” set by commodity production.

The history of the super-exploitation of the Polynesian workers is the history of the continued existence of the Polynesian mode of production within the framework of the dominant capitalist relations of production. So long as the Polynesian mode of production survives within the hostile capitalist environment, the wages of Maori workers are forced below the value of labour power. While the continued possession of some Maori land may slow down the proletarianisation of the Maori people, it cannot prevent and has not prevented it. It ensures, on the contrary, that when Maori workers enter the proletariat, they do so on the worst terms, as the lowest stratum of the class. This is not the result of racism, though this process has produced and will continue to produce racism. It arises rather from the logic of a slow and protracted expropriation of a pre-capitalist mode of production by the capitalist mode, at every point representing continuous immiseration of the indigenous population as the value of Maori land declines and the amount of land owned is reduced in area and fertility. Similar processes take place in other Polynesian islands but even more slowly."

"This [the South African case] as we have argued, is similar to the position in New Zealand. In both cases part of the costs of reproduction of indigenous labour-power is being met by the traditional labour of those (particularly women) outside the capitalist mode of production. South Africa’s development diverged from New Zealand’s in that the CMP displaced the petty commodity MOP in agriculture by force, a result of British imperialism’s drive to protect large-scale mining capital. The absence of any large-scale mineral or other raw material resources in New Zealand meant that massive capital investment such as in South Africa did not take place. This held back the development of industry and the rate of conversion of petty commodity production into capitalist agriculture, and allowed the survival of comprador small capital dominated by British finance, shipping and meat exporting capital. These differences however, are differences of pace and scale, not of substance. An accelerated concentration of capital in New Zealand and the South Pacific would utilise existing wage differentials between white and Polynesian workers to entrench an apartheid-like system. Under capitalism, South Africa represents the future of Polynesia."

The next step in the argument was to show that the struggles of the indigenous peoples to defend their mode of production from capitalist incursion gave rise to a rich history of insurrections and wars, and after a series of failed national movements, the assimilation of the indigenous peoples into the reserve army of the proletariat as the best, most militant, and ultimately the leading layers of the revolutionary proletariat. Of course, the punch line is that this revolution must lead to a "Socialist Union of the Pacific".

From Chapter 5 of Towards a Socialist Polynesia

Permanent Revolution in Polynesia

Polynesia (except Tonga) was annexed by various European powers in the nineteenth century, and the history of struggle against annexation is long and bloody. Throughout Polynesia, King Movements developed as forms of Polynesian self-government, following European monarchical traditions, initially under the influence of missionaries. These movements generally lacked the strength to control European land purchases, and their surrender to the market made inevitable their surrender to European governors. In Aotearoa, however, a King Movement developed after annexation rather than before it, against European opposition and using its monopoly of physical force in certain areas to control the activities of pakeha farmers.

This movement, because of its totally Polynesian character and its effective control of agricultural production was seen by the white settler ruling class – who had achieved ‘responsible government’ in 1852, excluding Maori from the vote – as part of an insurrection. Forms of Maori sovereignty directly confronted pakeha sovereignty, in opposed forms of government based upon conflicting modes of production. The King Movement once under attack from the white settler government, lost effective power because it did not gain military support from all sections of the Maori population in the land wars. The white government, protesting its ‘loyalty’ to Britain – so as to use the British army’s guns to facilitate land expropriation – conceded to the Maori people the struggle for national independence.

A minority of the King Movement saw itself as opposed to British rule – Te Hokioi, the King Movement paper, pointed to Haiti’s success in maintaining its independence – but the majority could not rise to the conception of a national movement cutting across tribal divisions. Yet the King Movement, before its suppression, exercised more economic and political power over both Maori and pakehas within its jurisdiction than any similar movement elsewhere in Polynesia, learning as it did from similar movements in other islands.

The defeat of the King Movement had several effects. It confirmed the white settler government in its role as a dependent satellite of British imperialism. It led to the rise of Christian churches independent of the pakeha missionaries, most notably Ringatu, whose view of the lessons to be learnt from defeat was not only that the pakeha missionaries were servants of imperialism, but also that the Maori people were being proletarianised.

“Each tohunga therefore must earn his living with his own hands and anything that in any way resembles tithing is not tolerated”. “ The love-feast whish is held in the morning of the second day of a monthly Ringatu festival, is a feast in the literal sense of the term. When a large crowd is gathered…the feast is held in the open, the ‘tables’ being laid on the ground in true Maori fashion…The tohunga offers grace, and the meal is eaten with relish. Truly only the best is provided, the motive being that it is a love-feast to God. A collection is taken toward the close of the meal, the money being used for church purposes only. The collection must not be used for defraying the expenses of the meal, or making other provision for the entertainment of the gathering. It is also a rule of the church that the money given must be earned by the sweat of the brow – interest on investments, proceeds of sale of land or leases not being acceptable.”[11]

The withdrawal of many North Island Maori from the only white institutions they had previous links with – the pakeha churches – was their verdict on the ruling class’s land war. Now, in a period of Maori political decline new white missionaries have emerged to tie Polynesian workers to white capitalism.

The formation in 1892 of a Kotahitanga, or union, deriving from the 1835 Declaration of Independence by a confederation of united tribes, was another effort by Maori in Aotearoa to achieve their own form of government. While it was claimed that Kotahitanga did not aim to limit the authority of the British Crown, both the New Zealand and British ruling classes refused to recognise it. Had its leaders seriously based themselves on the 1835 Declaration, they could have claimed the Kotahitanga had more right to existence than the pakeha parliament. They did not do so. Although the movement later subsided (as was inevitable because its success relied on pakeha parliamentary approval) it was nonetheless an expression of Maori lack of faith in capitalist parliamentarism, and an attempt to develop their own institutions instead.

By contrast, the so-called ‘Young Maori Movement’ (praised by Donna Awatere and the Socialist Action League), was an abandonment of the Polynesian revolutionary tradition, and a surrender to European parliamentarism, leading to such racist attacks on Maori culture as the Suppression of Tohungaism Act. With Apirana Ngata’s impeachment in 1934, it was shown that even the better elements in the Movement, given opportunities at the highest level, could not work through colonial parliamentary institutions. The Ratana Movement, in reaction, linked itself to the Labour Party, in endorsing Tawhiao’s view of the unity of the working class.

“…in London, Ratana was snubbed by his own High Commissioner, Sir James Allen, who was happy for the party to perform haka and poi dances at the Wembley exhibition but laughed when Ratana asked that arrangements be made for him to meet representatives of the British Government. This rejection deeply wounded Ratana and, standing on Westminster Bridge, he prophesied in the words used by Tawhiao: “When all your stone houses are destroyed in time to come, then will the carpenters, the blacksmiths and the shoemakers be in power and I will be the government.”[12] Although their links with the labour movement have enabled the Ratana Church to play a continuing political role in Maori affairs, again it has failed to achieve its objectives through parliamentary means.

The history of the Maori people in Aotearoa has been a history of struggle for its own form of government. So long as the Polynesian mode of production continued to have vitality, traditional leaders basing themselves on the survival of Maori social relations tried, always unsuccessfully, to persuade white settler governments to tolerate forms of Maori self-government. When traditional leadership failed, now leaders emerged – often as apparently ‘religious’ leaders in a society where distinctions between religion and politics are not clear cut – giving expression to the proletarianisation of the Maori people and their links with other workers outside the framework of parliamentary politics. The refusal of Maori to fight imperialist wars have been the direct result of the emergence of this formally religious, but proletarian in reality, tradition – mass actions with little echo and no support from the ‘official’ pakeha labour movement.[13]

As the old social relations of the Polynesian mode of production fused with the social relations of the Capitalist mode, as the Maori people became fully proletarianised, the early forms of proletarian ideology lost their religious shell and took on the form of self-government in opposition to imperialism and colonial racist parliamentary rule. The New Zealand colonial ruling class has and will refuse to concede the demand for self-government, but this demand will be achieved in spite of the ruling class, by smashing it. The King Movement and the Kotahitanga were imitations of European class institutions, their monarchies, their parliaments. It is necessary to go beyond European class society and its imitation.

The Polynesian people, their land having been expropriated, now constitute a section – potentially the most revolutionary section because of their tradition as an oppressed nationality – of the working class. The struggle for self-government has now become the workers’ struggle for power: instead of Kings and parliament, workers’ councils are on the agenda. The tradition of the Maori people, a tradition of armed struggle and revolutionary aspiration, now fuses with the international working class culture, developed by Marxism and its tradition of revolution to form the science and culture of the Polynesian socialist revolution.

This struggle has always had an international dimension. The King Movement of the Waikato drew on the lessons of Tahiti, Hawaii and Haiti in the nineteenth century. Today, as the Spartacist League predicted fifteen years ago, the Polynesian islands which have been conceded formal independence by imperialism, experience as a result the crisis of the nation-state in holding back the development of the forces of production, in its most acute form.

Political independence only deepens the economic dependence of the Polynesian island states, accentuating the dependence of the national economies themselves on the remittance of wages of Polynesian migrant workers in New Zealand. Therefore, the achievement in the less developed island states of what has proved impossible in the most developed island with its white culture – the objectives of the King Movement and Kotahitanga –shows that these forms of independence do not halt the pauperisation, immiseration and proletarianisation of the Polynesians by the Capitalist mode of production.

In Polynesia, the less developed island states are to Aotearoa what Transkei and Ciskei are to South Africa – reserves of cheap labour-power which can be forced back into poverty during any economic downturn in the sacred name of respect for ‘national sovereignty’. But the Polynesian proletariat has outgrown ‘nationalism’, which is another name for starvation behind national frontiers, and which intensifies imperialist exploitation instead of abolishing it. Samoa, the Cook Islands, Niue and to a certain extent Tonga, are New Zealand semi-colonies whose colonial dependence can be ended only by socialism. Tahiti, Eastern Samoa and Hawaii, are victims of the final ruse of imperialism – incorporation of the colony into the metropolitan imperialist state. We demand for them the right of secession!

What is needed is a Socialist Union of Polynesia! The revolutionary tradition of Samoa, Hawaii, and Tahiti – the history of uprisings against imperialism – must now directed beyond independence to socialism. Now that large numbers of Polynesian workers have been concentrated in Auckland and other parts of Aotearoa, it is there that they will exchange experiences and prepare for united revolutionary action. This pamphlet has concentrated on Polynesia since (with the exception of Tahiti and Hawaii) it is largely within the sphere of interest of New Zealand as a small imperialist power. A Socialist Polynesia would, however be only a step toward a Socialist Union of the Pacific."

No doubt this pamphlet would benefit from being updated and corrected in some factual points today, yet as an historical document of its times, the fight against the '81 Apartheid Tour, and the Marxist lessons Gager drew about the roots of racism in both South Africa and Aotearoa, its stands proud as part of the Communist Workers Group's revolutionary heritage.

Chinese Workers and Farmers Confront Chinese Imperialism: For the Socialist Revolution! Draft statement for discussion

2012-01-25T02:16:00.000-08:00

1900 striking workers at Honda's Foshan plant celebrate victory - May 2010

The Wukan rebellion has focused world attention on the role of the Chinese workers and farmers. In reality it is one fight among many over land that happens to have come to international media attention. It has to be seen in the light also of the many labour disputes that have broken out in recent years especially since 2008 when China recovered from the slowdown of the global recession with a massive injection of state investment in infrastructure. We will not document these struggles other than to point out that they are proof of the growing strength and militancy of workers and farmers facing the extreme pressure to increase productivity to maintain profits as the emerging imperialist Chinese economy competes with other imperialist rivals to make its workers and farmers pay for the global crisis.

The left is in disarray over China. Many think this wave of peasant and worker militancy is a pro-democracy movement against the ‘communist dictatorship’ inspired by the Jasmine Revolution. Others say labour disputes are the working class playing its role in bringing workers democracy and social equality which is lacking in China’s market socialism. Yet others recognise that China has restored capitalism and a new capitalist class is super-exploiting its workers and peasants, and then there are those like ourselves who say that China’s restored capitalism has developed into an emerging imperialism which has clear consequences for the class struggle.

We propose to critique the various positions (we could call them ‘post-Marxist’ since they abandon the ‘law of value’) to arrive at the truth about China today. The key to understanding China’s recent history is to discover how it combines pre-capitalist, capitalist and post-capitalist modes of production into a new capitalist imperialism. We need to develop a Marxist critique of this uneven and combined development which can explain how China’s transition from degenerate workers state back to capitalist state has been able to assert its economic independence to escape the trap of imperialist domination as an emerging imperialist power. Without such an analysis we cannot fully explain the historic leading role of the Chinese working class and peasantry in the current world situation.

The “most dangerous class”

‎Writing in the New left Review, Mike Davis says:

"Western post-Marxists—living in countries where the absolute or relative size of the manufacturing workforce has shrunk dramatically in the last generation—lazily ruminate on whether or not ‘proletarian agency’ is now obsolete, obliging us to think in terms of ‘multitudes’, horizontal spontaneities, whatever. But this is not a debate in the great industrializing society that Das Kapital describes even more accurately than Victorian Britain or New Deal America...Two hundred million Chinese factory workers, miners and construction labourers are the most dangerous class on the planet. (Just ask the State Council in Beijing.) Their full awakening from the bubble may yet determine whether or not a socialist Earth is still possible”.

China is today the “great industrialising” successor to Victorian Britain and New Deal America, where Western ‘post-Marxists’ are ‘awakening’ to the class struggle. However, China has long been recognised as being more advanced than the ‘West’. To see precisely why the Chinese working class is the ‘most dangerous’ class for capitalism today we need to rewind and replay the historic scenario of its history as a revolutionary class. The Chinese working class played an important role in three revolutions, the bourgeois revolution of 1911, the workers revolution of 1925-1927, the Stalinist/Maoist revolution of 1949, and today after the restoration of capitalism it is once again centre-stage in the coming socialist revolution.

Karl Marx was the first to understand that not all nations had to repeat the development of capitalism in Europe and coming late to capitalism already a global system, ‘backward’ nations could rapidly make the transition from capitalism to socialism ahead of the European states in what he called ‘permanent revolution’.

Marx fully expected that China would rapidly catch up and surpass Europe in its bourgeois revolution. As in all ‘backward’ countries colonised by European capitalist powers, Marx expected that the national bourgeoisies would become weak and reactionary allies of imperialism and lack the capacity or class interest to unify the nation and win independence from imperialism, making it necessary for the revolutionary working class to take the leadership of the bourgeois revolution and complete it as the socialist revolution.

Writing in 1850, Marx says:

“Chinese Socialism bears much the same relation to European Socialism as Chinese philosophy does to Hegelian philosophy. It is, in any case, an intriguing fact that the oldest and the most unshakable empire in the world has in eight years by the cannon-balls of the English bourgeoisie been brought to the eve of a social revolution which will certainly have the most important results for civilisation. When our European reactionaries in their immediately coming flight across Asia finally come up against the Great Wall of China, who knows whether they will not find on the gates which lead to the home of ancient reaction and ancient conservatism the inscription, ‘Chinese Republic – liberty, equality, fraternity’.”

What Marx was foreseeing was that once its reactionary ‘Asiatic’ mode of production was opened to the modernising force of capitalism China had the potential to break free of European domination and make its bourgeois revolution without having to repeat European history. Not only was Marx correct in this prediction, he anticipated that in China the bourgeois revolution would be completed under the leadership of the working class as the socialist revolution. Marx was here making the point later taken up by Lenin, that the bourgeois revolutionary tasks were better expressed as the ‘national revolution’ since they would be carried out by the proletariat not by the national bourgeoisie.

Marx was also anticipating Trotsky who from 1906 understood that the logic of this process in the epoch of imperialism would require a ‘permanent revolution’ in which the national and democratic tasks would be completed as part of an international socialist revolution. The Bolshevik Revolution put this theory to the test and proved that the national proletariat could begin to complete the national-democratic tasks, but that the permanent revolution would only be completed by the international socialist revolution. With the failure of the German Revolution in 1923, the Chinese Revolution became the next best hope for extending the Russian Revolution to the world.

Lenin lived to see the First Chinese national revolution of 1911. Trotsky survived long enough to see this revolution prove the universality of the theory of permanent revolution as the working class rapidly took the leadership of the revolution and made the Second Chinese Revolution as a workers revolution between 1925 and 1927. Trotsky, by then in opposition, fought against the Stalinist policy that betrayed the Shanghai workers revolution to the popular front with the Kuomintang.

Permanent Revolution Betrayed

Here was the tragedy of the Bolshevik program of permanent revolution betrayed by the Stalinists popular front. So weak was the Chinese bourgeoisie that it had to seek the authority of the Communist International and the Russian Revolution to force the Chinese Communists into a deadly political alliance with the Kuomintang which then sent its army against the revolution. Against this murderous popular front the Left Opposition program or Trotsky was for a Communist Party independent of the bourgeoisie to lead the armed struggle for the national revolution i.e. the program of permanent revolution.

After the defeat of the workers revolution in 1927 the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) retreated to the countryside, fought a long civil war, and ultimately led a largely peasant revolution in 1949 that defeated imperialism, expelled the national bourgeoisie, and created a Degenerate Workers State based on socialised, or workers, property. It was ‘Degenerate’ because it reproduced the Degenerated Workers State in the USSR. The CCP was led by Chinese Stalinists who held that the national revolution could be won by a ‘bloc of four classes’ (peasantry, workers, petty bourgeoisie and liberal or patriotic bourgeoisie). This Stalinist/Menshevik program was based on the theory of ‘socialism in one country’ first promoted by Stalin in 1925 to defend ‘socialism’ in the Soviet Union by making alliances with ‘democratic imperialist’ states. In exchange for their support Stalin committed the Communist Parties in these countries to form parliamentary blocs with the national bourgeoisie and renounce international revolution.

Thus the Third Chinese Revolution in 1949 was one in which the Stalinist/Maoist CCP proposed to defeat imperialist occupation but remain a bourgeois republic with the cooperation of the ‘progressive bourgeoisie’. The Stalinist/Maoist leadership proposed to collaborate with the Chinese bourgeoisie but become the ruling fraction of the national bourgeoisie. However, as in Eastern Europe, the Stalinist/Maoist plan failed because the weak national bourgeoisie was much more interested in preserving its ties to imperialism than in being subordinated to a planned economy. So they declined the invitation and the Stalinist/Maoists had no choice but to expropriate the bourgeoisie. Thus the seizure of power in 1949 led to the expropriation of the bourgeoisie by 1953 and the formation of a Degenerate Workers State (DWS) committed to defending workers property.

Nevertheless, Marx, Lenin and Trotsky knew that once the bourgeois revolution had begun in China the proletariat was the only class capable of completing that revolution as the socialist revolution. The advances and retreats of this ‘dangerous class’ could not be understood on the national terrain but as part of the international class struggle. Though the 1949 revolution was won on the national terrain by a peasant army under a Stalinist/Maoist leadership, it was the threat of the Chinese working class as part of the international proletariat that made the national bourgeoisie flee China forcing the Stalinist/Maoists to go further than they wanted, and to expropriate the bourgeoisie. Just as the Stalinists were obliged to defend workers property relations in the Soviet Union as the basis of their caste privileges, in China the Maoists were forced to create workers property relations to develop the forces of production where the bourgeoisie had failed.

While the working class was denied a democratic role in the CCP and the state, its potential was as the only historic class that had the social power to produce material wealth. The proletariat is the only ‘universal’ class that can replace the weak and declining bourgeoisie and lead an international socialist revolution against the decaying capitalist imperialist system. So while workers’ power was usurped by the Stalinist/Maoist bureaucracy in China, all that was required was a political revolution, in which the workers and peasants would smash the state machine, overthrow the parasitic bureaucratic caste and implement a genuine workers democracy and socialist plan. Failing that, the stagnation and decline of the DWS would lead inevitably to the restoration of capitalism and subordination of China once more to the existing capitalist imperialist powers.

Restoration re-opens road to Revolution

The question remains however, does the restoration of capitalism in a former DWS lead inevitably to submission to imperialism as a new semi-colony. Perhaps, the unique historical combination and development of a succession of modes of production would allow the former workers state to combine the law of value (or the ‘market’) with centralised state planning capable of developing the forces of production and accumulating sufficient capital to escape semi-colonial subordination and emerge as a new imperialist power. There is nothing in Marx, Lenin and Trotsky’s understanding of the uneven and combined development of capitalism to exclude such an historic outcome in China. In fact there is much in the Marxist tradition to point to the importance of a centralist state machine inherited from previous modes of production being ‘carried over’ to facilitate the birth of a new mode of production.

While most of this commentary is about the state forms that the bourgeoisie inherited from the feudal state, there is every reason to believe that the DWSs revived bourgeois-bureaucratic state institutions. In Russia one of the criticisms of the Bolsheviks by the anarchists and left communists, was that the Bolsheviks did not smash the state machine and retained some of the Tsarist state forms. Not true! Marx wrote after the experience of the Paris Commune in 1871 that the proletarian revolution must ‘smash’ the bourgeois state to build a workers state. In 1917 the Bolsheviks smashed the Tsarist/bourgeois state machine but had no compunction in forming a centralised workers’ state machine to impose the proletarian ‘dictatorship’ of the revolutionary soviets.

However when the soviets were usurped by the bureaucracy the degeneration of the workers state was facilitated by the same centralised state machine. The political revolution would therefore have to smash this bureaucratised state machine as the power base of the Stalinist/Maoist caste in order to open the road to socialism. However, with the failure of the political revolution smashed by the bureaucratic dictatorship this same state machine with its historic centralised institutions would become an important instrument the Stalinist/Maoist bureaucracy could use to transform itself into a new bourgeoisie and restore capitalism in a centralised and planned way.

We argue that this historic outcome is the reality today. Against those who say China never had a workers revolution; or that the CCP has ‘reformed’ socialism by using the market to stimulate growth in a New Economic Policy; or those who claim that the former workers state is now no more than a semi-colony of the imperialist powers; we argue that China has fulfilled all the expectations that Marx and the Bolsheviks had of the revolutionary role of the ‘most dangerous’ class; in revolution after revolution, combining modes of production to allow the economic independence of the degenerate workers state and the bureaucratised apparatus of the former workers state, to restore the law of value and make the transition to a new imperialist power. While the restoration of capitalism is a counter-revolution in the permanent revolution, Marx’s dialectical method reveals that a restored capitalist China today sharpens and condenses the contradictions of imperialism creating the objective conditions for the ‘dangerous class’ of hundreds of millions of workers to once again fight for the 'democratic' rights of ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’ by taking the road to world socialist revolution!

