PROGRAMMATIC AGREEMENT FOR AN INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

From Class Struggle 51 July-August 2003

We call for an International Conference, in which groups, fractions, militants, who are for the following principles and programmatic points, will be able to take part:

(1) All kinds of pseudo-theories have been adopted or invented by the revisionists to explain that decadent capitalism can overcome its crises and develop the productive forces without limits: “technical and scientific revolution”, “monopoly state capitalism”, “neocapitalism”, “the permanent arms economy”, “neoliberal globalization”, “new economy” etc.Against all these false theories, we affirm that for the whole imperialist epoch, capitalism has already exhausted its progressive role and is reactionary through and through.The current imperialist counteroffensive and the war against Iraq is proof that this capitalist system in its dying, destructive, imperialist phase, survives only by ferociously exploiting wage earners, and casting millions of workers out of production where they are condemned to misery, destroying the productive forces by means of economic crises and wars, each time more parasitic and destructive than the last, and threatening to destroy the whole of human civilization.

(2) All the imperialist powers, in the present crisis phase and the recurrent failure of the world economy – that since 1997 has struck from Asia and Japan, to Brazil and Russia, to Argentina and Turkey, and has now arrived at the heart of the United States itself – as well as exploiting their own working classes, urgently need cheap sources of commodities, slave labor and reserves of unemployed to boost their superprofits by superexploiting the colonial and semi-colonial world, so that they can resolve the present crisis and restore the rate of profit.The present colonising offensive of US imperialism is for a new repartition of the world at the expense of the imperialist powers of the second or third order.The second war against Iraq carried out by the US and Britain, despite the opposition of France and Germany, illustrates the inevitable increasing rivalry among the imperialist powers.If the revolutionary proletariat does not stop it first, capitalism will take humanity to new depths of barbarism beyond that seen in the 20^th century.

(3) Revolutionaries must join forces militarily in the trenches of every oppressed nation attacked by imperialism, and be for the military victory of that nation and for the military defeat of imperialism. But we fight for the proletarian leadership of the war, and to transform that national war into a socialist revolution both in the country attacked and also in the aggressor imperialist nation. We proclaim to all who will listen, that those who, in the imperialist countries, are not unconditionally for the defeat of their own imperialism and for the victory of the working class and of the oppressed nations, are neither revolutionary nor anti-imperialist. We call on the US working class, today confined in a straight jacket by the national patriotic politics of the AFL-CIO, and the Japanese and European working classes, to fight to break the subordination of workers organizations to the imperialist bougeoisie and to ally with its class brothers and sisters in the colonial and semi-colonial countries, to overthrow the their own imperialist bourgeoisies, their governments and their states,on the road to the socialist revolution.

(4) We fight against the reactionary utopia of a united capitalist Europe, and we call on the European working class to oust the monarchy and the reactionary government of Aznar in Spain, the Gaullist 5^th Republic in France, the anti-worker imperialist government of the united Germany, and the monarchy and the imperialist government of Tony Blair in Great Britain, etc.In other words,we call on all to defeat the governments and the states of the imperialist powers, by overthrowing the bourgeoisie, by demolishing the bourgeois state and putting in place Workers and working Farmers’ governments in these countries, opening the road to the United Socialist States of Europe.

(5) We reaffirm the validity of the theory and program of Permanent Revolution, against the policy of the "united anti-imperialist front" refuted after the tragedy of the Chinese Revolution in 1927. We support the widest anti-imperialist unity for action which takes even a small step forward in the struggle against imperialism for the working class and the exploited, always maintaining our absolute independence and political intransigent before all bourgeois currents in opposition or in government. Every semi-colonial bourgeoisie is necessarily pro-imperialist. As the smaller partners of the imperialists they can haggle over the surplus value extracted from the workers of their own countries, but, because they are an exploiting class, they are more afraid of the proletarian revolution than of the victory of the imperialists. Bourgeois or petty bourgeois nationalism, secular or clerical, always gives up the national struggle against imperialism and contains the proletariat and the masses under the yoke of capitalist exploitation. We fight for the overthrowing of the bourgeoisie and for the imposition of a Workers' and Peasants' government, because the only class that can liberate the oppressed nation from the domination of imperialism is the working class, leading the peasants and the exploited and oppressed masses.

(6) We denounce the surrender of the Iraqi bourgeoisie and of Saddam’s anti-worker officers and the Republican Guard before the imperialists attack, for betraying the national war of the Iraqi people and the anti-imperialist struggle ofthe masses of every Middle Eastern country, which today allows many leaders of the Ba’ath bourgeois nationalist party to collaborate with the Yankee and British occupiers. We denounce the bourgeois nationalist leaders of the oppressed Kurdish people because they were the allies of the invading Yankees and British in their war of colonial occupation against Iraq, and who will deepen the oppression and crush every struggle of the people for their legitimate right to national self-determination, includingtheir right to secede from Iraq,Turkey,Syria and Iran. We denounce the governments and states of the Persian and Arabian bourgeoisies of the Middle East, who kept “neutral” in the war against Iraq, refusing to constitute, against the imperialist military coalition, a coalition of all the oppressed nations of the Middle East to send arms, military equipment and supplies to fight against imperialism in Iraq.

(7) We denounce the Palestinian bourgeoisie and its political leadership, the PLO of Arafat, who gave up the revolutionary struggle of the Palestinian people and who kneel down before imperialism, before the "two states" plan of the UN and before Zionism. The Palestinian bourgeoisie wants to administer a caricature of a State as an agent of imperialism, in exchange for the blood of the martyred people. We declare war against all the treacherous leaderships and the renegades of Trotskyism who support the Zionist State of Israel by endorsing the counter-revolutionary policy of "two states" of the UN and the imperialists. We fight for the destruction of the State of Israel and for a secular, democratic and non-racist Palestinian State with a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government of the self-organized and armed Palestinian masses, on the road to a Federation of Socialist Republics of the Middle East.

(8) We denounce Chávez and his Bolivariano Movement for giving up the anti-imperialist struggle of the Venezuelan masses. Chávez sat at the negotiating table with the USA, with governments like that of Lula, and with "ambassadors of democracy" such as Carter and Alfonsín, and signed an agreement in which everything the imperialist and putschist reaction had not been able to achieve in the streets in two counter-revolutionary attempts was then handed over to them. We denounce also in Bolivia, the truce made by the COB, Quispe and Morales – leader of the WSF – with the murderous government of Sánchez de Lozada, thereby preventing the working class and the peasants from making the uprising they started last February victorious. In Colombia, for years, the truces and agreements of the FARC with the successive genocidal governments of this country have isolated the peasants’ war in the country from the proletariat in the cities who face the fascists "death squadrons". At the same time, the Stalinist leadership of the FARC refuses to expropriate a single oil well, or a millimetre of territory that it controls. Down with the truces and the agreements! For the independence of the workers’ organizations from the regimes, governments and lackey bourgeoisies! Only with such a proletarian strategy will we be able to set up a workers’ and peasants’ movement that, united with its class brothers, the American workers, fight to put an end to the slavery and misery in the "backyard" of Yankee imperialism. It is from this perspective that we raise the cry: Yankees out of Cuba, Ecuador; Puerto Rico, Colombia and the whole Latin America! Out with the European powers who are as much exploiters and oppressors as the Yankees! British out of the Malvinas! For a Federation of Socialist Republics of Latin America!

(9) We call the Russian working class to take up again the road of the Red workers, soldiers and peasants who in October 1917 made the first triumphant workers’ Socialist republic. The fight to create new workers’ states in the territories of the former USSR is an urgent task for the European and the world proletariat. We fight against Kim Song II of the North Korea, Fidel Castro and the Cuban restorationist bureaucracy, and with the new restorationist Chinese bourgeois, who adopted the reactionary and anti-worker pseudo-theory of "market socialism" which, as is shown by the brutal exploitation of the Chinese working class, and by the advance of restorationist measures in Cuba, and the submission of the Argentinean working class, is the counter-revolutionary policy of the World Social Forum to make the working class subservient to the capitalists. At the same time, in the case of the bureaucratized workers' states that still remain in existence, we unconditionally defend them from imperialism, in order to better overthrow the bureaucracies that are anxious to restore capitalism in these states.

(10) We declare war on all those leaderships that cling to the shirt-tails of the bourgeoisie, on their policy of class collaboration and their "popular fronts".History has proved time and time again that conciliation of class interests between the capitalists and the workers leads to the defeat and massacre of the masses. There is no possibility that the situation of the world proletariat nor the emancipation of any exploited class can be improved by submitting to the interests of any faction of the exploiters.

(11) We denounce and declare war on all the servants of the UN, including the majority of the renegades of Trotskyism who kneel before it. They follow their new leader Gladys Marin of the treacherous Chilean Stalinists, General Secretary of the Latin American Communist Parties Conference that meets twice a year. She is the spokeswoman for Fidel Castro, who abandoned the Chilean revolution in 1973, the Central American revolution in the 80s, and who also went to Argentina to support Kirchner against the revolution.Fidel Castro and Gladys Marin, mainstays of the World Social Forum, have declared that "another world is possible" without expropriating the capitalists, and continuing the exploitation of the working class. They call for the "redistribution of wealth" just as do the liberal democrats, hands in hand with the UN, the “thieves kitchen” of the imperialist gangsters. The same UN that approved the first war against Iraq, the genocidal blockade, and today is trying to get back into Iraq to defend the interests of the French and German imperialists. The same UN that in 1948 established the occupation of Palestine and the creation of the State of Israel, and which today supports the Zionist massacre of the Palestinian people with its policy of "two states". The same UN that promoted and supported the war against Korea in 1950, etc.

(12) We proclaim that, as it has been clearly demonstrated by the Argentinean revolution, in a pre-revolutionary or revolutionary situation the basis of any revolutionary program must be direct democracy and self-determination to enable the development, extension, centralization and arming of the masses’ organizations, such as the popular assemblies, the occupied factories, the commissions of the factories won from trade-union bureaucracy and the piquetero movement, which are expressions of the movement of the masses to create organs of dual power. In other words, when a revolution starts, those who do not fight for power and for the creation of Workers and Peasants Governments are no more than the servants of the bourgeois state. This is why in the Congress of the COTP-CI we put forward the demand: “For a government of the Third National Assembly of workers, unemployed and popular assemblies, with their self-defense organs!”

(13) We declare war on the pacifism that infects the consciousness of the working class.We also oppose the petty-bourgeois policy of individual terrorism that separates itself from the masses and disarms the masses.The uprising of the Bolivian working class and peasants with their cry: "Guns and grapeshot, Bolivians will not stay silent", shows the necessity to arm the proletariat. The bourgeois and counter-revolutionary leaderships prevent the arming of the proletariat, the formation of workers’ militia, and the destruction of the officer strata of the bourgeois armed forces. This has been proved in Palestine where Arafat and the bourgeois leadership of the PLO, along with Hamas and Hizbollah, prevent the generalised arming of the Palestinian people and sacrifice them to the murderous Sharon and his genocidal army.Despite this, we defend all anti-imperialist fighters against repression and demand the liberation of all anti-imperialist fighters in the world.

(14) Everywhere we confront the bureaucracies of all shades in the workers' organizations, bribed and corrupted by large capital; the bourgeois nationalists, social democrats and Stalinist trade-union bureaucrats, paid by the State to confine the workers to their narrow economistic interests and to the interests of the bourgeoisie and imperialism; the leaderships of the organizations of piqueteros that dominate the Argentinean working class, now begging for crumbs from the reformists, and that prevent the unity of the occupied workers and the unemployed and divide the workers ranks. The trade unions that were created to defend the economic interests of the workers have been transformed, over several decades by the trade-union bureaucracy coming out of the aristocracy of labour, into apparatuses where the bureaucracy is paid to collaborate with the bourgeoisie and its state to subordinate and impoverish the workers. We Trotskyists fight in the trade unions to eliminate the bureaucracy, and to win workers' democracy. We affirm that this is not possible without fighting for the complete independence of the workers' organizations from the bourgeois state that incorporates and corrupts them. We fight to impose workers' democracy based on the factory committees and the strike pickets; for renewing the leadership of the trade unions by resolutely putting up militant delegates at critical times to form a revolutionary leadership in the trade unions.

(15) We proclaim that any people that collaborates in the oppression of another people is unable to liberate itself. The imperialist bourgeoisies oppress what remains of their colonial empire(Puerto Rico, Northern Ireland, Martinique, Guadeloupe, New Caledonia…) and occupies again dominated countries (Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq…). We are for the independence of all protectorates and all colonies from imperialism. We are for the national rights of those peoples kept under armed oppression within bourgeois states (Basques, Kurds, Kabyles, Tamouls…). We categorically support the oppressed and invaded Chechyen nation against the genocide it suffers at the hands of the troops of the white counter-revolutionary army of Putin and the Russian bourgeoisie, today the agents of imperialism. We are for the unconditional right of national self-determination of all oppressed peoples, including the right to separate if the majority demands that right. In no case do we adapt ourselves to bourgeois or petty bourgeois nationalism. Only the recognition of the right of the self-determination of the oppressed people ensures the unity of the proletariat. For the same reason, we pronounce ourselves for the freedom of movement and settlement of workers, and for the complete equality of rights of all workers.

(16) We reaffirm the validity of Leninism–Trotskyism, of the program of Fourth International, as the continuity of that school of revolutionary strategy founded by the Third International of Lenin and Trotsky. It is from this strategic position that we call all the currents that say they fight for the interests of the working class, to break with the bourgeoisie and to start the struggle for power based on the autonomous and armed organizations of the masses. In the process of this combat, we are prepared to enter all united fronts and united actions with any workers' current ready to make even a single step forwards to advance our class. But as Lenin would say:while we are ready to strike together, we march separately. Before, during and after any such action we will not weaken our criticism of the reformist leaderships that are obliged to leave their luxurious offices and to put themselves at the head of the action of masses.

(17) The social democrat and Stalinist reformists poison the workers with the claim that capitalism can be reformed by means of the bourgeois state. It is useful for the plans of the bourgeoisie that the political apparatuses of social democracy and of the trade unions allies with it through "participatory" or "popular" democracy and manages their state to prevent the proletarian revolution. Social democrats and Stalinists are agents bought by the capitalist enemy.

(18) Pseudo-Trotskyist centrism has claimed to be revolutionary for fifty years while in practice it was subordinated to the reformist apparatuses. The Pabloist IC-USEC, the Lambertist IC-AIT, the Morenoist LIT, UIT, MAS and CITO, the Hardyist UCI-LO, the Cliffite IST, the Grantist ICT or The Militant, Altamiraist CI, the Loraist POR, etc., represent tedencies that have broken from Trotskyism into the camp of reformism.

(19) Social democracy, Stalinism and the trade-union bureaucracies have liquidated the most elementary principles and morals of the class. The centrists, revisionists and liquidators of the Fourth International are following in their path. The proletariat wants staunchness, honesty, loyalty, and the broadest workers' democracy. To discuss, to decide and to act, workers and youth must expel from the workers' organizations the method of lies, misrepresentation, and physical violence introduced by these leaderships who try to suppress or conceal the political differences inside the workers' movement

(20) We affirm that the 21^st century has begun in the same way the 20^th century finished: as an epoch of crises, wars and revolutions, highlighting all the characteristics of capitalism in decomposition. Against all the revisionists of Trotskyism who want to put the responsibility for the defeats on the masses and to hide their own capitulations and treacheries by saying that the problem is the "crisis of subjectivity" of the masses, or its "backward consciousness", we state that the start of 21^st century confirms the central premise of the program of the Communist International and of the Fourth International: without a social revolution in the next historical period, all of human civilization is threatened by catastrophe. Everything depends on the proletariat, and on its revolutionary leadership: the historical crisis of humanity is reduced to the crisis of revolutionary leadership.

(21) Those who call for this International Conference, proclaim the necessity for revolutionary internationalists to build revolutionary workers' parties and the world party of the socialist revolution, from the forces emerging out of the struggle of the masses. With such organizations, the proletarian insurrection will be able to triumph, world revolution will succeed, and socialism will be able to develop.

CALL FOR AN INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF PRINCIPLED TROTSKYISTS

From Class Struggle 51 July-August 2003

The revolutionary organizations that jointly wrote and signed this document – Lucha Marxista of Peru, Groupe Bolchevik of France, the Communist Workers' Group of New Zealand, the Grupo Obrero Internacionalista (CI) of Chile and the Liga Obrera Internacionalista (CI)-Democracia Obrera of Argentina – agree to call, on the basis of the principles and the programmatic lessons contained in it, an International Conference of Principled Trotskyists and revolutionary workers’ organizations.

We met in the Congress of the COTP-CI [COPT-CI is Committee of Principled Trotskyists - Fourth Internationalist – the grouping of Workers Democracy of Argentina and Workers International League of Chile.] in Buenos Aires in December 2002 and, during the heat of the Argentinean revolution, the heroic fight of the Palestinian people and of the preparations for the war against Iraq, we decided to launch a call for an International Conference on the basis of revolutionary lesson and essential programmatic agreements on these crucial facts of the world class struggle. A first result of these agreements and this common fight, was the joint declaration before the war against Iraq, published on January 22^nd, 2003,[Class Struggle # 48 March/April 2003 http://www.geocities.com/communistworker/cs48.html] raising a principled and internationalist position against it, and concentrating the struggle against the treacherous leaderships grouped in the World Social Forum – a real counter-revolutionary international – and against those revisionist Trotskyists and the liquidators of the Fourth International currents whether they are subordinated to the WSF or not.

In the few months since then, the world proletariat has entered into new struggles and suffered new defeats and repeated betrayals such as in Iraq, in Palestine, in Argentina, in Bolivia, in Venezuela.

We, the revolutionary internationalists, must firmly say that the partial victories won by the counter-revolution and the bourgeois-imperialist reaction are not because of the lack of heroism of the exploited in these fights, nor because of the technical and military advances of the genocidal imperialist troops, but the betrayals of the treacherous leaders of our class.

The revolutionary upsurge at the end the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s was a world wide process: themobilization of youth and workers in China; the anti-bureaucratic revolution in Czechoslovakia; the war fought by the Vietnamese people; the general strike in France; the large scale strikes in Italy; the victorious miners' strike in Great Britain, the national movements in Ireland and the Basque Country; the students' movement in Mexico; the revolution in Bolivia; the Cordobazo in Argentina; the fight of the Blacks and anti-war movement in the United States; the revolutions in Chile and Portugal; and so on. But this wave was contained and betrayed by the bourgeois or petty-bourgeois nationalists and the treacherous leaderships of the workers' movement.

From the 1980s, new defeats inflicted on the world revolution allowed the bourgeoisies of the imperialist countries to take the offensive again. A critical turning point was the defeat of the British miners in 1985, but the decisive event was the destruction of the USSR in 1991 and the subsequent restoration of capitalism in the former USSR and Eastern Europe by the Stalinist bureaucracy that had usurped workers' power from 1924.

This historical victory of the world bourgeoisie encouraged American imperialism to lead the coalitions that crushed Iraq in 1991, the Balkans in 1999, Afghanistan in 2002, and Iraq again in 2003.

But the imperialist powers cannot stabilise the situation. At the end of the 20^th century, the Palestinian Intifada that began in 1987; the mass demonstrations in East Germany and in China in 1989; the strikes of November-December 1995 in France; the strikes of 1997 in South Korea; the revolutions of Albania and Indonesia in 1997; came one after the other. The 21^st century began with powerful mobilizations of the masses, such as the heroic struggle in Palestine in 2000, the revolution in Argentina in 2001, and the rising in Bolivia in 2003. The imperialist mobilisation for war on Iraq was answered by an enormous anti-imperialist mobilization of the masses all over the world, that reverberated in the heartlands of the imperialist countries.Today the workers of Europe put up a fierce resistance to the liquidation of the historic gains won during preceding revolutionary advances.

It is necessary to tell the truth to the masses, no matter how hard and cruel: the defeats, the retreats in the revolutionary processes, the military defeats of the oppressed nations, they all resulted from the treachery of the existing leaderships of the proletariat and the exploited masses, which are in most cases, grouped in the World Social Forum today.

Imperialism, with this succession of counterrevolutionary victories, is looking for a way-out from the world economic crisis, by making the world working class and oppressed peoples produce more surplus value. At the same time each imperialist country is competing against its rivals for the resources and markets of the colonies, semi-colonies of Latin America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and the former workers’ states. It has to be seen yet whether imperialism can resolve its crisis by these means.To achieve this the counter-revolutionary leaderships of all kinds must consolidate the triumph of the counter-revolution by forcing the masses to the conclusion that imperialism cannot be defeated, and therefore must be accommodated.

Therefore, the immediate perspective for revolutionaries in the current world situation is dictated by the reality the working class is experiencing of the wars, economic crises and sharpening of the class antagonisms of the imperialist epoch.

We believe that under these new conditions it is necessary, on the basis of the revolutionary lessons of the many struggles, of the defeats and the betrayals suffered by the world proletariat, to clearly separate the reformists, liquidationists and centrists from the revolutionary internationalists, and to prepare the international proletariat for the coming battles, as the imperialist counter-offensive begun in the mid 1980s, now sharpens against the working class, the workers' states,[countries were capital has been expropriated and which so far survive capitalist restoration. The ‘group of five’ agree that Cuba and North Korea remain ‘bureaucratic workers’ states]and the oppressed peoples of the world.

Under these conditions of economic crisis, war, and revolution, the struggle of revolutionary internationalists to unite on the basis of these lessons and a revolutionary program to prepare for the coming struggles, is a task of utmost urgency.

Today the imperialist war against Iraq –as before it the heroic Palestinian struggle and the Argentinean revolution –has established a new Rubicon not only of the treacherous workers’ leaders, but also of the revisionists of Trotskyism who provide a ‘left cover’ for the class traitors. The various wings of the liquidators of the Fourth International cling to the shirt tails of the UN and the French and German imperialists, collaborate with the stinking corpse of Stalinism and social democracy, with the national bourgeoisie as in Venezuela, and with the radical petty bourgeois nationalist movements such as Hizbollah and Hamas.

In the Argentinean revolution, they are the enemies of the struggle of the masses to create armed, self-organising mass organs based on direct democracy, and they use the minimal and democratic demands of the revolutionary program as a chain around the neck of the masses. They became the servants of the stinking remains of Stalinism and supporters of the notorious, hated regime.

In Brazil, the revisionist currents of Trotskyism and liquidationists of the Fourth International have openly supported and called workers to vote for the class collaborationist government of Lula-Alencar, and some ministers, governors and Secretaries of State of the Brazilian reactionary regime come from their ranks.

In France, these currents support of the imperialist regime of the Fifth Republic: they have openly called workers to vote for "the lesser evil", for Chirac against Le Pen; or they have supported it by of refusing to fight for an election boycott and for a general strike before the second round of the elections. In France, in Spain, in Italy, in Great Britain, etc., these currents are completely subordinated to social democracy, to the new parties of recycled Stalinists, and to the workers’ aristocracy and the trade-union bureaucracies.

These are only some examples how the liquidators of the Fourth International have crossed the Rubicon. These liquidationist and revisionist currents do not leave in place one stone of the theory and the program of revolutionary Marxism. Their bankruptcy is complete.

Because of this bankruptcy we must extract the revolutionary lessons from the past struggles and the betrayals we have suffered. We must prevent the flags of Trotskyism and of revolutionary Marxism from remaining in the hands of these misleading usurpers. We must unite the dispersed ranks of revolutionary internationalists. We must fight to set up Leninist combat parties, and to build a revolutionary international.To achieve all of this, is it necessary to convene an international conference to re-group the healthy forces of the workers’ movement and in particular of those who say they continue to fight for Trotskyism and the Fourth International.

Those who call for this Conference all come from the splits in the Fourth International, and we still have differences that we will publicly debate in our press in the period before this International Conference. The most significant of these differences is over the present character of the revolutionary international.

For the comrades of the CWG of New Zealand, it is necessary to struggle for a new Fifth International. The comrades of the Groupe Bolshevik of France and of Lucha Marxista of Peru say that the organization built by Trotsky, the Fourth International, is dead, but its program is still alive and that militants and regroupments are still seeking to apply the program for the world socialist revolution. Consequently they raise the algebraic expression "for the revolutionary workers’ International" saying that it will be the debate and conscious action of the living forces building this international that will determine its concrete form.