Marx would disown the ‘post-Marxists’

The self-proclaimed Marxists are in disarray on China. They have the advantage of outliving Marx for a century-and-a-half but the disadvantage of failing to understand Marx for the same length of time. They suffer from their own particular brand of uneven and combined development where the articulation of historically backward ideas is subordinated to bourgeois ideology. Marx raged against the bourgeois empiricism of surface appearances that separates culture and politics from the mode of production; that takes market relations for social relations; that fails to concretise the truth in any historical situation or draw historical laws of motion to explain events. In the Critique of the Gotha Program Marx already confronted the backsliding of his contemporaries towards the vulgar economics of the market and its ruling ideas. In the twentieth century the capitulation of the Second and Third Internationals to imperialism left Trotskyism as the only current that continued the revolutionary Marxism of the Bolsheviks. By the onset of the Second World War Trotsky argued that Marxism faced a crisis, and that the survival of capitalism after the War would be a major challenge to Marxism. Unfortunately the post-war Fourth International did not rise to that challenge. Not surprisingly, a more than half a century later, the extreme bankruptcy of capitalism in the epoch of imperialism beset by structural crisis today is matched by the extreme bankruptcy of ‘post-Marxist’ theories of capitalism dominated by the ideas of the ruling class.

(1) STATE CAPITALISTS

State capitalists argue that the Soviet Union restored capitalism in 1929 (some say 1939) when the Stalinist bureaucracy transformed itself into a capitalist class. This ignores the key concept in Capital, the law of value, whereby the value of commodities equals the 'socially necessary labour time' (SNLT) to produce them, as capitals compete to reduce the price of production. The LOV is the dynamic law that underlies all the laws of motion of capitalism. Even in the imperialist epoch when Lenin argued that the tendency of monopoly capital was to suppress the law of value, it could not be totally suppressed and reappeared at the level of inter-imperialist economic rivalry and wars. Yet in the Soviet Union prices were set by the bureaucratic plan and not by the law of value with some minor exceptions. The result was the failure to reduce labour time, increasing inefficiencies, waste, and ultimately the stagnation of the whole economy. The law of value did not reappear in the Soviet Union until Yeltsin abolished the plan and allowed the LOV to restructure Soviet industry according to global SNLT after 1992.

In the case of China the state capitalists say that in 1949 the revolution in China did not create a workers state because the working class did not make the revolution. Therefore, China was state capitalist at birth. Trotsky already answered the state capitalists in the 1930s in In Defence of Marxism.

First, at the level of method, Trotsky critiques the state capitalists’ rejection of the dialectical method that treats reality as a unity of opposites. The state capitalists used bourgeois formal logic and split their analysis of the state superstructure from the economic base. They argued that the Stalinist bureaucracy became a new capitalist ruling class, and invented a new theory of state capitalism to justify the failure to defend the workers property and fight for a political revolution to remove the Stalinists. State capitalists cannot show that the LOV operated in the Soviet Union. Commodities were not produced for exchange so there could be no accumulation of capital, business cycles or crises of overproduction. Instead, prices are set by the plan and production extracts a surplus that fails to meet the needs of the workers or meet the plan and so increasingly the bureaucracy cannot maintain its privileges. Attempts by state capitalists, such as Neil Davidson, to make use of Trotsky’s concept of the law of uneven and combined development to explain the specifics of capitalist development, is rendered absurd when the key element, the LOV itself, is not understood.

Second, theoretically and programmatically, Trotsky argued that when the Red Army invaded Poland in 1939 and nationalised bourgeois property this represented an extension of workers property in the Soviet Union and created a new degenerated workers state. As in the Soviet Union, such extensions of workers property by means of Red Army occupations, such as in post-war Eastern Europe, must therefore be unconditionally defended as if it were part of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, such Stalinist occupations are at the expense of workers revolution internationally, and so to open the road to socialism the degenerated bureaucratic caste that rules in place of the workers has to be overthrown by a workers political revolution.

On the basis of this dialectical method, Trotskyists argue that in the case of the Chinese revolution in 1949, the CCP modelled on the Soviet bureaucracy, nationalised bourgeois property, defeated the imperialists and created a new workers state albeit degenerated at birth. The state capitalists cannot explain why in China the ‘state capitalists’ have renounced its isolation from the market to join the WTO and allow imperialist penetration, and still accumulate vast amounts of capital which it is now exporting in competition with its long standing imperialist rivals in the re-partition of the world. Hence the abandonment of dialectics and the LOV leads directly to post-Marxist bankruptcy!

(2) MAOIST MARKET SOCIALISTS

In China today, Maoists argue that the CCP still controls the ‘communist’ state and is developing ‘market socialism’. It approves of the Keynesian policies that boost workers wages, but not the market ‘reforms’ that transfer wealth from poor to the elite. The solution to this problem is for the working class to counter these market reforms winning regulations that redistribute the social wealth to the working masses. Independent unions are a means of mobilising workers democratically to push for socialist reforms. For example this is the strategy promoted in the China Labour Bulletin which attempts to show how the ‘communist’ state responds to workers defence of their property, rights, living standards etc., by means of reforms.

For the market socialists, the upsurge of worker and farmer protests is an expression of socialist democracy. Despite the incursions of capitalism, the state remains in control. This position is very popular in the Bolivarian states in Latin America, where the ‘Chinese road to socialism’ is presented as the working class alternative to being exploited by the existing hated 'Yankee' imperialists. Cuba has recently turned also in the direction of China to mask its own restoration of capitalism behind the veil of the Chinese Road.

Market socialists are essentially Mensheviks who understand capitalism in terms of exchange theory where income shares can be determined by state policies. Socialism requires the state to regulate and control the market. They are the same ‘Marxists’ that Marx himself castigated in The Gotha Program for abandoning his method in capital and backsliding to a fetishised exchange view of the capitalist market. Like all Mensheviks, the socialist revolution has to evolve in stages as the working class has the capacity to bring about the necessary changes to regulate the market when the conditions are ripe. The China Left Review presents this position clearly. Chinese workers are defending the rights one under ‘socialism’ in their fight against the inroads of the market. In that sense this is the prevailing Menshevik view of the proletariat as the ‘dangerous class’ forcing the market to adapt to ‘Chinese characteristics’.

In China the market-socialists play the same role as social democracy in the imperialist powers. They represent the labour aristocracy and bureaucracy that collaborate with the Chinese ruling class and defend its imperialist foreign policy as ‘social imperialism’ in the name ‘state socialism’ in return for sharing the plunder of China’s foreign imperialist super-profits. As we argue below however, the contradictions are so heightened in China today that the labour aristocracy will be squeezed between the new imperialist class and the most ‘dangerous class’ as it sharpens its weapons of class struggle.

(3) A DEGENERATE WORKERS STATE

The Degenerate Workers State arose out of the 1949 revolution with the expropriation of the bourgeoisie in 1953. A number of Trotskyist currents such as the Spartacists, International Bolshevik Tendency, claim that the DWS remains intact today as the influence of the market has not yet led to a transformation in the class character of the state. The argument goes like this. The revolution dispensed with the bourgeoisie and created a degenerated (those in the Spartacist tradition use "deformed") workers state. The degeneration meant that the revolution was incomplete as the bureaucracy had state power over workers property. The plan was imposed from the top down which meant that the economy stagnated. The bureaucracy therefore responded with NEP type reforms to introduce capitalism to stimulate the stagnating plan. The Chinese economy is still heavily dominated by SOEs, and state subsidies, so that the law of value does not yet determine the social relations. Moreover the impact of the global recession from 2008 has reversed the thrust away from capitalism back to the state owned economy.

The main argument however, is the same as that of the Maoist market socialists, that the CCP is still in power, it has not been overthrown by imperialism or Chinese capitalists and that the state owned sector (and therefore the plan) dominates the economy. The workers, even if represented by a bureaucratic caste, or plagued by corruption, are still the ruling class in a hybridised or bureaucratised form of workers’ state because workers property is dominant. China has not yet had the counter-revolution. For that to happen the capitalist class has to kick out the communists and take direct control of the state so that it can free the market to operate without state regulation.

This position breaks from Marx, Lenin and Trotsky’s definition of the class character of the state as defined by the property relations it defends and reproduces. It calls for political revolution and unconditional defence of the Degenerated Workers State when that state has already undergone a counter-revolutionary transformation into a capitalist state. However, as we argue below, the state is not defined by the extend of 'privatisation' but by the social relations it defends. The Chinese bureaucracy has committed itself to capitalist restoration by defending the operation of the LOV in all sectors of the economy under the name of 'market socialism' and defeated workers resistance to restoration. The road to power for workers is the socialist, not the political, revolution.

(4) CHINA: CAPITALIST SEMI-COLONY

Capitalism has been restored in China, and the bureaucrats have used the state to turn themselves into capitalists. But China remains a semi-colony exploited and oppressed by imperialist powers such as US, Germany, Japan, etc. rather than an emerging imperialist power. This leads to the position of defending China in wars with imperialist powers not only in the Pacific where the US is re-asserting its hegemony, and in every continent in the world where China is competing with US and EU powers for access to scarce resources.

This position is another instance of ‘post-Marxism’ which holds that a former workers state that restores capitalism must therefore remain a semi-colony while at the same time it is to be found in virtually every country in the world investing in scarce resources and extracting profits that match that of any imperialist power. As we argue in the document that we wrote challenging this dogmatic position in the FLTI, it is not credible that China acts as an imperialist in the Leninist/Trotskyist sense yet remains a semi-colonial proxy for the established imperialist powers. At the very least this would mean that China would not be accumulating capital in its own state banks and multinational corporations, but would pass this capital on as cheap inputs to its imperialist rivals.

The International Marxist Tendency (IMT) thinks that China is a semi-colony of imperialism too, but makes the very important point that China accumulates surplus capital invested in property speculation and hence explains the pressure to privatise collective property. Yet it is a feature of an imperialist country, not a semi-colony, to accumulate a surplus of national capital so it seems that the IMT cannot explain the existence of surplus capital and the property boom and still hold that China is a semi-colony.

All these impressionistic theories fail to trace their origins to the material reality of China today as a unique combination of historically overlapping modes of production dominated by the capitalist mode of production and the law of value. They fail to show how uneven and combined development produced in China had a national bourgeois revolution that went further and faster than most other semi-colonies, but that the bourgeois-democratic revolution could only be completed by overthrowing bourgeois property relations and creating workers property relations that in the unique conditions took the form of a ‘degenerate’ workers state where workers power was usurped by a Maoist bureaucracy whose dictatorship caused the stagnation of the economy. This forced the bureaucracy to reintroduce capitalism under the banner of ‘market socialism’ which inevitably restored capitalist social relations in the whole economy but under conditions which allowed China to escape semi-colonial servitude and emerge as a new imperialist power. Only on the basis of this understanding is it possible to explain the dynamics of class struggle in China today as the basis for a revolutionary program to guide the masses to socialist revolution.

Chinese Imperialism and “the most dangerous class”

China today is an imperialist nation that has a unique historical development. Marx, writing in 1850 after the 1848 revolutions failed in Europe, foresaw that China’s bourgeois revolution would be a socialist one. It was prevented from victory by the degeneration of the Soviet Union under the Stalinist bureaucracy. When the bourgeois revolution was completed it was by a Stalinist revolution from above that went further than it wanted to expropriate the national bourgeoisie and create workers property. But the working class never controlled planned production and the economy stagnated. With the collapse of the DWS in the 1980s and 1990s capitalism was restored. What no one foresaw however was that China’s national independence allowed it to restore capitalism without being subjected to imperialist oppression. Today it is emerging as the new global imperialist power competing with its rivals to repartition the world. It’s drive to expand super-exploits the semi-colonies on every continent and its own massive working class and poor farmers. These are the conditions under which workers and small farmers are fighting back today and to win they need a program that reflects and acts on that reality and transform it in a socialist revolution.

[a] SOCIAL RELATIONS ON THE LAND

Pre-capitalist China dominated by a ‘semi-feudal’, ‘Asiatic mode’ or ‘Tributary mode’ was overturned in 1911. But the bourgeois revolution was incomplete since China was dominated by warlords and imperialist partition. The Chinese bourgeoisie was weak and divided it had to join the Comintern and use the authority of the Bolshevik Revolution to drag the workers into a popular front trap. So as the working class took the lead in the national revolution it was exposed and betrayed by the Stalinist CCP leadership and defeated by the bourgeois Kuomintang army. Relations on the land remained dominated by semi-feudal and bourgeois relations. It took the peasant revolution of 1949 to finally complete the national revolution by overthrowing the bourgeoisie, unifying the country, defeating the imperialists, and liberating the peasantry from serfdom and wage slavery. So the farmers today are not the same as the pre-capitalist or capitalist peasantry who worked as serfs or agricultural labourers.

The 1949 revolution converted the peasants into collective farmers. The restoration of capitalist agriculture after 1978 reversed collectivisation causing a new class differentiation of the peasantry. While land was still collectively owned, land use was privatised, mainly to family farmers. Increasingly collective land was usurped by capitalist interests and family farmers dispossessed. But this process is far from complete. Poor peasants fought to retain their collective ownership and their family plots to augment meagre wages. So what constitutes the ‘peasantry’ today is an articulation of remnants of petty bourgeois, bourgeois and workers social relations, but now subordinated to restored capitalist social relations on the land, under the conditions of emerging Chinese imperialism caught in a global crisis of overproduction. Thus family farming is petty bourgeois production for subsistence and any excess is sold on the market. But land use under the pressure of emerging imperialism is privatising land on the basis of the law of capital accumulation.

Hence corruption and local crony capitalism are not the defining features of excessive market influences within ‘market socialism’, but defining features of capitalist appropriation where state power and monopoly capital employs crude methods of privatising land and labour. The process of separating farming families from their means of subsistence is not to serve the greed of Hong Kong land developers and local gangster capitalists but is necessary to create a ‘free labour force’ whose labor power is then subject to the law of value in the labor market. This has been going on since 1978 with the introduction of the market into agriculture. The peasants are dispossessed as land is aggregated and land use commercialised. Those cast off their land have become a reserve army labour of 10s of millions of migrant workers for China’s massive manufacturing and service industries.

What the Wukan rebellion shows is that since 2001 (when Wukan farmers first started resisting land privatisation), the countryside has been exposed to the demands of China’s transition to imperialism. Small farmers are the victims of the major restructuring of social relations in a capitalist imperialist economy facing a global crisis. So as well as the basic law of dispossessing workers of their means of subsistence, imperialism creates surplus capital which in China is redirected into capital exports but also speculation in land and property which leads to further dispossession. The the land rights and basic needs of the landless farmers and migrant workers cannot be realised by appeals to the CCP dictatorship but must be based on self-organisation, strikes, and occupation of the land and means of subsistence, combined with occupations and the socialisation of industry under workers control.

[b] LABOUR RELATIONS

The bankrupt Marxism of state capitalism cannot explain the causes of the labour struggles other than general abstractions and empirical impressions [note and cite]. The Market Socialists are proud of China’s rising living standards even if they are critical of the authoritarian state. Yet the so-called anti-crisis Keynesian policies to boost the economy in the world crisis are only possible given surplus capital. Such capital is not merely generated by banks and state policy, but by big balance of payments surpluses. Therefore accumulation of surplus capital is a feature not of market socialism or semi-colonial capitalism, both of which are usually bankrupt, but of imperialism. We can see then that it is not sufficient to explain labour ‘unrest’ in terms of market socialism, DWS, or semi-colonial conditions. The most dangerous class in China today is the result of the emerging imperialist class structure. The conditions prevailing in China today demonstrate clearly that China has become a new imperialist power competing against other imperialist powers in a global crisis of overproduction. The differentiation of the peasantry and the proletariat as well as a growing bourgeoisie all testify to this.

We will summarise the China Labour Bulletin report on the working class in China as proof of this point. The new generation of youthful migrant workers no longer see themselves as peasants. In other words they are now wage workers not dependent on subsistence on family or collective farming. As land is privatised migrant workers are forced to live entirely off their wage which means that they have no choice but to engage in labour struggles. They comprise 2/3rds of migrant workers and are the workers most involved in the waves of labour struggles in both foreign and Chinese owned manufacturing. The demands are mainly over wages which began from a very low point but have risen as China has rapidly invested in new technology to increase labour productivity. What this means is that while wages can rise and with it real living standards, the rate of exploitation is increasing and the share of new value produced is going mainly to capital as super profits. The upsurge in the period since 2008 is particularly significant. It represents the development of independent labour protests outside the official unions or party structures i.e. wildcats. The CCP has tried to revive the official union and impose state run collective contracts, but the wildcats continue. Increasing state expenditure on ‘social stability’ is unable to contain these wildcat struggles.

What this means is that in China today the extreme contradiction between labour and capital is materialising in the militant class struggle of the ‘dangerous class’ the proletariat. This is not the same as the Jasmine Revolution in semi-colonial North Africa. Nor the occupations of the indignados in the declining small imperialisms of Southern Europe. China’s class struggle reflects a rapid development of the forces of production by an emerging imperialist power which can only fully emerge as other imperialists decline. Not all the aspects of imperialist class structures are present. The SOE workers like state workers everywhere have lost many jobs. There is no time for the formation of a classic labour aristocracy tied to statised unions or the CCP. The labour/capital contradiction is so exacerbated in China that as the skilled workers emerge to challenge for a share in China’s super-profits they are at the same time being squeezed between the new layers of militant migrant workers and the imperialist ruling class.

The most skilled and productive workers are the new educated migrant youth and that fact gives the Chinese working class more independence from the state and the employers than the older imperialist powers. These new layers of militant workers will not have the luxury of being bought off by colonial super-profits and will necessarily take up again the historic role of the militant vanguard of the ‘most dangerous class’. China as an emerging imperialist power competing with its established imperialist rivals has the advantage of a massive pool of labour. But as that labour force upskills the organic composition of capital grows and so does the downward pressure on profits. The revolutionary combativity of the dangerous class that came onto the stage of history at the turn of the 20th century is a century later now approaching its appointed time and task – world socialist revolution. The objective conditions are such that with a revolutionary leadership that incorporates the program of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, the Chinese proletariat can lead the world working class on the road to revolution.

Program for the Socialist Revolution!

· Jobs for all. Sliding scale of wages and hours! A living wage for all!

· For democratic, fighting unions, independent of boss and state!

· For self-organisation of rural village, city and workplace soviets, coordinated into regional and national soviets!

· For local workers and poor farmers militias, coordinated into regional and national militias!

· For the right to self determination of all national minorities such as the Tibetans, Uyghurs and Mongols.

· No trust in the CCP to deal with corruption! Corruption is endemic to imperialist capitalism it cannot be reformed. We are for the workers and poor farmers in China to make a social revolution against the Maoist dictatorship! For Permanent Revolution!

· For all strikes and occupations to be generalised into an indefinite general strike to take state power and replace the new imperialist bourgeoisie with a Workers and Peasants Government to implement a revolutionary socialist plan.

· For the socialisation of land and its distribution to the users, the expropriation of the banks under the control of peasant representatives to finance production on the land.

· For the socialisation of industry and its subordination to a socialist plan can meet the needs of workers.

· China is capitalist and imperialist. We do not defend it in a war with the US, Japan or other imperialist powers. We call on the working class and poor peasants to refuse to be missile fodder in an inter-imperialist war. Form workers militia, split the standing army and turn your guns on your own ruling class!

· Revolutionary workers, build a new revolutionary workers party in the tradition of the Bolsheviks, the Left Opposition, and a new World Party of Socialism based on the Transitional Program of the Fourth International!

· For a Socialist Republic of China as part of a Socialist Federation of Asia and the Pacific!

New Zealand: Auckland Port employers out to smash port workers union

2012-01-14T00:24:00.000-08:00

The National and Act Government's policy, like in 1951, is to smash the unions and cut labour costs to make workers pay for the bosses crisis. Maritime Union NZ (MUNZ) Local 13 is fighting contracting out to non-union labor, a world-wide trend. At the same time the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) in North America is up against a major attack by ship owners to smash it and de-unionise the docks on the West Coast. Currently ILWUlocal 21 is resisting the Export Grain Terminal corporation at the port of Longview in Washington. The ILWU leadership is trying to keep the protest within the limits of the bosses' law while Occupy is building community wide pickets in support of the union. Occupy showed that by uniting with rank and file unionists it could shut down West Coast Ports on Dec 12. This is the way that MUNZ can win its fight against casualisation at the Ports of Auckland. This is the way to unite the working class internationally to make the bosses pay for their own crisis!

A Union busting fight

This is so obviously a setup to take on a key union with a strong record of militancy in NZ – the Waterside Workers Union now part of Maritime Union of NZ (MUNZ). It has all the hallmarks of the 1951 lockout which was a setup between the Holland National Govt and the US to use the ‘red scare’ to break the unions and enforce the direct rule of capital in NZ. Expect to see the NACT regime use this fight to bring in new legislation in an attempt to smash the unions as the only really effective opposition to privatisation, and return to the law of the jungle in the labour market.

The reason for this attack is not the greed or bloody mindedness of the boss class, but the drive for profits in a worsening global crisis where is it necessary to force down wages and working conditions for the ruling class to survive. Their so-called financial recession was not due to corruption or bad management, but was a symptom of falling profits in industry which produced a flood of speculative fictitious capital. And having baled out their banks, and some countries, the bosses are now forced to restructure industry to screw out more profits from the working people. So the drive to cut costs at all costs become an attack on workers wages and conditions in the name of "productivity". In reality, productivity is the capacity of workers to produce value, most of which goes in profits to the capitalist class. Increasing "productivity" then is the same as increasing the rate of exploitation of wage labour.

Austerity is Global

The attack on labour is global, since the bosses crisis is global and rapidly becoming an international depression. And as usual the NACTs are following the US and Britain in imposing these attacks on workers. They import new Departmental officials from Britain to head Social Development, Janet Grossman, who made her name by making clients pay for phone calls to claim benefits, and a new Secretary of Education whose former job in the UK was to set up Charter Schools. NZ has no shortage of right wing Think Tanks that spew out every toxic right wing concept in social services, management and labour relations. Not only that we have a Prime Minister who has direct links to Wall Street and a the CEO of Ports of Auckland Tony Gibson who once worked for Maersk, the monopoly shipping line. Every policy the NACTs have in mind to attack workers living standards and cut taxes and social spending is called by the universal name the bosses give to making us pay for their crisis - "austerity".

"Austerity" is what Mohamed Bouazizi faced when his fruit stall was trashed by the local authorities; what US workers face when they lose their homes to foreclosures; when their unions are smashed and unionists replaced by scab labour; when welfare cuts are blamed on welfare cheats; when student fees are bumped up; when workplaces close down and workers are sacked; when taxes and prices rise and wages fall. Austerity is what the Greek workers are facing when facing new taxes they are handing their kids over into state care. Austerity is what young Chinese workers face threatening mass suicide when their employer reneges on a wage increase. "Austerity" is simply a bullshit word to make it seem that for workers there is no alternative to the pain. TINA.