For the Argentinean and Chilean comrades of the COPT-CI, the fight today, more than ever, is for the regeneration and the refoundation of the Fourth International. The theory and program retains their validity and actuality and have passed the test of history. It is the usurpers and renegades of Trotskyism who have not passed this test. Therefore, it is the validity and actuality of its theory, program and strategy that determines the number of an International, as has been demonstrated several times by the experience of the world proletariat since the middle of the 19^th century.

But we will discuss these differences –and others that exist before the International Conference –within a common international bulletin, since we are linked by our programmatic agreements facing the explosive events of the international situation: of crisis, revolution and war. So, we are far from any centrist alchemy and from signing agreements with those who will then go away and betray the proletariat.

Therefore, we call for an International Conference to go forward towards setting up an International Center of Revolutionary Marxism. The program we promote here for this Conference is not written for small circles of intellectuals or for the editorial boards of Marxist papers. It is a program that we undertake to develop –and to fight for it –in the heart of the workers’ organizations in our countries. Hundreds of workers’ and class struggle organizations are affiliated to the World Social Forum, tied to the UN and the French and German imperialists by their treacherous leaderships. Our fight will be to win mass support for this revolutionary program from the combat organizations of the working class. They will have an honoured place beside the revolutionary Trotskyists.

The epoch of crises, wars and revolutions will not allow the would-be liquidators of Marxism and of the Fourth International to rest in peace.Our forces are very weak, but our program and the ideas that we defend are the fruit of more than 150 years of struggle by the world proletariat. They deserve to live, and sooner rather than later, they will be adopted by the many millions of exploited who enter into class combat.

Long live the struggle for an International Conference of the healthy forces of Trotskyism and of the revolutionary internationalist workers’ organizations!

July 2003

Collective for an International Conference of the Principled Trotskyism

§Communist Workers’ Group (New Zealand)

§Groupe Bolchevik pour la construction du Parti ouvrier révolutionnaire, de l'Internationale ouvrière révolutionnaire (France)

§Grupo Obrero Internacionalista Cuarta Internacional (Chile)

§Liga Obrera Internacionalista Cuarta Internacional - Democracia Obrera (Argentina)

§Lucha Marxista (Peru)

WORLD SOCIAL FORUM VS PRINCIPLED TROTSKYISM

From Class Struggle 51 July-August 2003

The urgent task facing revolutionaries today is to confront and destroy all those forces that try to convince workers that they cannot overcome capitalism and imperialism, but rather must adapt or accommodate to it. We say that most of these forces are gathered today in the World Social Forum (WSF). Against the WSF we seek to build a new revolutionary international. Here we explain why the WSF seeks to adapt workers to capitalism. We make a ‘call’ to all the healthy forces of Trotskyism and revolutionary workers organisations to unite to build that new revolutionary international that can destroy the WSF, and with it, capitalism.

In NZ today an Oceania Social Forum is being organised and will meet in Wellington in October this year.The Oceania SF is a spin-off from the WSF that has met three years in a row at Porto Alegre in Brazil.On the face of it this ‘movement of movements’ seems harmless enough. After all a wide range of political views are presented at each meeting, it has no clearly defined program, and its organisation is ostensibly very open and democratic.

But is it harmless? As we pointed out in earlier Class Struggles, [Class Struggle # 43, 48, 49.] the WSF is run by a narrow group of trustees based in the Brazilian Workers’ Party of President Lula, the French ATTAC (itself a front for the so-called Usec 4^th International soon to be joined by the Cliffite International Socialist Tendency) and some reformist intellectuals associated with Le Monde Diplomatique and Z Mag. It promotes the trendy left humanist ideas of Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, Naomi Klein, Walden Bello and others.

The WSF is dangerous for workers.It is a very sinister movement because it is linked politically to actual governments such as those of Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia and Brazil. This means that these countries are promoted as examples of how popular governments can resist imperialism and improve the lot of the workers and peasants. Much is being made of Lula being able to balance the interests of his working class supporters and the World Bank![Many workers internationally look to Lula as a turning point in working class history. For example, the IRSL (Iranian Revolutionary Socialist League says, “…the left-wing movement in Iran…prescribe this as a model for Iran. They purposely disregard the truth and the reality of the anti-revolutionary and anti-working class nature of such a movement and describe such an amalgamation as a ‘modern’ version of the working class struggle against global capitalism.”See article at: http://www.kargar.org/english/brazilian_workers_party12.htm]]

Second, some of the left democratic politicians (and right wing ex-Trotskyists like the Usec who have Euro MPs and MPs in Lula’s government) associated with the anti-globalisation movements claim to be part of the WSF giving them left credentials while they embark on openly anti-worker policies.

Third, the WSF is linked politically with the remnants of the Stalinist parties that in some countries have a long history and still carry some credibility. Despite its role in helping Allende disarm the workers before Pinochet’s coup in 1973, the Chilean Communist Party today leads Latin American Stalinists in alliance with the WSF. In Iraq today the Communist Party despite serious oppression still survives, has a representative in the US’s puppet government, and is playing a role in organising workers behind a peaceful transition to a new bourgeois regime. (See our article on Iran for evidence of the same in that country).

Fourth, widely supported by the Stalinists, the authority of Fidel Castro in the WSF is strong, particularly in Latin America, because, despite its deficiencies and the sell outs of Stalinist bureaucrats like Castro, the Cuban revolution has survived all attempts so far to destroy it. Castro’s Cuba lends its authority to the reformist model of ‘market socialism’ that goes down the same road as ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’ to the World Trade Organisation, and in Brazil today with President Lula goes all the way to the Free Trade Area of the Americas![Our position on Cuba is that it is a degenerate workers’ state which must be unconditionally defended against capitalism, but which needs a political revolution to replace the bureaucracy with a democratic workers government before Castro allows capitalism to be restored.The model of ‘market socialism’ is the view that socialism can coexist with the capitalist market put forward by those who seek to restore or adapt to capitalism under the cover of ‘modern’ socialism.]

Fifth, all of these currents join together in supporting the United Nations as an organisation that acts for so-called ‘democratic’ imperialism. Like Castro, they called for the UN to complete its inspections for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, opposing the US unilateral invasion in the name of multilateralism. Like Castro they backed the UN in its propping up of Israel, its sanctions against Iraq, and its ‘peacekeeping’ in Bosnia and East Timor. Today they back the UN going into Iraq to cover for the US invasion by taking responsibility for ‘peacekeeping’ and ‘rebuilding’.

Finally, and most important, the WSF now includes in its ranks so-called Trotskyists who are to the left of Stalinism and Castro and whose ‘street cred’ is significant in drawing into the WSF new layers of workers in struggle so they can be contained in this reformist international.For example, recently in Argentina, pseudo-Trotskyists united with Lula, Chavez and Castro to welcome the election of the populist Peronist Kirchner as an ‘anti-imperialist fighter’!

When we sum up all of these influences we can see that combined together as a world wide tendency, the WSF is a counter-revolutionary international that unless challenged and destroyed will lead workers and peasants everywhere to defeat and disaster. It is precisely to build a revolutionary opposition to the WSF that the ‘group of five’ have produced the following document calling all the healthy forces of Trotskyism and revolutionary workers’ organisations to a conference of Principled Trotskyists.

These principles can be the first step in uniting those forces that can go on to build a new revolutionary international communist party capable of not only destroying the WSF, but of leading workers everywhere in the struggle for socialist revolution.

IS IRAN NEXT ON BUSH'S HIT LIST?

From Class Struggle 51 July-August 2003

Iran is now a prime target of Bush’s administration. The Islamic Republic is facing mounting domestic opposition. The US is openly supporting the opposition. But will it become the next item in Bush’s ‘evil axis’ hit list? We examine the historical causes of the current crisis in Iran, and put forward our view on how workers can defeat the US plans for ‘regime change’, and at the same time overcome all the barriers to the formation of a secular, socialist republic in Iran.

In Iran today the situation is very unstable. Since 1999 there has been a gradual build up of opposition to the Islamic Republic headed by Ayatollah Khamenei. In the last weeks tens of thousands of students have taken to the streets in opposition to the privatisation of the universities. In Tehran, Shiraz, Mashhad, Esfahan, and many other cities, they have been joined by workers protesting the shortages of water, electricity, prices rises, unpaid wages and poverty. Both students and workers are calling for the end of the Islamic Republic. The mounting unrest is being used by the US to demand a “regime change” from within. Not only has Bush named Iran as one of the rogue states in the ‘axis of evil’, after the victory in Iraq he has made direct threats of unilateral US intervention to stop the development of nuclear weapons in Iran. Not to be outdone, France is arresting and jailing exiled members of the Mujahadeen, a radical militant Iranian organisation.

Many Iranians after 24 years of Islamic rule do want a ‘regime change’.Some capitalist and petty capitalist elements believe that the US can rescue them from the Islamic Republic and reinstall a Western-aligned democratic regime. But the working masses are strongly opposed to US intervention.Others want the Islamic regime to become more moderate and democratic without reorienting itself to the West. What do we make of these positions?

Whatever is wrong with the Islamic Republic, ultimately imperialism is to blame.So the US cannot be the solution whether it intervenes directly or not. Nor has the crisis of the regime be solved by the politics of religious fanaticism. As we shall see, the very nature of the Islamic Republic as a clerical regime prevents it from reforming itself.We shall show that the unpopularity of the government flows directly from its origins in 1979 as a counter-revolutionary regime that rode to power on the backs of an insurgent working class and poor peasantry, only to turn on the masses and smash its leading organisations. That is why the demand “Down with the Islamic Republic” is becoming the catch cry on the streets with the students and workers. There can be no compromise between the interests of the emerging mass movement and the repressive Islamic regime.

To understand why this is happening today, and why the opposition in Iran poses a potential threat not only to the regime, but also to the US and the other imperialists, we have to go back to the 20^th century history of Iran.

[Much of the material in this article is drawn fromthe Worker-Communist Party of Iran’s webpage: http:///www.wpiran.org/ and “Khomeini’s Capitalism: the imperialists close in”inRevolutionary Communist Papers No 6 Theoretical Journal of the Revolutionary Communist Tendency (Britain) June, 1980.]

British Imperialism’s semi-colony.

[Semi-colonies are oppressed countries whose political independence does not mean that the national bourgeois has any control over the economy which remains dominated by imperialism. They can include neo-colonies like India, but in some cases because they emerged out of existing non-capitalist empires like Turkey and Iran, do not originate as capitalist colonies.]

After the Ottoman Empire collapsed during WW1, British and French imperialism divided up the Middle East and created artificial semi-colonies or client regimes with puppet rulers. Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia etc were all born as the stunted children of imperialism who were destined to remain dependent and could never grow up so long as imperialism ruled. (We must not leave out Israel – in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 the British gave the Jewish capitalist class the green light to settle in Palestine.)The children were stunted because they were trapped in an international division of labour dominated by the imperialist powers, a division which made them exporters of cheap raw materials and importers of manufactured goods. Thus the semi-colonial capitalist ruling classes of the Middle East remained dependent on imperialism and could not follow the path of the US or Japan to economic independence.

Client regimes were delegated the task of managing the dependent semi-colonial development of capitalism so that the imperialists got the lion’s share of the oil and other wealth created by the workers in the region.While the local capitalists had an interest in negotiating with imperialism for as big a slice of the profits as they could get, they had to collaborate with imperialism for their class survival. Whatever their differences, both imperialists and the national ruling classes had a common interest in profiting from the super-exploitation of workers and poor peasants.

The difficulty for imperialism was to find semi-colonial regimes that could extract maximum super-profits without being overthrown by the masses. Because the national bourgeoisies were weak, they had to rely on regimes that formed alliances with the petty capitalists and to some extent the working class under the guise of ‘populism’ or ‘patriotic alliances’. Thus when the poor masses resisted their super-exploitation and demanded independence from imperialism, these regimes pretended to be anti-imperialist, and aided by reformist working class parties, made minor concessions to the masses to try to keep them quiet. When the imperialists applied too much pressure this strategy failed and workers threatened to break through the controls of the reformists and overthrow the state.The regimes then had to appeal to traditional petty capitalists as a class base for radical nationalist regimes that posed as anti-imperialist, but whose interest was ultimately to protect national capital by eliminating the threat posed by the revolutionary masses. Not until the masses organised independently of both the bourgeoisie and the petty capitalists would there be a class alliance strong enough to win the poor masses, including the impoverished petty capitalists, to a class alliance that could liberate these semi-colonies from imperialism’s deathly grip.

Iran’s 20^th century history followed this pattern. Under Reza Shah in the 1920’s and 1930’s Iran’s economy was dominated by Britain and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (ADIOS). [AIOC later became British Petroleum, now selling itself as Beyond Petroleum, and soon to be Beautiful People.]

The Shah attempted to negotiate a better share for the weak Iranian bourgeoisie. Because Iran had little private capital, he used the state to develop the domestic economy, imposing import controls and creating public monopolies in sugar, tea, cotton, jute, rice and carpets.He then built large scale manufacturing plants for textiles, food processing, forestry and mineral production. But inefficiencies and low quality made these industries unprofitable.When the Shah failed to get financial support from Britain in the 1930’s to prop up the stagnating economy he turned to an alliance with Hitler. To secure the oil fields and a supply line to the Soviet Union the British and the US invaded Iran in the south, and the USSR in the north. This invasion brought to an end this first phase of Iran’s attempt at insulated economic development.

The war and its aftermath gave a boost to economic protectionism from another quarter. From 1941 to 1951 the wartime economy encouraged the petty bourgeoisie of shopkeepers and small industry to expand to meet the domestic market, particularly the small businesses supplying the occupying military. But there was no large investment by imperialism to allow the economy to take off. This drove sections of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie to adopt a more radical ‘economic nationalism’.[Most semi-colonies experienced this expansion of the domestic economy under wartime conditions because they had to substitute domestic production for imports and got good prices for their exports from countries at war.]

At the same time the working class which had begun to develop under the Shah’s protectionist policy in the 30s continued to expand during and after World War Two and developed a strong anti-imperialist sentiment. [At the turn of the century 90% of the labour force worked in agriculture. By 1945 this hadfallen to 75%, in 1966 it was 47% and 1980 less than 40%. By 1920 there were at least 12 unions with a total membership of over 20,000. Many of these were affiliated to the Red International of Trade Unions. In the mid-1940s the Tide-controlled Central Council of Unified Trades Unions (CCUTU) had more than half a million members who marched under its banner on May Day 1946.]

The rise of Tudeh

Now the national bourgeoisie had once more to steer a course between imperialism and the anti-imperialist sentiment of the masses. It tried to advance its national class interests by riding the anti-imperialist wave but still keeping the exploitative relationship between the bourgeoisie and working class intact. It was helped in this task by the Stalinist organisations that dominated the political leadership of the working class. Rather than mobilise workers and poor peasants to overthrow the bourgeoisie, the Communist Party took the Stalinist view that Iran had to first develop as an independent capitalist country before it could become socialist. This was a convenient theory that allowed it to ally itself with the national bourgeoisie against imperialism to create a ‘democratic’ Iran as a ‘friend’ of the Soviet Union. But the price of this policy was subordination of the working masses and the nation minorities to the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie and to the inevitable counter-revolution. [Trotsky condemned such patriotic popular fronts as leading to the destruction of the working masses at the hands of the national bourgeoisie and imperialists. He called for workers united fronts independent of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie that could take the lead in the fight against imperialism and carry on to overthrow the national bourgeoisie as a ‘permanent revolution’. This was what happened in Russia, and had been prevented in China in 1927 by the Stalinist leadership’s popular front with Chiang Kai Chek (see Class Struggle # 46)]

As we have seen, the working class grew rapidly in Iran along with capitalist industry.It was mainly under the influence of the Stalinist Tudeh party. The Tudeh party was formed in 1941 by the survivors of the Communist Party of Iran. It quickly became the strongest force in the working class. But its policies were always tied to the USSR and to the Iranian bourgeoisie. While the USSR occupied the north of Iran, Tudeh supported the national independence movements of the Azerbaijanis and the Kurds as a means of prolonging Soviet influence and gaining oil concessions. By 1945 both Azerbaijani and Kurdish republics had been formed with the support of the Soviet troops and Iraqi Kurds. But once the interests of the USSR had been served the Tudeh was prepared to sacrifice the national rights of the minorities and the interests of the working class.

The Tudeh joined the government of the bourgeois liberal Prime Minister Qavam in January 1946. He promised oil concessions to the Soviets if they would withdraw their troops. The Soviets did so and the new republics were crushed. [The Azerbaijani republic was invaded in December 1946 and its leaders imprisoned or executed. The Kurdish republic fell soon after and its leader Qadi Muhammed was executed.] Qavam later reneged on his promise. The sell-out of the oppressed nationalities was hailed by the Tudeh as a victory.

Now Qavam could turn the screws on the Tudeh. He formed the Iranian Democratic Party (IDP) representing the landed aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, and a government-sponsored union. Tudeh joined an IDP-led government, providing three cabinet ministers. When the oil workers of Khuzestan staged a general strike in July 1946 and several casualties occurred on both sides, and the British Labour government threatened to invade Aberdan, the Tudeh general secretary Reza Rusta, who was also secretary of the CCUTU, [See note above] went to Abadan and persuaded the workers to call off the general strike without any of their demands being met. The betrayals of the national minorities and workers led to a falling off of Tudeh support at a time when the working class was still on the rise. Even so, its next task was to direct the working class in behind the economic nationalist policies of Mossadegh.

Nationalism serves US imperialism

Between 1949 and 1951 a series of strikes culminating in a general strike hit Iran. The Shah appointed Mossadegh to ‘re-establish social order’. As one Senator at the time observed:

“Class tensions have reached such a point that they threaten the whole fabric of society…The only way to save Iran is to unite all classes against the foreign enemy”. (RCP p 12).

Like the Shah before him, Mossadegh was an economic nationalist, but he went further in his attempts to insulate the Iranian economy. By 1949 he saw the need to harness petty bourgeois and worker support and formed the National Front for a sweeping nationalisation of industry. He calculated that Britain would even tolerate the nationalisation of the IAOC so long as it needed Iranian oil and could make a profit.

Mossadegh wasted no time in nationalising foreign industries including the IAOC. This suited the US which welcomed the loss of its rival’s oil assets.However, the IAOC called Mossadegh’s bluff, boycotted Iranian oil and shifted its operations to Iraq and Kuwait. Iran did not own a single oil tanker and its oil production fell to near zero. This crisis forced Mossadegh to retreat to his core support in the national bourgeoisie and working class against the Shah and the landed aristocracy.He took on more powers and sought to transfer control of the army from the Shah to the Prime Minister – i.e. himself.

This alarmed the US which saw the mobilisation of the poor working masses and the USSR gaining influence in Iran as a threat to its interests. When the Tudeh joined the National Front in 1951 in support of Mossadegh’s nationalisation plans, this was too much for the US. It started to move against him. The petty bourgeois were already opposed to Mossadegh’s radical plans for land reform and modern education. So the US cut off his loans and isolated him further by offering bribes to the petty bourgeois parties in the National Front.

“Most of the middle class and petit bourgeoisie soon realised that mass mobilisations against imperialism would eventually threaten their interests. They opted for a deal with imperialism rather than countenance any radical threat to their class position; Imperialism was quick to oblige. As soon as oil production was restarted massive American loans flowed into Iran. Economic policy once again fell into line with the requirements of imperialism” (RCP p 8).

The CIA and the army replaced Mossadegh in 1953 and the workers organisations controlled by the Tudeh then paid the price of the Stalinist popular front with the national bourgeoisie, becoming the victims of the Shah’s anti-worker policies.[The Shah banned trades unions and imprisoned many militants. New labour laws in 1959 allowed state-run unions but no right to strike combined with paternalist social insurance and profit sharing schemes. The Shah’s secret police SAVAK had spies in workplaces and employed thugs to break strikes.] They had learned the hard way that the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie were more afraid of a insurgent working class and a poor peasantry, than of imperialism. The dominant US imperialism moved to bring the national regime back into line with its economic interests, and under the Shah, the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie also fell into line. Thus ended of the second phase of economic nationalism.

The Shah as US imperialist puppet

The Shah Pahlavi was installed and ruled Iran for 26 years as one of the many US–friendly dictators in the region. He instituted the ‘white revolution’ designed to eliminate the social barriers of pre-capitalist classes, such as the landlords and the petty bourgeoisie, to modern capital accumulation. His aim was to reorganise the state along efficient lines to allow the free flow of capital. This was not to be another phase of economic nationalism but rather state-assisted capitalist industrialisation dominated by imperialism.The state would invest in new ventures and then privatise them once they were profitable.

State investment in the economy grew rapidly in heavy industry notably the Esfahan steel mill, Arak heavy metals factory, Tabriz tractor plant, Ahwaz Aluminium works and the Khuzestan petrochemicals complex. [RCP page 8]

Public spending on health, arms etc jumped from 27% in 1971 to 45% in 1976.ehi The traditional bazaar moneylenders were replaced by a state central bank and state banks in joint ventures with British, Dutch and Japanese banks. This period of rapid growth and expansion was possible only on the back of rising oil revenues to cover Iran’s balance of payments deficits.

The Shah opened up Iran to direct foreign investment and super-exploitation. Rising oil revenues fuelled economic development until the mid-1970’s. Growth rates went from 9% in the 1960s to over 35% in the early 1970s. National capital expanded into the production of consumer goods such as radios, refrigerators and cars for the domestic market. Foreign capital leaped over the import controls and invested heavily in rubber, chemicals, drugs, mining and aluminum.

While the Shah’s agricultural reforms failed to convert the landlords and peasants to capitalist farming, they created millions of displaced peasants.By 1977, Iran, which had been self-sufficient in food production in the 1950s, had to import 16% of its rice, 20% of its wheat and 25% of its meat. By the mid 1970s the increasing dependency on oil revenues left Iraq’s economy heavily indebted to foreign investors and unable to meet its debt repayments. Iran’s inability to escape the trap of imperialist super-exploitation by state-aided foreign investment in industry and agriculture was now obvious in its ballooning debt crisis.

The classes that bore the brunt of this crisis were the workers and poor peasants. The Iranian working class grew from 2.7 million in 1956 to 4.7 million in 1976, and the greatest increase was in the public sector. The failed agricultural reforms forced peasants off the land into the shantytowns around the cities. At the same time a shortage of skilled workers saw tens of thousands of foreign workers employed. Low productivity led employers to force workers to increase their output. In the 1970s opposition began to mount against the rising exploitation of the workers and peasants. More and more illegal strikes and go-slows occurred despite the harsh repression. The regime made concessions to skilled workers such as pay increases and profit sharing, but failed to stem the rising militancy of the working class. By 1978 the Shah was prepared to met this militancy with state force which in turn only produced more strikes culminating in mass demonstrations and the oil workers’ strike of October 1978.Here was a massive working class and poor peasantry, led by a section of militant state workers, ripe for social revolution.

Meanwhile, what had happened to the petty bourgeoisie, that backward class which the Shah tried to eliminate as a social barrier to modern capitalism? As we have seen, the ‘white revolution’ failed to modernise agriculture. The landlords retained their dominance in the countryside. The bazaar which brought together small traders, craftsmen and businessmen, survived and grew, but increasingly came under threat from the Shah’s modernising policies.The petty bourgeoisie suffered at the hands of the foreign banks and resented the Shah’s plans to replace the bazaars with supermarkets.The Islamic mullahs as a traditional petty bourgeoisie were aligned to the bazaars. So the Shah’s attacks on the bazaars challenged the whole social system of which the mosque was the centre. As the economic crisis further undermined the economic existence of the bazaar, from the early 1960s opposition to the Shah rallied behind the Ayatollah Khomeini.

So along with the emerging working class and poor peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie had became a force for change. However, rather than follow the course charted by the workers’ interests, the anti-Shah movement was taken over by a petty bourgeois radical Islam with its popular appeal to class unity against the repressive regime.How was it that the modern, expanding, and militantly led working class allowed itself to be dragged backwards into the reactionary Islamic Republic?

The left and the ‘revolution’

The ‘Islamic revolution’ has long been a highly contentious event for the revolutionary left. The basic sequence of events is clear enough. The Shah was overthrown by a bloc of the national bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, workers, landlords and poor peasants in which the masses provided the troops, and the Islamic leadership, the officers.The bourgeoisie wanted to take back more control over the economy from imperialism but was too weak to do this alone. The petty bourgeoisie and the landlords were desperate to prevent the Shah’s reforms from wiping them out. They rallied to the Islamic opposition. The workers and poor peasants mobilised in their millions to get rid of the repressive regime. They lent their support to what they believed to be a genuine national revolution.

The first phase of the revolution between 1979-81 was dominated by the workers movement which easily outweighed the petty bourgeois and bourgeois forces. The mass power of the insurgent workers owed nothing to the Tudeh which backed the Shah until September 1978! Khomeini had to make concessions and posture as an anti-imperialist to keep the masses’ support. But the revolution while it had the potential to be progressive and lead to socialism, rapidly turned into a counter-revolution.Why? Its ‘anti-imperialism’ was more apparent that real.Its real purpose was to subordinate the revolutionary masses to both the Iranian bourgeoisie and the imperialists. But to do this it had to keep the only revolutionary classes, the workers and poor peasants, on side. This required the collaboration of the political parties that represented those classes.To achieve this the regime had to convince the mass membership of these parties that it was genuinely ‘anti-imperialist’ and ready to break with imperialism and establish an independent, democratic, Iran.

The main parties of the left subscribed to the Stalinist or Menshevik position that the Shah’s pro-Imperialist dictatorship had to be overthrown and an independent bourgeois democratic nation created before the conditions for socialism could be built. As we have seen, this stagist view of history served the interests of the national bourgeoisie, but also imperialism, because no semi-colonial nation can become independent of imperialism unless it is lead by a workers and poor peasant’s revolution. [Tudeh’s collaboration with the Islamic regime was a total capitulation.It called Khomeini and co ‘progressive clergy… struggling for freedom and democracy’. Even after Khomeini turned on the workers, closing down party offices and banning left newspapers,the Tudeh was silent. It backed the reactionary Islamic constitution of December 1979. So slavish was its backing of the clergy that the Tudeh general secretary was contemptuously referred to as ‘Ayatollah Kianouri’.]

The main parties of the left – the Tudeh, the Mujaheddin and Fedayeen all supported the Islamic leadership of the revolution. [The two guerillaist groups the Mujahedin (Muslim Marxists) and Fedayeen (Castroists) believed that guerilla action could ‘detonate mass action’, but that action was still limited to a bourgeois democratic stage with an ‘anti-imperialist united front’ of all classes.]

They collaborated with the Islamic Revolution in the belief that it was more progressive than the Shah’s regime. But this was never the case.Khomeini’s forces were based on the Mosque and the Bazaar, the two main institutions that represented the surviving pre-capitalist social relations in Iran and whose adaptation to Iranian capitalism was to foster petty capitalism or a protectionist national state-capitalism.Inevitably, because of its weak position, the bourgeoisie had to rely upon the petty bourgeoisie Islamists to renegotiate a deal with imperialism. Initially this relationship was indirect and mediated by a ‘Bonapartist’ Islamic regime between 1979 and 1981.

Bonapartism is a form of bourgeois state named after the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte where power is held temporarily by a strong leader or powerful clique standing ‘above classes’ ruling indirectly on behalf of the bourgeoisie when the bourgeoisie is weak and under challenge from below. [Trotsky wrote: “In the industrially backward countries foreign capital plays a decisive role. Hence the relative weakness of the national bourgeoisie in relation to the national proletariat. This creates special conditions of state power. The government veers between foreign and domestic capital, between the weak national bourgeoisie and the relatively powerful proletariat. This gives the government a Bonapartist character. It raises itself so to speak, above classes’. Actually it can govern either by making itself the instrument of foreign capitalism and holding the p proletariat in the chains of a police dictatorship, or by manoeuvring with the proletariat and even going so far as to make concessions to it, thus gaining the possibility of a certain freedom toward the foreign capitalists”. (Writings, 1938-39, Pathfinder, p. 326)]

The Bonapartist state cannot encourage the masses too much without itself being overthrown. Nor can it balance between the two main classes indefinitely so it must crack down on the masses sooner or later. From 1980 the interests of the petty bourgeois class base of the regime forced it to rapidly align itself with national capitalism and re-negotiate its relation with imperialism. [Khomeini deliberately used a populist mixture of radical Islam, Persian nationalism and the glorification of petty commodity production to activate the petty bourgeoisie as the social base of his regime. The mass base of the regime was the Committees for the Islamic Revolution, led by local merchants and mullahs which formed the Pasdaran (Revolutionary Guards) that have played such a reactionary role in attacking workers and women opponents of the regime.] The outcome was the consolidation of an extremist clerical capitalism in which the Islamic leadership became the dominant fraction of the national bourgeoisie.

Khomeini’s Capitalism

As we have seen the Shah was overthrown by a workers’ revolution that had the potential to go on and become a permanent revolution for socialism. Instead it became a reactionary capitalist counter-revolution. At first Khomeini maneuvered towards the workers, the oppressed nationalities and women because he was too weak to smash them. Once he had contained them and consolidated his power he was able to establish a police state to secure bourgeois rule. Khomeini’s anti-imperialist rhetoric and his seizure of the US Embassy were ploys to deceive the workers and disarm them while he rallied the petty bourgeois forces for the counter-revolution.

The US was prepared to pay the price of an Islamic Regime because it forestalled a socialist revolution in Iran. Like the Iranian bourgeoisie, the first consideration of the imperialists was to back a regime that could restore order. Besides it was impossible for the bourgeois government of a semi-colony to break all ties with imperialism. The most it could do was re-open negotiations with imperialism.It sought new contracts with the EEC and Japan to lessen its dependence on the US. Yet the US contracts that were cancelled received full compensation out of oil revenue. The only real worry for the imperialists was the Islamic regime’s ability to contain the workers’ revolution from below. A German businessman expressed this concern:

“Iranian workers seized six employees of a foreign company, locked them in an office and then demanded to see the company’s books. They showed that the company was bankrupt, but they also showed that the European parent company had a bank account in Switzerland. The workers refused to release their European hostages until the parent company dispatched funds to settle all wage claims at the plant.” (RCP, p 23)

As insurance against a workers’ revolution succeeding the US tried to win support in the Iranian army.This failed when Khomeini purged the army in 1984. The US also backed Iraq in an 8-year war with Iran that wasted the lives of millions of workers and peasants and allowed Khomeini to consolidate the counter-revolution.

Rejecting the ‘white revolution’ of the Shah, the regime embarked on a road to economic nationalisation similar to that taken by Mossedegh in the early 1950s. But it was far too late for economic nationalism as a solution to Iran’s dependence. Under the Shah the Iranian economy had been integrated into the world economy. Cutting off important trade, finance and technical links to imperialism meant that the economy was doomed to stagnate. As a result the Islamic state managers became the most powerful section of the national bourgeoisie overseeing this decline. Stagnating state-owned industries became increasingly the property of ‘millionaire mullahs’ whose cronies benefited while the masses suffered increasing economic hardship. Mounting opposition was met by open repression.

Over the 24 years of its existence the reactionary class character of the Islamic Republic has become clearer. The mounting reform movements and the militant student and workers’ oppositions of recent years show that once again a mass mobilisation against a repressive regime is building. This has given the US under its current neo-conservative leadership the opportunity to strike a pose as liberators once more in the never-ending war against the evil axis of terror. This time it is Iran’s nuclear arms program that is the pretext for targeting a ‘rogue’ state. But in reality, after 24 years, the Islamic regime has become expendable. Today US imperialism is embarking on military smash and grab raids to try to patch up its crisis-ridden economy. Iran’s oil reserve is nearly as big as Iraq’s, and US imperialism is desperate to make sure that its imperialist rivals, the EU and Japan, do not get access to this reserve of black gold.

The lesson of permanent revolution

What are the lessons for today? A potentially strong working class has existed in Iran since the onset of capitalist development after World War 1. It became a class capable of revolution by 1979 as we have seen. But in 1953 and 1979 workers were betrayed by the Stalinists (and the other left tendencies) who made deals with the national bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeois Islamists that led to the defeat and destruction of the most advanced layers of the workers’ movement.

Today these Stalinist and guerillaist parties will again collaborate with the bosses and the clerics and play their deadly treacherous role. They must be politically destroyed by healthy revolutionary forces. The masses are impatient with the Islamist dictatorship and are calling for democracy and human rights.Revolutionaries must back this struggle for the basic democratic rights necessary for any social progress. But we have to say that only a socialist revolution can win and defend such democratic rights.

That’s why these basic demands should be accompanied by a complete transitional program of demands that mobilises workers and poor peasants against not only the threat of US imperialist intervention, but the backward national bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie and their reactionary Islamic leadership – for freedom of expression, freedom from the veil, release of political prisoners, the rights of the nationalities to self-determination, and the right of Iran to be armed with nuclear weapons to defend itself from imperialism.These demands must be accompanied by those calling on workers to organise and to occupy the factories and form workers’ councils and militias capable of taking power and creating a Workers and poor Peasants’ Socialist Republic as part of a Federation of Socialist Republics of the Middle East.

To take this program to the workers and poor peasants in Iran the urgent need is for and armed independent working class movement led by a Leninist/Trotskyist party as part of a revolutionary International.

For a Leninist-Trotskyist party in Iran!

For a Workers’ and Peasants’ state!

For a Federation of Socialist Republics of the Middle East!

THE MEDIA AGENDA IN NEW ZEALAND

From Class Struggle 51 July-August 2003

Panics and Profits

Reading the news or watching it on TV one might well wonder how we manage to carry on with our daily lives without being in a state of constant panic.In fact, if you believe the media it is amazing that people actually leave their houses at all.

Most recently people might well have gotten the impression that if they venture out they run the risk of being attacked by a rapist and or mugged by someone high on P or getting SARS.And if it is bad enough for us, then our children are at even greater risk.It seems a pedophile lurks behind every corner.In fact, danger lurks in our very house.If you survive leaky house syndrome, the use of chat rooms and groups may see young people abducted and sexually abused, used in pornographic movies and or having their organs sold.

The media seems almost obsessed by a sort of “panic of the day to make the news pay”. Of course there are the usual fillers, the feel-good stories about cats rescued from trees, the sports news (did we beat Australia at this or that?) and the other sections which pad out the paper (business, real estate, classified adds).But it is the front pages and the first few items on the evening news that attract our attention. And of course as consumers we pay for it.

Doggy news

Recently, papers such as the NZ Herald and the Sunday Star Times have had major features (or more like campaigns) on issues which they feel can beat up a panic or two.

No doubt the Sunday Star Times is patting itself on the back about its campaign to have the dog laws made tougher after a 4 year old girl was attacked by one.

Other media jumped on the bandwagon seizing on the latest panic, dogs on the loose, waiting round every corner (no doubt owned by pedophiles high on P).On the night after the attack “Holmes” interviewed the Minister of Local Government Chris Carter, a doctor who has treated victims of dog attacks, and a representative of the Rotweiller Association.Holmes virtually attacked the Minister and the Rotweiller owner while lapping up the doctor’s descriptions of the wounds inflicted by dogs.

Within the next few days there were a few cases of people throwing stones at dogs and their owners in public places (such as Long Bay).The NZ Herald reported the events with a sort of pious disgust, cynically since it was their grandstanding which launched the dog panic in the first place.

The end result was that our already tough dogs laws were made even tougher. The penalties were increased for owners of dogs who attacked people and most ridiculously people now have to turn their house into a sort of fortress if they have a dog. As well as fencing their property they will have to ensure anyone can get from the gate to the front door without hindrance from a dog. This will mean many people will need to erect new fencing both around their house and within its boundaries.

These new laws will impact most heavily on working and unemployed people, many of whom have a dog for companionship. By blaming the individual (a common theme in the media) these laws also increase individual isolation. We are encouraged to distrust those who own fierce-looking dogs (might they be criminals themselves?). The building of fences furthers this by contributing to cutting us off from our neighbors.

There is no doubt that the media presentation of the case of the little girl being savaged by a dog contributed to these new laws.Prior to the incident there were no plans to change the existing law.The evidence that dog attacks were on the increase is patchy at best and as pointed out by Chris Carter on “Holmes” in some areas attacks had gone down.

The way in which the media presents “facts” in a story or even the very facts it chooses to present contribute to our perception of events or trends in society.

Covering the Casualties

We see this on an international front.Most recently the imperialist war against Iraq quickly got presented and reported as a continuation of the so-called “war on terror.”

Even the New Zealand media, in a country which was not part of the US, led coalition of the willing (or should that be coalition for the drilling) reported events from a US slant. Iraqi casualties got in the road of stray bullets while every supposed victory of the US-led forces was reported in detail, even imaginary detail like the rescue of Private Jessica Lynch.

And if the New Zealand reporting was less than objective, the US reporting was simply slavish and embedded in the US civilising missionary position.News channels such as Fox (Murdoch’s monster) reported the war almost as if it were some sort of sport, using glib intros and dramatic commentary. Those that refused risked getting a stray bullet. It is hardly surprising in all this that the majority of US citizens supported the war.Unless they bothered to go on the internet and check out some of the alternative media sites or read some of the few anti-war papers like the Village Voice in New York they got a completely distorted picture.

The world media should hang its head in shame - in fact they should simply own up and admit they have been had,particularly now that it has been found that the weapons of mass destruction that Iraq was supposed to have were non-existent. Of course, the media won’t hang its head, and the reason for this is simple: the media is part of the whole rotten game.It is a myth that the media is some sort of independent Fourth Estate. The media has always been dedicated to the Capitalist Estate.

The Capitalist Estate

50 years ago the media outlets in NZ were largely owned locally and run as independent businesses.They were fiercely capitalist (hardly surprising since they were capitalist enterprises). As the cartoon from the left wing publication “Tomorrow” in 1937 reflects, even then the media could be seen to have an agenda which was anti-worker. In his book “The Unauthorized Version – A Cartoon History of New Zealand” Ian Grant reflects that National Party advertising and newspaper editorials were “barely distinguishable” (Page 164 – 1980 edition).

The big difference that has occurred over the last 50 years is that most major media outlets are now concentrated in a few hands. As Isaac Kearse points out in his excellent article on the Indymedia website entitled “Who owns the media” (http://www.indymedia.org.nz/media.php3) Transnational Capitalism has the New Zealand Media sewn up.Referring to research from an article by Bill Rosenberg he starts with the following startling facts:

“Three multi-national corporations dominate the news media in NZ, combined they control over 90% of daily newspaper circulation over 90% of commercial radio stations commercial free-to-air and pay-TV”. He then goes on to break down the facts, documenting the three Billionaires who dominate the New Zealand media scene.

In the print media, the big player is Independent Newspapers Ltd (also known as INL). They provide 70% of newspapers, magazines and sporting publications in New Zealand. INL is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp Ltd. [It has just been sold to Fairfax in Australia though this is unlikely to make much difference.] Murdoch is notorious for his interference and censorship of alternative points of view. The Fox Network mentioned earlier is also part of this evil empire.

One of the clearest examples of the Murdoch agenda can be seen in the following case outlined by Isaac Kearse:

“In 1996 WTVT, a Florida Fox-TV station owned by Murdoch provided perhaps the clearest example of censorship and interference by a media owner in history: In November 2 WTVT reporters uncovered that Florida's milk was coming from cows fed with a Monsanto hormone called rBGH. The hormone is legal in the US but was banned in many European countries after advice from medical researchers that it may lead to cancer of the colon in humans. Monsanto's lawyers contacted the executives of Fox-TV, and complained that the documentaries were inaccurate. Fox sent David Boylan to Florida, and eventually after more than 70 rewrites, the show was pulled, and the reporters fired, despite WTVT finding no fault with the reporting. In a moment of insane candour, David Boylan told an unvarnished truth, which should be framed and stuck on the top of every television set: "We paid $3 billion for these television stations," he snapped, "We'll decide what the news is. NEWS IS WHAT WE SAY IT IS.”

Murdoch’s operation is also notoriously anti-worker.His flagship the UK tabloid The Sun was one of the staunchest supporters of the Tories and the right-wing anti-union policies of Thatcher. The Sun only switched sides and editorialised in favour of Labour when Labour had swung so far to the right that it was clearly no longer any sort of threat to Big Business.

However, not content to merely editorialise, Murdoch went a step further, attempting to de-unionise his own business by moving non-union staff from the traditional home of UK News, Fleet Street, to a new plant at Wapping. He then got rid of the unionised staff in London, helped of course by the anti-union policies of Thatcher’s Government.

Other big players

In New Zealand, the other two big players are Wilson & Horton and CanWest. Wilson & Horton was the last major local player involved in the media game, the jewel in their crown being New Zealand’s biggest daily, The New Zealand Herald.The stable also includes The New Zealand Listener and The New Zealand Woman’s Weekly.In all Wilson & Horton publications account for 41.6% of daily NZ circulation.

Wilson & Horton is now part of the Independent News & Media group, yet another transnational media giant.This arrangement also controls TRN which accounts for over 50% of radio advertising and was formed when the commercial radio stations of Radio New Zealand were sold off in 1996.

As for CanWest, this Canadian-based company owns TV3 and TV4, leaving TV1 & TV2 the only non-privately controlled TV stations.It is likely that if National is re-elected they will seek to sell off TV2 with the support of ACT who would probably prefer that the New Zealand Government had no involvement in either TV1 or TV2.

The fact that New Zealand’s media is merely a creature of international capitalism is no accident.The control and filtering of information to the public is a crucial lynchpin in capitalism’s overall agenda to limit dissent and suppress revolution.The media acts as a “gatekeeper” ensuring the public largely gets the establishment’s view.

Writers such as Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman have written on the way in which the media is controlled by and for the interests of the powerful, most famously in their book “Manufacturing Consent.”

It follows from this that the type of stories the media pushes home in on individual responsibility and direct the blame to people rather than the structures they live under.So the problems are owners of fierce dogs and people with a criminal background, rather than capitalism which leads to such behaviour.

Nationalise Consent

Influenced by analysts like Chomsky, some so-called socialists believe that if the state can control the media, or own some of it, that this will solve the problem. Media can then be democratically regulated to reflect the interests of the masses rather than the capitalists. The problem with this “Social Democrat” solution is that as long as capitalism exists then the media will reflect the dominant bourgeois ideology. This represents society as based on the fetishised relations of exchange, inverting and obscuring the underlying social relations of production. While they are part of capitalist society, publicly-owned media will present reality as one in which the state can reform capitalism by making sure everyone gets paid the full value of their work.

This explains why state or quasi-state media organizations such as TENS with a public charter must promote a utopian view of society in which laws can regulate dogs, GE, interviewing style, solo mums, immigrants; and profits, so long as we are all devoted to equal rights and responsibilities, caring and sharing. Still, it is better to have a BBC that will tell Blair he has lied than a Fox that will bankroll Bush’s wars. We just have to be clear that the BBC’s critical stance presupposes that if Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction etc etc then Blair would have no case to answer. Of course it has nothing to do with the BBC that Blair had to lie to sell the war for oil.

Cybersocialism?

One modern development that has given the media moguls a run for their money is the Internet.While the Internet is dominated by giant corporations - Microsoft, CNN, Yahoo etc. - it does open up sites for incitement.Amongst the ruling class there is a widespread hatred of the free-for-all that is the Internet but they need it to sell their commodities.The freedom of expression that exists on the Internet leads to a huge variety of material, some of which is downright offensive, but it is this very freedom which gives organizations like Indymedia the ability to get an alternative message out which in turn can be used in articles like this one.

Sadly, many on the left alarmed by some of the most extreme content on the net are calling for the state to step in and take more control of it.This is a crucial tactical error and works on the assumption that the state is some sort of neutral figure.If we cede control of the Net to the state or corporations like Microsoft then we lose the possibility of using the net to extend freedom of speech and the dissemination of information independently of the giant media combines. We must all fight for:

• Unconditional defence of the internet and opposition to controls by business or the state
• Fight any plans to sell the two State-owned TV stations or National Radio. Although state media has its weaknesses (as outlined above) it is still possible for citizens to have some say, however minor, in its running. Fighting for the democratic right to control the media is a crucial step towards socialising the media.
• Support Journalists and printers involved in media unions whenever they take industrial action – it is crucial to keep the newspaper industry unionised
• Speak out against the lies in the media on both national and international issues and seek wherever possible to publicise an alternative point of view.

AN IRAQI TROTSKYIST ANSWERS FAQs ON THE WAR

From Class Struggle 51 July-August 2003

We opposed the war, but we failed to stop it.

What can we learn from this experience?

We opposed the war against Iraq.We tried to stop it. We built a movement that spanned the globe. From Madrid to Auckland, from California to Seoul, we organized in our millions to demonstrate our opposition, our fears, our rage and our disgust.

Yet in our millions, we were unable to win. In our millions, we were unable to stop the wheels of the American war machine. We were reduced to watching the onslaught if not in silence, then in impotent rage, in melancholy.

Has the Antiwar movement suffered a colossal defeat?

Practically, yes. Morally? Morally we have been proven correct. On the question of the validity of the case for war we have been proven correct. But the war is now a historical fact. That Bush and Blair lied and continue to lie is clear, but that they are successful liars is just as clear. The question is not whether the war was just; we always knew it was not. But knowing or proving that it was unjust will never be enough to stop a war.

Why did we fail?Isn’t opposition to war a natural and noble human instinct?

The world does not run in the interests of humanity. The world is run by imperialist superpowers in their own interests. Yankee imperialism has a number of strategic objectives that called for the war on Iraq. The only force capable of countering the imperialist machine is the working class. And yet it was precisely the working class that was not mobilized to oppose the war.

While workers certainly joined the movement, they did so primarily as individuals, atomized cells of a shattered and fragmented labor movement. In the absence of workers internationalism, it was natural they did not see themselves as part of the international working class, but as mums and dads. While mums and dads have every reason to oppose wars that their children are sent to kill and die in, they do not have the means to stop them.

Even at the height of the movement, apart from the odd euphoric moment in Hyde Park or in Rome, we knew that we were not going to win. We knew that the war would happen.

Why couldn’t the international working class stop this war with a general strike?

There were many good instances of this kind of action. The firefighters in Britain spring to mind as a union that was staunch in its opposition. In Greece(and elsewhere) transport workers refused to move military goods and supplies. These moves needed to be emulated and widened to the point of paralyzing the bosses’ economies. There are of course very good reasons why such a strike did not occur. The workers of the world are reeling from decades of counter-revolutionary advance. From New Zealand to Moscow the workers organizations have been repressed and beaten back. In this international situation the warmongers knew that they would not be defeated.

OK we opposed the war, but we failed to stop it. Who can resist the occupation as a historical fact?

In Iraq, the forces of the labor movement had suffered heavy defeats. Since 1968 the Baathist government has been very active in smashing all resistance. The catastrophic Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988 was followed by even more catastrophic military adventures in Kuwait. 13 years of sanctions added their toll. By 2003, the Iraqi working class was disorganized, leaderless and exhausted.

The organizations of the Iraqi working class existed only outside Iraq, ironically in the very imperialist countries that had demanded their obliteration. Traditionally Holland, the UK, and the USA have been the main centers for the exiled Iraqi left. Since 1991 they have been operating in Northern Iraq. From exile the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), the Worker Communist Party of Iraq (WCPI) and numerous other independent Iraqi leftists opposed the war.

If the communists are weak can the Baathists muster support?

When war was declared, the Iraqi people took some measure of revenge on the Baath Party by leaving it to its fate, refusing to defend it. The Baath nationalist dictatorship was unable to stand up to the assault. Aware that it was not able to win any head-on military confrontations with the American forces, the Baath Party preferred to melt away. The dictatorship had given orders to its followers, to its Republican Guard and other elements close to the regime, to embark on a campaign of looting and murder. The world watched as the museums and the banks were stripped.

But the Baathists are still resisting the occupation

In the weeks since the fall of Baghdad, Baathist forces have been engaged in a campaign of provocation and sabotage that has reinforced their anti-worker credentials. They have routinely sent armed men into unarmed demonstrations and shot US soldiers, inviting return fire. They have attacked Iraqi electricity workers trying to restore power to parts of the city of Baghdad. They have given the occupying forces a ready excuse to do what they will. Under their leadership, Baghdad fell and was occupied by the Yankee invader. This fact alone is enough to condemn the dictatorship to ignominy.