The Fightback begins

But things are now changing. The suicide of Mohamed Bouazizi sparked off the Arab Spring. The occupation of Tahrir Square was quickly followed by uprisings across the Arab world. Dictators fell. Some like Mubarak left the army in control. Other like Gaddafi used heavy weapons to put down a protest and his regime was overthrown 5 months later. Bashar el Saad in Iraq, the Saudis and the Bahraini ruling class have retained power by barbarous killings. Yet like all the other protests, repression has fuelled more resistance as the fear disappears.

When the Arab Spring jumped the Mediterranean to Greece and Spain the squares filled up with Generation Zeros. Governments fell but 'austerity' regimes were voted in or appointed by coalitions to drive through more attacks on workers. Right across southern Europe from Greece to Ireland, the masses are primed ready for a new social movement to unite and organise a powerful resistance. But they are contained and disorganised by the traditional party and union leaderships who are in the pay of the capitalists. They are waiting for the example of how to unite the global working class as an independent force to take control of their own lives. That movement was begun in Egypt, continued in Greece and then jumped the Atlantic to take the form of Occupy Wall St. From its beginnings, the Occupy movement has signalled that it has broken with the institutions of the bourgeois state by virtue of the symbolic occupation of public space against the rule of private property.

Occupy Movement is born

This symbolic occupation became a real occupation when the state responded with police force. When Occupy Oakland was evicted by the cops it met and called for a General Strike on Nov 2 last. 30,000 people turned out to blockade the docks. Then the US West Coast Occupied movement shut down the West Coast ports on Dec 12. Occupy Oakland and other evicted West Coast Occupations began organising a mass picket at Longview against Export Grain Terminal corporation (EGT). EGT is a joint venture between three conglomerates: U.S.-based Bunge North America, Japan-based Tochu Corporation, and South Korean-based STX Pan Ocean, that wants to ‘outsource’ ILWU jobs to contracted scab workers.

The rank and file of the unions immediately recognised common cause with Occupy, and rallied behind Occupy Oakland and others when they faced eviction. Jack Heyman, a militant rank and file member of the ILWU welcomed Occupy Oakland as bringing a fresh impetus to the union movement. Occupy has not learned to distinguish between the labour bureaucracy and the rank and file yet but faces a steep learning curve over Longview. This is because the leaderships of the unions regarded the Occupy movement as a threat to their control of the unions and their privileges of office. Initially they refused to back the West Coast Shutdown as interference in union business, but now facing the growing resistance to the union busting attack on Local 21 at Longview the union leadership has declared its hand.

Labour bureaucracy opposes Occupy

When the ILWU rank and file and Occupy joined forced to build a Caravan for a mass picket in defence of Local 21 the ILWU leadership came out with a letter against strike action in solidarity that would break the Taft-Hartley Act that bans by law solidarity strikes. It therefore refused to call for all the docks to shut down and called on the ranks to keep their distance from the Occupy picket. The ranks replied saying as they had in Oakland on November 3 and all the West Coast Ports on December 12, that the members would observe the Occupy picket (and of course join it). So despite strike ban law, rank and file groups are calling for wildcat strikes to hit the port owners where it hurts.

This fight came to a head in Seattle on the 6 of January where a joint meeting of ILWU Local 21 rank and file and Occupy Seattle met to build more support for the join picket. The meeting was physically disrupted by officials of ILWU who insisted on reading out the official letter from the leadership against solidarity strikes. The response of the meeting was to call 'mike check' and form a physical barrier to the disruptive elements. The call then went up "repeal Taft Hartley!" So while reactionary elements were prepared to sacrifice the Longview jobs which would be a major defeat for unions as a whole, the outcome of this meeting was a huge political step forward that ended in victory. The rank and file of the ILWU and of the Occupy Movement were in accord that a mass picket to defend the jobs of the dockers cannot be leg-ironed by the Taft Hartley Act. So now they know that the only way to 'repeal' a reactionary bosses' law is to break it!

The mass picket

Jack Heyman's words to Occupy Oakland ring more true now than ever. The union ranks and Occupy must unite to advance the struggle of the working class to smash the 'austerity' regimes the world over. The way to make this happen is for Occupy to take up the cause mobilise the 99% and build massive community public pickets of the docks and all other workplaces where workers are under attack. In Egypt it is recognised that Tahrir square would not have been occupied without the years of strikes in that country. In Spain and Greece the sit-down occupations of the squares are becoming sit-down occupations of Government Departments and workplaces.

The Generation Zero that is educated and unemployed is now joining with employed workers to occupy the assets the ruling class. Occupy Oakland targeted the docks that are owned by a Goldman Sachs subsidiary. Now that the Occupy movement has declared its support for the unions fighting for their survival a major convergence of the forces of the working class is beginning. The mass picket is now becoming a reality. It is the only occupation that the bosses really fear, the occupation of their private property and capacity to screw their profits out of the labour of the workers.

The Dockers fight is International

The support of Occupy for dockers is no accident. Dockworkers are among the most militant and political of all unions shutting down the ports to protest the killing of Oscar Grant, the Israeli attack on the Peace Flotilla, Apartheid South Africa, dictatorships in Chile and El Salvador, and the Iraq war etc. The ILWU is famous in the US for being the union that refused to handle cargo going to fascist regimes in the 1930s, in the same way that the Waterside Workers Union in New Zealand refused to load scrap iron to fascist Japan when it was occupying China. During the 1951 lockout in NZ, the ILWU and other dockers unions refused to handle ships loaded by scab labour. So from the days of the Red Feds when the Wobblies sailed all around the Pacific organising workers there has been a tradition of internationalist trade unionism between dockers unions.

Keep a close eye on the big fight at Longview, Washington State, where the big shipowners and corporates are trying to smash the ILWU and bring in scab labour to handle grain shipments. It will be a showdown between the capitalist monopolies and an emerging new force in the united working class. It will make or break the unions. That is why the working class on the West Coast is rallying behind this struggle on the basis of an 'injury to one is an injury to all'. More than ever, community groups like Million Worker March and Labor Black and Brown, Oscar Grant Committee, and migrant workers groups as well as Labor Councils are joining forces as never before.

Similarly, the fight at Ports of Auckland against MUNZ Local 13 refusal to accept casualisation and contracting out, is a make-or-break fight. It has all the hallmarks of 1951 and a right-wing government determined to break the union movement. You can bet that the Labour Party will sit this one out preaching "neither for nor against" as Walter Nash did in 1951. Mayor Len Brown and Opposition leader Shearer do not want to get involved in a 'class war'. Nor will support and fundraising nationally and internationally determine the outcome. International solidarity is welcome but while it works within the labour law it won’t stop the defeat of MUNZ. The ILWU refusal to handle ships loaded by scab labour in NZ didn't win the fight.

Defend MUNZ union workers!

What is needed is mass pickets to stop contract labour take away the jobs of the union members. That is the only language that bosses understand. The Port is owned by the people of Auckland who have seen off several attempts to flog it off. This is a more determined showdown this time. What is being defended here is the right to unionise and the right to a job and a living wage. The capitalists and their spin doctors are using this fight to promote privatisation. So defending the jobs of union members at POA is taking a stand against selling off public assets.

It is also a wakeup call for workers to organise independently to rebuild the union movement and not rely on a so-called ‘left’ majority of Auckland Council under Brown or a future Labour Government to undo the damage. Labour is into managing capitalism by increasing 'productivity' i.e. exploitation of workers. "Independently" means organising and relying on the strength of the working class, not the media, lawyers or politicians. It means forming strike committees to build solidarity, support committees to back up and provide for a mass picket, and defence committees to protect the picket against state forces. In 1951 the military was used to break the strike, just as today the bosses are planning to use the military to break Local 21 in Longview.

To build a mass picket at POA to stop the scabs is the next step. That means calling on all unions to rally to the picket. The logic of the picket is that of an Occupation. By occupying a workplace you prevent scab labour from taking your jobs. By making it an Occupation you invite everyone who identifies with the Occupy movement to make the labour movement their favourite cause until we win! The immediate step is for MUNZ and Occupy Auckland to form a joint Strike Committee like that formed between Occupy Oakland the and ILWU to defend Local 21.

For a joint Strike Committee between MUNZ Local 13 and Occupy Auckland and all other working class organisations committed to the struggle!
No to sackings, No to casualisation, No to contracting out, No to scabbing on the union!
Solidarity with ILWU and the Occupy Movement resisting 'austerity regimes' everywhere! Build international action to hit the monopoly shipowners!
Down with the bosses austerity regimes making workers pay for their crisis!
We will not pay for their crisis, make the bosses pay!
No confidence in Auckland City Council or Ports of Auckland who are in the pockets of the corporates!
For strike action in solidarity with the MUNZ workers fight!
Down with the NACT government and its anti-worker austerity policies!
No to privatisation, part privatisation or PPPs of state owned assets!
Whose Port! Our Port! That’s the cry of Occupy!
No to privatisation, put the ports under workers management and control!
For a General Strike to defeat the NACTs and for a mass Workers Party based on the rank and file of the unions!
For a Socialist Aotearoa in a Socialist Asia/Pacific!

After Election Defeat Labour Party launches New Year Sale

2012-01-02T21:00:00.000-08:00

Cunliffe (right) with Shearer (left) holding Labour Balloon dead centre

Worst defeat since 1932

In the aftermath of its worst defeat since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Labour Party rushed into the public spectacle of a leadership contest to replace Phil Goff and Annette King. The desperation of the old guard to retain the leadership against a challenge from the left by David Cunliffe and Nanaia Mahuta was obvious in the haste to replace Goff with another centrist leader. For leader it put up David Shearer who had been in parliament for only 2.5 years and for Deputy, Grant Robertson who had been in parliament for one term of 3 years. The lack of parliamentary experience was more than made up for by Robertson's time-serving as Labour Party admin hack, and Shearer's time dodging friendly fire in Iraq.

While on the face of it this was a move that took the contest out of the party back rooms into the public gaze, in effect it was a stage-managed succession of the Blairite centrist bloc to use the media to boost the 'popularity' of David Shearer as Labour's answer to National's hugely 'popular' PM, John Key. It signals a further shift of the Labour Party away from its working class roots towards an open capitalist party modelled on the US Democrat Party where the party Leaders are also Presidential candidates.

While the Labour Party members attended a series of debates between the candidates, it was always goingh to be the 34 MPs of the caucus elected the leadership in a secret ballot. Would they listen to their membership? In members meeting after meeting, Cunliffe won the crowd leaving Shearer looking like a non-starter. But the reality of Labour Party democracy is that party members probably had less influence on the decision than the right-wing political commentators and bloggers who mainly went for Shearer.

Centrist Coup

It turned out that the majority of the 34 MPs were more concerned to find a leader that could win the popularity contest against John Key, than listen to the membership who clearly favoured Cunliffe over Shearer. Although to be fair, the Party has only itself to blame for having evolved over many years from a Party where MPs were mainly unionists and accountable to the rank and file membership into a Parliamentary machine where lawyers, teachers and union officials treat the membership as election fodder.

So the Labour Party elected David Shearer as Leader and Grant Robertson as Deputy and a lot of the leftish membership took it as a defeat. Shearer and Robertson are both members of the centrist old guard that survives the Fourth Labour Government and joined the party during the 90s and 2000s when Labour was living in the shadow of the super Blairite Fourth Labour Government's deregulation of the economy. Blairism, after Tony Blair, who when elected in 1997 famously declared that there was no longer any socialist left or neo-liberal right in the British Labour Party, only the centre (and that centre was a kinder, gentler, neoliberalism). The NZ Labour Party has beat him to it by a decade in swallowing Rogernomics in the 1980s and shifting the goal posts so international capital could score every time. The NZ Labour Party abandoned any pretence to serving its traditional working class constituency and adopted the centrist politics of 'neither left nor right'.

Blairite centrist party

But despite its Blairite posturing, the Labour Party could only paper over the yawing crack between its historic working class base and its increasingly open capitalist economic program. The old guard around Clark and Goff pretended to undo the 'deficit' of Rogernomics, but never could undo the damage. The draconian ECA became the Blairite ERA with a few concessions made to the union leadership. They were being paid off for their willing complicity in this betrayal claiming that unions and bosses could do fair deals when all the while the workers share fell relative to profits. By pushing productivity as the holy grail of social harmony the union bosses were in reality screwing up the rate of exploitation.

As the global capitalist economy went into meltdown in 2007 international finance capital made sure that it escaped the crisis by passing on its costs to the working class. This has reactivated the class struggle internationally to a level not seen since the 1930s. In NZ Labour's rank and file began to stir and inside the Party there was pressure to move left to respond to restlessness of workers. This put the old Blairite guard on Red Alert but Labour couldnt convince enough workers to come out and vote. It lost to the National Party in 2008 with a pathetic lacklustre campaign and no major policies to win back worker support. In fact 200,000 former Labour voters stayed at home.

Left Behind

After the 2008 election defeat, Clark resigned to go to the UN leaving Goff as caretaker. Shearer flew in back from dodging bullets in Iraq! Nobody on the left apart from Te Atatu MP Chris Carter had the guts to challenge Goff for the leadership and his attempt led to his sacking from the Party. Goff tried to appeal to the middle ground by opposing asset sales, introducing a tiny Capital Gains Tax, and put up the age of retirement from 65 to 67. Labour stole the ACT parties policy of making workers work, longer and die earlier. Again Labour's Blairism was focussed on the centre and not the working class.

Such was Goff's failure to challenge National that many Labour voters switched to NZ First or the Greens in desperation to provide a few more MPs to back up a Labour led government. In a defeat even worse than 2008, a million voters stayed home, a fifth of young voters failed to register, and National won the party vote even in the historic Labour bastion of South Dunedin. Yet not until the centrists staged a coup to replace Goff immediately after the election did the left take even a minimal stand in the form of the Cunliffe/Mahuta to challenge for the leadership.

Cunliffe and Mahuta drew that conclusion that Labour had to reconnect with its working class roots and made it clear how they wanted to go about it. They began talking of policies to make this happen. Cunliffe's selection of Mahuta, a Maori woman, as his deputy was itself proof that they were serious about reaching out to the Maori, Pacifika and Pakeha working class. More than that, they said that the Labour Party constitution should be changed so that the members elected the leaders of the party. The defeat of the left then is also defeat for those disenfranchised workers because the victory of the right has junked even those tentative left moves to reconnect with the working class and to give that class a democratic voice in the party.

Labour for Sale

In effect the Labour Party has been prepared for sale. It lurched to the right in the 80s but came back to the middle in the 90s and 2000s. But now Shearer's task is to make it presentable for sale to the mythical "neither left nor right" middle-earth NZ. This is identity politics of the Hobbit kind. Shearer will dumb down any serious attempt to re-connect with Labour working class roots and pull Labour further to the centre.

When Shearer talks about renewing Labour its like Tony Blair's ‘renewal’ of British Labour away from the unions towards the middle class. Under his leadership, unless challenged by the Left, the Labour Party will sleepwalk into a scenario like the United States where it doesnt matter which party has a majority in Congress, they all sell out to Wall Street and global capitalism. Labour’s rightward trajectory going down the same road. Competing for the middle ground in parliament is 'broken'. The middle class is being squeezed downwards. The ‘self employed’ and small business people will be squeezed out of existence as the depression deepens. The working masses are looking for a social movement to reclaim their lives.

This is creating a dangerous layer of combustible people who will find themselves downwardly mobile and see the working class either as their allies or their enemies. The Labour Party cannot reach out to them with a centrist program because it cannot counter the forces that are destroying the middle classes. It can win them over however with a radical program that promises jobs, living wages and economic security for all workers including the self-employed. Failing that, these layers will become fascist fodder as the NACT regime moves further to the right.

Social Democracy is Stuffed

There is no middle ground in NZ politics where Shearer can rush in like the UN with the peacekeeping forces and refugee camps. Shearer’s expertise as a top UN aid worker is irrelevant when you have to fight a class war. As Warren Buffet famously stated, there is a class war and the bosses are winning. Either Labour goes back to its working class roots or it will find itself cannibalised by the petty bourgeois NZFirst, Greens, and National lite at the centre and Mana and other forces on the left.

This is probably inevitable looking at the fate of Social Democracy in Southern Europe as it is replaced in Greece and Italy by the direct rule by Goldman Sachs veterans. But unless those in the Labour tribe want to go down with a moan and a whimper they should put up a fight. Instead of this mantra of a ‘caucus’ united behind a Blairite centrism those on the left need to take a stand and fight for their ideas and the people behind them to regain the leadership of the Labour Party. The centrist Blairites need to be kicked out of the Party as the neo-liberal Rogergnomes were kicked out in the 80s.

The first contest will be the review of Labour's Constitution to put the democratic control of the Party into the hands of the members, so that it is the working class that is being made to pay for the crisis that will control the Party and not the self-serving parliamentarians and union bureaucrats whose privileges of office separate them from the working class. Failing that, Labour will finish its rightward shift in the post-war period and complete the transition into an open capitalist party. At that point, there will be no course for workers but to form an independent working class party based on workers democracy within which revolutionaries will fight for a program for socialist revolution.

December 12: For Independent Working Class Action!

2011-12-11T01:16:00.000-08:00

Why Workers Should Support the December 12
West Coast Port Shutdown, and What We Need To Do Next

The Occupy movement’s decision to shut down the ports on the West Coast on December 12 has been criticized by mainstream media, union officials, and even some labor activists who consider themselves progressive. They complain that Occupy does not represent union workers; that the port shutdown action has not been officially endorsed even by the ILWU, much less by the labor councils in the port cities; and that the action will hurt the people who work at the ports, who are part of the “99%.” They argue that if Occupy wants to support the labor movement, it should follow the instructions of the labor bureaucrats rather than acting on its own.

To this we respond: BULLSHIT! These criticisms ignore the fact that the present labor bureaucracy, hog-tied by its links to the Democratic Party and its craven fear of violating the oppressive Taft-Hartley anti-strike law, has demonstrated time and time again that it is incapable of fighting effectively for the interests of even those few workers who belong to a union, much less the interests of the working class as a whole.

That is why, having run out of patience waiting for the union leadership to take action in the face of the current economic crisis, the working class of Oakland took action on its own on November 2, and kicked Wall Street where it counts by shutting down the Port of Oakland! The union tops refuse to demonstrate our power through mass direct action, but the workers of Oakland showed that as a class, we can, and we will!

Workers Must Break with the Democrats

Yes, there is a class war going on, and the 99% did not start it. The corporate plutocracy has been waging an all-out war against organized labor for decades, to the point where 89% of workers no longer belong to a union. Their latest ploy is to blame public workers and their unions for the current structural crisis of capitalism—as if the demands of teachers, firefighters, and public health workers for a fair wage and a threadbare pension were responsible for crashing the biggest economy in the world.

As a result, over the past decades the situation of working people and the poor in the United States has gone from bad to worse. While this was happening, the “leadership” of the union movement did nothing to fight back directly, instead contributing money, volunteers, and votes to the Democratic Party. They have continued in this vein even while Democratic politicians have cut budgets, slashed social services, and imposed takebacks on public workers. When Obama promised “hope” and “change,” the union tops cheered, and they will back him again in 2012.

But by now it is crystal clear that channeling our discontent into electoral campaigns brings working people nothing but false hope, and change for the worse. The Democrats have promised us health care reform; jobs; the Employee Free Choice Act to boost union organizing; and environmental protection. They have delivered precisely NOTHING. We are still faced with a shrinking job market, a lower standard of living, home foreclosures, budget cuts, tax cuts for the rich, and bailouts for the banks. And still the union leadership backs the Democrats, refusing to assert labor’s political independence and fight back with mass working class actions.

Today’s Labor “Leadership” Is Unsupportable

The core focus of today’s port shutdown is the fight to defend the ILWU 21 dock workers in Longview, Washington, and to promote organizing of the truck drivers at all the ports. The situation of the truck drivers is shameful; they cannot organize for better wages and working conditions because the law has falsely labeled them “independent contractors” who cannot bargain collectively under the antitrust laws. But their situation is only the tip of the iceberg of attacks on workers, both union and non-union, by the corporate fat cats. All of us must organize to fight back against the ongoing attacks on our standard of living and our civil and human rights.

Unions led this struggle in the distant past, but under today’s leadership, we cannot rely on them to do so again. On November 2, unions responded to Occupy Oakland’s call for a port shutdown with letters of support for what they called a “Day of Action,” but not one dared to defy Taft-Hartley by calling their members to walk out in unison and create a real general strike. Instead, they told workers to take vacation time if they wanted to participate.

In the run up to December 12th, the labor leadership’s role has gotten worse. The ILWU leadership has taken a stand against their own rank and file and against the community that supports them. Under pressure from the Port Management Association and the Democratic Party, the Alameda County Labor Council even went so far as to consider a resolution opposing the port shutdown. The resolution was tabled, and some labor activists are trying to give the Labor Council left cover by calling the resulting “neutrality” a mini-victory. As the late historian Howard Zinn put it, however, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.”

We Need an Independent, Militant Leadership

The Occupy movement should be commended for firing a warning shot in the class war fight-back. But as the often brutal police crackdowns on the Occupy encampments have demonstrated, tents and consensus-based general assemblies are not a sustainable or effective way to defeat the bodies of armed men that the corporate-controlled state has at its command. In order to fight back and win, what we need is a General Strike Movement. Union militants dedicated to the advancement of our class cannot place faith in the populist, cross-class Occupy movement.

Occupy cannot accomplish the necessary task of galvanizing rank-and-file workers to defeat business and corporate unionism and turn our organizations into a weapon that can and will wage a militant struggle for the interests of the entire working class. We must reinvigorate and democratize organized labor, and raise up a new cadre of class struggle driven leaders who will work with the rank and file to smash Taft-Hartley and mount united mass strike actions. Such a movement, combined with the fight for working class political independence, must be put front and center on labor’s agenda today!

To achieve genuine working class political independence, rank-and-filers must organize to create representative bodies composed of democratically elected workers’ deputies who are subject to immediate recall. We must form factory committees, neighborhood councils, and inter-factory and inter-district workers’ councils.

We must also lend our support to the unemployed and marginalized elements of the population in their self-organization efforts. When workers join with the oppressed communities to oppose their common enemy, we all benefit. This was shown by the ILWU Local 10 strike in October 2010, in protest of racist police brutality and the murder of Oscar Grant, which forged the ties between labor and the oppressed that contributed so greatly to the success of the November 2 port shutdown. Together, we can work jointly on the tasks of seizing control of the economy, reorganizing it to serve human needs instead of private profit, and defending ourselves against counterattacks by the agents of corporate capital.