If neither the communists nor Baathists can defeat the occupation, how do we take our fate into our own hands?

The occupation is a historical fact. We must learn from it that we must never trust a nationalist dictatorship to defend the workers anywhere, at any time.

We are unable to undo history. We must not tire no matter how bitter the pill it forces down our throat. The occupation of Iraq by the Yankee invaders is a painful state of affairs.

Rather than desperation, what is required now of the Iraqi revolution is firmness. We must strive to turn this reversal into its opposite, into a defeat for imperialism. A number of important steps have been taken already. Generally, we must turn the Imperialist occupation into a workers’ revolution.

How do we go from occupation to revolution?

It is clear that occupation will not end without a victorious armed struggle. Having said that, for the Iraqi left to start armed struggle against the Yankee occupier at this stage is suicidal. It would in fact not be very different from the tactics of the Islamic groups in Palestine. Small forces of armed men taking pot shots at passing US convoys may meet the mechanical demands of anti-imperialists in the West, but it offers no solution to the Iraqi working class.

What is your perspective?

Iraqi left forces must form a united front of labor and begin organizing a liberation movement. The people of Iraq already march through the streets protesting the occupation. Their anger and their energy must be harnessed. We need boycott the puppet Governing Council, which is made up of handpicked US stooges and demand and urgently build a constituent assembly. That way we can build the mass workers movement as the only possible way we can liberate Iraq.

How can we do this practically?

There are signs of this process beginning. The Worker-Communist Party of Iraq (WCPI) is playing a lead role in organizing the movement. It has already initiated “The Preparatory Committee for Forming Workers’ Councils and Trade Unions in Iraq”. This is an excellent development. The councils in particular have the potential to become the basic organizations for workers’ democracy.

The WCPI have formed a union for the unemployed. As of June 17^th, they had signed up around 20,000 members to the Union of Unemployed in Iraq (UUI). The basic demands of the union can be summarized as “either jobs, or Unemployment insurance”. They have already scored astonishing successes, such as the occupation of the old Iraqi trade union building. The soldiers of Iraq’s Army have been successful in their demand for payment of their wages.

The Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) was founded on the 22^nd of June. Already they have established the first women’s shelter in the Middle East. They are organizing against the Islamist elements that are trying to impose the reactionary veil and other aspects of their reactionary politics on the secular women of Iraq, and they are organizing against the occupation.

How does this kind of organizing help in the struggle for freedom from occupation?

Firstly it takes the initiative back from the Islamists. After the collapse of the dictatorship, the Islamic currents gained a brief advantage. They were the only organization in Iraq that had a ready audience and an existing infrastructure. They sent their armed men into hospitals and food banks and set themselves up as repositories of medicine and general help.

It did not take long for the true nature of this movement to show itself. Liquor stores were bombed, women were forced to adopt Islamic customs.

Secondly, this kind of movement is a mass movement that is oriented directly to the blue-collar workers and the unemployed who number in the millions. It is imperative that the movement must encompass oil and transport and other workers, decommissioned soldiers, students etc. This movement must evolve to include all the working classes and other exploited classes in Iraq.

Is there really no alternative but a workers’ revolution?

There will be no Marshal plan for Iraq. While George Bush may be able to pledge 15 billion dollars to help fight AIDS in Africa (Bush’s re-election is coming up) he is unable to find the money to rebuild Iraq. The US economy is not the powerhouse it was in post World War II period.

Let there be no mistake, it is the imperialists of the world, and the USA in the first instance, that are responsible for all the tragedies of modern Iraq, including Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. Far from being liberators, the Yankees are seen correctly as the cause of Iraq’s suffering. As Saddam himself said, the Baathists were brought to power “aboard an American train”. Far from greeting them as liberators, we should present them with a bill for the last 35 years of Iraq’s suffering.

The demands for jobs and for unemployment insurance will not be met. The capitalists of Iraq are not able to offer anything to the workers. Neither are the capitalists of the USA.

But there are factories in Iraq. There are fields in Iraq. There are minerals in Iraq. And there are millions of workers, scientists, technicians, peasants and students, soldiers and mothers in Iraq.

It is time to take these resources, from the fields of Babylon to the oilfields of Kirkuk, and to put them to work for the good of the toilers of Iraq.

How do workers and peasants take control?

It is necessary for the movement that has already started fighting to begin occupying the factories and the oil fields.

We have shown that we can organize the defense of our streets and neighborhoods; now let us run and organize the defense of our workplaces.

If we do not start taking what is ours, the American occupier will. Their plans to privatize public industry into the hands of their own capitalists are well known.

This ancient civilization that gave the world the first alphabet, can once again lead the world by showing the way to a truly human, socialist society. We can do this by convincing Iraqi workers that they can win a new society in which workers and producers are able to transcend the tyranny of imperialism and capitalism.

---

Workers Aid to Free Iraq!

The red-hot question facing workers internationally is this: can Bush get away with his invasion and occupation of Iraq?The US stepped up its role of world policeman by unilaterally invading Iraq to make ‘regime change’. The ‘blank cheque’ that the US issued after S11 was filled out. The invasion of Iraq marked a decisive shift from the previous Gulf War which stopped short of invasion, and the wars in Serbia, Kosovo and Afghanistan that were waged jointly by all the imperialist powers.By going it alone, the US was signaling a breakdown of the UN and the ‘collective security’ of the imperialist bloc.The open rivalry of the US, EU, and less visibly, Japan, the major imperialist powers, was now ‘all go’ again. The US invaded and occupied Iraq.

This defeat had serious international repercussions most notably the stepping up of attacks against Palestine, against the revolutionary workers in Latin America, further repression of migrants and trade union rights in the US, and the warnings to Iran and North Korea that the US would not tolerate the development of nuclear weapons. The cost of this invasion to the US is that the Emperor now has no clothes.All the flimsy pretexts for war have been exposed as lies. The end of Saddam has brought a US military dictatorship up against the Iraqi people and their desire for democracy. So now US imperialism faces the prospect of escalating resistance in Iraq. If this opposition becomes organised and spreads internationally this can reverse some of the setbacks flowing from Iraq’s defeat.

Already opposition in the imperialist countries is spreading among those who supported the war as the reasons for the invasion are being seriously challenged even inside the ruling class. However, while we call on workers in these countries (and in their lackey client states like NZ) to mobilise and defeat their own ruling classes to prevent them from going to war and to get the US/UK out of Iraq, it is the ongoing armed confrontation between US military and the Iraqi people that is the critical point for the world revolution.

Faced with this reality, we urgently need a specific plan of action to support this resistance.If it was correct to defend Iraq during its war with the imperialist invaders it is still correct to call for military aid to go to the resistance to defeat the imperialist occupiers including those of the armed forces of our‘own countries’.If it was correct to bloc militarily with the Baathists and Islamics against the imperialists, it is still correct today to bloc with all those fighting the imperialists.However, these two political currents have their class base in the national state bureaucracy and the petty bourgeoisie. Their real interests are in doing a deal with imperialism to get the franchise to run Iraq. Therefore we defend them only if they are fighting the imperialists and not the workers.

That is why we say that the working class and the poor peasants alone have an interest in liberating Iraq from imperialism.Working class organisations have to be rebuilt. We support all the efforts of revolutionaries to organise and arm workers. We support the organisation of the unemployed for jobs, workers’ occupations of factories, and the formation of workers’ self-defence committees and militias.

That is why we call for the anti-war workers in the labour movement to take action to Free Iraq.We say that workers’ material aid should go only to those workers and peasants who organise independently of the capitalist, petty capitalist and reformist parties whose class interests are to collaborate with imperialism. We also make clear that, to organise and mobilise successfully against imperialism and its national collaborators, a revolutionary party capable of leading the insurgent workers and poor peasants must be built as part of a new international revolutionary working class party.

You can get involved by taking the campaign for NZ workers’ aid to Iraqi workers into your unions and get resolutions in support of the following organisations:

“Union of the Unemployed in Iraq” Union_u_iraq@yahoo.com

Read their official letter to all labor unions and organisations around the world

http://www.wpiraq.org/english/unemployed170603.htm

“Organisation of Women’s Freedom in Iraq”nadia64uk@yahoo.com

announcement of formation on June 22 in Baghdad

http://www.wpiraq.org/english/baghdad010703.htm

Also read about the formation of a “Preparatory Committee for Forming Workers’ Councils and Trade Unions in Iraq” at:

http://wpiraq.org/english/moayed10703.htm

PROSTITUTION, EXPLOITATION AND CAPITALISM

From Class Struggle 51 July-August 2003
The Prostitution Act Reform Bill was passed into law on the 27^th June 2003 by the very narrow margin of one vote.Here we put a communist perspective on this issue and explain why we give critical support to this new law.

A very short history of sex work

This much-debated piece of legislation, though long overdue, was only passed because a Muslim MP Ashraf Chaudhary could not in good conscience vote either for or against it and so abstained.

For this decision he has been pilloried by many as either indecisive, a traitor to Islam or bowing to pressure from his party leader. Asked on the night why he had followed this course of action he responded with the statement that though he could not for religious reasons vote for the Bill, he could not vote against it as it contained some important protections for workers.

Chaudhary was realistic enough to know that just because of his moral objections to prostitution, it was not going to go away. Therefore better to improve the law to make life safer for prostitutes than persecute them for what is a longstanding social practice.

Chaudhary is right. Prostitution has existed for as long as the patriarchal family as more or less ‘deviant’ sex outside marriage. The law and policing practices governing prostitution are the result of social attitudes that recognise that paying for sex outside marriage is widespread, but at the same time should not be ‘normalised’ as no different to marital sex. Why not?

In the patriarchal family the male head of the household was boss and his sons inherited his property.Marital sex was necessary to make sure that his sons were legitimate heirs. Women were paid for their sexual services by their upkeep and were also expected to be the moral champions of monogamy. Prostitution was tolerated because it fulfilled the need for sex outside marriage without threatening to destroy the patriarchal household.

Under capitalism this changed. The working class had no property to pass down to its sons. Instead the working class family became a ‘domestic factory’ for making babies to feed the bosses’ factories. To ensure that dad stayed around to feed the family production line, the ruling class tried to enact legislation to restrict extramarital sex. They also promoted the moralising myths that stigmatised prostitutes as deviants while their mainly male clients usually escaped the law.

Making up Morals

Those who opposed the Bill promoted lots of half-truths and untruths about the Bill and prostitution. They failed and the new Act will remove many of the negative effects of the old laws and in doing so will in time help to dispel some of the lies and myths that surround prostitution.

There have been myths perpetrated within New Zealand for many years about prostitution, most of which have come from the Church, the ‘moral’ right or the Radical Feminist movement These myths include the claim that prostitution was at one time illegal in New Zealand. It has never been illegal. Pimping, brothel keeping, living off the earnings and soliciting on the other hand are, and have been ever since the 19^th century. The obvious effect of these laws is to penalise the prostitute (and the pimp) but not the client.

The main aim and force of the Act is to remove these ‘crimes’ from the Statute books, as the present situation marginalizes the prostitutes and their families.It makes them and their families not only into criminals but also into easy targets for gangs and those who would exploit them for profit.

Job satisfaction for profits

The second myth that the moralists like to perpetrate is that no woman would willingly choose to be a prostitute. But nor do other workers choose freely to work for wages. The truth is that no worker is free to choose under capitalism, as the alternative is starvation or living in an oppressive relationship. Some prostitutes claim that they are not exploited or abused, but are professionals. So do many other workers take a pride in their job. Like the prostitute who does not see that extramarital sex props up the bourgeois family, they also fail to see that their labour produces profits for the bosses and props up capitalism.

Many women ‘try’ prostitution for economic reasons but the vast majority of these women very quickly find that it is not for them. In other words they look for a better job. It is neither ‘easy’ money nor is it morally debasing to the women who choose it as their profession. In that sense prostitution is service that people enter to earn a living. The truth is that it is capitalism and the patriarchal family that create prostitution that are immoral, not the actions of the prostitute or the client.

Pimps stand over tactics

Under the existing legislation parlour owners have more power over their workers than any other group of “bosses”. Though the fiction was maintained that these women were private contractors they were required to work rosters that did not necessarily take into account personal circumstances or commitments.When they refused to do impossible shifts or missed shifts, they were fined (these fines could range from $10 to $50 or more per shift missed). In one case we know of a worker fined (docked) over $500 when she failed to show up for a shift even though she was ill and had rung to inform the “boss” that she would not be in.

Women in parlours were often required to go with any man that chose them and were unable to refuse if they wished to continue to work in that establishment. This was illegal under existing legislation (it was illegal to force or coerce any person to take part in a sexual activity) but because of their marginalized position women could not complain. Under the new law this form of coercion carries with it a sentence of up to seven years in prison.

The law change has made it possible for these women to legally setup their own “houses” or “brothels” without the stand over tactics of the “boss”.There was even a group of parlour owners who opposed the law change for this very reason.As the law stood if a woman had any criminal conviction, and in particular a drug conviction, she was not permitted to work in a parlour and these were often the women who ended up working on the streets.These are the most vulnerable of workers in the industry and the law change will allow them to move off the streets into brothels or to rent a room from which they can work, though many may choose not to change the way that they currently work.

Brothels to pay tax, GST and ACC

This bill now brings parlours/brothels under the same legal restraints as other employers/businesses thus offering a modicum of protection to the workers through the need for these “bosses” to comply with the minimum standards set down by ACC and OSH for the workplace to be safe.So while revenue collection may well be one of the objectives of the bill it is not the only objective, as was portrayed by some of those who opposed it.

Already most parlours (at least in Auckland) require that they know the woman’s real name – this is verified by photo ID and their real addresses, and these are kept on record.Some even require IRD numbers, therefore most of the women who work in the massage parlours are already known to and in contact with the IRD, as are many of the women who work privately.In some towns and cities in New Zealand women are even required to register with the police if they wish to work there, Dunedin for example.

Radical liberal hypocrisy

So called ‘moral’ grounds were not valid reasons for those on the left to have opposed this bill.It is no good claiming that capitalism must be overthrown to get rid of prostitution, but meanwhile doing nothing to help prostitutes to organise and improve their conditions while we prepare for the revolution. The removal of the blatant oppression of women who work in this profession by the parlour owners, the ”bosses” and those who rent apartments with rent plus ‘extra use’ charges were very valid reasons to critically support the Bill.These are the capitalists that profit from the present situation and they are aided by those who choose to use moral grounds for their objections.

It is also wrong for some opponents of this bill to disguise their real agendas behind a professed concern about the conditions and pay of working women. Even if these views are sincerely held, prostitutes are also working women and to use them and their occupation in this manner is to debase their value as women and as human beings, and to treat them as commodities in just the same way as the parlour “bosses” do.

Defeating this bill would have done nothing to assist or alleviate the inequality of wages paid to women workers, nor would it have brought about pay equity or have made any progressive political change to the capitalist system in New Zealand.It would only have allowed the blatant exploitation to continue.

On the other hand, giving critical support for this Bill does not mean that we endorsed prostitution, any more than fighting for wage increases means we endorse wage exploitation. On the contrary capitalism will never by overthrown unless the workers mobilise to demand what they need now to the point where they are strong enough to take it themselves! Prostitutes now will have the same legal rights as other workers to organise and bring about reforms that can hasten the end of the patriarchal family and capitalism.

Crime and drugs red herrings

Another myth is that prostitution causes crime. But the problems associated with drug dependency, mental illness, and suicide cannot be laid “at the door” of prostitution as often these problems are pre-existing.These are problems brought about by the capitalist system and are not the product of any one industry.As figures for the number of women working in the industry are only estimates and often only take into account street walkers or at best include parlour workers, it is impossible to state that statistically this is a more dangerous occupation than many others, including nursing, being a doctor or any other high stress employment.

Another argument raised to prevent the passage of the Bill was that of very young persons taking part in paid sexual activities. Under the old law a man had as a defense the belief that the woman/girl was of the age of consent (this was 16 except if she was working in a massage parlour where the minimum age was 18). This has now changed.All sex workers now have to be of the minimum age of 18 and the onus is on the client to be certain of this.

As for the frequency of assaults and murder, this is higher for streetwalkers than others in the industry as these workers are by far the most vulnerable.This Act can help them to be safer and to move off the streets if that is what they want.But the figures for both assault and murder of women still show that it is women who choose to get out of abusive relationships that are at the greatest risk of both being assaulted and murdered, not prostitutes.

All these myths and misconceptions aside, the workers in the sex industry now have the chance to bring to themselves the greatest protection available to workers everywhere: they are now in the position to either form their own union or to join an existing union and achieve the strength of collective negotiating both for conditions of work and payment.Like the workers in any other industry, this will give them the potential to have control over their labour and remove it from the bosses’ sole discretion. They will not need to rely upon the law and the law enforcement agencies that will often fail to administer the law. They can organise themselves to fight for and defend their rights. And in that they deserve the support of all workers.

All out for the sexual revolution

As Marxists we recognise that prostitution today is the product of capitalism and patriarchy and will not go away until we abolish both. Meanwhile capitalism requires us to sell our labour to survive, and the selling of sexual services is also necessary for the reproduction of bourgeois families and capitalist society. For some these services are performed inside bourgeois marital-type relationships as partners. For others, these services are performed outside the family as prostitutes.

Both services perform a necessary function to capitalism and their providers deserve the same protections as other workers and the same respect.The changes now enacted in the Prostitution Reform Act mark an important step towards equality of opportunity and employment rights for sex workers outside the family who will now be better organised to meet the oppressive tactics of their bosses and the ruling class and pave the way not only for the sexual revolution but for the socialist revolution!

HANDS OFF THE SOLOMONS! NO TO THE KHAKI GREENS!

From Class Struggle 51 July-August 2003

The recent invasion of the Solomon Islands by a force led by Australia and New Zealand represents a new stage in the recolonisation of the Asia-Pacific region. Like Iraq, the Solomons has been occupied in the name of humanitarianism, but in the interests of imperialism. The Facilitation of International Assistance 2003 legislation provides the 2,000-strong military force with both wide-ranging powers and immunity from prosecution under local law.

The legislation was drawn up not in Honiara but in Canberra and Wellington. Such was the contempt in Canberra for the parliamentary deliberations in Honiara that the documents were leaked to sections of the Australian media before they were even tabled in the Solomon Islands. The invaders have tried to argue that their actions are legitimate because they are backed by the people of the Solomons and by the Pacific. But the Solomons parliament which approved the invasion is notoriously corrupt and unrepresentative, and the invaders are lying when they say that other Pacific governments are united in support of their actions.

Green Party MP Keith Locke's disgraceful speech to parliament justifying the invasion showed up the hypocrisy of the pro-invasion left. Locke argued that the invasion was justified because Solomons political leaders like Prime Minister Kamakeza supported it...then went on to acknowledge the corruption of the Solomons political system and to urge its reform!

While corrupt MPs voted for invasion, the Fijian-based Pacific Concerns Resource Centre (PCRC) pointed out that the invasion flatly contradicted the wishes of the National Peace Conference held in August 2000 by representatives of dozens of organisations drawn from many sectors of Solomons society. This conference had called for the demilitarisation of Solomons society, not an invasion led by an Australian army recently responsible for war crimes in East Timor and Afghanistan. The PCRC recognised the blatantly imperialist nature of the invasion, condemning plans for "a governing council of about 12 people led by a chief executive with a light infantry company on standby, a judicial team of 20, prison staff, a group of accountants and other financial managers to administer the economy".

Others have pointed to the presence of small numbers of Fijian and Tongan troops in the invasion force as 'evidence' for Pacific peoples' consent. It's true that, desperate to avoid being the next targets for intervention, Fiji and Tonga have joined the invasion force, but neither of these countries can be called even a bourgeois democracy - one government runs an apartheid system, and the other is an absolute monarchy! Proponents of the invasion do not mention the deep uneasiness of Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu, larger countries with closer ties to the Solomons and traditionally more independent foreign policies.

It’s about imperialism

In 'An Un-Natural Disaster?', an article in Class Struggle #48, we exposed preparations for the invasion in the mass media, the Australasian political establishment, and Australia’s intelligence services. We also pointed out that the social crisis in the Solomons has been caused by the super exploitation of the islands by imperialism, and by the intensification of this super exploitation over the past few years by the ANZAC suits who run the IMF in the South Pacific.

Last November, at the insistence of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Solomon Islands government sacked 1,300 employees – that’s about 30 percent of the public sector workforce. The number of government employees had already been halved from 8,473 to 4,337 between 1993 and 1999.

As part of last November’s ‘reforms’, the Solomons government gave control of its finances to an Australian, Lloyd Powell, for whom the post of Permanent Secretary of Finance was created. Powell is the executive director of the New Zealand-based company Solomon Leonard, which has a proven track record in overseeing austerity programs in the Cook Islands, Vanuatu and Tonga.

Is it any wonder that the slash and burn policies of the IMF and Powell have created economic and social crisis in the Solomons? John Howard and Helen Clark are now using the crisis as an excuse to force neoliberalism on the Solomons at the point of a gun.

Humanitarian Aid - for ANZAC profits

The attempt by the Australian government and media to dress up the Solomons intervention as an act of humanitarian charity is a sham. Australia and New Zealand are interested in the Solomons for economic and strategic reasons.

In a pro-invasion ‘analysis’ called 'Our Failing Neighbour', the Australian Strategic Policy Institute noted: “Prior to the 2000 coup there were about 100 Australian companies doing business in Solomon Islands, with about 30 having operations there. Since the breakdown in law and order this has declined to only a handful having operations on the ground. This amounts to significant economic loss for Australia.”

Howard and Clark are also worried about instability spreading west from the Solomons to the mineral-rich island of Bougainville, where ANZAC troops only recently helped quench a decade-long independence struggle.

Anti-war movement, unions should act

The movement opposing imperialist war and occupations in the Middle East must focus some of its attention on the invasion of the Solomons. If we can’t oppose imperialism on our own doorstep, then we have no chance of helping to defeat it farther afield.

The anti-war movement should demand that all foreign forces stay out of the Solomons, and that Lloyd Powell and the rest of the IMF be kicked out of the country. The New Zealand and Australian governments should forgive the debts they are ‘owed’ by the Solomons, and should fund the recreation of the public sector jobs that the IMF destroyed last year.

The people of the Solomons have a right to defend themselves against the ANZAC invaders. Because of its isolation and underdevelopment, the Solomons lacks a strong workers’ movement, and has no socialist movement at all. Opposition to the invaders may be led at first by tribal or religious forces, but this will not make it illegitimate.

The anti-war movement in wealthy countries like New Zealand has no right to condemn oppressed people in super exploited nations who turn to religious ideas and tribal organisation in an effort to understand and combat their oppression. It is up to the left and the workers’ movement of Australasia to aid the people of the Solomons, and in doing so advance progressive and pro-worker ideas in the country.

The Australasian union movement has a shocking record of support for ANZAC imperialism in the Asia-Pacific region. In 1999, for instance, Aussie trade unionists gave money and labour to build the walled compound that became the headquarters of the UN army of occupation in East Timor. It was from these headquarters that ANZAC thugs launched attacks to crush workers’ and students’ protests with guns and batons, once the reality of occupation had set in for the 'liberated' East Timorese.

Today Australasian unions should aid the victims of imperialism, not the bullies. Strikes and blockades should be organised to stop the movement of supplies and reinforcements to ANZAC troops in the Solomons. The struggling trade unions of the Solomons should be aided, so that they can defend their members against continued IMF cuts and the restrictions on civil liberties which the ANZAC occupiers will introduce.

Khaki Greens hail invasion

Across Australasia, the anti-war movement while united in opposing a US invasion of Iraq is divided over a US-backed invasion far closer to home. The Green and social democratic politicians who tried to dominate the movement against an invasion of Iraq are amongst the loudest supporters of John Howard's latest military adventure. Bob Brown, the leader of Australia's Khaki Green Party, has actually criticised Bush and Howard for not being keen enough, saying that the invasion of the Solomons was 'long overdue'.

Here in New Zealand, the Khaki Greens have shown similar enthusiasm. Greens Foreign Affairs spokesman Keith Locke gave pre-emptive backing to the invasion in a July the 1st speech to parliament. Locke told MPs that he was “not really concerned about the New Zealand troops operating in an insensitive way because they have a very good record internationally”. Does Locke know anything about history? Does he think that the murder of civilians in Vietnam and Korea and the mass execution of POWs in North Africa counts as ‘very good’? Locke went so far as to identify the Greens with the National Party's attitude to the Solomons, saying "I think Bill English was right" in a reference to the National leader's earlier statement to parliament.

Like his friend Bob Brown, Locke has spent years urging the Australasian political establishment to launch an invasion of the Solomons. He’s also been a cheerleader for military intervention in Bougainville, East Timor, Kosovo, and (under UN auspices) Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s doubtful whether any other sitting MP has been such a wide-ranging advocate of the use of New Zealand armed forces overseas as Keith Locke.

Impressed by the size of protests against the invasion of Iraq, some people have argued that the anti-war movement is also an anti-capitalist movement. But the pro-war position of many 'peacenik' liberals and Greens and the gutless silence of the Alliance tell us otherwise.

How can we understand the pro-invasion stance of the Greens? Are they contradicting themselves by opposing New Zealand occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan but supporting a New Zealand occupation in the Solomons? We don’t think so. The Greens are a pro-capitalist organisation rooted in the least efficient section of the New Zealand capitalist class – struggling and small businesses that have nothing to gain from the continued globalisation of the New Zealand economy supported by their more prosperous cousins who back National and ACT.

But the Greens’ business backers oppose globalisation because of their bottom line, not out of concern for workers at home or the Third World. They disagree with Helen Clark not over support for imperialism, but over where exactly and under what banner the army should repress workers and peasants and help extract superprofits. The Greens’ patrons have no chance of competing with the hotshot multinationals carving up the Middle East under the banner of the US (as opposed to the French and Germans), so they naturally opposed the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and called New Zealand military support for these wars a waste of money. It is in the Asia-Pacific region that the green capitalists hope to mark their mark.

The invasion of the Solomons has exposed the politics of the Green Party just as surely as the war on Afghanistan exposed the Alliance. To be sure, the Greens have some honest, hardworking pro-worker rank and file activists, but this doesn't change the class location of the bulk of the party's membership and class nature of the politics their leaders push. By its very nature the Green Party is a futile avenue for pro-worker activism. Now's the time for lefty Greens to get out of this rotten organisation and become full-blooded reds!

Instead of busting their guts for careerists like Locke, they should join the revolutionaries around the world and mobilise the working class to take direct action against the wars of recolonisation which are the survival-mechanism of capitalism in the twenty-first century. The anti-war movement can only develop an anti-capitalist backbone if it attracts the support of the organised working class. Unlike their local capitalists, workers do not have an economic interest in wars of recolonisation.

Keith Locke's pro-invasion speech is online at http://www.greens.org.nz/searchdocs/speech6482.html

THE KINLEITH DISPUTE SETTLEMENT

Leaflet reprinted in Class Struggle 50 May-June 2003

On the 28^th of May 2003, it was announced in a joint press release by the Engineering Printing and Manufacturing Union and Carter Holt Harvey that the 3–month long strike at Kinleith pulp and paper mill, was over.

The settlement that was eventually reached by both parties, resulted from a period that saw the exhausting of 4 mediators and threats of legal action by CHH against the EPMU and individual workers.

When EPMU National Secretary Andrew Little stated in the press release that the health and safety issues at the heart of the unions concerns had been clarified to the unions satisfaction and that ratification by workers spelled the return to work, the question on the lips of workers was, “How many concessions had been made by the union in regards to the conditions that existed in the previous collective agreement that expired 2 years earlier?”

In order to answer the question, it is necessary to consider the comment made by Kinleith Chief Executive and CHH “hatchet man” Brice Landman after the settlement when he said that Kinleith had the chance to move forward again on a “sustainable basis”. First of all, the sustainability that Landman is referring to is a function of the necessary labour required at minimum cost to maximize profits sufficient enough to head off the effects of trading in a depressed market. In other words – the control of labour. This is an argument well understood by union negotiators conditioned with an “economism” mindset. The problem for workers is that it lays the way open for compromises and concessions that always favour the bosses.

The two key areas that were won by the company and prime reasons for CHH’s move against the union where the all-up “salarisation” of pay structures and the final say in the promotion and appointments of senior staff. Calling them concessions would be an understatement.

The “red herring” of the company wanting production workers to replace the full time professional fire service amounted to CHH using an unrealistic proposition to apply leverage in a trade-off against the union so that eventually the

salary and promotion issues could be brought in. The cost of maintaining the Fire service amounts to less than the salary of CHH half owners International Paper CEO John Dillon’s US$8.96million, the result of a 62% pay rise last year even though IP lost a net sum of US$880 million.

Adding yet more “red herrings”, legal action against the EPMU and senior Kinleith delegate James “Whisky” Hastie, were instigated by CHH for supposed damages from earlier strikes. The attempt to extend the lawsuit against a further 6 workers was described as “tactical industrial strategy” by EPMU lawyer Dr Rodney Harrison. Whichever way one looks at the strategy used by CHH, it clearly had the effect of pressuring the union to accept the new conditions of employment.

A further example of tactical manipulation against the union was CHH’s refusal to settle the long drawn out negotiations over 2 years for a new collective agreement, because it wanted to exhaust all of the union’s resources to the point that workers would settle individually on the company’s terms. When laid-off maintenance workers were rehired by ABB Contractors, it was on an individual basis, though some remained members of the EPMU, a right protected under law.

Voices from the Rank and File

CHH’s serious lack of “Good Faith” reminiscent of the bad old days under the ECA seems to have done it no harm at all. Political non interference especially by local MP and Minister of Defense Mark Burton who was more sympathetic to the company; highlighted an expression by Bill (not his real name), one of the striking workers, when he said that the Labour Party was no longer a workers Party. It had caused him and others to question the role of the EPMU as an affiliate of the Labour Party. He went on to say that he could not understand why the dispute had dragged on for as long as it did and why some workers were saying that they could smell a rat, but could not put a finger on it.

Bob (not his real name) a veteran of 33 years at the mill, said none of the bosses who run Kinleith actually live in Tokoroa.

“Landman and the rest of them come from Taupo, Rotorua and Cambridge; they don’t belong to the local community or live in the immediate environs. It’s them and us as far as I’m concerned. Bugger the lot of them I say!”

Rex (again not his real name) one of the site delegates and almost 30 years at the mill had this to say.

“The level of support that we have been getting from locals, and workers from other unions and work sites has been great. A couple of tonnes of spuds were sent from some watersiders over in Tauranga who ended up dumping their company union for a proper one. We received plenty of food stuffs from all over to be distributed among all the affected workers and their families not to mention the wild pork and meat hunted locally by some of the boys when they’re not on protest camp duty. The really amazing thing though, has been the nearly $10,000 that we have been receiving from supporters each week during the strike. What you get to appreciate during a “blue” (strike/dispute) such as ours, is the amount of solidarity within the rank and file and its importance. No doubt being rural and isolated helps to amplify the effect of that support. But it shows that real strength for all workers can only come when we are all united. Some of the blokes who remember the bitter split after “91”when the bulk of Kinleith joined the “Engineers” (EPMU), some of us were a little embarrassed when a “Woodies” (NDU) delegation came over from Tasman Pulp and Paper to show solidarity with us. If the shoe was on the other foot, we would go and support them in similar circumstances.”

Joe (not his real name) now retired having spent most of his working life at the mill as a “Pulpy” and not an “Engineer”, reflects on the real characters of the union movement who were the towers of strength.

“Quite simply they were the core of the Rank and File. They never occupied positions of official office, more a limitation of their lack of education, I reckon. But given the right political direction some of them could have become revolutionaries. I remember wanting to belt the crap out of union sell-out bureaucrat Ray Hamilton years ago and feeling the anger that was there and its still there. Characters like Hamilton are still with us today running unions like they were their personal little empires.”

Where to now?

When union-busting American forestry company International Paper bought into CHH more than a decade ago, it did so quite conscious of the fact that the ECA of the day provided the right environment for it to exploit the fast growing forests to supply the rapidly rising demand in Asia. Through its practice in the US and Mexico of forcing the closure of mills to counter unions and militant workers, it thought that applying the same methods in NZ would effect similar results if it thought that its interests were being threatened.

We have seen in the last 10 years the slashing of Kinleith’s work force from nearly 2000 down to 270, pulp and paper production at record levels - way in excess of 500,000 tonnes, the longer hours and accompanying stress for the workers. The rate of worker exploitation has increased 8 fold with the acquisition of machinery bought as part of a $900 million up-grade over the last 13 years. The profit returns on investment last year amounted to $137 million or less than 7% of the injected capital which was more reflective of the depressed international commodity prices at the time.

IP/ CHH finds itself in the undreamed of position (from a capitalist point of view) of existing at a time when the lone super-power in the world, the US, has the means to force economic conditions on workers (militarily if necessary), favourable to grossly exploitative Tran-National Corporations. The US conquest of Iraq is the best illustration of what can be expected where it is dictating the terms to bring its workers under its thumb.

“TO BE YOUNG, GIFTED, AND ... SIMONE!”

From Class Struggle 50 May-June 2003

by Mumia Abu-Jamal

"...Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought."Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), 'To a Skylark'

When the historical record of the Twentieth Century is finally written, a special chapter will have to be penned about the remarkable and talented singer, who was called Nina Simone (1933-2003).

In any true history, words, no matter how skillfully crafted, or masterfully moulded, will fail to capture the brilliance of the woman. Some recording must be appendixed, so that the student will be blessed to hear her thrilling contralto, dark, full, rich as earth in the promise of spring.

Also required, will be a collection of her lyrics, so that no one may miss the words that she dared set to music and bring to life, with a fury, a passion, and sheer artistic courage that continue to dazzle years, decades even, after their creation.

She was an Artist (with a capital 'A') in every sense of the word, but she was far more than that term now suggests.She was proud, imperial, majestic and deliciously arrogant as say, the late jazz great Miles Davis was, in his prime.

The writer remembers her appearing in the late 1970s, in an outdoor, mid-day concert at the Bell Tower at Temple University.She looked out at the crowd with nervous irritation, not fear driven by the uncertainty of her performance, but a barely suppressed anger that there were only hundreds of people gathered to hear her, not thousands.

She sang songs with bite, and grit, and pride and longing... and rage.Deep, down, boneset rage, at how cheaply life was lived for Africans in America.Her "Mississippi Goddamn" was an anthem that stirred, not merely the Civil Rights Movement, but also the Black Liberation Movement: "You don't have to live next to me, just give me my equality!” she demanded.Her songs could also be tender, loving odes to the multiflavored beauty and spirits of Black women, as in her signature "Four Women", which spoke of the various moods and hues of her sisters. Decades before Erykah Badu would wear the head wrap Simone did so, and walked as regally as the Nubian princess that she became.

Although she was born in the Jim Crow South, the apartheid way of quiet acceptance was never hers, and she spoke out boldly, in her art, and in her interviews, against the injustices suffered by her people.

When the Nixon-era began, she bid her homeland adieu, and like a generation of other brilliant Black Americans (like the writer, Richard Wright) who could not abide the nastiness, meanness, and racial indignities of the time, she migrated to live with dignity in France.

Some reviewers have pronounced her career essentially over when she left the U.S. during the '70s, never to rise again. But great artists, like great music, have a habit of resurrection.

In the early '90s, an American film emerged that was a borrowing from the French.Bridget Fonda portrayed an alienated, drug-addicted, youngster who got caught up in a failed drugstore robbery, turned killing.She was spirited into a shadowy spy agency where she worked invariably played Nina Simone records in the background to reflect her moodiness.The film was titled "Point of No Return" (a U.S. remake of "La Femme Nikita.") A generation of young filmgoers were thus exposed to the wonder and power of Simone's magnificent instrument.

Where are the Simones of this generation? They are there... in the shadows, perhaps; but they are there.

They are perhaps afraid of giving as much as their recently departed ancestor.For, even they know that she sacrificed a good deal to sing the songs that moved her great heart.Such a prospect is no doubt scary.

Yet, one wonders, who among the madding throng will be remembered, not to mentioned revered 30 years from now?How much of what is produced now furrows its way into the heart, or rings the deep bell of recognition in the soul?Who will sing of the wonder, the terror, the beauty, and the madness of Black life in this new century?

End

ANTI-CAPITALISM OR STALINISM IN NEPAL?

From Class Struggle 50 May-June 2003

Backed by the US and the UK, the government of Nepal is trying to end a decades-long political crisis by winning international support and aid for its efforts to crush or co-opt internal political opponents. Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the world, with 42 percent of the population below the poverty line, according to official figures. Per capita income is $250 and 36 percent of the population consume less than the minimum daily calorie requirement. About 60 percent of adults are illiterate, while for women the rate is 70 percent. Life expectancy is 58.1 years and the infant mortality rate is 75 per thousand births.

Since 1996 guerrillas of the Communist Party-Maoist (CPM) have fought an on-again, off-again war with the Nepalese government, which is run by a King with the help of a weak parliament. In all, an estimated 7,200 people have died in the fighting. Supported by UK military advisers and US cash, the Nepalese government has been guilty of numerous breaches of the human rights of the workers and poor peasants who form the base of the CPM’s support(1).

Myth vs Reality

Here in New Zealand, the Anti-Capitalist Alliance has written extensively about the situation in Nepal, and is holding a series of public meetings on the issue(2). It is certainly true that, with war in the Middle East and turmoil in Latin America, not enough attention has been given by the left to events in Nepal. However, the message the ACA is spreading about Nepal seriously misrepresents political events in that country. According to the ACA, the CPM is leading the Nepalese workers and peasants to an anti-capitalist revolution. Here are some excerpts from ACA leaflets and articles:

“People’s War (PW) in Nepal, which was initiated in February 1996 under the leadership of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) has been developing in leaps and bounds. The fire of revolution, which initially sparked in a few districts in Western Nepal, has swept all over the country...The reality is that the Nepalese people are in the process of building their own people’s government while attacking the old state power. ..The above affirms the truth of the dictum penned by Mao Tse-Tung, ‘Political power grows from the barrel of a gun’. To truly win political power the masses must take action and overthrow the old society. This is what is happening in Nepal”

Sounds great, right? Well, yeah, except that getting rid of capitalism is not actually high on the CPM’s list of priorities. When we say this, we’re not relying on rumours, or merely making a prediction – the CPM itself has repeatedly made it very clear that it is fighting for a capitalist, not anti-capitalist, Nepal.

The leaders of the CPM want to see a Nepal dominated by Nepalese rather than foreign capitalists. Like Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland and the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka/Tamil Elam, they are keen to sell out the struggle of their rank and file members in return for places in a capitalist government. The CPM’s military campaign is designed only to force the Nepalese ruling class to allow their leaders into the circle of power. When the Nepalese ruling class installed a new Prime Minister called Deuba in office in 2000, the CPM hailed it as ‘a great advance’ and a ‘victory over reaction’, called off its armed struggle, and appealed to ‘all parties’ to form a government of national unity.

The CPM only restarted its war after S 11, when the Nepalese ruling class was emboldened to try to crush it as a ‘terrorist’ force. Now the CPM has organised another ceasefire with the Nepalese government, and is trying to bargain its way into a government. To show just how bad the politics of the CPM are, we will quote from an interview that its deputy leader Baburam Bhattarai gave last year to the Washington Times (14/12). Commenting on international interest in the conflict in Nepal, Bhattarai noted that:

“It is good that the international community is now awakened by the ever-intensifying civil war in Nepal, and is showing concern for its just and logical conclusion...Our own preference would be to settle the problem internally without any external interference. But if the complexities of the situation, particularly Nepal's specific geostrategic positioning between two superstates, India and China, so dictate, then we would not mind facilitation or mediation of some genuinely neutral international organizations”

Bhattarai is saying that the CPM would like to come to an agreeable deal with Nepal’s capitalists on its won, but that if it is absolutely necessary outside capitalists can help to reach a settlement. Bhattarai’s faith in the existence of ‘neutral’ international capitalist organisations does not exactly mark him out as a revolutionary. Just like Stalin, the CPM hopes to use Europe and the UN as counterweights to US imperialism. Bhattarai goes on to say that:

“We have time and again made it clear that we will have diplomatic and friendly relations with all the countries of the world on the basis of five principles (Panchsheel) of peaceful coexistence — namely mutual respect for each other's sovereignty and national integrity, non-interference in each other's internal affairs, equality, mutual benefit and peaceful coexistence. Given the specific geostrategic position of the country sandwiched between the two huge and hostile states of India and China, we will strive to maintain friendly and equidistant relations with the two immediate neighbors. It is just ridiculous to presume that a state of Nepal's size and strength can inflict by design any harm to giant India”

Bhattarai is talking of friendly relations with a state that has for decades fought and repressed its own Maoist guerrillas. So much for socialist internationalism and spreading revolution. Bhattarai goes on to lay out his party’s politicalprogramme:

“Of course, the basic thrust of our economic development policy would be self-reliance and abolition of dependency, which has plagued the country's economy for long. For this we intend to restructure our economic relations with foreign countries and multilateral institutions in a friendly and cooperative manner...Please note that we are not pressing for a "communist republic" but a bourgeois democratic republic.”

Bhattarai isn’t lying when he denies plans for communism. He and the CPM have nothing to say about the seizing of property and capital by the workers and peasants of Nepal and the establishment of a planned economy. Seizing US-owned factories and farms wouldn’t be ‘friendly’, so it’s not an option. Bhattarai’s vision is of a national capitalism in Nepal, not of socialism. The CPM has not taken control of private businesses in the so-called ‘red zones’ of Nepal it controls. It merely taxes these businesses, like any good capitalist government would. Since Bhattarai’s interview the CPM has moved even further to the right, giving up even its demand for a republic in Nepal. It is now prepared to put up with a constitutional monarchy. Some revolution.

What’s behind the CPM’s Sellout Politics?

The CPM won’t challenge capitalism in Nepal because its leadership is made up of Stalinists. Their political heroes are Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot (Bhattarai actually makes a point of defending Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime in the interview quoted above). The CPM even features a picture of Stalin on the cover of its official magazine, The Worker. The party leaders agree with Mao’s assessment of Stalin as ‘a great Marxist-Leninist’ and employ the ‘two-stage’ strategy Stalin laid down for revolution in the semi-colonial world. According to Stalin, the semi-colonial world had to become capitalist before it could be socialist.

Socialists had to make political alliances with local capitalists to oppose the foreign capitalists, and then allow local capitalists to take the lead in any post-colonial government. Stalin used his theory of two-stage revolution to make deals with Western imperialist governments. He would order local communists to work for ‘national capitalism’ not socialism, and grateful imperialists would make concessions which strengthened his regime in the USSR.

Stalin’s two-stage strategy was opposed by Trotsky, who pointed out that the October revolution had happened only because Russian revolutionaries had not made a political alliance with the local capitalists who took power after the February revolution. Trotsky argued that revolutionaries should make only a ‘military bloc’ with their local capitalists to get rid of foreign capitalists. In other words, they should aim their fire in the same direction as the local capitalists in the fight against imperialism, but keep their independence and be ready to get rid of the local capitalists when the foreign capitalists were defeated. Only by overthrowing capitalism can Third World nations break out of the global grid of capitalism and establish a planned economy aimed at meeting people’s needs, not the needs of the global marketplace.

The ‘national capitalism’ that the two-stage strategy brought about in many postcolonial countries has proven Trotsky to be right – in country after country, national capitalism has meant neo-colonial economies still dependent on the West and overseen by corrupt and brutal dictators bankrolled by the West(3).

Still lost in the Congo?

So why is a group calling itself the Anti Capitalist Alliance giving good PR to Stalinists who want to bring national capitalism to Nepal? The ACA has quite rightly been a staunch critic of leftists who thought that the UN or European Union could provide a progressive ‘solution’ to the crises in Iraq and Palestine.

Why doesn’t the ACA criticise the CPM’s appeals to the UN, European Union, and other ‘neutral international organisations’? The ACA has pioneered the view that left reformism is finished in New Zealand because there is no ‘material base’ for it – in other words, because New Zealand is too poor to payfor left-wing reforms. How then can the ACA support the CPM’s reformist capitalist programme in Nepal, one of the poorest countries in the world?

In Auckland, the ACA consists of the Workers Party, a group which shares the Stalinist politics of the leadership of the Communist Party-Maoist in Nepal. In his booklet Apostles of Treachery, Workers Party founder and chief ideologue Ray Nunes summed up the party’s thinking:

‘Let us put it in the form of a simple equation: Stalinism = communism, therefore Hate Stalin = Hate communism’ (pg 41)

Like the Nepalese Stalinists, the Workers Party is strongly influenced by Shining Path, the Peruvian group which modelled its politics on Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, and seriously disorganised the fight against US-backed governments in Peru in the 1980s and 90s.

The Workers Party believes in a two-stage strategy to revolution in the Third World, and has a long history of supporting ‘national capitalist’ regimes there. They praised the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe, for instance, as an exponent of ‘African socialism’.

Back in 1997 the Workers Party launched a heated attack on our group for publishing an article criticising Laurent Kabila, the rebel leader then about to take power in Zaire/the Congo. Written in collaboration with comrades in Europe and South America, our article argued that Kabila was a would-be national capitalist who wanted to exploit rather than liberate his country, and should therefore be given no political support. For the Workers Party, Kabila was leading ‘something close to a peoples’ war’, and his coming to power would be ‘excellent news for the African peoples and indeed for those of all countries’(4).

The years since 1997 have shown how wrong the Workers Party was about Kabila, who was such a popular leader that one of his own bodyguards assassinated him. Today Kabila’s son rules the Congo, which remains an impoverished semi-colony dominated by the US. Why won’t the Workers Party and the Anti Capitalist Alliance learn from history?

From sellout to repression

It is the bankruptcy of the Stalinist political programme that makes the repressive features of Stalinism necessary. Bankrupt politics can’t be defended in open debate – that’s why Stalinist parties ban factions and open debate, and Stalinist governments build labour camps. In the 1980s and early 90s in Peru Shining Path massacred thousands of members of other leftist groups and trends, justifying its actions with the slogan ‘We cannot have the victory of two revolutions’. Our group has comrades in Peru who struggled to survive in the atmosphere of terror Shining Path and the US-backed government of Peru together created.

The Workers Party gave verbal support to the Shining Path’s campaign of repression. When Shining Path rivals the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement were holed up in the Japanese embassy in Lima, surrounded by government troops, the Workers Party used its paper not to support them, but to condemn them as ‘counter-revolutionaries’. In Nepal, the Communist Party-Maoist uses typical Stalinist tactics to suppress dissent. Since the beginning of its guerrilla war, it has killed 29 teachers who belonged to a union sympathetic to the government.

So much for revolutionaries winning debates in the labour movement with the force of their ideas. In 2000, some CPM members in the Jajarkot area of Nepal organised a faction to oppose the efforts of their leadership to make a peace deal establishing national capitalism with the Nepalese government. The CPM suppressed this faction, as well as a senior leader of the organisation who took its side.

It is difficult to get reliable information out of Nepal, but it seems safe to assume that resistance to the Stalinist leadership continues inside the CPM. After all, the needs of the rank and file of the party are completely at odds with the national capitalist strategy of the leadership.

No solidarity with Stalinism

There is no doubt that the workers and peasants in the CPM are fighting a heroic struggle in Nepal. But the Stalinist leaders of the CPM only undermine that struggle with their plans to negotiate a ‘national capitalist’ future for Nepal. The Anti Capitalist Alliance is right to raise the issue of solidarity with Nepal on the New Zealand left, but it is undermining its own good work by giving uncritical support to the Stalinist leaders of the CPM. The ACA should not repeat the mistakes of the Communist Parties of the 1930s and 40s, who cuddled up to Stalin when he was busy undermining the cause of socialism.

Solidarity with Nepal means opposition to Stalinism. We thank comrades on the Indian subcontinent for supplying some of the information given above.

Because we believe that this an important issue which needs to be debated openly, we offer the Anti Capitalist Alliance space in our paperClass Struggle to reply to the arguments made above.