Our Struggle Must Be Internationalist

The Occupy movement was inspired in part by the struggles of the people of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and the Middle East during the Arab Spring. Those struggles relied on support from working class strikes and the defection of rank-and-file members of the armed services to the side of the protesting masses. Workers in the United States need to learn many of the same lessons in working class independence, rank and file organizing, and workers’ democracy.

The Arab Spring also offers us another, equally important lesson. Despite the sacrifice and struggle of the Egyptian and Libyan masses, their lack of an alternative leadership left a vacuum into which the repressive forces of the bourgeoisie and the top army leadership have stepped, only to renew the repression of the people. This development exposes the limitations of pacifism and leaderlessness.

In addition, the globalization of capital makes it more important than ever for those who wage the struggle against capital to form ties with our counterparts around the globe. The workers’ movement cannot succeed unless it develops an internationalist consciousness, in solidarity with our brother and sister workers overseas. It is in all of our common interest to defeat the imperialist wars and interventions waged by the United States, NATO, and their allies.

Confront and smash Taft-Hartley and all anti-labor laws through political and general strikes!
Break with the Democrats and all capitalist parties! There is no lesser evil! There is no legislative solution!
Build a fighting workers’ party that can wage a militant direct action struggle for a workers’ government!
Jobs for all! Share the work: 30 hours work for 40 hours pay! Implement a sliding scale of wages and prices!
Full citizenship rights for all immigrant workers! Defend immigrants against La Migra and ICE!
Organize workers’ defense guards based on labor and the oppressed Black and Brown communities!
No foreclosures! Open foreclosed homes to workers and the unemployed! Forgive all student loan debt!
Open the books of the major finance houses and corporations! Seize the stolen wealth hoarded by the 1%!
Nationalize finance capital, the big banks, and the major corporations, without indemnification and under workers’ control!
Form democratic workers’ assemblies to prepare and organize for the seizure and operation of the economy!

HUMANIST WORKERS FOR REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISM

Dec. 12, 2011 www.HumanistsForRevolutionarySocialism.org • hw4rs@yahoo.com Labor Donated

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Humanists-for-Revolutionary-Socialism/80134436166

Shut the Ports Down on December 12! Call by Labor Black and Brown

2011-12-07T17:24:00.000-08:00

Oakland General Strike 2 November 2011

Labor Black and Brown Unite!
ALL OUT TO DEFEND ILWU LOCAL21
AN INJURY TO ONE IS AN INJURY TO ALL

In Longview, WA, the capitalists of the EGT conglomerate are engaged in union-busting against ILWU Local 21. EGT plans to unload their grain on a ship in the Longview port using scab (union-busting) labor. According to the ILWU West Coast Contract this work is supposed to be done by workers represented by ILWU Local 21. Shut the Ports on Dec 12! Stop the scabs on Dec 15!

According to the Transport Workers Solidarity Committee, the ILWU is "...facing a frontal attack, threatening the future of our jobs and our unions. What is needed to defeat these employer assaults is a solid union action, shutting down the coast." Join the Caravan to Longview Dec 15th!

What does this mean? Last year on October 23rd, when ILWU local 10 shut down the Bay Area ports they called for "Justice For Oscar Grant" and organized a 3,000 strong "Labor/Community Rally" in Downtown Oakland, in Frank Ogawa Plaza (now re-named "Oscar Grant Plaza"). The ILWU led the working class in Oakland in uniting across race lines against racist police murder and injustice by saying this injustice will cost the bosses! THE POLITICAL STRIKE WAS LAUNCHED FOR RACIAL JUSTICE AND AGAINST POLICE MURDER! The PMA lost a lot of money, and their scheduling was disrupted. Stuck on the ships; No cargo moved! Idle were the ports but not the consciousness of the people. The seeds of Nov 2nd and Dec 12th were watered during the fight for justice for Oscar Grant!

"An Injury to One, is an Injury to All! The ILWU membership puts it’s money and sacrifice where their mouth is. That's one of the reasons the bosses hate the ILWU. They wield for others, the kind of power that the entire working class must use to defend and advance the rights of working people and the most oppressed everywhere. In every corner of the world where workers struggle against imperialism they know the internationalist heart of the ILWU and they call on us to SHUT THE PORTS DOWN! GAZA IS WATCHING, EGYPT IS WATCHING, DURBAN, COCHIBAMBA, FUKISHIMA, BUENOS AIRES, AUCKLAND, HARARE, ACROSS THE PLANET THE MOST OPPRESSED AND EXPLOITED KNOW WHAT WE DO HERE STRIKES A BLOW AT THE HEART OF IMPERIALISM.

Members and supporters of the ILWU are calling for a West-Coast wide port shut down. As the ILWU - led October 23rd, 2010 Bay Area port shut down was in defense of the rights of Black and Brown people, and all working people, this proposed coast-wide port shut down is in defense of ILWU Local 21, the whole ILWU and the entire union movement. They are defending the very existence of unions

For the sake of Black and Brown rights, for the sake of Black and Brown pride, we must not allow the ILWU fight alone. Every union, every worker, every able-bodied Black and Brown person must join the battle to defend the ILWU. If we merely spectate, and allow the bosses to defeat the ILWU, this bodes ill for the poor and working folk. If ILWU looses Longview to the scabs we all loose!

Who can deny the current capitalist goal of smashing unions? Who can deny the capitalists' goal of smashing all resistance to the continued marginalization of Brown and Black people, and community? Who can deny the use of police terror to obtain our submission? We know this is a racist class war to keep the 0.01% in power! The continued rule of he capitalist class and its twin profit parties. is unsustainable.

We say NO! Just as we rose up for "Justice for Oscar Grant!" and stated "We Are All Oscar Grant!" we must now stand up and unite Labor Black and Brown-Shut the Port Down! The ILWU carried the message of the potential power of the union movement. We must join these movements of resistance, uniting the fight of the workers with the fight of the Brown and Black communities.

WE ARE LABOR BLACK AND BROWN

Labor Black and Brown organize and unite in struggle against the capitalist bosses and their representatives. We expose and oppose those who act to prevent the independent political organization and political action of labor Black and Brown people. They act as transmission belts for the bosses’ ideology into our community. In the fight for jobs, for our unions, for our schools, against police brutality, to defend native and aboriginal rights, against the prison industrial complex and with #occupy and the ILWU you will find labor Black and Brown. We say it is time to build the democratic working class/labor Black and Brown organizations, assemblies, and neighborhood and factory action committees!

In these organizations and struggles labor Black and Brown will advance demands, slogans a strategy and tactics which lead our people and our class toward political and economic independence and power!

We say down with phony police review commissions: Form up labor Black and Brown tribunals to try killer cops! Build a General Strike movement against police brutality!
We say cops out of our communities, out of our schools, off our campuses! Build labor Black and Brown self defense guards against racist attacks, against la migra, against police brutality; against scabs taking union jobs and to defend the #occupy activists!
We say the system is the crime! Tear down the prison industrial complex! Free Hugo Pinell, Free Leonard Peltier Free Mumia Abu Jamal! Free all political prisoners!
We defend our immigrant sisters and brothers. We demand full citizenship rights for immigrants. End corporate sweatshop exploitation! Organize immigrant workers! Defeat ICE!
We say down with the forced austerity: Jobs for all! 30 hours work for 40 hours pay! Poverty is the crime! Open the books of industry! Provide a sliding scale of wages and prices! We demand billions for public works create millions of ethical, green, humane jobs now! Educate and train all willing workers, provide day care, public laundry and communal kitchens!
We say health care is a right! Socialize the medical industry under health care workers and community control! End drug profiteering free medical science from corporate control!
We say today’s labor leaders are not our friends, they do the bosses dirty work demobilizing the membership and trapping us inside the bosses’ political parties. For labor Black and Brown to lead the class collaborationist labor leaders must be replaced by rank and file members dedicated to class independence and united labor Black Brown strike action.
We stand with the colonized and native people in their struggle to save mother earth from the barbarism of the imperialist rape of the land and destruction of the people and their ancestral traditions. Free Hawaii! Free Puerto Rico! Defend sovereign people’s treaty rights!
We stand for the defeat of imperialist exploitation across Africa, Asia and Latin America!
We stand against imperialist war mongering in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya and the saber rattling toward Iran! In wars against the third world and in inter-imperialist wars we call for:

DEFEAT OF US IMPERIALISM!

JUSTICE FOR OSCAR GRANT-JUSTICE FOR RAHEIM BROWN AND ALL VICTIMS OF POLICE VIOLENCE. FOR GENERAL STRIKES TO JAIL KILLER COPS!

DROP THE CHARGES AND RELEASE ALL ARRESTED OCCUPY ACTIVISTS

HANDS OFF WHISTLEBLOWERS SEAN GILLIS, DORIEN MAXWELL &TOPAZ DUBOIS

Contact Labor Black and Brown laborblackbrown@yahoo.com

Labor Donated December 7 ,2011

Lenin, State Capitalism and Left Wing Childishness

2011-12-07T16:39:00.000-08:00

One of the arguments of anarchists and 'left communists' against the Bolsheviks is that Lenin restored state capitalism. This they argue is evidence that the Bolsheviks had betrayed the revolution.

For example on Libcom we find a triumphant claim that Lenin 'intentionally' introduced state capitalism in Russia and so is outed as a traitor to the revolution and/or a Menshevik stage theory hack.

Well, if we go to the writings quoted in the Libcom article it doesn't take long to find out that this 'intention' did not mean that Lenin had abandoned the revolution and restored capitalism. On the contrary, such was the dire state of the revolution because of the war and the invasion of numerous capitalist armies, the workers state was forced to reintroduce the 'concession' of the profit motive as an incentive for peasant production to prevent the starvation of workers and provide taxes for industrialisation.

Let's quote from the article On Cooperation to make it clear that 'state capitalism' for Lenin had a precise historical meaning in the Russian context. It was a practical tactic on the part of the workers state - a 'concession' to the peasantry to allow the revolution to survive and develop more pre-conditions for the transition to socialism.

Quoting Lenin:

"Whenever I wrote about the New Economic Policy [NEP] I always quoted the article on state capitalism which I wrote in 1918 ["Left-Wing” Childishness and the Petty-Bourgeois Mentality; part III]. This has more than once aroused doubts in the minds of certain young comrades but their doubts were mainly on abstract political points.

It seemed to them that the term “state capitalism” could not be applied to a system under which the means of production were owned by the working-class, a working-class that held political power. They did not notice, however, that I use the term “state capitalism", firstly, to connect historically our present position with the position adopted in my controversy with the so-called Left Communists; also, I argued at the time that state capitalism would be superior to our existing economy. It was important for me to show the continuity between ordinary state capitalism and the unusual, even very unusual, state capitalism to which I referred in introducing the reader to the New Economic Policy. Secondly, the practical purpose was always important to me. And the practical purpose of our New Economic Policy was to lease out concessions. In the prevailing circumstances, concessions in our country would unquestionably have been a pure type of state capitalism. That is how I argued about state capitalism.

But there is another aspect of the matter for which we may need state capitalism, or at least a comparison with it. It is a question of cooperatives.

In the capitalist state, cooperatives are no doubt collective capitalist institutions. Nor is there any doubt that under our present economic conditions, when we combine private capitalist enterprises—but in no other way than nationalized land and in no other way than under the control of the working-class state—with enterprises of the consistently socialist type (the means of production, the land on which the enterprises are situated, and the enterprises as a whole belonging to the state), the question arises about a third type of enterprise, the cooperatives, which were not formally regarded as an independent type differing fundamentally from the others. Under private capitalism, cooperative enterprises differ from capitalist enterprises as collective enterprises differ from private enterprises. Under state capitalism, cooperative enterprises differ from state capitalist enterprises, firstly, because they are private enterprises, and, secondly, because they are collective enterprises. Under our present system, cooperative enterprises differ from private capitalist enterprises because they are collective enterprises, but do not differ from socialist enterprises if the land on which they are situated and means of production belong to the state, i.e., the working-class.

This circumstance is not considered sufficiently when cooperatives are discussed. It is forgotten that owing to the special features of our political system, our cooperatives acquire an altogether exceptional significance. If we exclude concessions, which, incidentally, have not developed on any considerable scale, cooperation under our conditions nearly always coincides fully with socialism.

Let me explain what I mean. Why were the plans of the old cooperators, from Robert Owen onwards, fantastic? Because they dreamed of peacefully remodeling contemporary society into socialism without taking account of such fundamental questions as the class struggle, the capture of political power by the working-class, the overthrow of the rule of the exploiting class. That is why we are right in regarding as entirely fantastic this “cooperative” socialism, and as romantic, and even banal, the dream of transforming class enemies into class collaborators and class war into class peace (so-called class truce) by merely organizing the population in cooperative societies.

Undoubtedly we were right from the point of view of the fundamental task of the present day, for socialism cannot be established without a class struggle for the political power and a state.

But see how things have changed now that the political power is in the hands of the working-class, now that the political power of the exploiters is overthrown and all the means of production (except those which the workers' state voluntarily abandons on specified terms and for a certain time to the exploiters in the form of concessions) are owned by the working-class.

Now we are entitled to say that for us the mere growth of cooperation (with the “slight” exception mentioned above) is identical with the growth of socialism, and at the same time we have to admit that there has been a radical modification in our whole outlook on socialism. The radical modification is this; formerly we placed, and had to place, the main emphasis on the political struggle, on revolution, on winning political power, etc. Now the emphasis is changing and shifting to peaceful, organizational, “cultural” work. I should say that emphasis is shifting to educational work, were it not for our international relations, were it not for the fact that we have to fight for our position on a worldscale. If we leave that aside, however, and confine ourselves to internal economic relations, the emphasis in our work is certainly shifting to education.

Two main tasks confront us, which constitute the epoch—to reorganize our machinery of state, which is utterly useless, in which we took over in its entirety from the preceding epoch; during the past five years of struggle we did not, and could not, drastically reorganize it. Our second task is educational work among the peasants. And the economic object of this educational work among the peasants is to organize the latter in cooperative societies. If the whole of the peasantry had been organized in cooperatives, we would by now have been standing with both feet on the soil of socialism. But the organization of the entire peasantry in cooperative societies presupposes a standard of culture, and the peasants (precisely among the peasants as the overwhelming mass) that cannot, in fact, be achieved without a cultural revolution.

Our opponents told us repeatedly that we were rash in undertaking to implant socialism in an insufficiently cultured country. But they were misled by our having started from the opposite end to that prescribed by theory (the theory of pedants of all kinds), because in our country the political and social revolution preceded the cultural revolution, that very cultural revolution which nevertheless now confronts us.

This cultural revolution would now suffice to make our country a completely socialist country; but it presents immense difficulties of a purely cultural (for we are illiterate) and material character (for to be cultured we must achieve a certain development of the material means of production, we must have a certain material base)."

January 6, 1923

The meaning is clear. In the context of post-revolutionary Russia, 'state capitalism' means a 'concession' to small producers to work for a profit, under the control of the workers state, to meet the larger need of the state to accumulate the means for the socialist transition. By speaking of a specific form of 'state capitalism' Lenin is providing a concept to explain the concrete historical conditions which requires a distinction between 'state capitalism' in a workers state and 'state capitalism' in a capitalist state.

To drive the point home lets quote Lenin from "Left-wing" Childishness part 4

"To make things even clearer, let us first of all take the most concrete example of state capitalism. Everybody knows what this example is. It is Germany. Here we have “the last word” in modern large-scale capitalist engineering and planned organisation, subordinated to Junker-bourgeois imperialism. Cross out the words in italics, and in place of the militarist, Junker, bourgeois, imperialist state put also a state, but of a different social type, of a different class content—a Soviet state, that is, a proletarian state, and you will have the sum total of the conditions necessary for socialism.

Socialism is inconceivable without large-scale capitalist engineering based on the latest discoveries of modern science. It is inconceivable without planned state organisation, which keeps tens of millions of people to the strictest observance of a unified standard in production and distribution. We Marxists have always spoken of this, and it is not worth while wasting two seconds talking to people who do not understand even this (anarchists and a good half of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries).

At the same time socialism is inconceivable unless the proletariat is the ruler of the state. This also is ABC. And history (which nobody, except Menshevik blockheads of the first order, ever expected to bring about “complete” socialism smoothly, gently, easily and simply) has taken such a peculiar course that it has given birth in 1918 to two unconnected halves of socialism existing side by side like two future chickens in the single shell of international imperialism. In 1918 Germany and Russia have become the most striking embodiment of the material realisation of the economic, the productive and the socio-economic conditions for socialism, on the one hand, and the political conditions, on the other.

A successful proletarian revolution in Germany would immediately and very easily smash any shell of imperialism (which unfortunately is made of the best steel, and hence cannot be broken by the efforts of any . . . chicken) and would bring about the victory of world socialism for certain, without any difficulty, or with slight difficulty—if, of course, by “difficulty” we mean difficult on a world historical scale, and not in the parochial philistine sense.

While the revolution in Germany is still slow in “coming forth”, our task is to study the state capitalism of the Germans, to spare no effort in copying it and not shrink from adopting dictatorial methods to hasten the copying of it. Our task is to hasten this copying even more than Peter hastened the copying of Western culture by barbarian Russia, and we must not hesitate to use barbarous methods in fighting barbarism. If there are anarchists and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries (I recall off-hand the speeches of Karelin and Ghe at the meeting of the Central Executive Committee) who indulge in Narcissus-like reflections and say that it is unbecoming for us revolutionaries to “take lessons” from German imperialism, there is only one thing we can say in reply: the revolution that took these people seriously would perish irrevocably (and deservedly).

At present, petty-bourgeois capitalism prevails in Russia, and it is one and the same road that leads from it to both large-scale state capitalism and to socialism, through one and the same intermediary station called “national accounting and control of production and distribution”. Those who fail to understand this are committing an unpardonable mistake in economics. Either they do not know the facts of life, do not see what actually exists and are unable to look the truth in the face, or they confine themselves to abstractly comparing “capitalism” with “socialism” and fail to study the concrete forms and stages of the transition that is taking place in our country. Let it be said in parenthesis that this is the very theoretical mistake which misled the best people in the Novaya Zhizn and Vperyod camp. The worst and the mediocre of these, owing to their stupidity and spinelessness, tag along behind the bourgeoisie, of whom they stand in awe. The best of them have failed to understand that it was not without reason that the teachers of socialism spoke of a whole period of transition from capitalism to socialism and emphasised the “prolonged birth pangs” of the new society. And this new society is again an abstraction which can come into being only by passing through a series of varied, imperfect concrete attempts to create this or that socialist state.

It is because Russia cannot advance from the economic situation now existing here without traversing the ground which is common to state capitalism and to socialism (national accounting and control) that the attempt to frighten others as well as themselves with “evolution towards state capitalism” (Kommunist No. 1, p. 8, col. 1) is utter theoretical nonsense. This is letting one’s thoughts wander away from the true road of “evolution”, and failing to understand what this road is. In practice, it is equivalent to pulling us back to small proprietary capitalism."

Clearly in Russia, a socialist revolution took place in 1917 and a new workers state came to power. Don't take our word for it take that of Winston Churchill and the imperialist overlords who invaded from every direction with counter-revolutionary armies to smash the new workers' state. With the defeat of the German Revolution and the benefits of its advanced large-scale capitalist production, Soviet Russia was forced to make use of capitalist methods and techniques and make a concession to capitalist incentives to overcome that backwardness. Lenin knew this would be the case before the revolution, and did not change his view after the revolution, or sell-out to capitalism with the NEP. If that was the case why would imperialism continue to conspire for the downfall of so-called 'communism' in the workers state?

The Bolsheviks always said that socialism in one country was not possible, let alone a backward, isolated and war-devastated country. This is why they formed a Communist International and fought for a world revolution. As Lenin said in one of the quotes above, 'Leftwing' communists and anarchists who do not understand this cannot make a revolution. Nor have they since.

Class Struggle 97 October-November 2011

2011-11-28T15:49:00.000-08:00

Class Struggle 97 October-November 2011

Defend Iran against the U.S., EU and Israel warmongers!

2011-11-27T20:58:00.000-08:00

Resolution of the Revolutionary Communist Organization for Liberation (RKOB), 9. 11. 2011,

For several weeks now the European and U.S. imperialists and their Israeli henchmen have been threatening Iran with war. They call on Iran to abandon its program to develop nuclear power plants and threaten it with economic sanctions and, increasingly, with military aggression. The justification - that Iran will build secret nuclear weapons - is simply a lie that is used as a justification for a bloody imperialist war of aggression. Remember the claim of George W. Bush in 2003 before the imperialist invasion that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (which, according to the U.S. government, it could use within 45 minutes)! Today, Iran has neither nuclear weapons nor is it close to their completion.

In every criminal case the judge asks: "cui bono?" (Who benefits from the crime?) since that person is often guilty. Similarly we have to ask today: "Who benefits if Iran is not allowed to build nuclear power plants? Who benefits if – under the pretext of a ‘threatened peace’ – preventive strikes against Iran are prepared? Who benefits by waging war against Iran? Who benefits if the economic development of Iran is inhibited by international sanctions and restrictions on the peaceful use of nuclear energy?” It is pretty obvious that the beneficiaries and the culprits are the U.S., the EU and Israel!

But let us accept for a moment the scenario which the imperialists and their UN agencies are painting and assume that Iran is producing nuclear weapons. How can the U.S. (which possesses 9.400 nuclear warheads), France (300), Britain (200) and Israel (100) claim any legitimacy by accusing Iran of building nuclear weapons themselves?! In the history of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which was dictated by the U.S. – several countries have broken it – Israel, India, Pakistan and South Africa. None of these countries were threatened by war at that time. This is hardly surprising since all of the them were allies of the United States. Only stupid bureaucrats and people who can benefit from the imperialist policy can argue that the EU, the U.S., Israel or the United Nations has any right to blame Iran for its production of nuclear weapons.

But as in the preparation of any imperialist, unjust war, the issue is the economic interests of major powers – in particularly Iran's oil. Iran has, after Saudi Arabia, the world's second largest oil reserves (approximately 11.6% of global reserves). Iran also has an important geo-strategic position by which it controls the shipping and oil transport via the Strait of Hormuz. Likewise, the Western powers would, have through a compliant regime in Tehran, better access for oil pipelines from Central Asia, the Persian Gulf and the border with Russia.

Israel is currently the most aggressive warmonger against Iran. The strategic position of Israel in the last year has been significantly weakened by the Arab revolution. Its greatest ally in the region, Egypt and Turkey, turn more and more against this racist apartheid state and the U.S. also withdraws more and more economic and political support (due to its own massive economic problems and military defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan). Israel is trying to regain its lost political position by an aggressive war.

A war against Iran would very likely not end with its occupation. The current military and economic situation of the U.S. and the EU is in a too bad shape and Israel is already having difficulties keeping its own borders under control. What a challenge Iran would be with more than 75 million inhabitants and an area of 1.65 sq km! A bombardment by the air force against the economic lifelines of the country and on various military targets is more likely. The Iranian people are particularly in danger as Israel has threatened several times to use so-called mini-nukes (i.e. smaller nuclear bombs with an explosive force of less than 5 kilotons) against Iran.

If Israel and its supporters in Washington, London, Paris or Berlin really decide to start a war against Iran, then we Bolshevik-communists clearly stand for defense of Iran against imperialist aggression. We have no sympathy for the regime in Tehran. It is a bourgeois-Islamic dictatorship that must be overthrown by a revolution of the workers and peasants. But a victory of imperialism against Iran would strengthen the biggest exploiter of the world and worsen the conditions of the liberation struggle. That is why we fight against every form of interference and oppression of the major imperialist powers against Iran - whether by economic sanctions or by war.

We will explain to the masses: "Despite the fact that the Islamic regime in Tehran is suppressing the workers, peasants and national minorities, they are fighting a just war against those who want to oppress you even more. Every military air craft which is shot down by the Iranian armed forces, is an air craft which cannot be used any more against the people of Tehran, Beirut or the Gaza." We call on the oppressed Arab masses and the workers movement of the West: “Help your Iranian class brothers and sisters, organize "Red Aid" for those who have suffered from these attacks!” If possible, they must also arrange to send weapons for the Iranian Resistance.

In the case of a war mass demonstrations and solidarity strikes in all parts of the world must be organized. We call for the port workers to refuse loading the deadly cargo on NATO supply ships, to prevent these ships from refuelling and replenishing their supplies. The Iranian nation needs our international solidarity! If the imperialists dare to attack Iran with ground troops, we propose to set up International Brigades to support the Iranian Resistance.

In short, everything must be done to ensure that NATO loses such a possible war.

* Hands off Iran! Long live international solidarity with the Iranian people!

* No sanctions against Iran!

* In the event of war: For the defeat of the U.S., EU and Israel! For the military victory of Iran!

[Note: The CWG position on Iran also opposes the military intervention of China (and its ally Russia) as imperialist rivals of the US for control of Iranian and Central Asian oil and other resources]

Aotearoa/NZ - End of Parliamentary Democracy?

2011-11-27T16:28:00.000-08:00

Labour leader Phil Goff (left) and National leader and former Goldman Sachs banker John Key

In Aotearoa/NZ the National and Labour parties are both capitalist parties but they are not quite the same. Labour historically claims to represent working people, while National has always stood for international finance capital. Under the current crisis of global capital the NZ Labour Party like Social Democratic parties everywhere has almost exhausted its claim to represent the working class. In the face of this historic bankruptcy, support for Social Democracy has been falling as the largest sector of workers no longer vote. Capitalism in crisis is everywhere openly abandoning the figleaf of parliamentary democracy and installing Bonapartist regimes to impose mounting austerity attacks on workers. The results of the 2011 election in Aotearoa/NZ has confirmed the bankruptcy of Social Democracy with the number or voters falling to an historic low at 73% of eligible voters and Labour's share of the vote falling to an historic low in the traditional working class constituencies.

Labour Party exhausted historic role?

Labour is being pulled left and right in the face of the global capitalist crisis. It’s torn between two masters. On the one hand it has to serve capitalism and manage capitalism by increasing the productivity of labour the creator of value. On the other it has to respond to its working class supporters and try to claim it serves their interests or it loses its reason for existence. This reveals that Labour like all Social Democratic parties is founded on a class contradiction between its bourgeois program and its labour movement base. Its function is to attempt to suppress that contradiction. In a crisis when that contradiction comes exploding to the surface, Labour has no option but to move right to attempt to solve the crisis at the expense of the working class. But in the process the contraction threatens to destroy Social Democracy.

This explains labour’s lurch to the right. Its new policy on pensions steals the extreme neo-liberal ACT party's policy of making workers work harder, longer, and die sooner. Pushing out the age of retirement from 65 to 67 is an open attack on the working class. To get elected Labour has again abandoned its working class roots and openly appeals to international finance capital to allow it to manage its affairs in NZ. It's another lurch to the right in response to a deep crisis echoing the 1980s crisis management at the expense of workers. Labour has gone so far to the right it even makes multi-millionaire Gareth Morgan’s Big Kahuna look positively leftwing.[see note]

Labour wants to make workers' pay for NZ's economic crisis in the same way as so-called 'socialist' parties in Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland are making workers pay for the crisis of international finance capital. And like those parties which have been voted out or replaced by unelected politicians, Social Democracy is exposed as political bankrupt. What this proves that when it comes to deciding which master it serves Labour always sides with the capitalists and their profits rather with workers and their needs. Let’s prove that this is historically true.

Labour was never a socialist party. It was formed in 1916 after the historic defeat of militant labour in 1913 to co-opt the labour movement into parliament. But under pressure from unemployed workers and destitute working farmers during the Great Depression of the 30's the First Labour Government came to power on a radical populist policy of economic protectionism and income redistribution. This policy prevailed under both Labour and National until the late 1960’s when falling export earnings and internal costs created a big balance of payments deficit. The National Government Prime Minister Muldoon's response to the deepening international crisis in the 1970s was to reinforce protectionism. He refused to concede control over NZs economy even in the face of the threat of massive capital flight. Not because he was pro-worker but because he was for the protection of farmers and manufacturers from rising world prices for energy etc. Hence the 'think big' economic nationalist policy of self-reliance which ironically echoed that of the First Labour Government of the '30s. NZ became a pariah for international finance capital. When Labour was elected in 1984 it found itself facing a double global structural crisis and a crisis of capital flight from a collapsing NZ economy.

Labour became the Government without declaring to its working class supporters that it would shortly adopt the shock therapy of monetarist deregulation. It claimed it had no option because of a crisis of confidence in the NZ economy on the part of international capital. 'Rogernomics', as it came to be called after Finance Minister, Roger Douglas, was the policy of international finance capital (neo-liberalism) designed to destroy protectionism and privatise public assets. It was driven by the crisis facing global capital of falling profits. Douglas prepared his plans as early as 1980 as anyone who read ‘There Must be a Better Way’ knows. Labour had the unions in its pocket so by the time its so-called ‘red’ [pro-Moscow 'socialist'] leaders woke up under their beds it was too late. They were rewarded by Labour stripping the unions of basic rights just before the 1990 election. The left split to form the New Labour Party while many workers refused to vote Labour. Labour was defeated and the 1990s became a decade of National-led governments that furthered the neo-liberal plan of deregulation.

Labour was in Government from 1999 until 2008 but did damn all to reverse its sell-out to monetarism of the '80s. It reformed the Employment Contracts Act to restore the 'balance of power' between employers and unions but the unions remained hollow shells and never recovered their mass membership. Labour had to live within the neo-liberal parameters it had imposed in the 1980s. Its ‘rescued’ some privatised state assets like AirNZ and NZRail but for the sake of business not workers. State provision of basic infrastructure has always been the role of the state in NZ as a subsidy to a weak national capital. So basically Labour accepted the neo-liberal ‘settlement’ of finance capital of the 1980s and imposed further limits on the sovereignty of parliament through fiscal and monetary policy constraints.

This is why it no longer has the tools (or the will) to tackle neo-liberalism and opts for fake ‘tough’ options like making workers work harder and longer. Labour’s tax adjustments are fiscal fiddling which do little to reverse steeply regressive taxation and the widening income gap. Labour introduced the Goods and Service Tax [GST] in the '80s as part of the neo-liberal shift of taxation from capital to labour. Taking GST off fresh fruit and vegetables will be eaten up by inflation in no time. The Capital Gains Tax [CGT] is another grim joke. It won’t do anything to stop speculation or boost productive investment in jobs. That’s why Labour’s excellently produced election advertisements try to cover up its historic sell-out to finance capital with clips from the Joe Savage and Walter Nash eras from 1935-1949 falsely claiming to be going back to Labour’s social justice historic roots.

It is the failure of Labour to reconcile the class contradiction that runs through it that has created the vacuum for the NACT regime to take power and dominate the political domain. Having co-opted the ‘middle class’ and labour aristocracy the NACTs are now resolving the class contradiction by dividing and splitting the working class between aspiring middle class and the ‘underclass’ in the name of national unity. The NACT regime now takes the form of an increasingly authoritarian Bonapartist regime.

Down with NACTs Bonapartism!

NACT PM John Key is a leader who appears to be able to stand above ‘partisan’ politics and represent the nation. He can change the law almost at will. He passes some urgent retrospective empowering legislation and sends a minister to ride shotgun. Some say it’s a feature of ‘presidential’ rule that spawns mini Tsars. His 'presidential' appeal however is that of finance capital and his reputation as a successful 'banker'. John Key the rich banker can pass himself off as above the nation because he represents the financial salvation of the nation. Of course this explains why Key is so popular and can get away with doing what he likes, laugh it off, smile and wave, and move on.

This is a well known phenomenon to Marxists who refer to it as ‘Bonapartism’ after the French Bonapartes who ruled as ‘strong men’ in the 1800s seemingly above classes, and therefore identifying with the nation as a whole. It is a feature of a period of social crisis when the open Tory parties are too much identified with the greedy, arrogant ruling class, so a populist figure, apparently straddling the classes, can for a relatively short period maintain a class balance and semblance of order and stability. Bonapartism provides a cover for creeping autocracy as the regime has to implement rapid reforms to make the working masses pay for its crises and restore its profits. In the current crisis, as the success of John Key shows, Bonapartism is taking the form of unelected Bankers assuming executive power by default allowing Social Democracy and Rightwing regimes to hide behind the figleaf of the authority of finance capital that is 'too big to allow nation states to fail'.

Yet Bonapartist figures cannot put the lid on class struggle in a serious prolonged crisis and the working class begins to resist the attacks on it. A very clever Bonapartist like Key can delay the shift to the right by simply smothering working class resistance. He won the ‘08 election as ‘Labour Lite’ keeping his Tory agenda under wraps. He has removed the wraps as his popularity and ability to maintain the class balance holds. He is well managed. The RWC and his photo op with the Mad Butcher continues to promote his stand for the national above classes. He drinks in the corporate boxes with the rugby bosses and sits in the stands with the heartland of working class NZ, the league fans, fraternising with another self made working class multi-millionaire. To make it easier the Labour Party under Goff is incapable of standing up for the most oppressed workers. And Mana has not yet been able to appeal to the disaffected hordes of Labour voters attracting only 1% of the vote in the 2011 election.

However, in one or two or three year’s time depending how rapidly the global crisis develops, the NACT regime will no longer be able to keep workers down. The Bonapartist regime will then move right to redefine the nation as excluding the ‘outsiders’- the 100s of thousands of workers who have been disenfranchised by Labour’s open pro-capitalist trajectory in the last 30 years and who in 2008 and 2011 stayed at home. Labour faces the ignominy of most of its traditional working class base alienated from 'their' historic Party.

The ‘outsiders’ are those sections of the working class mainly Maori, Pacifica, youth and women who are over-represented as unemployed, lowpaid, unpaid, precarious, casualised workers and labelled as the 'underclass'. The Bonapartist regime attacks these groups to victimise and demonise them in order to divide and smash their unity as workers. The NACTs have used Brash and will now use Banks to drive racist, sexist, anti-youth and homophobic wedges in this direction hoping to incite the formation of fascist currents. This opens the way for a fascist movement to demonise and physically attack the most militant sections of the working class and destroy its challenge to capitalist rule.

A serious working class opposition to capitalist class rule has therefore to unite all of these class elements as one single fighting force. This is what is under way with the wave of occupations that is spreading across the world. These occupations are all pointing towards growing support for general strikes from Egypt to Bolivia, Greece to the US etc, which if they become based on workers councils, militias and support from the ranks of the military, open the road to the smashing of the class power of the bourgeoisie and the rise to power of the working class globally.

Global Revolution is the solution!
Just as we see growing layers of the masses around the world turning their backs on parliaments and the bankruptcy of social democracy, mobilising on the streets and Liberation squares to take their futures into their own hands, young people and workers are doing the same in Aotearoa. When it is clear that parliament is talk shop for the bosses and the state the committee to manage the affairs of the ruling class, the people are waking up to the reality that they have the power to make change by uniting, organising and campaigning for what they need.

The Arab Revolution that stood against political dictatorships sparked off the ‘indignados’ in Spain and Greece to stand up against the dictatorship of finance capital. The first tentative demand to emerge from the #OWS is the Robin Hood Tax but already it's clear that even to make this demand the movement needs to unite with workers everywhere and build for a general strike to bring down the capitalist regimes and open the road for real democracy. The general strike #OccupyOakland led on November 2 followed closely on the 48 hour general strike in Greece. There will be many more. Based on a revolutionary consciousness, program and action and lead by a global democratic mass workers' revolutionary party, this can be the beginning of the revolution.

After the Robin Hood Tax comes the jailing of the Sheriff and his army of cops and then the deposing of King John and the ruling class.

[note]

The Big Kahuna

Gareth Morgan and his collaborators have put out proposals for an Unconditional Basic Income to all (paid work or not) and a flat tax to pay for it which would incorporate a Capital Gains Tax. These proposals are an advance on modern social democracy that has conceded a tax regime that is highly regressive (poor pay a bigger % of income than rich). While the UBI challenges the fundamental presumption of capitalism that we must work or starve, and takes away the stigma attached to social welfare, in the end this is still a distributional solution to inequality that fails to get to the roots of capitalisms class structure. It is a proposal for re-allocating a social wage in a way that is more efficient for capital to make profits and to buy social peace. Nevertheless these proposals are ones that should be taken up by the left and debated as they can become the launching pad for mobilising working people to challenge the rule of capital, the ownership of private property, and the exploitation of labour-power as the source of profits.

Perspectives on the Greek Revolution

2011-11-17T14:38:00.000-08:00

Solidarity march with migrant workers

The Greek tragedy is the lack of revolutionary leadership of the workers movement!

For Workers’ Councils, Workers’ Militias and a Workers’ Government!

1. Greece is currently the mirror image of the future of many countries in Europe and beyond in two senses. First, Greece has shown with what brutality and what devastating consequences monopoly capital in the stage of decaying capitalism tries to shift its economic and debt crisis onto the backs of the masses of the working class and peasantry. Second, we see that the existing reformist bureaucracies that control the labor movement lead our class to disaster. Either they execute the orders of the capitalist class as stooges, or they help these stooges indirectly by leading the workers with a strategy that cannot possibly win. Centrism in Greece demonstrates again its adaptation to bourgeois ideology and to the reformist bureaucracy. One must say outright: Greece proves again that without a revolutionary workers party based on a Bolshevik program the proletariat is helpless to defeat the blows of the ruling class.

Capitalist crisis and Politics of plunder

2. The crisis of capitalism pushes Greece to ruin. Already in 2010 the Greek gross domestic product shrank by 4.5% and by the end of the second third of 2011 a further 7.5%. In 2011 it is expected that there will be not enough tax revenue to service the current debt repayment. By March 2011 the debt of the country was over 340 billion Euros. This is against this background of a dramatic rise in unemployment and poverty. At the end of 2009 there were approximately 9.6% unemployed; today the official figure is 16.3%. According to the trade unions there are one million unemployed, i.e. 22% of the workforce! Among 15 - to 29-year-olds, nearly one third are without a job. Moreover, up to 30,000 wage earners in the state sector are threatened with dismissal till the end of the year. Public sector workers wages shall be cut on an average of 30-40%, and pensioners face a reduction of their pension by a fifth. The employers can now legally take advantage of high unemployment to undermine the industry collective agreements: the absolute lower limit of about € 740 gross wage for a full time job no longer applies for newly hired young adults under 25 years. You have to make do with just under €600 gross per month. At the same time the rich get their money out safety: according to the German news magazine Spiegel Greek millionaires in Switzerland alone, have deposited € 600 billion.

3. The attacks on the Greek working class are justified by the bourgeois governments, the EU bodies (including the Social-Democratic parties) and the media, by blaming allegedly high wages and government spending in Greece. This is of course one of the many lies the bourgeois ideological apparatuses uses to justify their austerity attacks. According to the French bank Natixis, the annual working time in Germany is on average 1390 hours yet in Greece it is 2119 hours. The gross wages in Greece are 30% less than in Germany. The share of government employment to total employment is in Greece (8%) below that of Germany (just under 10%) and is just over half the average of industrialized countries (15%). Similarly, the share of social spending of GDP is 36% and well below that of Germany (45%). The argument that Greece has taken too much debt and lives "beyond its means" is nonsense. It is in fact a prisoner of imperialist finance capital: in just the last 20 years the country has paid more than €600 billion in interest to the banks - twice as much as its national debt.

4. The actual cause of the devastating economic crisis and the massive austerity attack is not that of wrong neo-liberal policies as the leaders the left Social Democrats and Stalinists insist. For about 40 years global capitalism has been in a period of weak economic growth and crises, the result of the inevitable over-accumulation of capital and the tendency of the falling rate of profit. The neo-liberal policies were not the cause of this crisis because they arrived a long time after it began. There are and have been in the capitalist countries all imaginable forms of government – from a bourgeois government with the participation of radical right-wing forces (e.g., Italy with the National Alliance, in Austria, the FPÖ / BZÖ); Social Democratic governments ruling alone; governments with the participation of "communist" parties (the Jospin government in France, the PCF or twice the Prodi government in Italy with the Rifondazione Comunista); and the dictatorship by a Stalinist party (China, under the leadership of the CPC, where in the early 1990s there was a transition first from a degenerate workers' state to a capitalist state, and in the late 2000s to an imperialist power). But despite the differences in these forms of regime, they all reacted in the same way to the crisis of capitalism with the intensified exploitation of the working class and a massive redistribution of wealth in favor of the bourgeoisie.

Greece put on starvation rations

5. The crisis of the capitalist world system that erupted in 2008 with the worst recession for a long time has gone to a new level. The system has passed the stage of a crisis on its death bed and now approaches its grave where the only alternative is socialism or barbarism. During this period characterised by monopoly capital – the survival of the banks and corporations that dominate the state and economy depends on drastically cutting the value of labor power, screwing up the interest rate and looting the raw material reserves etc. to increase their profits. Weaker capitalist countries – like Greece – are the first victims of the relentless politics of this imperialist plunder. But ultimately it makes the working class and oppressed peoples of all countries pay for its crisis.

6. The aim of the imperialist EU in Greece is to put the workers and oppressed on starvation rations and to privatize the remaining state assets (and sell them mainly to large foreign corporations). So the Greek State offers for sale 39 airports, 850 ports, railways, highways, two energy companies, banks, thousands of hectares of land which the state lottery, etc. with a total value of US$71 billion. Furthermore, a significantly higher proportion of the Greek economy is transferred into the ownership of imperialist capital (so far around 90% of bank capital is still in local hands) and the rights and organizations of the working class are weakened to create a much cheaper labor force for the capitalists to exploit – not only by Western European capitalists but also Greek employers. Therefore, the Greek capitalists essentially support the EU's brutal austerity policies even if they ask for, of course, better terms for them from Brussels.

7. The political crisis in Greece and the events in the EU underline once more the thesis of Marxists that bourgeois democracy is not democracy for the workers class and the broad masses, but in reality a disguised dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The "socialist" government in Athens can be commanded by the stock exchanges and the Greek capitalists in parliament to adopt the austerity package of the EU Commission, when it is obvious that the people are against it. Nor will the peoples of Europe have the slightest say in the austerity measures. So the government in Athens has just ruled against the so-called democratic or sovereign will of the people. The leaders of PASOK (Panhellenic Socialist Movement) and ND (New Democracy – the conservative party) vote to change the government, set the date for new elections, and decide the future of the people. How hypocritical were the "democrats" of Western governments (including the Social Democrats) and the monopoly capitalists, when in early November the then Greek President Papandreou dared to announce a referendum on the austerity package. An outcry over the "irresponsibility" of the government arose in the EU and the stock market tumbled down. Democracy for the capitalists is only viable as long as long as it does not affect their profits. Petty-bourgeois democrats a la ATTAC or the ideologues in the "Democracy Now" movement think that within capitalism a true democracy is possible. This is a childish illusion. In a society in which classes exist and one class exploits the other, there can be no true democracy. The state apparatus, the parliament, the government - they are all in a ‘bourgeois democracy’ controlled by the numerically small class of capitalists. Lenin's statement that "even the most democratic [of] democratic republic[s] is nothing but a machine for the oppression of the working class by the bourgeoisie, the masses of working people by a handful of capitalists" (‘Theses on Bourgeois Democracy and Dictatorship of the Proletariat’, 1919), is valid today than ever .

The class character of Greece

8. All this shows the hopelessness of bourgeois nationalism. It is a reactionary dead end, and chains the working class politically to the bourgeoisie. Bolshevik-Communists therefore reject the "patriotic" orientation of the Stalinists of the KKE (Communist Party of Greece) and many other left-wing reformists, towards the formation of an anti-EU "national bloc" in common with bourgeois forces, as completely reactionary and utopian.

9. In the Greek population there is a widespread mood that sees the EU as dictating a foreign austerity policy (not least Berlin-controlled) onto the country. This is reflected in numerous patriotic expressions at demonstrations and also at the celebrations marking the anniversary of the famous "NO" against Mussolini's dictatorship on 28 October 1940. Without doubt an element of national oppression exists in the current crisis, insofar as there are not equal relations between states, as the major powers in the EU – especially Germany and France, but also smaller imperialist powers such as Austria or the Netherlands – treat Greece unashamedly as a developed semi-colony whose government policy it can dictate.

10. At the same time the patriotic Stalinists of the KKE and other leftists, "forget" that Greek capitalism has also striven to take its place as an internationally active exploiter class. The Greek capitalists have traditionally been among the largest owners of ships (with a share of almost 16% of world shipping tonnage in 2010). Also since the early 1990s, Greek capital has established itself as a leading foreign investor in South Eastern European and Balkan countries and in Serbia, Albania, Macedonia and Bulgaria it even takes the first place among foreign investors. Greece's leading four banks –National Bank of Greece, EFG Euro Bank, Alpha Bank and Piraeus – now control about 20% of the financial sector in Southeast Europe. In short, Greek capital is exploiting the proletariat not only domestically, but also through the super-exploitation of workers in poorer semi-colonial countries. It is however noted that part of the officially recognized "foreign investment" (referred to as capital exports) is in reality more capital flight in the face of severe economic crisis in Greece and represents less a sign of strength but of weakness of Greek capital. This shows incidentally, that the patriotism of the ruling class serves only as an ideological veil to fool the oppressed classes, but if it is conducive to their profits, they will – without batting an eyelid – readily submit to foreign masters.