Footnotes

1 The CPM maintains a number of websites. One of the biggest can be found at http://www.insof.org/

2 The Anti Capitalist Alliance website can be found at http://anticapitalists.tk/

3 For a proper introduction to Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, check out http://www.workerspower.com/wpglobal/LDTch2.html

4 See the articles ‘Kabila Foils Imperialists’ and ‘Stupidity Incarnate!’ in the April and June 1997 issues of The Spark. For an online attack by the Workers Party on our group, see ‘Trotskyists Rival Capitalists with Big Lie Campaign [against Stalin]’, http://home.clear.net.nz/pages/wpnz/raytrotsky1295.htm

PALESTINE: THE ROAD MAP TO HELL

From Class Struggle 50, May-June 2003

The so-called “Road Map” for the settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was born of a US-UK desire to help various Arab regimes defend their support for the war against Iraq before their hostile subjects. Bush proclaimed his support for the eventual creation of a Palestinian mini-state at the Azores summit in March, immediately prior to the start of hostilities against Iraq by the “coalition of the willing”.

The circumstances surrounding the final release of the Road Map and its contents make clear that the purpose of US intervention on the Palestine question is to consolidate its own position as the Mideast superpower. Unlike previous similar initiatives, the Road Map was unveiled without even a US presidential appearance, much less the Rose Garden handshake between Palestinians and Israelis that has accompanied previous initiatives. Israeli reaction was swift and unmistakable. In the immediate aftermath of the road map’s publication, the Israeli Defence Force launched a number of operations in the West Bank and Gaza. The most devastating was on May 1 in Gaza City, claiming 12 lives, including those of top Hamas member Yusef Abu Hein and his two brothers and three children—one aged just two years

The road map was only issued after the US successfully forced part of the first stage on the Palestinians—“comprehensive political reform”. This translates into the removal or sidelining of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat and the installation of a regime that is ready to do Washington’s bidding.

Arafat has for a long time wanted a sell out deal with Israel, as was demonstrated by his signing up to the Oslo Accords in 1993. But both Tel Aviv and Washington have wanted to remove him because of his subsequent refusal to go along with Israeli efforts to rewrite the Oslo agreement in order to reduce the territories making up a Palestinian state and legitimise the vast increase in Zionist settlements on the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Arafat’s fate was sealed when he failed to suppress the intifada that erupted in September 2000 as a result of Likud leader Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to the Al-Aqsa mosque and Dome of the Rock on Temple Mount.

The Chalabi of Palestine

Washington’s chosen replacement for Arafat is Mahmoud Abbas — known as Abu Mazen — a businessman and adviser to the rulers of Qatar, who sits on the right wing of Arafat’s Fateh and who led the discussions culminating in the Oslo Accords. Abu Mazen is the Chalabi of Palestine. His elevation to the post of prime minister, which he assumed by making a speech promising to combat terrorism “by any party and in all its shapes and forms”, was backed by Washington. So was his slate for cabinet posts —particularly the nomination of Muhammad Dahlan as top security official because of his proclaimed readiness to crack down on militant Palestinian groups.

Only after Abu Mazen was successfully installed was the road map published. An unnamed Bush official told the press candidly of Washington’s intentions: “We’re telling people that this is the moment to build up Abu Mazen, and it undermines that objective if you treat Arafat like he’s still in charge. That cannot happen and must not happen.”

Three Phases of Defeat

As for the road map itself, the document offers little to the Palestinians other than a series of demands that they abandon and suppress any struggle against Israeli occupation. Its proposals are divided into three phases, culminating in the founding of a Palestinian mini-state by 2005. “The Quartet” — the United States, European Union, United Nations and Russia — are to decide whether each stage has been completed successfully. But each stage is progressively less well defined and no definition is given as to what would constitute a Palestinian state. From the general tenor of the document, it can only be an apartheid-style bantustan, wholly subservient to its more powerful Israeli neighbour and answerable more or less directly to Washington.

Phase One of the Road Map begins with an immediate and unconditional cessation of violence by the Palestinians, “visible efforts on the ground to arrest, disrupt, and restrain individuals and groups conducting and planning violent attacks on Israelis anywhere” and the mounting of “effective operations aimed at confronting all those engaged in terror and dismantlement of terrorist capabilities and infrastructure”. The restructured/retrained Palestinian security forces” are to resume security cooperation with their counterparts in the Israeli Defence Force, “with the participation of US security officials”.

Only after such a massive security clampdown is deemed by Washington to have been successful is Israel to begin a “progressive withdrawal” of its troops — and then only from those areas occupied from September 28, 2000, the start of the intifada — and freeze any further settlement activity.

Phase Two is meant to focus on “the option of creating an independent Palestinian state”, but with only “provisional borders” and “attributes of sovereignty” as determined by “the consensus judgment of the Quartet” and only after Palestinian elections are held that it is hoped will further marginalise both Arafat and any group opposed to Washington’s dictates. The fate of the Palestinians is also linked in the document to securing “the goal of a comprehensive Middle East peace (including between Israel and Syria, and Israel and Lebanon)”.

Phase Three, a “final, permanent status resolution in 2005”, is meant to include a settlement of all outstanding issues including borders, sovereignty over East Jerusalem settlements and the disputed right of nearly 4 million Palestinian refugees to return to the lands from which they were dispossessed in 1948. None of this is defined, other than with a prescription that it should be “agreed, just, fair, and realistic”.

The Road Map offers far worse conditions to the Palestinians than anything contained in the Oslo Accords, and it holds out potential rewards that are even less attractive. There is not a chance that any Palestinian entity created by this document would have even a semblance of independence. It would not enjoy territorial contiguity and would continue to be policed by Israeli forces as a virtual prison camp for a captive population. The Road Map could only be advanced by a regime drunk on its own power, which believes it can do what it wants in the aftermath of the military crushing of Iraq.

The Palestinians will inevitably resist efforts to impose a US-inspired settlement.Abu Mazen has no popular base and is widely viewed as a tool of the US and Israel. As for Sharon, he calculates that he enjoys enough support in Washington to derail any negotiated settlement that requires Israeli concessions. The majority of his cabinet is on record as opposing an independent Palestinian state in any form, while some have come out forthrightly for what amounts to the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and Gaza in order to establish a “Greater Israel”.

Speaking to Haaretz on April 14, Sharon granted that the “Iraq war created an opportunity with the Palestinians we can’t miss”, but boasted that he had told President Bush “a number of times—I made no concessions in the past, and I will make no concessions now, or ever make concessions in the future, with regard to anything that is related to the security of Israel.”

Labour, Greens side with Sharon

Predictably, the Clark government has added its weedy little voice to the chorus of Western nations demanding that the Palestinians accept Bush’s Road Map. On his recent visit to the Occupied Territories, New Zealand Foreign Minister Phil Goff met Arafat personally to warn him of the ‘consequences’ of not following the Washington line. Goff’s ‘friendly advice’ is the diplomatic flipside of the military pressure New Zealand helps to bring to bear on Palestine as a part of the so-called Multinational Force and Observers (MFO), a US-funded international army which patrols the southern border of the Gaza Strip on behalf of Sharon. The ‘peacekeepers’ in the MFO specialise in trying to stop supporters of the intifada smuggling weapons into the Gaza Strip across remote tracks and through tunnels from Egypt’s Sinai peninsula. And how about the Green Party, which has been keen to present itself as a supporter of the Palestinian cause, sending MPs to speak to rallies and condemning Sharon in parliament? The Greens are giving enthusiastic support to the Road Map. The Greens are a party which represents the interests of small business, so they are naturally sympathetic to the politics of the small-time capitalists in the Palestinian Authority who are selling out to the US in the hope of becoming the managers of a UN neocolony. We’ve already seen the Greens sell out over Afghanistan, where they supported UN-organised military action, and Iraq, where they backed a Franco-German military occupation as an ‘alternative’ to US military occupation. Support for the Road Map is one more reason not to trust the Greens.

Some of the information in this article comes from the World Socialist Web Site at www.wsws.org

Different Road, Different Destination

If Bush’s Road Map offers nothing but destruction, is there a different, revolutionary road for the Palestinians and their supporters around the world? Let’s look at the facts: Palestine is a small semi-colony whose economy is dominated by the imperialist US and its puppet Israel. Israel itself is an artificial apartheid state which can only exist because of enormous US subsidies. The US has always supported Israel over the Palestinians, because Israel is a guaranteed friend for the White House in the Middle East. Surrounded by Arab populations that hate it for its treatment of the Palestinians, Israel has only ever had Western imperialist powers like America to turn to for help. That suits the Americans fine – they can use Israel as a foothold in an oil-rich region, in return for throwing it billions of dollars worth of financial and military aid yearly. American help might seem on the surface like a good thing for working class Israeli Jews, but in reality they pay for Uncle Sam’s ‘aid’ with dangerous lives in a garrison state in perpetual economic crisis.

Even if it achieved full political independence, Palestine could never be free of imperialist domination, as long as its economy was dominated by the US and Israel. As we have seen, the Road Map offers the Palestinian people not a viable state but a Bantustan. Under the terms of the accord, this ‘state’ would constitute less than 20% of the original Palestine, be broken into hundreds of pieces by Israeli roads and be pockmarked with armed Zionist settlements and Israeli army bases. Devoid of heavy industry or a proper infrastructure, such a ‘state’ could serve only as a crash pad for Palestinians forced to cross its borders every day to work in Israel. The petty capitalists who dominate the Palestinian Authority would serve as managers of the Palestinian labour force, taking a few crumbs from the Israelis and the US. In order to achieve real independence, then, the Palestinians also need to get rid of imperialist economic domination. In other words, they need to take over the resources and industry in Palestine and run them for their own benefit under a planned economy.They need socialism. But the tiny size of the Occupied Territories means that a socialist revolution would have to spread to Israel to survive for long. Sharon’s artificial Jewish theocracy needs to be abolished and replaced by a secular, socialist Palestine.

From Popular Committees to Permanent Revolution

A socialist, secular Palestine in place of Israel and the Occupied Territories seems a long way off, but the Palestinians people have at times taken steps in its direction, despite the aggression of Israel and the sabotage of Arafat. In the first months of the intifada, grassroots organisations called Popular Committees were formed to organise the resistance to the Israelis. The Popular Committees featured fighters and supporters from a range of Palestinian factions, and soon began to attract considerable support from a population tired of the empty promises and backroom deal making of Arafat and the Palestinian Authority. As the war intensified and spread throughout the Occupied Territories the Popular Committees began to threaten the authority of Arafat. A power struggle emerged with Arafat and the Palestinian Authority continuing to attract the loyalty of the Palestinian elite and the Popular Committees rallying workers and students.

When Arafat was directly threatened by the Israelis, the Popular Committees would mobilise their forces to defend him, without giving up their independence. In other words, they made a ‘military bloc’ with the Palestinian capitalists for the purpose of fighting the occupying imperialists, but retained the independence that would be necessary to overthrow Arafat and Co once the Israelis had been defeated. Trotskyists refer to this as a strategy of ‘permanent revolution’. Watching the Popular Committees in action, the Trotskyists in the Palestinian Socialist Workers League recognised that they were a force with the potential to create a new, socialist Palestine.

Unlike the corrupt capitalists Arafat represented, the Popular Committees had the desire to fight the Israelis until victory, and to mobilise the masses of the Arab world to help them in their task. And, with their base in the working class, the Popular Committees had the potential to be political and economic building blocks of a socialist society in post-Zionist Palestine.

In a leaflet issued early in 2002, the Socialist Workers League wrote that “it is necessary to develop and expand the Popular Committees, turn them into elected councils of representatives of the Palestinian workers, peasants and soldiers opposed to occupation, and coordinate their activities at the national level. This national council will have the political and moral authority necessary to conduct the mass uprising and turn to the masses of the region, including the Jewish workers, with the call: Let us fight together against imperialism, Zionism, and the client regimes from Egypt to Saudi Arabia! Let us build our own social regime: the socialist society of the workers, peasants and refugees!”

The Left Let Palestine Down

But the Socialist Workers League slogan ‘All power to the Popular Committees!’ was largely ignored by the left outside of Palestine. Instead of supporting the real nucleus of a socialist Palestine, the Western left either supported Arafat and an independent capitalist Palestine ‘as a step forward’, or else argued that support for the intifada meant support for Arafat and suicide bombers, and was thus not worth giving. A better response came from Workers Democracy, the group that was on the frontlines of the Argentinean revolution at the same time as the Popular Committees were forming in Palestine.

Together with the Communist Workers Group and three other organisations, Workers Democracy produced a statement urging the international left to rally to provide arms and other aid to the Popular Committees. The failure of the left to take up this call by the ‘group of five’ can be linked to the failure of the Popular Committees to develop into a successful challenge to Israel and to the government of Arafat. Without the massive international solidarity Workers Democracy wanted to see, the Popular Committees were overwhelmed by Sharon’s reoccupation of the West Bank. Today the Islamist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad have taken over the role of the Popular Committees, fighting the Israelis independently of the Palestinian Authority. But the Islamist, pro-capitalist and anti-worker politics of these groups are reflected in counterproductive tactics like suicide bombing, and in an Arafat-style willingness to sell out in return for a few crumbs from the imperialist table. Hamas is already talking about a ceasefire with Israel, if only the Israelis will ‘give us back the 1967 boundaries of Palestine’.

Back in New Zealand...

What about the hard left in New Zealand? Here as elsewhere, the anti-capitalist left has tended to divide between a stagist ‘capitalist state as a step forward’ line and an ultra-left ‘no struggle for independence is worth supporting’ line.

Some groups haven’t even made it that far. On Palestine as on other issues, the Socialist Workers Organisation (no relation to the Socialist Workers League in Palestine) has tailed the Greens, trying vainly to pick up a few stragglers with ‘moderate’ policies that nip at Nandor’s heels. At an emergency rally held in Auckland after Sharon’s invasion of the West Bank last year, SWO members rolled up armed with placards bearing the militant slogan ‘Palestine attacked – Helen Clark should speak out’. Unfortunately for the SWO, Helen Clark had already issued an empty and utterly useless condemnation of the invasion. So for that matter had George Bush. The SWO’s slogan reflected the fact that its leadership shares the Greens’ belief that the New Zealand government can play a ‘good cop’ role on the international scene, helping to rein in ‘bad cops’ like Sharon and Bush. Back in 1994, for instance, the SWO urged Jim Bolger to send a frigate to Mururoa Atoll in retaliation for French nuke tests. The SWO thought that a National Prime Minister could represent Kiwi workers against the French, so it’s no surprise that it thought Helen Clark could fight for the Palestinians against Sharon. The Clark government’s wholehearted endorsement of the Road Map shows how wrong the SWO was.

The ultra-left attitude toward the intifada was expressed locally by two articles in the now-defunct anarchist paper thr@ll. Bad Badder Baddest, a January-February 2002 article which thr@ll co-editor Fyd McLean described as ‘exquisite’, openly announced that ‘We are not hung up on Palestine for the Palestinians.’ For the authors of this piece, Palestinian national liberation could only mean ‘localised tyranny...religious and cultural oppressions’ (1) In a later article, thr@ll reported the protests which followed Sharon’s invasion of the West Bank, but asked whether these actions could have any value, if they were motivated by the desire to create an independent Palestine. thr@ll couldn’t understand that it was possible to create a revolutionary independent Palestine, by building the Popular Committees into organs of direct democracy like the workers’ councils of revolutionary Russia or 30s Spain. Like many anarchists used to the strategy-free ‘ra ra ra’ politics of the militant end of the Western anti-globalisation movement, thr@ll’s authors struggled to deal with the complexities of a real revolutionary situation in a semi-colony where nationalism inevitably has a powerful appeal amongst the working class. Obsessed with avoiding the pitfalls of capitalist nationalism, thr@ll’s articles failed to see the anti-capitalist potential of the intifada.

At the other extreme is the Dunedin-based International Socialist Organisation. The ISO has been very active in the anti-war and pro-Palestine movements in Dunedin and Wellington, and the latest issue of its Socialist Review features an article called ‘Victory to the intifada!’(2) The ISO makes the very good point that activists shouldn’t be afraid to use the slogan ‘Victory to the intifada!’ Nor though should revolutionaries be afraid to explain what that slogan should mean. Nowhere in its article does the ISO draw a class line through the intifada. Nowhere is it clear whether the article favours Arafat’s intifada for a capitalist Palestine, or the intifada for a socialist Palestine reflected in the slogan ‘All power to the Popular Committees!’ If Fyd McLean is blinded by Arafat’s capitalist nationalism, then the ISO is blind to the danger of national capitalists hijacking the intifada. In their different ways, McLean and the ISO exemplify the mistakes the revolutionary left has made over Palestine.

At most, Bush’s Road Map can only temporarily quash the intifada. More dangerous, in the long-term, is the failure of much of the Western left to understand the logic of the Palestinian struggle and the strategy required to defeat Israel and its allies in the White House. In Palestine and elsewhere in the Third World, the theory of permanent revolution offers the only way forward, past the twin wrecks of stagism and ultra-leftism.

(1) Bad Badder Baddest is online at http://thrall.orcon.net.nz/21badbadder.html (2) The ISO’s article is online at http://www.iso.org.nz/sr/14/intifada.htm

ACEH: IT'S ABOUT IMPERIALISM

From Class Struggle 50, May-June 2003

Aceh is at war again. A truce between the Indonesian government and rebels has been torpedoed by the Indonesian demand that the Acehese renounce their claim to independence. Now Indonesian troops are burning villages and schools and hunting fighters of the Free Aceh Movement through the jungle. What position do revolutionaries take on this question?

Imperialism and Indonesia

The crisis in Aceh is caused by imperialism. Indonesia itself is a creation of imperialism, an unwieldy collection of peoples forced together by arbitrary boundaries drawn up by European capitalists. Imperialist countries like the US, Britain, Japan and the Netherlands continue to exploit Indonesia, sucking big profits from cheap labour and rich natural resources out of the country and into Western banks, and leaving only crumbs for the locals. In his movie The New Rulers of the Earth John Pilger noted that between them the tens of thousands of Indonesians who work in Nike factories earn less in a year than Tiger Woods gets from his advertising contract with Nike. Even in Aceh, one of the richest parts of the country, underdevelopment and foreign control are easy to find. Aceh’s large oil reserves are controlled by multinational companies, most notably Exxon-Mobil. There are few oil-based industries like plastics or chemicals to add value to Aceh’s oil. The big companies give their most skilled jobs to experts from outside Aceh and Indonesia.

From Communism to Nationalism

In the 1950s and early 60s opposition to Western exploitation of Indonesia was led by communists. Attracted by the promise of the seizure of foreign-controlled land and businesses, hundreds of thousands of peasants and workers joined the Indonesian Communist Party. The Communist Party was a serious contender for power in the 1960s, but it was destroyed by Stalinist misleadership and by the CIA-backed coup that brought General Suharto to power in 1965. With US help, Suharto slaughtered over five hundred thousand communists and destroyed the organised working class movement in Indonesia. With class politics driven into the shadows,leadership of the opposition to imperialism passed to nationalists and Islamists. Today, the Free Aceh Movement blends Acehese nationalism and Islamism. But can nationalism and Islamism defeat imperialism? Aceh is a small region, containing only about four million people. The Free Aceh Movement commands around 5,000 fighters, against an occupying force of 45,000. In a quarter century of war, the Acehese have lost at least 40,000 lives without ever looking like gaining independence.

Across Indonesia, the force which has been able to shake the Indonesian ruling class and its imperialist backers is not nationalism or Islamism, but the mass action of workers and peasants. In 1998 it was mass street protests, strikes and land occupations which brought down Suharto, the man Bill Clinton had in 1996 described as ‘our kind of guy’. These protests sparked solidarity actions by students and workers around the world. Unfortunately, without any sort of any organisation in place of the old Communist Party, the workers and peasants of Indonesia were unable to turn the anti-Suharto revolt into a revolution.

As Marxists, we support the Acehese people’s right to independence. The workers in the imperialist countries that have a history of oppressing Aceh such as Britain and the US, and their local ‘peacekeeping’ deputy sheriffs Australia and NZ, should demonstrate that they are on the side of the Acehese people by offering arms and military support.Indonesian workers, students and poor peasants should fight against Megawati Sukarnoputri’ s genocidal attack. If this fails to lead to workers and peasants taking control of the revolution in Aceh out of the hands of the capitalist leadership, then only the experience of living in an ‘independent’ capitalist Aceh will teach the Acehese the truth – that socialism is the real alternative to imperialism. Only when Aceh’s natural resources, land and industry are taken out of private ownership and a planned economy is built, will outside domination of Aceh cease.

The local capitalists who dominate the Free Aceh Movement do not dare to challenge the foreign control of Acehese resources – they wish only to negotiate a better rate for the control of these resources. For that reason, they refuse to mobilise the Acehese working class, and to use strikes and other workers’ tools to fight for independence. They prefer to use guerrilla attacks to rouse the ‘moral conscience’ of the West and drag the Indonesian government to the negotiating table. The leaders of the Free Aceh Movement spends a lot of its time jetting about the world, trying to convince imperialist governments to back its cause. The supreme leader of the Movement is based not in Aceh but in faraway Sweden, that homeland of ‘enlightened imperialism’.

The Khaki Greens and dangerous ‘solidarity’

Protests in support of the Acehese have been called across Australia and New Zealand, with Indonesian embassies and consulates being popular targets. In both countries, the Green Party have emerged as enthusiastic backers of the Free Aceh Movement. This is not surprising - the Greens are cut from the same cloth as the Acehese capitalists. Like the Free Aceh Movement, the Greens are dominated by the interests of local capitalists who are trying to get the multinationals off their backs, and who think that enlightened imperialism can help them. Over the last eighteen months or so the New Zealand Greens have made a name for themselves by calling for the pulling of Kiwi troops, ships and planes out of the Middle East. It’s not so well known that the Greens want these forces redeployed in the Pacific and South Asia, to act in a ‘humanitarian’ role in ‘crises’.

The ‘Khaki’ Greens are all for military adventures, as long as they’re ‘humanitarian’ military adventures like the invasion of East Timor in 1999 or NATO’s war on Yugoslavia in the same year. The Greens want New Zealand to stop helping out the bad guys in the Middle East, and start acting like good guys in Asia and the Pacific. What better place to start than Aceh, with a new ceasefire and some ‘peacekeepers’, perhaps?

Trouble is, New Zealand has always been a bad guy in Asia and the Pacific. New Zealand is a semi-colony of the US – US capitalists own many of our key companies and are able effectively to dictate the New Zealand government’s economic and political policies. It’s not surprising, then, that the US has always been able to count on New Zealand to serve as its Deputy Sheriff in the Asia-Pacific region, from Vietnam to Samoa to East Timor.

Riding on the coat tails of the US, New Zealand has even been able to carve out a sideline career as a mini-imperialist power in the Pacific, sucking profits out of small countries like the Cook Islands and Fiji. Earlier this year we ran an article on the looting of the Solomon Islands by New Zealand, Australia and the International Monetary Fund. We described how ANZAC suits in the South Pacific branch of the IMF had forced the Solomons to cut government spending by a third, and lay off a third of government employees. Now that these IMF ‘reforms’ have intensified the chaos and crime in the Solomons, the Australasian governments and their friends in the mass media have taken to describing that country as a ‘failed state’ and a potential ‘haven for terrorists’. Sound familiar?

The Solomons is not an isolated case: both the US and the ruling classes of Australia and New Zealand are increasingly keen on military intervention in the Pacific and in South Asia. With the backing of the US, New Zealand and Australia combined to quash the independence struggle on Bougainville Island, co-opting the leadership of the Bouganville Revolutionary Army and getting it to sign a sell-out peace deal renouncing independence with the Papua New Guinea government on a New Zealand frigate. Papua New Guinea itself is now being mooted as a candidate for armed ‘humanitarian’ intervention by an Australian intelligence establishment spooked by the political instability in Oz’s former colony. Australia has already begun nibbling at Papua New Guinea’s neighbours – it oversees a neocolony in East Timor, and has flooded Indonesia with secret service forces since last year’s Bali bombing.