11. Greek capitalism therefore has a contradictory character. While it has historically been oppressed by European and U.S. imperialism it has also made efforts to make parts of the Balkans its own semi-colonial hinterland. An overall picture of Greek capitalism is that – given the relatively low importance of the role of capital exports and repatriation of super-profits in proportion to the overall economy and the overall relatively underdeveloped nature of capitalist development in the country –Greece has no imperialist character. We reject the use of categories such as "sub-imperialism" (as used by the centrist IS/SWP tradition of Tony Cliff) as un-Marxist, because in the modern era of imperialism they blur and render indecisive the characteristic contradiction between oppressor and oppressed countries. Rather, Greece is an advanced semi-colony in subordination to the imperialist powers – especially the EU and the USA, and increasingly China. The current crisis in Greece and its open submission to the dictates of the big powers show that the efforts of the Greek capital in the past 20 years to become a small regional imperialist power were not crowned with success. The last years have confirmed the semi-colonial status of Greece.

12. The example of Greece also confirms the thesis of Bolshevik-Communists that China has now become a new imperialist superpower. The dramatic increase in its capital exports – China is now the world's fifth-largest foreign investor – shows that the country is neither a semi-colony nor a degenerated workers' state, and certainly not a socialist state. In the recent past, China has won through massive investments an influential role in Greece and thus gained a springboard into the EU. The state capitalist Chinese company Cosco controls with a US$5 billion investment the largest port in the country. China plans a number of other major investments in Greece and has already signed contracts for projects totalling more than US$5 billion for the purchase of larger sectors of the major trading fleet, telecommunications, railways, etc. For the Greek working class Chinese investment brings heavy attacks. For example, Cosco prohibits in “its” Piraeus harbor any union activity or even collective bargaining agreements. What a bizarre nonsense that many Stalinists and Chavez supporters admire China as a socialist, or at least still a progressive country!

13. The reactionary character of Greek chauvinism is also reflected in its history of oppression and partial expulsion of national minorities (Turks, Albanians, Macedonians, etc.). Founded in 1991, even the independent Republic of Macedonia was not recognized by Greece for many years. At the same time Greek chauvinism is also used to justify the exploitation of the many migrants and thus to deepen the split in the working class. This is even more serious given the fact that the migrants number officially a million (2 / 3 are Albanians) and amount to 20% of the total labor force.

Patriotism - the dead end of reformism

14. Shamefully, a large part of the reformist Left (left wing of PASOK, KKE, Synaspismos, etc.) subscribes to Greek patriotism. The KKE, for example, refers to itself in its program as a "patriotic party" and is committed to "defending the territorial integrity of the country against the new imperialist world order." The only "dangers" of the "territorial integrity" of Greece in the past few decades were the conflict with Turkey and some demands by the Macedonian minority in Greece to secede. In fact, the KKE on the Macedonian question supports "the safeguard of inviolability of borders; the avoidance of every irredentist propaganda and of actions that hinder the approach and cooperation of the two countries." (KKE Resolution 19.2.2008). In general, the KKE denies the existence of any national minority in Greece (Interview with the longtime KKE Secretary General Aleka Papariga, 02/26/2011). The commitment of the KKE to patriotism and the defense of the capitalist state against other states and against the self-determination of national minorities is nothing more than social-chauvinism and subordination to the capitalist fatherland.

15. Today the KKE calls for the withdrawal of Greece from the EU and the euro currency and the restoration of "independence" for Greece and the drachma currency. But in reality, the solution of the Greek crisis can only be international in character. A capitalist Greece outside the EU will face at least as tough austerity measures as those imposed by the present government. The reformist bureaucracy of the KKE preaches the illusion that Greece could be an independent nation because the country "has conditions to create a self-supporting developing national economy." (Aleka Papariga, 5.7.2010) Such a nation existing in isolation is not possible.

16. The struggle against the imperialist dictates of the EU must be fought internationally. The West European workers' movement must fight on the streets and in parliament against all austerity policies to “rescue” Greece and against anti-Greek chauvinism. Revolutionaries in Greece must reject the bourgeois-nationalist perspective sharply and the demand for withdrawal from the EU7 or the Euro zone and the reintroduction of the drachma. The slogan for Greece’s withdrawal from the EU and euro should be made only in connection with the slogan of a workers' government and as part of the process of socialist revolution.

17. We are opposed to ultra-left positions, which – because of the presence of Greek national flags in demonstrations and site occupations or the organized right – conclude that these mobilisations have a reactionary character. Of course, in a real popular movement, which is directed against the brutal subjugation of the country under the dictates of the imperialist EU, patriotism is understandable, in particular given the fact that the workers vanguard still does not have a revolutionary consciousness and therefore cannot decisively influence these mobilization with an internationalist perspective. Bolsheviks-communists argue against patriotism as such not with abstract teachings about the myth of the homeland and the moral superiority of internationalism. Rather, we point out that Greece can be saved only a) if it is free of rule by Greek and international capital, b) if the fight is on the basis of complete equality with the non-Greek parts of the working class in the country (immigrants, national minorities) and c) if it takes place as part of a common international struggle of the working class in the Balkans, in Europe and the Mediterranean, for a socialist federation.

18. It is particularly important, therefore, to underline the reactionary role of Greek capital in the Balkans and in the over-exploitation and national oppression of the migrants in their own country. To combat Greek chauvinism consistently, we make our program for the national self-determination (including the right of secession) for the minorities in Greece; for the full equality of migrants (full citizenship rights, equal pay, recognition of their language as equal at work and education, abolition of the official State language, etc.); for a socialist perspective for a Balkan Federation and the United Socialist States of Europe, a priority. Equally urgent is the unity of the Greek Revolution and the Arab revolution.

19. The importance of the revolutionary struggle for complete equality and integration of migrants is reflected especially in Greece. They are an important part, especially of the most oppressed sections of the working class. The struggle of the union of cleaners and domestic helpers in Athens (PEKOP) shows that migrants can play an important role in the class struggle. Its most famous representative, the Bulgarian migrant Kostantina Kuneva, was attacked in late 2008 during a labor dispute by paid assassins of the company concerned who threw sulfuric acid all over her face. She survived despite severe injuries and PEKOP – supported by a large wave of solidarity from other parts of the working class and the youth – was able to win the strike. The organization and mobilization of the lower sections of the working class – among which the migrants play a key role –is a crucial precondition for the victory of the Greek revolution.

Widespread pre-revolutionary crisis

20. The central question is: Why has the government been able to stay in power even after a string of very brutal austerity policies forced on the people against their will? Is it the lack of combat readiness of the masses? Certainly not! The massive attacks of the capitalist class were answered by the working class with a series of general strikes, demonstrations and site occupations. The statistical average in 2010 was two demonstrations per day in Athens!

21. Is Greek capitalism in such a strong position? No. Not only are the workers and the oppressed no longer willing to accept the series of savage packages. The ruling class cannot continue its existing politics unchanged. Greece is facing national bankruptcy. The political system is totally discredited in the eyes of the people. Each government crisis is followed by the next. No wonder that there is speculation among the political elite of Greece and the EU already about the need for a civil war, a military coup and a Bonapartist regime.

22. Greece is definitely facing a pre-revolutionary crisis. If we disregard the rebellion in Albania in 1997, we find in Greece the most advanced revolutionary development in Europe since Portugal 1974-75. Lenin's classic definition of a revolutionary situation clearly applies to Greece: "(1) when it is impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their rule without any change; when there is a crisis, in one form or another, among the “upper classes”, a crisis in the policy of the ruling class, leading to a fissure through which the discontent and indignation of the oppressed classes burst forth. For a revolution to take place, it is usually insufficient for “the lower classes not to want” to live in the old way; it is also necessary that “the upper classes should be unable” to live in the old way; (2) when the suffering and want of the oppressed classes have grown more acute than usual; (3) when, as a consequence of the above causes, there is a considerable increase in the activity of the masses, who uncomplainingly allow themselves to be robbed in “peace time”, but, in turbulent times, are drawn both by all the circumstances of the crisis and by the “upper classes” themselves into independent historical action." (VI Lenin, ‘The Collapse of the Second International’, 1915). From the Greek revolution to the Arab revolution since January 2011, the August uprising of the poor in Britain a few months ago, and the world-wide Occupation movement, there is further evidence for the Bolshevik-Communists assessment that the historical crisis of capitalism has opened a revolutionary period.

23. So the ruling class holds on to power not because of their strength and not because of the lack of combat readiness of the working class. The cause lies rather in the fact that the proletariat and the oppressed have no revolutionary leadership. Instead, at the head of the labor movement stand the reformist bureaucracies, with their policies to betray and sell out the struggle of the masses. Either they execute the orders of the capitalist class as direct agents (PASOK), or they help these lackeys indirectly by misleading the proletariat with a reformist strategy which must inevitably end in defeat (KKE, Synapismos). Centrism (which vacillates between reformism and revolution) is incapable of a raising a truly revolutionary program as a political alternative to the bureaucracy, such as the pseudo-Trotskyist forces (Marxistiki Foni / IMT, DEA) and Maoist organizations (such as KOE), with Synapismos/SYRIZA (Coalition of the Radical reform left) or Antarsya (a coalition of SEK/IST, OKDE-Spartakos/Fourth International) and others. (Xekinima / CWI belonged to SYRIZA until a few months ago).

24. The pre-revolutionary crisis threatens to degenerate. A pre-revolutionary or revolutionary situation cannot last forever. The masses are weakened by loss of momentum and lose faith in the possibility of victory. At the same time, the ruling class can prepare for a decisive counterattack and for the establishment of a Bonapartist regime with wide-ranging executive powers. Against the backdrop of a deep economic and social crisis, the continued inability of the labor movement to take the initiative inevitably leaves space for the growth of a rabid nationalism and fascism. (e.g. LAOS and Chrysi Avyi). Only the timely construction of a revolutionary workers party based on a Bolshevik program can ensure that the resolute struggle of the masses leads to the proletarian seizure of power and not to a heavy defeat.

The Crisis of Leadership – treachery of PASOK, KKE and SYRIZA

25. The working class in Greece is bound on several sides. The ruling party PASOK in this crisis proves once more to be the direct agent of domestic and foreign monopoly capital. It plays a leading role within the big trade union federations - the Federation GSEE and the public sector union ADEDY. At the last congress of the Greek General Confederation of Labor (GSEE) in March 2010, PASKE – the trade union group close to PASOK – 48.2% of the delegates voted to unite behind PASOK’s social-democratic program to weaken and limit the struggle against austerity. The PASOK government does not shy away from using military repression to discipline the workers. It used the civilian mobilization orders to break the 17-day strike of the garbage workers by force out of fear of a solidarity strike by millions of workers against their policy. This law dates from the Second World War and allows the forced provision of government services. The striking workers were effectively subjected to military discipline. If they refuse, they can be thrown in jail for up to five years.

26. However, at the same time the internal contradictions intensify in the face of growing anger among the masses. A number of leading trade union officials now sees itself forced to break with PASOK. In different unions (teachers, municipal employees, railway workers) PASKE even splits from PASOK.

27. It is significant that PASOK is part of the Socialist International. It is a counterrevolutionary instrument like the other European social democratic parties that support the imperialist policy of robbing Greece through its various EU "aid packages".

28. The Communist Party (KKE) is a classic Stalinist party i.e. it is a bourgeois workers party, which is ruled by a bureaucracy that serves the maintenance of capitalism by promising reforms to its working class social base. Its union faction PAME won 20.9% of the delegates’ votes at the last congress of the GSEE. It has important bastions of support in the traditional core layers of the proletariat like the port and construction workers - and exerts an important influence on the class-conscious workers. However, PAME is does not have the strength of the GSEE and the ADEDY (Civil Servants Unions) to organize general strikes. The KKE played a central role in the anti-fascist struggle for liberation during the Second World War. In 1944 it formed a coalition government with the bourgeois and monarchist forces to disarm the partisans and install a capitalist regime during the revolutionary crisis of 1944-45. Also in 1990-91, the KKE participated in a coalition government with PASOK and ND. It now pursues the Stalinist strategy of establishing a "social popular front" - also called the "anti-imperialist, anti-monopolistic, democratic front of the people". To this end the KKE organizes not only workers and peasants, but also the petty bourgeoisie (it has created the PASEVE –the Anti-monopolist Protest Movement of All Greeks to organise “the Self-employed and the small Tradesman”).

29. The KKE bourgeois role was also evident during the uprising of the youth in December 2008 (a weeks-long mass revolt - not unlike the August uprising of the poor in Britain - after the murder of 15-year-old student Alexandros Grigoropoulos by two police officers). While tens of thousands of youths were fighting in the streets against the police, the KKE Secretary General Papariga slandered the militants as "hooligans" and "hoodies" led by “foreign intelligence." (Interview 17.12.2008)

30. The reformist policy of the KKE is based primarily on strengthening its position in Parliament. The class struggle in the streets and in the factories is subordinated to its parliamentary position. Papariga said in the 2010 "Proposal for Resolving the Crisis" that the party only puts its emphasis on the extra-parliamentary struggle if it sees no possibilities for parliamentary coalitions and maneuver; "...if the political balance of power allows us no effective intervention in favor of the people, then we focus on the extra-parliamentary movement." The KKE is often radical and likes to talk of socialism and the power of the working class. But instead of taking advantage of the present revolutionary crisis to orient the wave of strikes and general strikes and occupation movements to organize an uprising and the revolutionary seizure of power, it demands – along with the other reformist and centrist forces (e.g. SYRIZA) – the formation of a "transitional government" and new elections.

31. Bolshevik-Communists reject the slogan for new elections as it means in the present phase of the heightened class struggle and mass mobilizations nothing but a diversion from the revolutionary struggle on the streets and in the factories back onto the parliamentary road. It reflects an orientation of the reformist bureaucracy that solve the political crisis and the mass mobilizations of popular protests by electing a new civil government to parliament, rather than by an uprising and the overthrow of the ruling class.

32. Against this background we can assess the clashes during the two-day general strike on 19./20 October. The KKE used their forces to form a barrier of people to protect the Parliament and allow the deputies access so they could vote for the recent brutal austerity package. The radical forces of “The Plirono” (We do not pay) movement, the militant Union of Municipal Employees POE-OTA, the radical Left, and the autonomous/anarchists were trapped in Syntagma Square. In response to the bureaucratic and sometimes violent actions of the KKE security forces there were violent clashes between the KKE-stewards and radical parts of the demonstrators. This was the result of the role that the KKE on 20 October played: that of a middle-class auxiliary police who guarded the Parliament against the masses, while the new austerity package was agreed. (That is why the KKE/PAME security forces are often called "KNAT" –a combination of the terms KKE youth organization KNE and the special police MAT)

33. The KKE denounced the radical forces as "anarcho-fascists." Many centrists condemned both the KKE and the radical forces. Doubtless the autonomous/anarchist forces repeatedly caused a counter-productive escalation with the police. But this should not detract from the overall political context. Against the background of many general strikes and the widespread hatred of the people for parliament and the government, the repeated attacks by protesters against the parliament building in the past, it is absurd to justify the KKE/PAME behavior against the workers' demonstration on the pretext of stopping some ‘crazed anarchists’. No, the Stalinist bureaucracy wanted to prove to the ruling class its loyalty in the face of the government crisis and possible new elections. "We are a reputable, state-supporting force, protecting the Parliament in times of crisis and we can control the movement". The policy of the KKE is clearly reminiscent of the role of the Stalinists in the Spanish Civil war 1936-39, where they defended the bourgeois republic against the radical forces of the time. But if the KKE has played out its role, the reactionary forces will sweep it away as it happened in Spain also.

34. The “Coalition of the Radical Left” – SYRIZA – is dominated by the left-reformist party Synaspismos, a Euro-communist split from the KKE in 1991. The founding leaders of Synaspismos were at the forefront of the government coalition with New Democracy and PASOK of 1990-91. Synaspismos is now part of the European Left Party and follows a left-social democratic politics, which sees neoliberal policies as the cause of the crisis and advocates a reform program and government participation in the management of capitalism. Significantly, in the 1990s Synaspismos supported extremely chauvinistic propaganda towards Macedonia and mobilized with the Conservatives, PASOK and the church, for joint demonstrations under the slogan "Macedonia is Greek".

35. In 2010 there was a separation of the right wing of Synaspismos under the former Minister of Justice Fotis Kouvelis (in the coalition government of 1990-91), which formed the reformist Democratic Left party (DIMAR). DIMAR follows the logic of social democracy more consistently than KKE and SYRIZA. Kouvelis calls for new elections so that "the political crisis does not turn into a crisis of democracy". In early November the DIMAR deputy Grigoris Psarianos along with PASOK and ND called for the formation of a transitional government to restore “normal democracy” and to keep the country "on European course". Here speaks a party appealing to the bourgeoisie as a serious coalition partner to administer the capitalist state business.

36. Even if SYRIZA today is sometimes radical and may resonate with some layers of the militant workers and youth, it is basically a left-reformist force. Significantly SYRIZA in recent months did not demand the resignation of the government, but called for a referendum on the debt and the establishment of a committee to review how much of the debt should be paid and how much should be canceled. Similar to the KKE calls for new elections, it has a reformist-parliamentary strategy in response to the crisis. Its goal is to find a place in a bourgeois government ("a new coalition of power", SYRIZA president Alexis Tsipras 04/11/2011) is. That is why Tsipras appealed to President Karolos Papoulias to hold elections to defend the Constitution. Everyone had an obligation under the Constitution to undertake initiatives to preserve social cohesion and national integrity." One should take initiatives “avoid finding ourselves faced with unpleasant events that some times wrong people, institutions and our democracy.” (31.10.2011) Such statements of the supposedly "radical left" in times of severe crisis of capitalist democracy tells us much more about the thoroughly bourgeois-reformist character of SYRIZA than hundreds of rhetorical speeches about anti-capitalism and socialism. Those who think that SYRIZA is more left-wing than the KKE’ make a big mistake. Equally significant is the fact that for years several centrist organizations like Marxistiki Foni / IMT, DEA and KOE have been part of the left-reformist SYRIZA, afraid to break with the reformist Synaspismos and thus carry responsibility for its betrayal.

37. In Greece, anarchism is traditionally relatively strong. Its strength is a consequence of the bureaucratization of the labor movement and the treachery of its leaders in the past. Given the weakness of the revolutionary forces, it is no surprise that many young people and probably some workers turn to anarchism. What they see as ‘communism’ is nothing but the Stalinism of the KKE "Leninism" and the "working class discipline” of KKE stewards calling the rebellious youth "hooligans" as a pretext for protecting parliament. At the same time we must also see that many young activists are misguided in their involvement in the ranks of anarchism. For without a revolutionary (not Stalinist!) party no revolutionary overthrow of capitalism is possible. Without turning to the working class in the factories, without tactics against the organizations of the labor movement, the working class cannot be won to the revolution. Without a disciplined approach to demonstrations and street fighting the ranks can be mislead into police provocations and other counter-productive actions. In short, we are appealing to the anarchist activists to join the ranks of the working class party in the revolutionary struggle for the abolition of classes and the state.

Return of spontaneous movements

38. The massive upsurge of class struggle in recent months has brought very important and promising developments among the masses. Out of the dissatisfaction with the unsuccessful protests organized by the bureaucracy of the unions and the KKE, there arose the spontaneous mass movement Kinima Aganaktisménon Politón (KAP –Indignant Citizens' Movement) starting with the demonstration on 25 May 2011. The movement reached its climax in the summer when tens of thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands attending their meetings and demonstrations. It calls for the cancellation of debts and the expulsion of the Government, the EU Troika, the IMF, the banks "and all who exploit us." Like so many spontaneous mass movements it is also politically contradictory. On the one hand it embodies a desire for "true democracy", a frontal rejection of government, EU, IMF and "exploiters" and its use of bourgeois legality to square occupations has an enormously progressive potential. On the other hand, it lacks roots in the factories and refuses to allow the formal participation in the meetings of political organizations, which is a petty-bourgeois element in this movement.

39. Because of the radical-democratic nature of the KAP and thus their lack of control by the bureaucracy, the KKE leadership sees this movement as a threat. Shamefully, they condemn it as "apolitical" and reject any involvement in, and support for the movement.

40. The attitude of Bolshevik-Communists to such spontaneous bourgeois-democratic protest movements is characterized by the combination of a) an active participation in, and support for the movement, b) a politically clear and educational criticism of its petty-bourgeois orientation, anti-party sentiment, etc., c) the open advocacy of an orientation to the working class and the establishment of action committees in the factories, neighborhoods and schools, and d) a clear perspective on the necessity of socialist revolution and the building of a revolutionary combat party of the working class.

41. Another very important phenomenon is the spread of rank and file assemblies and the formation of actions in many enterprises and neighborhoods. These committees are spontaneous and are barely linked together. Related actions are also the numerous occupations of public buildings.

Program of the Revolution

42. In the past year and a half Greece has gone through a pre-revolutionary development; numerous ‘general strikes’ (12 until now), occupations and demonstrations have proven beyond doubt the fighting spirit of the masses. But so far these heroic struggles have had no success: the PASOK government has been able to push through the brutal austerity packages in parliament.

43. The reason for this failure lies in the fact that at the head of the mobilization there is no revolutionary combat party of the working class, but rather, reformist bureaucracies with centrist appendages. They pursue a strategy of impotent dead-end mobilisations which are directed at winning lucrative power and privileges via new elections.

44. The key condition to overcome the current crisis is the building of a revolutionary party. Only with such a party at its head can the working class be won to a program for the socialist seizure of power and the road to liberation opened. The first step in this direction is the creation of a revolutionary party-building organization to develop such a program and to unite activists on the basis of this program.

45. The central tragedy of Greece to date lies precisely in the huge gap between the struggle and determination of the working class on the one side and the terrible political backwardness of the leadership of the workers' movement on the other side. There is no revolutionary party capable of leading the proletariat to take power. Today many militant workers and young activists support either reformist or centrist forces (e.g. trade unions close to PASOK, KKE/PAME, SYRIZA, DIMAR, Antarsya), the Autonomists/Anarchists, or they are unorganized. From this fact follows the centrality of the united front tactic. The battle for winning over first the vanguard and then the entire proletariat requires that the revolutionary forces do more than strike together with the workers. They must also direct their demands to the existing organizations and that includes also their leaderships. To direct demands to the leaderships does not imply we have any illusions in their reformist and centrist programs. On the contrary, revolutionaries explain openly to the working class why these leaders are not able to lead the liberation struggle to victory, why they are an obstacle to the revolution and why they must therefore be replaced by a revolutionary party. In a revolutionary crisis the working class can learn ten times as fast as in normal times of relative class peace. But the working class cannot be won over to the revolutionary program solely by means of propaganda - they must go through their own experiences with their leaders’ betrayals. Therefore it is necessary to direct the calls for the establishment of action committees, workers 'militias, etc., up and including the workers' government also to the current leaders of the Greek labor movement such as the pro-PASOK unions, KKE/PAME, SYRIZA, DIMAR and Antarsya.