For now, Australia, New Zealand and (surprise surprise) the US are all backing the Indonesian government against Aceh. Bush, Howard and Clark all gave the Free Aceh Movement the same line: give up your claim to independence if you want the truce to continue. For now, the US is more worried about Islamists building a state of their own in Aceh than about the instability a new round of fighting could cause. But Aceh is a very important part of South Asia. Not only is it rich in oil, it sits on the western side of a shipping lane that leads to Singapore, one of the busiest ports in the world. There is a real chance that, if instability worsens, the US (and therefore Australia and New Zealand) could decide to change horses, and back a neo-colony over chaos. The US might decide to put its muscle behind an independent Aceh, in return for the Free Aceh Movement guaranteeing it control over the region’s ports and oil. This, of course, is exactly what happened in East Timor back in 1999, when Clinton andstooges like John Howard and Jenny Shipley saw the opportunity of setting up a UN colony and grabbing control of the oil in the Timor Gap.

Solidarity with Aceh, against Imperialism

There is a real danger that the Aceh solidarity movement in Australasia could play into the hands of imperialism, by making arguments for a ‘humanitarian’ intervention in the region. Again, this is what happened in 1999, when mass protests against Indonesian occupation of East Timor were turned into cheerleading sessions for a US-orchestrated invasion that only seemed necessary because the sell-out East Timorese leaders were keeping their troops away from the Indonesians in an effort to ensure massacres that would appeal to the ‘moral conscience’ of Bill Clinton. Today East Timor is a rapidly disintegrating neocolony of the West.

Unemployment stands at 50%, crime is rampant, students are shot for protesting UN occupation, and demobilised Fretelin troops have started a low-level guerrilla war in the countryside. East Timor is the sort of mess that the Khaki Greens’ ‘humanitarian imperialism’ makes.

The Australasian left should show solidarity with the Acehese fight for independence without offering an excuse for any Western military or political intervention in the region. Let’s recognise that the real cause of the war in Aceh is imperialism, not Indonesian brutality or a lack of moral conscience amongst Western governments.

Let’s focus our protests on the US, Australian and New Zealand governments, and on companies like Mobil. We should only target Indonesia with direct action to stop any military gear going through Kiwi ports, for instance. By their very nature, actions like these highlight the links between New Zealand capitalism and the war in Aceh. Symbolic protests focused on the Indonesian government are dangerous, because they bolster the Khaki Green argument that Indonesia acts alone in its oppression of the Acehese, and that ‘neutral’ governments like New Zealand’s might be able to play a ‘humanitarian’ role in Aceh.

FOR A SOCIALIST ALLIANCE

From Class Struggle 50 May-June 2003

The Labour government has moved right as part of a popular front government that is openly attacking workers in Afghanistan, Iraq and here at home. The Greens and Alliance are committed to the dead end parliamentary road to reform capitalism. We need to build a new working class alliance that can fight for socialism in the unions and on the streets. Is a Socialist Alliance the next step? We think that it is provided that it is a democratic united front that can draw workers into action and is not a bureaucratic exercise dominated by tiny left groups.

Time to build an alternative to Labour

After the last election we wrote in Class Struggle that what we need in NZ is a Socialist Alliance. This was clear from Labour’s move to the right during its first term 1999-2002. We went into the election with the view that Labour was still marginally a bourgeois-workers party (with an obvious bourgeois program, but with the support of significant sections of the union movement- weak as it is). For that reason, while thousands of ordinary workers in big unions like the Engineers, PSA and Service and Food, had illusions in Labour as ‘their’ party, it was tactically necessary to get Labour re-elected to rid these workers of any remaining illusions that Labour acted for the working class.

As we expected the re-election of Labour saw a further shift to the right and a retreat from any pretence of a pro-workers program towards an open accommodation with the US war aims and international finance capital (free trade agreements, GATS etc). Labour was now divorced from the Alliance (which after the split with Anderton and the Alliance Council broke over Labour’s pro-war position on Bush’s ‘war on terror’) and shacked up with a fly by night Peter Dunne’s ‘United Future’ Party. Perhaps the time was ripe for workers to strike out and form a new workers party that did put the interests of workers centre stage.

Nearly a year later we think that we were right. Not only is Labour now part of a popular front government (i.e. Dunne’s‘United Future’ is a petty-bourgeois democratic party) but its rightward trajectory is now confirmed with the hardening of its pro-imperialist stance advocating the UN cover for Bush’s war on Iraq(including new anti-terror legislation directed at NZers). Many NZ workers now see Labour as engaged in an attack on workers in Afghanistan, Iraq and in NZ. If there were an election tomorrow we would stand worker candidates based in the rank and file of the unions.

But standing on what platform? We don’t want workers to vote for the Greens or Alliance. They are reformist parties that compromise with the bosses and offer only the dead end of the parliamentary road. Nor do we want to create a new Labour Party to repeat the history of old Labour’s betrayals. We want workers’ candidates opposed to imperialist war, but also opposed to the causes of war –capitalism and imperialism. That means standing on a working class platform to end capitalism and replace it with socialism. A platform that starts with immediate demands for what workers need now, such as cheap power and jobs for all, and going on to raise the demands that will be necessary to get them, such as the social ownership of the means of production and a Workers Government to plan for a socialist economy.

Socialist Alliance in Britain and Australia

The British and Australian Socialist Alliances offer some lessons on how not to build a Socialist Alliance. The whole point of an alliance of socialists is to unite the revolutionary left into a high level United Front as the basis for building a mass revolutionary workers party.

However, for this to happen there has to be inclusiveness of the revolutionary left around an anti-capitalist program; democracy in the organisation where all groups have a voice in proportion to their size; and discipline in doing united front work.Such a UF would then force the divided left to democratically organise around common struggles and to openly and honestly debate their differences. This is the best way to ensure that those with the best method and program win mass worker support and defeat opportunist and sectarian currents in the workers movement.

In England there are problems with inclusiveness, democracy and discipline. The English SA began as a purely electoral alliance and is heavily dominated by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) as its own ‘front’. The SWP uses its size to pick and choose what issues the SA will campaign on making it little more than an ‘open branch’ of the SWP. The withdrawal of the Socialist Party (SP), the only other large left tendency, from the English SA has consolidated SWP control. Ironically, in Scotland, the SP has been influential in forming the Scottish Socialist Party and forcing the SWP to dissolve itself and form a faction inside it. The SP should return the favour in England.

But the result, in England and Scotland, is not genuine United Fronts. They are electoral fronts in which two dominant parties call the shots and prevent or limit the mobilisation of workers around important industrial struggles. This means that because strong united front actions are bureaucratically manipulated, the parties that run the SAs do not get their bad programs exposed.

In Australia the Democratic Socialist Party, which numerically dominates the Australian Socialist Alliance, has decided to liquidate itself into the ASA. Its points to the SSP as the example it wants to follow. This demonstrates that the DSP is confident of its size and program and does not need to use its party organisation to control the SA. The DSP would then become a tendency(like the SWP in the SSP) among others in a single organisation.

This move was opposed by the ISO (linked to the British SWP but much smaller proportionately then its British ‘mother’) and the Freedom Socialists, who want the SA to remain a ‘United Front’, and by Workers Power which wants SA to campaign to build a mass revolutionary workers’ party.At a recent meeting the DSP won its position and the Australian SA is now officially a ‘multi-tendency’ party. Formally, each ‘tendency’ is free to continue as an independent party with its own program, but in practice, the majority in the ASA will tend to be dominated by the DSP and independents who want to create a ‘left’ reformist party on a minimum program.

Socialist Alliance as a United Front

The question is: given the mixed experiences in Britain and Australia, how can an Alliance of left parties be built as the basis of a future mass revolutionary workers’ party in NZ? The answer is to build it as a United Front and not as a single party. People who call themselves ‘socialist’ differ greatly in what they mean by it and how to get it. They need to be convinced to become consistent revolutionaries by the testing of their ideas in practical actions. A NZSA should be based on united campaigns to advance the interests of workers –such as rebuilding the unions under rank and file control, anti-war action, defence of migrants, opposition to police state etc.

While unity on such campaigns is essential, at the same time there has to be complete freedom of criticism and action by all the groups that belong – that is the right to form ‘factions’ in the SA. This would allow all left groups to join – inclusiveness – the SA as a United Front where common actions, such as elections, strikes, anti-war action etc can be made – discipline – but at the same time be free to fight for their own political program –workers’ democracy.

Where groups differ in principle on basic questions, they should have the right to independent political action. For example, CWG is part of a regroupment process with revolutionary Trotskyists on two continents in an effort to unite ‘principled’ Trotskyists around a revolutionary program and in a Leninist/Trotskyist international.Our program has many points that would not be agreed to by the other revolutionary lefts currents in NZ. Our differences have been well aired in Class Struggle over the years.

An important difference today would be our position of ‘Victory for Iraq’ in the war against imperialism. Others in a NZSA would not necessarily agree to the slogan ‘arms to Iraq’. On this question we would insist on our right to act independently of SA.A healthy Socialist Alliance that worked as a United Front on this basis would create some of the conditions necessary for the formation of a mass revolutionary workers party.

We have argued that there is a need to form a SA-like United Front in NZ that will create a forum in which the revolutionary left can combine on common actions but remain free to debate their differences in the workers movement. We should start by calling on the other revolutionary left groups to discuss a principled basis for a Socialist Alliance.

To facilitate this CWG puts forward some basic foundation principles for discussion:

Capitalism as an exploitative social system cannot be reformed by parliament.

Our goal is socialism –the social ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.

Socialism will only come from the self-organisation of the working class.

An alliance of socialists should be based on the method of the United Front and of workers’ democracy.

Workers Democracy means complete freedom to debate and discuss and hold minority positions, but unity of action once majority decisions are taken.

Where fundamental political differences exist, members will be free to act independently (that is, in their own name) of Socialist Alliance without losing their membership rights.

WHO ON THE LEFT PASSED THE IRAQ TEST?

From Class Struggle 50, May-June 2003
War concentrates politics even as politics concentrates economics. The US/UK attack on Iraq has brought to the surface all the contradictions and deep antagonisms of capitalism today. Who saw the war as the outcome of imperialism in crisis forced to recolonise Iraq to get its oil? Who on the left understood this and took the next step to defend Iraq against imperialism? Those who did are the core of a new revolutionary international. Those who didn’t must be condemned as betrayers of the socialist revolution.

We can dispense with the reformist left who looked to the UN to deal with Iraq. These forces already conceded that the UN had the authority to impose sanctions on Iraq.They wanted a UN backed invasion. In other words they rejected the fundamental revolutionary position that Iraq is an oppressed country and must be unconditionally defended against imperialism. The UN is a ‘den of thieves kitchen’ and represents the deals that the imperialists make to advance their interests.

But the thieves fell out when the US/UK invaded Iraq unilaterally instead of backing the French and German imperialists plan of using the UN to disarm Iraq. So the reformist left championed the ‘peaceful’ imperialists against the US and UK. Thus the reformist left sides with one set of imperialist powers, with just as bad a history of colonial oppression, against another. In the event that the rivalry between these powers turns to open war, these reformist leaders would send their workers to war on the side of their imperialist bosses just as they did in 1914.

There was another more leftwing tendency however, which did not look to the ‘peaceful’ imperialists to deal with Iraq. This is the pacifist left who rejected the UN sanctions on Iraq as much as they rejected a UN backed invasion. They saw that the so-called ‘peaceful’ imperialists opposed the US and UK invasion because that would mean risking their own oil concessions in Iraq. This tendency therefore did not back the UN solution, but instead put their hopes in building a mass movement that would “stop the war”. They even attempted to mobilise workers in unions to take industrial action to prevent the ‘coalition’ military forces from being deployed in Iraq.

They saw that this was a war by the US and UK for oil. It was an attack by a rich and powerful country against a weak and largely defenceless country. Under the pressure of the war on Iraq, when millions marched against the war, and when thousands of Iraqis fought against the invasion, there was a move of some on the left, such as the CPGB, towards a ‘defence of Iraq’ position. But in practice the defence of Iraq was translated into ‘stopping the war’ at home. They said the best way to defend Iraq was to stop the invasion by a combination of sit-ins, marches and strikes. This fell far short of the necessary ‘defence of Iraq’ position of revolutionary Marxists. Why?

To turn the ‘defence of Iraq’ into ‘stopping the war’ at home fails to take the class logic of imperialist war to its necessary conclusion.The defence of Iraq means the ‘defeat’ of the imperialist oppressor not only at home, but also in Iraq. It means a ‘Victory’ to Iraq as an oppressed country.The responsibility of revolutionaries in the imperialist countries is to put their class before their country. They have to mobilise to smash the enemy at home, but they also have to try to smash the enemy wherever it goes to war against an oppressed country. Their duty does not stop at national borders. Class internationalism means that workers have no country.

The crucial test for revolutionaries in this war was to go beyond fighting the ‘enemy at home’ and to join with the oppressed in the trenches of Iraq. This meant entering a military bloc with the national leadership of Iraq, the Ba’athists, for the defence of Iraq. This meant worker volunteers siding with Iraq and being prepared to kill workers in uniform from the same oppressor country as themselves. And it meant doing so with a program that called for the workers to form an independent, armed force that would fight to take the lead in the defence of Iraq away from the Ba’athists and the Clerics.

Almost all the revolutionary left failed this test.Its ‘defensist’ position remained one that did not commit Western workers to class internationalism. The IST (SWO in NZ) took the opportunist position that Iraq should be defended by…its own people, which practically means under its existing leaderships. But should, or could, its ‘people’ defend it under such leadership? While the masses overwhelmingly wanted to defend Iraq, they did not have the means to do so.They were subordinated to a national reactionary leadership who disarmed them for fear that they would rise up against the oppressive regime.

That’s why revolutionaries do not sow illusions in clerical or bourgeois leaders being reliable anti-imperialist fighters. Their class interests are to compromise with imperialism not defeat it. Therefore, to call for the ‘people’ of Iraq to defend their country without putting forward any means of freeing the masses from their treacherous leaders, is not to defend Iraq at all.

Others, like Workers Action, took a defensist line that refused a military block with Saddam. They said that there was no “mass progressive nationalist movement” to support against Saddam. This made a united front to defend Iraq impossible. In other words revolutionaries should abstain from the struggle inside Iraq until Saddam was removed and some progressive nationalist movement came into being. How do these ‘revolutionaries’ think this was going to happen?

This is an ultra-left position similar to the Iraqi Workers’ Communist Party that was for the simultaneous defeat of Saddam and the US/UK forces. In effect this meant sitting out the war away from the fighting and waiting until history was ready for them to intervene.This ultraleft position is in reality no different from the opportunist one, imperio-centric, because ‘history’ by default is the victory of ‘democratic’ imperialism, overthrowing the Ba’athist regime and creating the conditions for the bourgeois democratic revolution.

What stopped these ‘revolutionaries’ from making a military bloc with the Ba’athists?The fact is that they are embedded in the racist, chauvinist,labour aristocracy or petty bourgeois layers of the labour movement.They will not side with the oppressed if this means that workers at home see them as unpatriotic or traitors. This means that their ‘internationalism’ is merely a mask for their ‘nationalism’.

In the case of the opportunists, their ‘internationalist’ tasks are defined to mean that they, the imperio-centric working classes alone, can defeat imperialism. Workers Action for example got completely carried away by the anti-war movement. “…we have seen the creation of a phenomenal political power across the globe that can start to challenge US imperialism. The anti-war demonstrations on February 15 have had an enormous impact throughout the world, and have opened up a new era in politics”.(Workers Action, 21, 2003 page 2). Shame this ‘new era’ in politics did not stop the war.

‘Talking up’ the anti-war mobilisation as a ‘serious challenge’ to US imperialism means ‘talking down’ workers going to other countries to kill workers in uniform from their own country and challenging colonial oppression as the material basis of the racism and chauvinism in the labour movement at home. If you cannot even confront racism and chauvinism in the imperialist working classes, how can you defeat imperialism?

The reverse side of this imperialist chauvinism is that it then becomes the national task of workers and peasants in the oppressed countries to resist imperialism. Why? Because that is their right to self-determination.

How, say the opportunists, can these peoples determine their own future if workers from other countries who are regarded as oppressors assert their duty to fight alongside them? Well, it doesn’t occur to these ‘internationalists’ that this is the surest way for workers from imperialist countries to prove that they are not oppressors but genuine internationalists.

In the case of the ultralefts, this is the flip side of the opportunist coin.Refusing to enter a military bloc with Saddam Hussein because he is a dictator is also a capitulation to the same imperialist racism and chauvinism at home that leaves the defence of Iraq to its own people. The fact that many in the IWCP are exiles in the ‘West’ and embedded in the same labour aristocracy as the Western left, underlines their ultraleft position. And it also explains why they then flipped to an opportunist line after the war calling for the UN to create a security force to allow Iraq to make the transition to democracy.For these pseudo communists, democratic imperialism is superior to an Iraqi dictatorship.

This is why in practice these ultra-lefts were prepared to leave the defence of Iraq to the Ba’athists and the clerical leaderships who would capitulate as soon as their class interests were threatened. This is exactly why these leaderships made the compromises they have made with the occupiers in the hope of doing deals with the US/UK to become the new rulers. This shows that, like the opportunists, the ultra-lefts are not serious about workers defending Iraq. They are prepared to leave the self-determination of Iraq to dirty deals between the Iraqi bourgeoisie, the Clerics and the imperialists.

The revolutionary way to fight the imperialist invaders was to mobilise the workers and peasants who were oppressed by the Ba’athists and Clerics to prove that only workers and poor peasants militias could defend Iraq. This meant calling on the Ba’athist and Clerical leaderships to arm the workers and peasants. When it became clear that the leaderships would not do this and instead would look after their own skins, workers could then decide how best to defend Iraq. But these questions of strategy and tactics could not even arise when the ultra-lefts did not offer any leadership to the masses under the oppressive control of the Ba’athists or Clerics.

Even those few groups that formally came out in ‘defence of Iraq’ such as Workers Power, and the International Bolshevik Tendency, did so in an abstract way.Workers Power quoted Trotsky on the “ duty of the international proletariat to aid the oppressed countries and their war against oppressors” but did not specify how that aid should be given.

(“The Left that Fails to Back Iraq” (http://www.workerspower.com/wpglobal/antiwarLeftfails.html)Not even a mention of arms to Iraq, and certainly no call for a military bloc with the Ba’athists.

The IBT, who condemn the Spartacists for ‘flinching’ in the face of charges of ‘treason’ at home, also took a defensist position. But nowhere in their statements on the war is there a call for a military bloc with Saddam, let alone a program for revolutionaries to take the leadership of the anti-imperialist struggle in Iraq (www.bolshevik.org).

We come to the conclusion that to our knowledge no Trotskyist groups other than the Group of 5 who signed the statement on Iraq lived up to their historic and revolutionary responsibility to fight for the defence of Iraq. (http://geocities.com/communistworker/iraq.html)

Who else called for the formation of a military bloc with the Ba’athists, with a program for workers to lead the defence of Iraq and for the formation of a Workers’ and Peasants’ state of Iraq in a Socialist Federation of the Middle East?If they exist and have put forward this position clearly, we want to contact them because they are principled communists.

Those who failed this test must be condemned as imperio-centric misleaders and betrayers of socialism. They are the rotten Stalinist and Trotskyist tendencies with opportunist/ultra-left positions that are a programmatic reflection of their integration into the racist, chauvinist labour aristocracy and petty bourgeoisie in the imperialist countries.

The healthy forces that blocked militarily with Iraq in its defence against imperialism with a program for permanent revolution have shown that they have the method and program to form the core of a new antiwar and anti-imperialist movement and open the way to the formation of a new revolutionary international.

MayDay Leaflet

OPPOSE BUSH’S WAR – GROUND THE ORION!

Leaflet from Class Struggle 49 March/April 2003

To Whenuapai workers – in and out of uniform!

We are picketing this airbase to protest the Clark government’s plans to send an RNZ Air force Orion to the Persian Gulf to support Bush’s war for oil in Iraq. Working with the frigate Te Kaha, the Orion will be asked to identify and plot the movements of every ship passing through the only sea access to Iraq. Information collected by the Orion and Te Kaha will be fed to the US aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. In recent months, the Abraham Lincoln has been involved in the bombing of Iraq and in planning for an invasion. By doing some of Bush’s grubby spying, the Orion and Te Kaha would help US ships and planes to focus on direct aggression against Iraq.

But the Orion can’t take off if there is no one to service, supply, or even fly it. Whether you are a worker wearing a uniform or a worker on civvy street, there are three bloody good reasons why you should join the global anti-war movement and blackballing this plane.

Reason #1:the Iraqi people will suffer terribly from the war the Orion would be supporting. According to a study by Australian doctors, 500,000 lives are at risk from an invasion of Iraq. ‘Collateral damage’ from bombs and missiles, contamination from depleted uranium shells, and disease are all expected to take a toll.

Reason #2:your fellow workers around the world are already suffering the effects of Bush’s War of Terror. Many workers recognise that Bush’s ‘War on Terror’ is a war on workers in the West, as well as a war on the peoples of the Middle East. The warmongers want to take long-term control of the region and boost their flagging profits by making Western labour as well as Middle Eastern oil cheaper. Bush used his war plans as an excuse to attack the West Coast waterside workers when they tried to strike last year, and is trying to use his post-World Trade Centre ‘Patriot Act’ to strip hundreds of thousands of state employees of their right to union membership. In Britain, Bush’s best friend Tony Blair has used the war as an excuse to threaten to ban the right of firefighters to go on strike for higher wages. (Refusing to back down, the firefighters have scheduled more strike actions.)We can trust Helen to pull the same ‘national security’ card out of the pack the moment she fears the prospect of working class militancy.

Reason #3:you will suffer from continued New Zealand support for Bush’s wars.
The Clark government is trying to trade military and political support for the War of Terror for a free trade deal with Bush. According to economic analysts, such a deal would mean the privatisation of the New Zealand health system and water services by U.S. multinationals, the removal of restrictions on Genetic Engineering, and the buying up of the New Zealand countryside by US bosses. This is what New Zealand workers in uniform are being asked to risk their lives for in the Middle East!

Unions representing 130 million workers from Australia to Togo have come out against the latest stage in the endless War of Terror.In Western Australia, 75,000 workers from nine unions have pledged to go on strike the minute any attack on Iraq begins, whether or not it is sanctioned by the UN. In Ireland, mass pickets have forced the US government to stop using the Shannon Air Base to move troops and supplies to the Middle East.In New Zealand, the Council of Trade Unions opposes a war on Iraq and calls on its members to protest. You should protest by blackballing the Orion!

Working class militancy can defeat this military madness!

Oppose Bush’s war – ground the Orion!

DAWA is at www.Yahoogroups.com?dawa_nz

Anti-imperialist Coalition is at www.antiimperialist.org.nz

EAST TIMOR: BUSH'S MAN IN DILI

from Class Struggle 49 March/April 2003

We note that Jose Ramos-Horta, the ‘Mandela of East Timor’, has joined Tony Blair and John Howard as a cheerleader for George Bush’s war against Iraq. In an impassioned article for the New York Times, Ramos-Horta recently condemned the global anti-war movement as unconcerned with the plight of the Iraqi and Kurdish peoples. Like the ‘leaders of the Iraqi opposition’ today, the East Timorese 'begged a foreign power to free us from oppression, by force if necessary’, this former guerrilla leader claimed.

Ramos-Horta’s new job as PR man for ‘regime change’ in Iraq will no doubt come as a nasty shock to the social democrats, Greens and fake revolutionaries who helped him sell out the East Timorese people in their hour of need in 1999. We remember Ramos-Horta being treated like a rock star when he arrived in Auckland to (mis)lead an East Timor solidarity march at the time of the APEC conference in September 1999. As the Greens and social democrats wept and hugged each other, Ramos-Horta took the mike at the pre-march rally and urged APEC leaders like Bill Clinton and John Howardto invade East Timor and thereby ‘save’ it from the Indonesian forces they had armed and funded for decades.

With Indonesian-backed militia on the rampage in the aftermath of a phony referendum on independence, Ramos-Horta and his crony Xanana Gusmao had been busy keeping their mutinous Falintil troops in isolated rural cantonments, so that they would not be able to antagonise Clinton by intervening to protect their people. Ramos-Horta was in Auckland because he was also keen to stamp out the strikes and boycotts that workers in a number of APEC countries had launched to stop the Indonesian military machine in its tracks.