46. A revolutionary program for the crisis in Greece must first of all explain the character of the current crisis and draw the correct conclusions. This crisis cannot be overcome by reforms and governmental coalitions within the framework of capitalism. The working class and the popular masses will experience a social massacre, a social and historical defeat, if the ruling capitalist class – regardless of whether ND, PASOK, KKE or SYRIZA administer their businesses – is not overthrown in time. The most important element of the current situation is therefore the question of power. Which class rules - the working class or the capitalist class?

47. This is understood by the parties and felt by the masses who want to get rid of the politicians and the government. Therefore the reformists and centrists put forward their answer to the question of power. They demand new elections and a "left" or "anti-monopoly popular government". Several centrists (e.g. CWI, IMT) do not share this orientation towards new elections. They propose a prolonged or even indefinite general strike to overthrow the government and the formation of a workers' government. Their rejection of the reformist electoral orientation is correct but their concept of the struggle for a workers' government is wrong and naive. It is a characteristic of centrism that it presents the seizure of power in a (pre-) revolutionary situation as a relatively peaceful transition, without rupture, in other words, in an opportunistic, non-revolutionary way. The indefinite general strike is seen as a weeks-long strike which forces the government to resign and then a workers government based on trade unions, leftist parties, action committee etc. delegates, emerges. In a (pre-) revolutionary situation this is a completely unrealistic view of the proletarian seizure of power. Moreover, it is a dangerous opportunistic illusion which is spread by centrism in the ranks of workers vanguard.

48. Not coincidentally, several centrist groups such as the CWI or the IMT share the revisionist theory of a peaceful transition to socialism. The scenario of civil war and the appropriate political and military preparation is outside of their horizon. But the ruling class will not voluntarily give up their power and a few street fights are not sufficient to win. Already the CIA speaks openly of the possibility of a military coup and the U.S. business magazine Forbes is acknowledging their sympathy for a coup in an article with the headline: "The Real Greek Solution: A Military Coup" (26/10/2011). We warn that the Greek proletariat is threatened by that terrible prospect like that of Chile in 1973. Whoever does not consistently promote the revolution is punished by a counter-revolution. Bolshevik-Communists do not conceal their views of the necessary steps to resolve the question of power. They openly say that power can only won by means of a socialist revolution. Revolution means the armed revolutionary uprising and civil war of the organized working class, led by a revolutionary party. Revolution means the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat. Only under such a regime can the masses of the people be freed from the yoke of capitalist domination, can industry be planned according to the interests of society, and can the class enemies of the revolution be suppressed and the revolution spread internationally. To propagate a workers 'government in a (pre) revolutionary situation as a concrete objective, without preparing the working class for the inevitably of civil war and armed rebellion won by a workers' militia, is to spread reformist illusions of a step-by-step, peaceful transition towards socialism. Bolshevik-Communists reject decisively such a policy of centrism.

49. The question of power is the central axis of the Programme of Action at the present stage of Greek politics. From this several consequences follow. The working class can take power only when it is organized accordingly, and learns to fight for power. The revolutionary action program must take up the most urgent questions of the immediate struggle for survival and demonstrate that they can be answered only by the seizure of power.

50. In order to take control of the defensive struggle themselves, the working class and the oppressed must form Action Committees in the factories, neighbourhoods and schools. At regular assemblies of employees, residents, school students, university students, etc., the most important local and national issues shall be discussed. The decisions will then be implemented by elected delegates who are held accountable to these assemblies and can be voted out by them at any time.

51. Such Action Committees are the first step to Councils (or Soviets as they were called in Russia in 1917). Councils/Soviets are the instrument of the working class by means of which they build their counter-power and lead the fight for workers’ control in the enterprises and the education system. Such Action Committees/Councils will then elect delegates and join together locally, regionally and nationally. Demand a national conference of delegates from all the action committees/councils! Demand that the KKE, SYRIZA, DIMAR etc mobilise for the establishment of such councils!

52. Especially in the current phase of economic collapse, where many enterprises dismiss workers or close down, the slogan of workers' control is of crucial importance. All companies that want to cut wages, lay workers off, or threaten to close down, must open the books. We advocate immediate nationalization of these enterprises under workers' control. Equally important are the slogans of factory occupations and the continuation of production under workers' management. The already existing initiatives to refuse payment of higher duties, taxes, rents, etc. are a very important step. They must be coordinated through Action Committees/Councils and expanded to an effective mass campaign.

53. Hardly a demonstration passes without the attacks of heavily armed police. We know the ruling class is already publicly talking about the possibility of a military coup. All this underscores the urgent necessity of arming the organized working class and youth. Immediately, of course, the construction of powerful self-defense units is needed to protect demonstrations, strikes, immigrant communities, etc. against police raids, fascists and provocateurs. But in the current situation where the question of power is clearly posed, it is necessary to go beyond the centrist slogan of self-defense committees. State power can only be conquered when the working class creates its own armed forces – i.e. workers' militias. Instead of protecting parliament against militant demonstrators, the KKE/PAME should put their forces in the service of the workers' militia! At the same time revolutionaries must organise subversive activity in the armed forces (army, police), to prevent them being used as a decisive blow against the people.

54. No demand for new elections, but for the overthrow of the government by an indefinite general strike and an armed uprising! For the formation of a workers government based on Workers' Councils and militias! As a first step: demand that the dominant labour organizations today – GSEE, ADEDY, PAME, KKE, SYRIZA, DIMAR and Antarsya – form a workers' government based on the mobilization of the masses! Down with the PASOK/ND-conspiracy against the people! The power lies not in parliament, but on the street! A real workers' government is based on the organs of workers’ power (Councils, Militias, etc.), and must expropriate the bourgeoisie and smash the state apparatus. Of course the creation and maintenance of a workers' government that implements such a revolutionary policy will face the determined and violent opposition of the ruling class. Therefore, a workers' government without armed organs is an impotent caricature that would fall immediately to a military coup as it happened in Greece in 1967 or in Chile in 1973. Although the sequence and pace of development cannot be predicted, it is obvious that the questions of the indefinite general strike, the armed struggle for power and the workers' government are inextricably linked.

55. Against the vice of the debt trap we raise the slogan of the cancellation of all debts. No halving of the debt, no moratorium (postponement of repayment), no committee to review the debt - but simply cancel all debt! Not only the public debt, but also the debt of private households, small traders and self-employed should be deleted immediately.

56. The economy must no longer be the victim of a small group of corporate masters and financial jugglers! For the expropriation of the super rich - this elite group of monopoly capitalists! For the nationalization of the domestic and foreign banks, large industrial and service companies as well as the large landowners (including the church property!) under the control of the workers! The labor movement must develop an economic emergency plan to secure the survival of the population and the country against the extortions of monopoly capital.

57. 35% of the workforce in Greece is self-employed. Many of them are non-exploitative peasants or small traders, who can be won as allies for the socialist revolution. This requires, however, that the working class takes the path of socialist seizure of power. A workers' government needs a program for the peasants and the lower middle classes: For the nationalization of the land! No small farmer and small trader will be expropriated against his/her will. For the cancellation of the debts of farmers and small traders - instead interest-free loans! Promotion of voluntary associations with the longer-term goal of voluntary collectivization!

58. International solidarity! The international workers' movement – first of all in Europe and the Balkans - must rush to their brothers and sisters in Greece to help. The unions and workers' parties of Europe and the Balkans have to organize an immediate campaign for total cancellation of all debts of Greece. Fight the governments and the EU Commission which openly tries to blackmail Greece! For a campaign within the labour movement against anti-Greek chauvinism in the media and Social Democracy! The international trade union of bank employees must initiate independent investigations and make public both the flight of capital of the Greek capitalists and the speculation and profit rip-off of international banks at the expense of Greece.

59. No to Greek chauvinism! For the recognition of full equal rights of national minorities and migrants! For the right of self-determination of national minorities up to and including the right to secede! For full citizenship rights for immigrants, equal pay, equal recognition of their language as in offices and schools, for the abolition of the state language! For the massive organization of migrants in the unions! Equal representation of migrants at all levels of management!

60. Fight the oppression of women! Equal pay for equal work! Instead of cuts in public services, we demand a massive expansion of public child care facilities and public and inexpensive restaurants and laundries as a step toward the socialization of housework!

61. A workers' government would immediately break with the imperialist EU and the euro-zone and instead promote the building of socialism in Greece and the international spread of revolution to the Balkans and throughout Europe. For a socialist federation of the Balkans! For the United Socialist States of Europe!

62. Let us repeat: the Greek revolution will end in a serious defeat if a revolutionary combat party of the working class based on a Bolshevik program is not built in time. Time is short! The Bolshevik-Communists of the RKOB seek discussion and unity with all serious revolutionaries in Greece. Forward to the Fifth Workers International, the international revolutionary workers party!

Resolution of the Revolutionary Communist Organization for Liberation (RKOB-Austria), 11/10/2011

Endorsed by Communist Workers Group (CWG-Aotearoa/New Zealand)

[Note: CWG endorses the RKOB statement on Greece in all its fundamental points. At the same time we acknowledge programmatic disagreements over the question of Stalinism, capitalist restoration and centrism which we are continuing to discuss with a view to resolving]

OAKLAND LEADS THE WAY

2011-11-06T14:04:00.000-08:00

November 2nd the working class of Oakland outflanked the labor bureaucracy, the Democratic Party, the cops, the anti-labor Taft-Hartley law and kicked Wall Street where it counts by shutting down the Port of Oakland.

A racially diverse cross-section of Oakland 10-20,000 strong, made up of workers (organized and un-organized), unemployed, youth, students, parents, elders, disabled, marching bands, affinity groups, anti-police brutality groups, every variation of socialists, communists and anarchist and the OWS activists marched from between three and five miles to the furthest berths at the port of Oakland to assure adequate picket lines were formed up at each gate.

As each person crested the rise on the bridge over the train yard and saw the mass of picketers in front and behind them, they must have become aware of the unique nature of this mass picket line forming up, the enormity of the power of the so-called “99%” was becoming self evident. With that image an understanding, a shift in consciousness percolated across the crowd as the solidarity was experienced, the working class of Oakland was becoming self-aware and was self-expressing! We had broken out of our isolation, our atomization and demoralization and were putting our stamp on the international class struggle in a profoundly significant and exemplary manner! The union tops won’t fight the Taft-Hartley anti-strike laws but the working class showed that as a class we could!

WHY TODAY'S LABOR LEADERS CAN’T LEAD

As the international crisis of capitalism imposes austerity on all the working people, dependent peoples, marginalized and specially oppressed communities the labor bureaucracies have displayed their inability to respond with appropriate class force to turn the tide against capital and in favor of labor. At least three factors prohibit labor, under the current leaderships, from launching the overdue counter attack. First: no working class political independence, second: anti-labor laws, third: professionalization, institutionalization and class collaboration of labors’ leadership
Decades of ignoring the class divide between workers and capitalists in politics and thereby preventing workers’ independent political action by channeling labor into the “big tent” of the capitalist Democratic Party, this prevents independent working class political action and perpetuates class collaboration politics.
Anti-labor laws such as Taft-Harley prohibit secondary strikes, sympathy strikes and ultimately General Strikes. Such laws are regularly evoked in the bosses’ courts to crush job actions, keeping the labor leaders from ever considering any strike action let alone secondary strikes, or a general strike. Once the strike is off the table labor is left toothless! Workers with signed contracts containing no-strike clauses have signed their class power away!

The labor tops are often sent to (or emerge from) academic training in labor relations at institutions which promote class peace! These labor academies do not view the historic interests of the working class as separate from and antagonistic to the interests of capital. They do not teach a critique of the political economy of capitalism. They accept as given the entrenched and perpetual nature of capitalism without ever entertaining the possibility that the contradiction between social production and individual profit accumulation is non-sustainable. They deny the historical inevitability of the deepening of capitalist crisis leading to barbarism and inter-imperialist war. All the while they are drumming into labor leaders heads what cannot be done instead of what has been done and what needs to be done. These institutions perpetuate the most backward forms of trade unionism. They promote class peace even while capital launches class war. Their assigned task is to keep the rank and file in line, disorganized, demobilized, atomized and demoralized and voting for the Democratic Party. To the extent that they are successful the unions serve capitalism, to the extent that workers break out of these constraints unions can become the schools for class struggle and worker’s power!

OUTFLANKING THE LABOR TOPS!

This week in Oakland the ranks of the working class and labor burst through the containment of the labor leaders edifice. Responding to the brutal police riot on Tuesday October 25th when police fired a “non-lethal” projectile point blank, critically injuring two term Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen, the dye was cast. News of Scott’s injury flashed twitter speed around the world and immediately all eyes were on Oakland. News that Egyptians were marching on the American Embassy in solidarity with Oakland swelled internationalist fervor across the OWS movement while live feeds flashed demonstrations across a thousand cities standing militant vigil for Olsen.

The Occupy Oakland (OOM) movement took the bold step of calling for a General Strike despite not having the social leverage to accomplish the task and shut down the entire city. It was quickly acknowledged that labor would not down tools but that with enough pressure the Port of Oakland could be closed, the mis-named general strike would manifest as a day of action culminating in a mass picket to shut the port.

Even though the labor unions respond to the call of the OOM not one union dared to defy Taft-Hartley by of calling their members to walk out in unison and join a General Strike. The Alameda Labor council, the SEIU 1021, OEA, Local Carpenters, the CNA and the ILWU all sent letters of support to the General Strike as a Day of Action rather than as a strike. Workers were encouraged to take vacation days to attend the General Strike!

Bottom line: if you have to take a vacation day to attend the General Strike-it’s not a General Strike. If you ride the BART train or AC transit bus to the General Strike and the fares are being collected it is not a general strike? Despite the inability of organized labor to launch a General Strike they were able to provide many of the amenities necessary for a Day of Action. OEA paid for the toilets and the Alameda Labor Council paid for a lunch for all while union member volunteers cooked and served. But when it came time to shut down the port it was the Oakland rank and file working class not the labor tops who took the lead!

THE INTERSECTION OF ANTI-POLICE BRUTALITY, LABOR AND OWS

When OWS emerged in Oakland, youth, the Black and Brown community and the most radical elements the labor movement were already primed to present the generally white “middle class” OWS with tasks that would challenge the movement on questions of special oppression, class exploitation and class struggle.

The Oakland community had been organizing against police brutality for the last three years following the BART police execution of Oscar Grant, a young black worker and father. As the racist and anti-working class nature of this police brutality unraveled, a block between labor activists and anti-police brutality activists developed into a one-day political strike by the ILWU local 10 on October 23rd 2010. This action shaped and promoted the development of an anti-racist class consciousness among many workers and youth in Oakland.

Again during the occupation of the Wisconsin Capitol last winter many of these same forces came together around the April 4th 2011 ILWU 10 port shut down in solidarity with public workers. These actions exemplified for many, the role labor could and should be playing in organizing actions to defend the most oppressed communities and the interests of the entire working class.

These actions over of the last two years as well as the fight against cuts in education funding, the struggle of public workers, the young, the old and the disabled brought many forces together who would play a role in the OWS and the General Strike/Day of Action.

In a feeder march from Laney College to join the noon General Strike rally, AFT and OEA and UTR teachers, two groups of high school students, the black student union, entire classes of students, Labor Black and Brown activists, and various socialist groups marched on and served a symbolic eviction notice to the Oakland School Board.

The spirited crowd swelled to over 1,000 and marched right past the giant and welcoming banner of the “Oakland Commune” at 14th and Broadway in order to march on the banks! At the Laney rally 40 posters were distributed calling for “Nationalization of the Banks under Workers Control”, “Break with the Republicrats” “Build a Workers Party that Fights for a Workers Government.” These signs could be seen throughout the duration of the march. When these posters were distributed recipients were encouraged to read carefully and choose only posters they agreed with. This indicated to us that the sea of “tax the rich” posters we always see at OWS actions could easily be replaced by posters with more advanced slogans and transitional demands.

INTERNATIONALISM ON THE RISE?

From the first pizza pie ordered by the Egyptian movement and sent to the public workers at the Wisconsin Capitol occupation last winter a new internationalism has been developing in the working class. For possibly the first time since the days of the Spanish Civil war American workers have started to look internationally for class inspiration. The uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa provide many warnings and lessons.

Despite the media focus on Tahrir square much of the background organization came from the working class quarter which engaged in rolling waves of strikes and the formation of neighborhood committees to defend both against the cops and thugs. Yet despite toppling Mubarak, the occupy movement has been disbanded, many anticipated openings and freedoms are restricted and the hated military still imposes the rule of imperialism over Egypt.

Despite many violent clashes and the hundreds killed and disappeared by state repression, illusions in pacifism and parliamentarianism disarmed the working class both politically and militarily and held back the rising demand of the most oppressed for working class power. Conversely weapons as we see in Libya often come at a price. The National Transitional Council in Libya made its peace with imperialism to affect the defeat of the hated Gadhafi regime. In turn the new government has taken the task to militarily disarm the revolutionary fighters whose self-organization and loose confederation allowed the NTC to assume the leadership role while the youth did the fighting and dying. And in Tunisia, where the first spark that set the stage for 2011 was struck, the constituent assembly model promoted by “Western Democracy” has shown it can be counted on to maintain neo-colonial servitude and has been given the task of and has managed to exclude the revolutionary youth who brought down the old regime from the newly forming bodies of governance!

Working class political independence is based on the formation of representative bodies composed of the democratically elected workers deputies subject to immediate recall, to form factory committees, neighborhood councils, and inter-factory and inter-district workers councils supplemented by the unemployed and marginalized layers of the population similarly organized which jointly take to themselves the tasks of seizing, defending and reorganizing the economy. The formation of workers councils of this sort are essential to centralize and guide the strike movement to win the soldiers to the peoples side and take united action to defend the socially created wealth from the prying hands of imperialist exploiters and their comprador lackeys enjoying the fruits of subservience to imperialist dictates. To be victorious is to establish a workers’ government and a workers’ state. The illusions in pacifism, gradualism, reformism and faith in the parliamentary road must all be navigated and swept aside by the concrete experience of the masses; this is the process of consolidating the lessons of the class struggle. Other wise the movement will be defeated, disarmed and the rule of capital will perpetuate with increased levels of exploitation and misery. Many of these same lessons in working class independence, in rank and file organizing, in workers’ democracy which need to be learned for successful revolutions in MENA need to be learned here as well. And just as the Egyptians sent pizza to Wisconsin and marched on the American Embassy in solidarity with Oakland and Scott Olsen, OWS needs to develop an internationalist consciousness and oppose and fight to defeat US imperialist wars, and interventions otherwise OWS falls into the trap of nationalism and social pacifism. THE VICTORY OF THE 99% MUST BE INTERNATIONAL OR NOT AT ALL!

THE ROLE OF REFORMISTS, CENTRISTS, PACIFISTS AND ANARCHISTS

Under the guise of adherence to process the OWS movement has developed many lists of the wrongs of capitalism but has assured discussion of demands are not entertained to define the movement. This echoes back to a debate at the turn of the last century in German Social Democracy between Rosa Luxemburg and Eduard Bernstein. Bernstein is famously remembered for arguing that the movement is everything and the program is not essential. Rosa Luxemburg on the other hand argued for making the program of social democracy concrete by clearly defining the nature of the economic crisis, the tasks of the working class and the need to adhere to class based and internationalist principles. The collapse of international social democracy in the face of the imperialist war that broke out in August 1914 (European socialists supported their national ruling classes instead of opposing the inter-imperialist war) was the consequence of Bernstein’s method. Today as the “99%” tries to self define the lesson of 1914 should not be ignored.

By perpetuating a programmatic vacuum, in the name of the openness of the process of the movement, the politics of the dominant paradigm, of the liberal/progressive critique are expressed as the “logical” or “common sense”, sometime spoken/sometimes unspoken, demands and direction of the movement and as such, without nary a hint of discussion, act to edge out, contain and prevent debate over working class program and revolutionary action.

To the “99%” who see the gross inequalities of wealth distribution as well as tax codes, which allow wealth to accumulate unencumbered by the 1% and their cronies, this awareness manifests across the OWS as the demand “tax the rich”. “Tax the Rich” posters are ubiquitous and it appears that all labor, liberals, progressives and socialists come together around this demand.

Despite reflecting the subjective desire of the “99%” for justice this demand actually perpetuates illusions in the ability of this decaying system to be reformed by simply adjusting the tax code. Significantly accompanying this demand is the admonishment of the corporate elite for their greed. This critique of capitalists as merely a cabal of mean and nasty, greedy thugs who can be brought into line by tax reform erects a roof before laying the foundation.

If greed alone were the problem, then indeed taxation could tweak the system. But greed is part of the super-structural alienation resultant from a system predicated upon and legally bound to enforce pursuit of profit above all else. This system of capitalism binds the process of production in a contradiction between social production and individual wealth accumulation. This basic contradiction cannot be taxed away. The task at hand to resolve this contradiction is therefore not to simply tax the rich but rather to expropriate the vast quantity of finance capital being horded and/or invested in speculation by the big banks and corporations and put it under the productive control of democratic councils convened by workers representatives and representatives of the specially oppressed communities, unemployed, and marginalized peoples.

But this basic working class perspective can only find voice under the watchful eye of the facilitators who either limit the time of the revolutionary socialists during vox populi or rule such discussion out of order when they are interjected in other “logistical” or “action” oriented discussions. For revolutionary workers it is a basic understanding that politics and program precede action and logistics. This primacy of program is necessary to assure we know where we are going the actions should flow from the program and not visa-versa. Whereas the “tax the rich” demand based on the “greed” critique has emerged as the unifying direction of the movement, in absence of a real debate over program, this reformist program dominates. But as our experiment, with distribution of posters at the Laney march and as the applause our speaker received while calling for nationalization of banks and finance capital under workers control and for a workers party that fights for a workers government during a limited one and a half minute speech during a vox populi reveled, the participants in the movement are open to demands which challenge the rights of capital to control production. “Tax the rich” does not challenge that right!

The reformists, pacifists, labor leaders come together to assure this vacuum continues as the content of demands and critique of the system they agree with ultimately feed into the rhetoric of the Democratic Party which sings this song when election time roles around but abandon it when they get power. As we head into the 2012 campaign the role of reformism, pacifism and liberalism join to corral the working class away from independent political action and back to the big umbrella of the Democratic party. The centrists and anarchists play along, by not challenging these reformists and fighting for demands and actions which draw working class solutions based on resolving the basic contradictions of capitalism.

The most egregious variants of these methods are displayed by ex Panther, ex CP member Angela Davis who, for all her experience offers no program other than self-actualization platitudes from author June Jordan, by Michael Moore who evokes the moral imperative against “capitalist greed”, by the ISO which in San Francisco has endorsed anti-working class proposition C and which freely distributes “tax the rich” posters. The ISO at least should have read the 1938 Transitional Program of the Fourth International which develops a program of transitional demands designed to guide workers to take production into the hands of the working class.

Then there are many strains of anarchists. When challenged to a discussion at the OWS in Oakland to compare Marxism and Anarchism the anarchists refused to show up. Most of the anarchists ignore or disparage discussion of program and there are about a hundred who self-isolate by “black-blocking” and refusing to discuss program or preparing for joint action. Rather they go on sprees of window smashing which are easily infiltrated by police provocateurs and used to evoke violent backlash against the entire movement.

Following the port shut down some anarchistic youth and squatters attempted to seize a vacant homeless facility to bring it back to the service of the homeless. This exemplary action challenges the irrationality of capitalism, which allows housing to remain vacant while people are driven out of their homes and onto the streets. This type of movement is essential and should have the support of labor and the communities of the oppressed. It is for that reason that we are convinced the so-called vandals are not real anarchists but are provocateurs and the young and naive easily swayed by these seemingly radical actions. Was the fire which was lit in the street and the window which were broken done by cops dressed as “black blockers” to assure the storm troops had excuse to crush the squatters. These outbursts of violence do nothing to organize the working class and prepare for the seizure of power and are therefore just as counter-revolutionary as the non program/program of the liberals and reformists.

Seemingly opposite are those pacifists who can be heard calling out to the cops, “Your part of the 99%”. These pacifists perpetuate the lie that the state is class neutral and the cops are workers just like the rest of us. This ignores a fact that every working class kid in the UK learns as a child, a fact that most people of color figure out some time in their teen years and that is that the role of the cops is to keep poor and working class people in their place especially when they organize strikes and community self defense or when the 99% decide to fight back. The cops are enforcers for Wall Street. They, as an institution can not be won over by moral arguments any more than stock holders can be convinced to elevate morals and ethics over profit. Ultimately this mythology perpetuated by the pacifists prevents workers and oppressed people from preparing workers, Black and Brown self defense guards and thereby allows the cops, ICE, the racists, the homophobes, and anti-Semites to brutalize our people our movements and smash our organizations and picket lines. The anarchists and pacifists the liberals and fake socialists all come together to disarm the working class by elevating the movement over program and allowing mystifications such as: cops being part the 99%, the crisis of capitalism seen as a moral failure rather than the trajectory of an outdated mode of production unable to contain its own contradictions, the denial of the need to clearly define a working class action program to create a class struggle movement leads the unaware into class collaboration and capitulation to our class enemies program, and adopting a modes of struggle leading to the defeat of our class. Neither window breaking nor turning the other cheek serve us!

THE LIMITS, COMPLICATIONS AND IMPEDIMENTS OF THE OWS PROCESS

“MIKE CHECK” “MIKE CHECK” “MIKE CHECK” This is how you take the floor during the general assembly. “DIRECT RESPONSE” “DIRECT RESPONSE” With a little chutzpah and these two phrases an individual can control the discussion. Is it expedient, yes at times it works and can be used to make group decisions which the majority can understand and decide upon quickly. Many decisions such as how to clean the plaza, to occupy city hall, or call for a general strike, move a crowed to form a strike line, or deciding to march left or right can be accomplished by this method.

At the same time this system combined with consensus and even modified consensus has effectively kept the OWS movement from charting a course toward working class action independent from the ruling class politics. Rather this system allows and promotes the ruling class ideology through the multiple transmission belts of the liberals, progressives, labor leaders, pacifists, fake socialists and anarchists. These political tendencies swim well in the OWS because their role is to prevent the working class from developing a program that guides the working class to the seizure of economic and political power.

The revolutionary workers’ movement since the days of the Paris Commune has a tradition of workers’ democracy which promotes the broadest democratic discussion leading to organized and centralized united class-wide action. This form of organization is derived from the nature of the class war, which has been launched upon us by the bosses. Our enemy is the most organized, centralized, militarized; national security state ever assembled and is united to take every action “necessary” in defense of private ownership of the means of production. Its defeat requires higher levels of organization.

Its defeat will not be accomplished by public assemblies where a handful of reformists can block the development of program or a handful of pacifist can block the formation of labor, Black and Brown self defense guards or the arming of pickets, or the formation of workers’ militias. Invariably in public assemblies using the OWS method a minority will block the assembly from drawing the class lines which are necessary to lead the working class past the illusions of pacifism, the class collaboration of the labor leaders, the moral imperative of the liberals, the ultra leftism and susceptibility to provocateurs of the so-called “black block” anarchists, and the pseudo anti-leadership philosophy being promoted.

Only workers assemblies based on democratic representation by elected workers deputies from the factories, offices, schools, and other workers organizations can mobilize the social power needed to take mass unified action in the form of the indefinite general strike action leading to the seizure of power by the working class. This lesson needs to be learned and relearned by each generation that comes into conflict with capitalism. Such assemblies have emerged in every worker’s uprising since the Paris Commune. But their emergence alone is no guarantee of victory. Indeed the same social forces we see holding back the OWS and “indignados” movements today will find their way into workers assemblies and will do their best to hold the workers back. But in the workers assemblies the working class will be seeking a road to class power and when the working class assembles it has a tradition of taking action based on majority vote not consensus. The revolution will be decided upon and launched by a majority of workers deputies so assembled, unlike the General Assembly of the OWS which has no social weight, the workers deputies assembled represent the power to produce or not!

ARE THE OWS ASSEMBLIES INCIPIENT WORKERS’ COUNCILS?

At this point the OWS has yet to self-define yet it does not lack a class character. Like any army of resistance assembled or assembling the OWS has to address all the logistical and political tasks and in so doing the inherent logic of democratic decision making and socialized work have emerged as a method which is both organic to the task at hand and familiar when looked at historically through the eyes of workers’ and communal resistance movements. Yet despite attracting many workers, unemployed, youth, homeless and specially oppressed people, despite the presence of many well known socialists, anarchists, and communists on the platform of OWS and even facilitating for OWS many apologists for capitalism and ideologically driven capitalists who have long supported the Democrats have made their way to the platform provided by OWS.

In an attempt to self define the movement identifies with the 99%. But that is clearly a rhetorical ploy based on fuzzy sociology. The real ruling class, the top oligarchs are more like 0.01% and they have a good 7-12% of the population materially dependent on and committed to the perpetuation of their rule. But what kind of movement could you build around the slogan “We are the 87.243%!”. This fuzzy sociology allows lots of fudge room which appears in the “Oakland Commune” as a class and racial divide between the most oppressed peoples and the largely Caucasian and often “middle class” OWS core group. Left to its own fuzzy sociology and its own interactive process the OWS is an expression of the radicalized petty bourgeois feeling the pressure capitalism’s implosion. At the same time and despite the fuzzy sociology the class character of the mobilization at OWS can change on a dime, with massive gathering of trade unionists and workers at the encampments. This has happened a number of times with masses of trade unionists coming to OWS in NYC and as happened in Oakland in the days after Scott Olsen was injured when the labor committee assembled.

REVOLUTIONARY LEADERSHIP AND THE ROAD FORWARD

Revolutionary Marxism today recognizes that to overcome the pitfalls of reformism, pacifism, liberalism, anarchism and centrism the working class must construct its own revolutionary party based in the working class and among the most oppressed peoples. The task of building a revolutionary leadership involves a concrete challenge and ongoing critique of these ideologies for leadership of the workers movement. All of these ideologies have a historic record which guides us to understand exactly how they will operate today.

The science of Marxism explains not only how they think, their philosophical foundations and the materialist basis for their ideologies but shows how due to their subjectivity they remain blind to the consequences of their method. Their ideologies are invariably expressions of the radical petty bourgeoisie and the labor aristocracy which feel the crushing weight of capitalism’s collapse but seek to maintain their privileges and to avoid the coming to power of the working class and the most oppressed and marginalized peoples both here and internationally. Note the absence of anti-imperialist demands or even mention of the current spate of attacks on Gaza or the Zionist colonialist plans to build 1000 more homes in East Jerusalem.

So the most pressing task is the construction of an internationalist workers party which hones a multi-national cadre of revolutionaries to intervene in and guide the workers movement to the seizure of power through the development of a living transitional program that expose the limits of capitalism and outlines the working class alternative.

As the OWS movement must outgrow its original base it will draw in more working class people. Revolutionary workers fight to bring a working class program to the mobilization and turn the anti-corporate rhetoric into an anti-capitalist understanding of the task at hand. Developing a program to unite the working class and OWS activists in independent political action must commence. To succeed an action program is needed that leads to the creation of class struggle caucuses intent on transforming the unions into class struggle organizations fighting for the historic interests of the entire working class. Independent workers organizations that unite the most oppressed and marginalized people with the ranks of labor and the OWS participants need to be formed.

Common working class demands should issue forth from independent class struggle organizations to guide the working class into taking actions that lead to class power!

The demand to “Break with the Democrats and all Capitalist Parties” must be in the forefront. The demand to “Build a Workers Party prepared to Fight for a Workers’ Government” follows and shows the road forwarded after breaking with the Democrats. The demand for “Jobs for All” based on shared work at “30 hours work for 40 hours pay” exposes the contradiction between the increased productivity of labor and the declining wages of labor. The demand for “Full citizenship rights for all immigrant workers” unites the most oppressed workers with the rest of the class. The demand for “labor Black and Brown self defense” opposes the viewpoint that the cops have any place in our future or that they are in any way part of the 87.243%. The demand to “open the books of the major finances houses and corporations” exposes the true value of and hoarding of social wealth. The demand to “nationalize finance capital, the big banks and major corporations and run them under the control of the democratic workers assemblies” is the response to the ever present reformist mantra “tax the rich”. The demand to take class struggle a level where we confront Taft Harley and all anti-labor laws through strike actions, general strikes and political strikes elevates the consciousness of the working class to the enormity of the tasks that lie ahead. But despite the enormity of the task it can be accomplished if dedicated and trained cadre unites to bring this method into the heat of the class struggle.

Shutting the Port of Oakland by the rank and file of Oakland’s working class is an opening blow using class struggle methods of direct militant action against the greatest imperialist power. To be victorious it needs to be followed up with armies of militants armed with a class program and clear understanding that only a workers’ government based on workers democracy can resolve this crisis in the favor of the working classes and oppressed people here and across the world. This task requires the building of local, national and international revolutionary leadership cadre united in a revolutionary workers international organization committed to the method of the 1938 program of the Fourth International.

IMMEDIATE TASKS FOR REVOLUTIONARY WORKERS IN THE OWS MOVEMENT!

Fight for organizing a real general strike building toward indefinite nationwide general strikes. That means that we need to struggle to convene Workers Assemblies or Workers Strike Committees. We must argue that OWS general assembly cannot substitute itself for Workers Assembly or a General Strike Committee.

The Workers General Strike Committee (WGSC) must be built seriously and professionally not via the anarchist/pacifist petty bourgeois methods of OWS. Only when deputized representative rank-and-file militants from the Bart union, AC Transit, the supermarket workers, ILWU, OEA and other key unions, call for and attend a real strike committee can a general strike become a reality. In addition to representatives from these unions representatives from the oppressed black and brown communities must also have a sizable representation in the WGSC. This is so because without the mobilization of the oppressed and their communities for the general strike, it is not a real general strike. They are subjected to most of the police brutality, racism and poverty. Thus without the mobilization of Black and Brown workers in the communities for the general strike there will not be a genuine general strike. WGSC must win the rank-and-file militants from the key unions who participated in the Nov. 2nd protest. This can be done by mass leafleting at job sites, use of indy-media, KPFA, black and brown media, the left press, labor/workers media, Facebook, twitter etc.

Such a combination of representatives of unions militants and Black and Brown community militants should constitute the core for the WGSC. The method of functioning should be workers democracy as it is the only method that has worked successfully in the struggle against capitalism since the days of the Paris Commune.

A series of transitional demands that unite the masses against capital should be advanced in the WGSC:

Expropriate the banks and capitalist industries without compensation and place all socialized capital under workers’ control.
Cops out of Oakland!
For Labor Black and Brown communities to form Defense Guards against Police Brutality!
Restore all the cuts and lay-offs from the crisis.
Stop all the foreclosure. Occupy and defend all the houses stolen by the banks!
Free education from K1 to graduate school and PhD! For workers, teachers and Students control over all aspects of education! Down with the capitalist mis-education system!
Down with the twin parties of capitalism. Build a fighting workers’/labor party to fight for a workers’ government!

Humanist Workers for Revolutionary Socialism November 5, 2011

Aotearoa: Labour Party adopts ACT policy on pensions to shaft workers

2011-10-29T17:53:00.000-07:00

Labour Party Leader Phil Goff hoping he won't get his balls barbecued

Labour's new policy on pensions steals the extreme neo-liberal ACT party's policy of making workers work harder, longer, and die sooner. Pushing out the age of retirement from 65 to 67 is an open attack on the working class. To get elected Labour has abandoned its class roots and openly appeals to international finance capital to allow Labour to manage its affairs in NZ. It's another lurch to the right in response to a deep crisis echoing the 1980s crisis management at the expense of workers. Labour wants to make workers' pay for NZ's economic crisis in the same way as so-called 'socialist' parties in Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland are making workers pay for the crisis of international finance capital.

Labour’s commitment to neo-liberalism was declared in the 1980s. The National Government Prime Minister Muldoon's response to the deepening international crisis in the 1970s was to reinforce protectionism. He refused to concede control over NZs economy even to the point of the threat of
massive capital flight. Not because he was pro-worker but because he was for the protection of farmers from rising world prices for energy etc. Hence the 'think big' economic nationalist policy of self-reliance which ironically echoed that of the First Labour Government. NZ became a pariah for international finance capital. When Labour was elected in 1984 it found itself facing a double global structural crisis and a collapsing NZ economy.

Labour became the Government without declaring to its working class supporters that it would shortly adopt the shock therapy of monetarist deregulation. It claimed it had no option because of a crisis of confidence in the NZ economy on the part of international capital. 'Rogernomics', as it came to be called after Finance Minister, Roger Douglas, was the policy of international finance capital (neo-liberalism) designed to destroy protectionism and privatise public assets. It was driven by the crisis facing global capital of falling profits. Douglas prepared his plans as early as 1980 as anyone who read ‘There Must be a Better Way’ knows. Labour had the unions in its pocket so by the time its so-called ‘red’ [pro-Moscow 'socialist'] leaders woke up under their beds it was too late. They were rewarded by Labour stripping the unions of basic rights just before the 1990 election. The left split to form the New Labour Party while many workers refused to vote Labour. Labour was defeated and the 1990s became a decade of National-led governments that furthered the neo-liberal plan of deregulation.

Labour was re-elected in 1999 for 3 terms but did damn all to reverse its sell-out to monetarism of the '80s. It reformed the Employment Contracts Act to restore the 'balance of power' between employers and unions but the unions remained hollow shells and never recovered their mass membership. Labour had to live with the neo-liberal parameters it imposed in the 1980s. Its ‘rescued’ some privatised state assets like AirNZ and NZRail but for the sake of business not workers. State provision of basic infrastructure has always been the role of the state in NZ as a subsidy to a weak national capital. So basically Labour accepted the neo-liberal ‘settlement’ of the 1980s and imposed further limits on the sovereignty of parliament through fiscal and monetary policy constraints.

This is why it no longer has the tools (or the balls) to tackle neoliberalism and opts for fake ‘tough’ options like making workers work harder and longer. Labour’s tax adjustments are fiscal fiddling with steeply regressive taxation and the widening income gap. Labour introduced the Goods and Service Tax [GST] in the '80s as part of the neo-liberal shift of taxation from capital to labour. Taking GST off fresh fruit and vegetables will be eaten up by inflation in no time. The Capital Gains Tax [CGT] is another grim joke. It won’t do anything to stop speculation or boost productive investment in jobs. That’s why Labour’s excellently produced election advertisements try to cover up its historic sell-out to finance capital with clips from the Joe Savage and Walter Nash eras from 1935-1949 falsely claiming to be going back to Labour’s social justice roots.

Labour was never a socialist party. It was formed in 1916 after the historic defeat of militant labour in 1913 to coopt the labour movement into parliament. But under pressure from unemployed workers and destitute farmers during the Great Depression of the 30's the First Labour Government came to power on a radical populist policy of protectionism and income redistribution. But after the Lange Government's collapse into deregulation in the 1980s Labour no longer has any ability to control the economy let alone redistribute wealth. This latest sellout in the face of the current crisis to do the bidding of international finance capital marks Labour's total bankruptcy as a social democratic party with any pretence to serving the interests of the working class.

Just as we see the masses around the world turning their backs on parliaments and the bankruptcy of social democracy, mobilising on the streets and Liberation squares to take their futures into their own hands, young people and workers are doing the same in Aotearoa. When it is clear that parliament is talk shop for the bosses and the state the committee to manage the affairs of the ruling class, the people are waking up to the reality that they have the power to make change by uniting, organising and campaigning for what they need.

The Arab revolution that stood against political dictatorships sparked off the indignatos in Spain and Greece to stand up against the dictatorship of finance capital. The first tentative demand to emerge form the #OWS is the Robin Hood Tax but already it's clear that even to make this demand the movement needs to unite with workers everywhere and build for a general strike to bring down the capitalist regimes and open the road for real democracy. The general strike called by #OccupyOakland for November 2 follows closely on the 48 hour general strike in Greece. There will be many more. Based on collective consciousness, action and self-defence this can be the beginning of the revolution. After Robin Hood comes the trial of the Sheriff and then the deposing of King John.

MILLION WORKER MARCH SUPPORTS OCCUPY WALL STREET

2011-10-20T15:58:00.000-07:00

ILWU picket in action

The Million Worker March (MWM) organizers and activists call upon all workers organized and unorganized and the unemployed to join and defend the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. We extend the call to anti-war, immigration rights, environmental and social justice activists to join this movement which could replicate the “Arab Spring” here at home.

The MWM, initiated by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10 on October 17, 2004 at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., advanced the slogan “mobilizing in our own name” independent of the two Wall Street controlled political parties to address the economic crisis of working people in which the vast majority are under siege financially.

All important social movements, which occurred in this country, were started from the bottom up (rank and file/grass roots) and not from the top down. The MWM’s mission statement speaks to how “. . . a handful of the rich and powerful corporations have usurped our government. A corporate and banking oligarchy changes hats and occupies public office to wage class war on working people. They have captured the State in their own interests.” They represent what the OWS activists call the 1%, otherwise known as the ruling class.

Like the MWM, the OWS has emerged at a time when the two corporate controlled political parties are preparing for the presidential election; a smokescreen where billions are spent to promote a top down and false ceremony of democracy.

Like the MWM, the OWS will be criticized for having demands that are too broad. We have endured more than 50 years of corporate assault on working people, social services, jobs, wages, pensions, health care, public education, and housing. The pursuit of endless wars, the lack of a comprehensive immigration policy and the erosion of the environment in pursuit of corporate greed, makes it impossible to address all of these issues in a sound bite. Yet one thing is crystal clear, OWS conveys a definite anti-capitalist message. It is being expressed to the entire world at the “temple” of American Capitalism, Wall Street. The OWS, while now a major protest movement against the capitalist elites, must continue to deepen, expand and become a direct challenge to corporate power. Class warfare demands fighting on multiple fronts and it all leads back to Wall Street. While the officialdom of labor has given verbal support to OWS, the rank and file possesses the real power of the labor movement. It is only through rank and file unity that labor’s true power can be realized in this OWS movement. Workers can take action at the point of production and service as well as put people in the streets.

We must be mindful of attempts to co-opt this movement. Let us not forget the action of the Democratic Party and its surrogates within AFL-CIO to pressure Wisconsin unions not to initiate any General Strike actions in opposition to Governor Scott Walker’s plans to eliminate collective bargaining for State workers. Wisconsin workers were limited to circulating petitions to recall targeted State republican elected officials. This took away labor’s only real power, the ability to withhold its labor in defense of collective bargaining.

ILWU Local 10’s Executive Board has adopted a Resolution to join and defend the OWS and called for other longshore locals to do the same. More importantly, Local 10 is connecting the OWS movement with the Pacific Northwest dockers struggle with EGT in Longview , Washington . (EGT is an international grain exporter which is attempting to rupture longshore jurisdiction.) The driving force behind EGT is Bunge LTD., a leading agribusiness and food company, which reported $2.4 billion in profits in 2010. This company has strong ties to Wall Street. This is but one example of Wall Street’s corporate attack on union workers.

On October 12th, the vice-president and secretary-treasurer of ILWU Local 21 in Longview , WA , who are engaged in battle with EGT, were allowed to speak by the organizers of “Foreclosure on Wall Street West ”. They explained their struggle to several hundred people attending the rally that took place in the San Francisco financial district. This is an important and strategic show of solidarity between labor and OWS.

It was Black trade unionists that conceived and launched the MWM. Black workers and other workers of color should play an integral role in expanding the power and influence of OWS. The Black unemployment rate is 24% and growing. This needs to be a part of the discussion of the peoples’ assemblies as it concerns empowering this peoples’ movement.

Working people need to have a political expression of our own which is an alternative to the U.S. corporate sector that both the Democrats and the Republicans represent. The timing of the MWM in Washington was to prepare the beginning of a fight-back precisely because the agendas of two political parties, acting as one, the corporate agenda of permanent war, destruction of all social services, Jim Crow and a relentless assault upon working people.

This is an opportune moment for rank and file working people to forge a mass movement for fundamental change. Rarely has the importance of unity in struggle been more compelling along an axis of class independence.

Only by our own independent mobilization of working people (99%) across America , can we open the way to addressing a peoples’ agenda. The MWM and OWS are both about building grass roots and rank and file anti-racist unity “forging the fight-back” on all governmental and corporate policies influenced and or directed by Wall Street.

Let’s take it to the corporate state, Let the 1% take the weight

Leo Robinson, ILWU Local 10, Retired National Convener
Clarence Thomas, ILWU Local 10, Executive Board Co-Chair MWM
Chris Silvera, Teamsters Local 808, Sec-Treasurer, Co-Convener MWM East Coast
Saladin Muhammad, Black Workers for Justice, Convener MWM Southern Region

Jerry Lawrence, ILWU Local 8, Co-Convener MWM Pacific Northwest
Debby Stringfellow, ILWU Local 8, Co-Convener MWM Pacific Northwest
Gabriel Prawl, IWLU Local 52, Co-Convener MWM Pacific Northwest

Trent Willis, ILWU Local 10, Executive Board. Conceiver, MWM

Website: www.millionworkermarch.org
Email: mwmeast@yahoo.com

October 17, 2011