Instead of supporting armed struggle at home and workers’ action internationally, Ramos-Horta appealed to imperialist leaders like Clinton! Fortunately for Ramos-Horta, and unfortunately for the people of East Timor, Clinton and stooges like John Howard and Jenny Shipley saw the opportunity of setting East Timor up as a UN colony and grabbing control of its oil wealth for the West. When the East Timorese objected to this carve up, the UN invasion force crushed their protests in a series of confrontations that climaxed in the Dili riots of mid-January 2000. Today resistance to the colonisers is once again increasing, with three students being killed in riots at the end of last year.

For his part, Foreign Minister Ramos-Horta has since 1999 made a lucrative career for himself as an advocate for imperialism around the world. Before coming to Bush’s aid over Iraq, he had been busy attacking the Palestinian people for having the nerve to resist Israeli occupation with armed force. According to Ramos-Horta, the Palestinians should be opposing Sharon’s tanks and machine guns with civil disobedience and petitions to the UN. Yeah, right.

As the bankruptcy of Ramos-Horta’s regime and rhetoric becomes ever more obvious, his former lovers on the Western left will no doubt spurn him, much as the Labour Party liberals who once cheered the ‘African socialism’ of Robert Mugabe today demand sanctions against Zimbabwe. Like Mugabe, Ramos-Horta will have become ‘corrupted by power’ and ‘out of touch with the people’. Clichés like these will help the liberals and fake revolutionaries who supported Ramos-Horta in 1999 avoid taking responsibility for their own role in turning East Timor in to a UN colony.

As Marxists, we have no interest in explaining history with clichés. We see the continuity between Ramos-Horta’s betrayal of East Timor in 1999 and his betrayal of the Iraqi and Kurdish peoples in 2003. We see the continuity between Mugabe’s capitulation to British imperialism at Lancaster House in the late 70s and his present attempts to rein in the land occupation movement and break the trade unions.

We argue that the ‘betrayals’ of the likes of Ramos-Horta and Mugabe are the product of the impossibility of national liberation struggles in the Third World achieving their aims without going all the way to socialism. We argue that it is only by turning national liberation into ‘permanent revolution’ by abolishing the market and breaking out of the global economic grid of imperialism that nations like East Timor and Zimbabwe can escape from the economic and hence political domination of powers like the US. Bush’s man in Dili offers plenty of evidence for our argument.

PAEDOPHILIA PANIC

Review of "A City Possessed: the Christchurch Civic Creche Case"

from Class Struggle 49 March/April 2003

By Lynley Hood, Longacre Publishers

“Blind Justice” was a series from the BBC which was screened here about ten years ago.It centered around the cases taken by a fictional Left wing team of lawyers.In the first episode actor Jack Shephard (who plays one of the main characters in the story) tells another lawyer what his philosophy is:“The law is a bulldozer, driven by vested interest.We can pull a few people clear but we can’t make it make sense.” But this is because each class in society views the justice system from its own point of view.

Right wing politicians never pass up an opportunity to whip up the public by calling for tougher sentences and complaining about people let out on parole.Victims feel let down by the system and by being on a conveyer belt which they have little or no control over.Several years ago when I approached a lawyer to ask for help with an immigrant friend accused of rape I was told such people are “grist for the mill.” On the other side, criminal lawyers spoken to, talk of the “intellectual dishonesty” of the courts when making decisions and accuse them of being too keen to believe the police and waive the rights of the accused.

For Marxists ‘making sense’ of the Capitalist Justice System comes down to the way the state regulates the lives of the working class.Workers need to be maintained in their bourgeois families according to social and moral rules that ensure that they are fit for work.Workers who steal, threaten violence, or break moral norms or sexual standards are punished and paraded before the public. When extreme transgression of moral standards occurs, public reactions are also extreme. Because of fears that such criminal excesses could overrun decent society, individuals suppress their own desire to ‘break the rules’ by joining in the ritual punishment of the transgressors.The outburst of public emotion that surrounds and amplifies such rule-breaking is called a ‘moral panic’.

Bourgeois media coverage of the justice system serves this purpose. It is selective and sensational, homing in on high-profile cases likely to rouse the emotions of a sexually obsessed public.Therefore, anything to do with sex and particularly, sexual abuse allegations is likely to get a lot of attention.The coverage of the Christchurch Civic Creche case was understandably reasonably saturated, by media standards.

So where has the ‘left’ stood on such issues and on this case in particular?The answer is all over the show.Many on the left (particularly those who would define themselves as feminists) believe that sexual abuse is an epidemic in our society.They therefore tended to believe that Peter Ellis was as guilty as sin.The women at the Christchurch Civic Creche presented more of a problem, since many on the left refuse to believe that women are capable of sexual abuse.But the problem is that it is difficult to see how the scale of abuse that Peter Ellis is said to have indulged in could have occurred without the knowledge of the women at the crèche.

The criticism leveled at people on the left if they challenge the above view is that they are not taking the issue of child abuse seriously.This response seems to be reminiscent of the attitude taken to people in the United States in the 1950s who dared to challenge the McCarthyism Witch hunts.They were accused of being communists themselves. It is ironic that today some so-called leftists are using the same tactics that were used against communists by anti-leftists in the 50s.

It’s a reasonable perception that the general public is fairly evenly divided on whether sexual abuse is as widespread as some say it is.They also seem to be fairly evenly divided on whether the events that were supposed to take place at the Christchurch Civic Crèche took place.

In such cases the media acts as a “gatekeeper” deciding what the public should know.The courts add their own gate keeping to this process and further limit what is known, particularly during the course of a trial. Ostensibly, this is done so that the defendant gets a fair trial and that alleged victims are not identified.Whatever the reasons, the end result is that the public and even the jury in a trial are often not aware of all the facts.Sometimes these facts emerge after the trial as was the case in the Civic Crèche trial.

Yet even when facts are released after the event, the media gatekeepers are still in a strong position to regulate what we know.Only a dedicated person, willing to research all the facts can truly give us a fully rounded picture of what a trial was all about.There is a social context for any case.What was happening to NZ society in the 1980’s that created a climate for moral panics and hysteria about sex cases? While the media and the trial lawyers focus on the so-called facts of the case it is important to understand the broader canvas on which the case is painted.

Lynley Hood’s book seeks to lay before us all the facts she feels relevant and to put before us the context in which the Christchurch case occurred.The result is a kind of snapshot of society and gives us a better understanding of the way the justice system operates.

It is notable that it takes over 160 pages before we even get into the events leading up to the original trial.In the first part of the book Lynley Hood talks of the evolution of the counseling and child protection methods which were used and also other non-related panics relating to child molestation and child pornography which occurred in Christchurch prior to the case. The overall impression Lynley Hood gives us in these first 160 pages is that it was not a case of if such an event as the Christchurch crèche case was to going to occur, more when it would happen.

In the decade before the Civic case we had seen a shift from media-stoked moral panics about gangs, and racism, to moral panics focusing on violent crime and the sexual abuse of children. In all cases the fears underlying these panics bear little relation to reality, and as they become more centred on children they become more and more detached from reality.

This is demonstrated by the extreme concept of Satanic and Ritual Abuse, no incidences of which have ever been proven to exist. Hood mentions the fact that prior to the Christchurch Civic case being investigated there had been an expose on “60 Minutes” of allegations about a pedophile-sex ring involving child pornography.The investigation by the police showed the whole thing was a load of nonsense but that didn’t stop it taking on a life of its own.

Our newspapers and TV news often feature stories of alleged pedophile activities and it seems that many television cop/investigation shows include plots involving pedophilia.In the week that I wrote this review there were at least three dramas on television involving pedophilia, child abduction by pedophiles and child pornography rings.It is the new TV obsession because of the current moral panic surrounding it.

What is interesting in this panic is the way that some people continue to believe that sex rings and ritual abuse exist, even when there is little or no evidence of them.It is hypothesized by the believers that there is some sort of vast conspiracy, reaching up to the highest levels, which is protecting the abusers.Like all conspiracy theories, people who believe this cannot be dissuaded by something as mundane as the facts, preferring instead to say that the reason no one is ever caught for ritual abuse is there is a cover up.They fall into the same category as believers in alien abductions and the members of the Flat Earth Society.

What happened at the Christchurch Civic Crèche seems to be symptomatic of the “culture of fear” that has intensified during the neo-liberal years of the 1980’s and 1990’s.As society was destabilised and more and more people marginalised, fears of social disorder grew rapidly and were projected onto certain social groups.

Writers such as Barry Glasner and Frank Furedi have written about how the media has hyped up certain issues and exaggerated their occurrence out of all proportion.An example of this is that although the number of child abductions by strangers has remained largely static for the last 20 years, there is a perception (bought about by media sensationalism of a few cases) that child stranger abductions are more common now.The results of such perceptions are wide ranging.

It is clear from early on in “A City Possessed” that Lynley Hood believes there were fatal flaws in the Christchurch Civic Creche case.She does not attempt a “balanced” approach, putting both sides of the argument, weighing up the pros and cons.Instead she clearly has a conviction that Peter Ellis and the women charged (who were acquitted) were innocent victims of a climate of fear and shonky interviewing techniques used on the children.

This is not a flaw, unless you start reading the book expecting a so-called balanced approach (whatever that means).If you read the inside jacket, you might expect something more middle of the road, but if you read the comments on the back you will not be under any illusion about the thrust of the book.

Lynley Hood also draws parallels early in the book with the sort of witch hunts that occurred in the USA in the 17^th century and the anti-communist witch hunt of the 50s and compares them to the pedophile witch hunts being carried out in our time.

A factor that emerges as a key ingredient in the Christchurch Creche case is the use of extremely questionable interviewing techniques.Over the past twenty years the number of people offering counseling in New Zealand (and other countries) has increased dramatically.Unfortunately, the standard has gone through the floorboards.It seems under our free market ideology that anyone can set himself or herself up as a counselor with no or little training.

Twenty years ago counselors were psychiatrists and psychologists and they had university qualifications and were members of professional organisations and subject to some form or registration.Now there is little way of knowing the qualifications (and value of the qualifications) of counselors.

There has also been a move away from a scientific approach to counseling towards acceptance of totally improvable concepts such as “recovered memory syndrome.”Counselors have developedseemingly magical powers by which they are able to recover memories of what happened to a person when they were four or five.We all know that our memory can be unreliable and we also know that we have little recollection of what happened when we were four or five.

Thus, whatever is ‘recovered’ by these counselors is extremely subjective and short of a confession from the perpetrator of abuse cannot be proven to have a foundation in fact.

Most of these counselors are little more than modern day shamans.They are spell-casters, waving their magic wand and conjuring up demons from the past.This wouldn’t matter so much if their spell- casting wasn’t taken so seriously be the police, media and judiciary.The consequences of their actions are often the imprisonment of people, some of whom I am sure are innocent.

This is not to deny that sexual abuse does take place.It irks me that I have to write this, but I do so because the criticism leveled at people who dare to challenge what is happening in our society is that they don’t take sexual abuse seriously or don’t believe it exists at all.Lynley Hood makes this point in her book.

There are many other points and issues that Lynley Hood raises in the book that deserve attention from our society.In addition to attacking the method of child questioning used in the case, she gives ample evidence that the children were coached by their parents and the interviewers.

She also rightly attacks the current rationale that children never lie about sexual abuse (unless they deny it happened).The book offers an interesting insight into the tactics of the police who behave as little more than licensed thugs (Chapter 9) and lays open the myth of the supposedly objective justice system (in particular Chapter 12).

From a Marxist point of view, the book fails to correctly analyze why the outcome was as it was.While Lynley Hood correctly gives us an overview of the climate leading up to the case she fails to realise that it was unlikely that any other outcome was going to occur for Peter Ellis once the ‘moral panic’ got rolling.There is a clear suggestion that had another policeman done the investigation the outcome may have differed. A similar, though understandably more guarded approach (given the laws for contempt) is taken by Hood to the Judge’s handling of the case.

As Marxists we are under no such illusions. It is possible that the outcome might have been different, but given the accumulation of circumstances that shaped the way the case was dealt with, it is unlikely.To return to the original quote about the justice system, you can’t “make it make sense.”Unless, that is, you adopt a Marxist perspective. The courts and police are not objective observers - they are instruments of state oppression and operate in the interests of the ruling class to protect their property and regulate the lives of the working class.

This criticism does not detract from what is, however, a very good book that seems at times more like a sociological study of an aspect of our society than a recounting of the events.Hood’s book is a valuable contribution and statement of where capitalist society is going at this point in time.Reading it makes one wonder if we have progressed all that much since the time of the Salem witch hunts.

Putting the issue of alleged sexual abuse aside, it is clear that satanic and ritual abuse is nonsense and nothing more than a modern day equivalent of religious mumbo jumbo.The fact these views are held by educated people does not give them any greater credibility.What it does show is the level to which moral panic has risen in our society and the importance of identifying the real class enemy and pointing out how superstitious beliefs are being used to deflect anger away from the real targets at which it should be aimed.

THE WORLD SOCIAL FORUM AND LULA LAND

From Class Struggle 49 March/April 2003

The Big Boys have taken over the World Social Forum, says anti-globalisation guru Naomi Klein. Boo hoo! What did she expect? Lula turns up at Porto Alegre and has 75,000 adoring fans who complain when he leaves for the World Economic Forum in Davos. He’s the boss. The WSF is really a reformist ‘movement of movements’ that wants to replace neoliberalism with democratic socialism. But the grassroots enthusiasms of the anti-globalisation troops post-Zapatistas and post-Seattle were always directed from above.It was a small group of PT (Brazilian Workers’ Party) leaders, Le Monde Diplomatique intellectuals and ATTAC ‘activists’ who set the WSF agenda in 2000.

Z Net editor and activist Michael Albert said as much. He found that as a member of the International Council the big decisions about what the forum was about, who would speak , and who would attend, were already made. The big issues, neo-liberalism and how to fight it, and how to make’ another world possible’ were already shaped by the politics of these reformist organisations.

The WSF was the child of the PT, and now the PT leads a Popular Frontgovernment with its main leader, Luis Inacio de Silva, ‘Lula’ for short, the newly elected President of Brazil. So it’s not the WSF but the main attraction that has changed. The WSF still attracts the bevy of left-wing celebrities like Chomsky, Michael Albert, Arundhati Roy and Samir Amin, but the stars are now clearly the strong men of Latin American social democracy, with Lula, Chavez and Ecuadorian leader Guiterrez at their head and Castro as elder statesman (there were 50 Cuban Communist Party leaders headed by Castro’s daughter at Porto Alegre 2003). The fate of the WSF hangs on Lula’s political fate which itself turns on the balance between the US ruling class and his mass working class constituency.

Movements of Movements

Now that it is obvious that Porto Alegre mark 3 was a PR job to get progressive world opinion lined up behind Lula, let’s see how he can deliver on the promise that “another world is possible”.Ignacio Ramonet, a lead writer of Le Monde Diplomatique, reacted to Lula’s election enthusiastically. For Ramonet, Lula’s election marked “the beginning of a new historical cycle in Latin America. The preceding cycle began at the end of a dark period of military tyrannies, repression and armed uprisings, and lasted two decades, since 1983” (what about the Brazilian military coup of 1968 that lasted 20 years, Pinochet’s coup1973 that also lasted nearly 20 years,and the military regime in Argentina from 1976 to 1983?!).

Ramocet says Lula’s electioncrowns a string of left wing victories: the election of Chavez in Venezuela in 1998, the overthrow of President Mahaud in Ecuador in January 2000, the ousting of Fujimori in Peru in December of 2000, the downfall of de la Rua in December 2001, and the election of Colonel Gutierrez in Ecuador in November 2002. Are these regime changes signs of the end of ‘neo-liberalism’ and the opening up of a more democratic period?

Despite the US drive to war, both Chomsky and Roy see signs that grassroots democracy represented by many struggles around the world is ‘confronting the Empire’. They endorse the concept of a ‘movement of movements’. This is the idea that local movements such as the landless in Brazil, the peasants in Colombia, the piqueteros in Argentina, the Kurds in Turkey, the people of Cochabamba in Bolivia, and the poor farmers of India, will join their struggles together to make one big movement. Not only that, Chomsky thinks that the unprecedented and growing majorities opposed to the war on Iraq in Europe and before long in America, before any war has taken place, show that the ruling US and European elites are being threatened from below by a new mass resurgence of peoples’ democracy.

In her speech at Porto Alegre, Arundhati Roy echoed these themes.She asked: “How do we resist ‘Empire’ and make another world possible? The good news is that we are not doing too badly”.She listed a string of victories - Bolivia, Colombia, Peru, and so on - and pointed to the collapse of some of the world’s biggest corporations, like the notorious Enron, Betchtel, WorldCom, and Arthur Anderson. “We may not have stopped ‘Empire’ in its tracks – yet – but we have stripped it down. We have made it drop its mask, we have forced it into the open. It now stands before us on the world’s stage in all its brutish, iniquitous nakedness.”Like Chomsky, however, democratic resistance is a rather abstract tool with which to ‘lay siege to Empire’. Roy wants us to “To deprive it of Oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different to the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe”.

The problem here is that the stories that come out of the WSF are not very different to the ones that some sections of the imperialist elites tell us. ‘Empire’ here means the US out of control – Chomsky’s rogue state. According to Metzaros, in this new age of ‘global hegemonic imperialistic capitalism’ only the US is imperialist. That sounds like the French and German politicians trying to mask their rapacious oil concessions in Iraq as humanitarian aid. Painting the US as ‘fascist’ makes them look ‘democratic’. ‘Imperialism’ means the greed and power of a US elite which takes the form of neo-liberalism and globalisation. But this can be resisted and overturned by ‘movements’ fighting against injustice and greed. ‘Democratic’ countries can gang up in the UN to fight imperialism. This vision is boosted by Toni Negri’s view that the US represents a reactionary imperialism that has to be contested by …yes, the European states and the UN!And if ‘imperialism’ is open to reform by the movement of movements, then maybe capitalism can be reformed from below by means of ‘market socialism’. The tell-tale mark of reformists is their belief that a majority can rule the state and reverse the sign of the zero-sum society from rich to poor. Same old story.

Market Socialism

What do all the currents in the WSF have in common?It is the belief that capitalism is a zero-sum society based on unequal exchange that can be reformed by an alliance of workers, petty bourgeois and‘democratic’ capitalists (and/or progressive military leaders like Chavez) in cross-class governments. In ganging up against ‘fascist’ imperialist America, the European bourgeoisie can pose as democrats and mask their own imperialist interests.Entering governments and alliances with the democratic bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeois intelligentsia and the Stalinist and Castroist bureaucracy that dominate the labour movement claim that these governments are controlled by workers, when they are anything but! This is how they try to mask their service to the bourgeoisie in containing workers’ struggles.They have to claim that workers get the best of the deal with a shift from neo-liberal austerity to ‘market socialism’. To paint the politics of betrayal in rosy colours the WSF gets ‘revolutionary’ credentials by its association with a bunch of academic Marxists like Samir Amin and James Petras who dress up with revolutionary phrases reformist policies of socialism on the installment plan.

When such ‘Marxists’ endorse Lula they provide him with an alibi. They blame those who want to mobilise the working class to take power for frightening off the EU imperialists, or for provoking a US counter-revolution. They peddle illusions that workers can benefit from some ‘new deal’ that will alleviate their poverty and suffering!Already in Argentina, the left bureaucracy has turned the administration of poverty into an art form where they are paid by the state to oversee ‘work for the dole’ schemes.

Lulaland

But now we face the truly historic test of Lula’s promise to deliver ‘market socialism’ in Brazil. The election of Lula threatens to repeat the whole history of betrayals in Latin America in the name of the Brazilian PT!Lula wants to negotiate with the IMF and World Bank using his working class voters as electoral fodder.Ramocet praises Lula with no reservations. Lula gets a rapturous welcome in Porto Alegre.But how can Lula deliver to his supporters, the poor workers and landless peasants, unless he repudiates the national debt, nationalises the banks and renationalises privatised state industry?And he cannot do that without arming the workers and peasants to stop a military coup and US counterrevolution succeeding like it did in Chile in 1973.

Whatever the idealism of the WSF ‘story of stories’, or models of a ‘socialist’ utopia, these noble thoughts cannot measure up against the actual struggles on the ground. Story tellingdoes not arm workers and peasants against the military might of imperialism. Not unless one is telling the stories that explain the lessons of the bloody history of workers struggles in the 20^th century - stories that say that unless workers take state power they cannot participate in the economy as equals and managers.Or that workers cannot plan a socialist economy unless they expropriate the private property of the capitalist owners.Or that what is needed is a workers’ government and a socialist plan.

We already have clear evidence from Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Ecuador, Argentina, Venezuela, and Colombia, that workers must occupy their factories or workplaces, must make military alliances with the landless peasants, must arm themselves to defend themselves, must organise a general strike, must break with the bureaucrats, must win over the rank and file of the army and seize state power, before any real challenge to imperialism is possible.None of this is possible without the building of an international revolutionary party and program to lead workers along the road to revolution.Failing these measures, imperialism has, can, and will stage armed counter-revolutions and smash all resistance. But with these measures workers and poor peasants can create a United Socialist States of Latin America.

WHY THE GREEN LEFT CAN'T STOP THE WAR

From Class Struggle 49 March/April 2003

If Labour Parties are implicated in Bush's war, should workers try to build Green Parties or left Social Democratic parties like the Alliance? While their stand against the war appears better than Labour's would they be able to stop the war?

What ‘peace-loving’ capitalist governments?

At a recent GPJA (Global Peace and Justice Alliance) meeting Alliance activist Mike Treen began a talk on the impending war on Iraq with the statement: “I don’t think we can stop the war on Iraq, but we can make it more expensive for them to go to war”. What he meant was that we are unlikely to influence the Labour-Progressive Coalition Government to get them to recall the ships and planes. But we may make them unpopular and bring about their electoral defeat at the hands of political parties opposed to war.As a member of the Alliance, Treen clearly sees the Alliance rebounding into parliament at the expense of a Labour Government discredited because it won’t criticise the US policy of unilateral regime change. No doubt the Greens share this hope for a revival of their electoral fortunes too.

On the following Saturday, 15 February, New Zealand led the 12 million who rallied against the war. GPJA organised the Auckland rally of more than 10,000 people who marched up Queen Street to Myers Park. There an audience of at least 5,000 cheered loudly in support of resolutions that opposed a war against Iraq whether done in the name of the UN or not, and called on the Labour government to refuse to participate in this war. Water Pressure Group spokesperson Penny Bright got the loudest cheers of the day, when she condemned the UN Security Council and called for direct action at military facilities like Whenuapai Air Base.

On the following day at a‘Peace in the Park’ rally 2,000 people listened to similar speeches and a small group delivered a ‘letter’ with hundreds of signatures to the Prime Minister Helen Clark’s residence repeating the demand that Labour must oppose the war on Iraq. So clearly even if GPJA leaders did not think that they could stop the war, they had hopes of influencing NZ’s participation, or at least exposing Labour as a government committed to war, preparing the ground for political parties against the war to win support in the anti-war movement.

But what Treen failed to say, and what we in the Communist Workers Group and the Anti Imperialist Coalition constantly say, is that appeals to bourgeois governments of any sort cannot stop war. While they may claim to represent workers’ interests, Green and Social Democratic governments go to war to defend the profits of their own bourgeoisies. They do this because the labour bureaucracy that runs the unions and controls Labour Parties are paid for their services with a share of the bosses' profits, so have to prop up the profit system.

Lessons of History

In Australia, the Labor Party endorsed the First World War enthusiastically. Labor leader Billy Hughes traversed Britain holding public meetings to rally support for the war. What offended Labor workers in Australia was not so much Hughes’ jingoism as his parading around in a top hat sucking up to British royalty. Though Hughes was kicked out of the Labor Party this was over the issue of conscription not the war itself.In NZ Labour leaders like Peter Fraser went to jail rather than fight, but by the Second World War they were in government, and backed Britain’s war by introducing conscription and setting up a network of prison camps to house the thousands of workers who refused to fight for imperialism.

If that is the track record of past Labour governments, then Clark’s Labour-Progressive Coalition Government is no better. In fact the Greens and the Alliance say it’s worse because it took part in a secret war in Afghanistan where NZ SASS troops guided US bombers to their targets. But would the Greens or Alliance be any better in Government? What if the majority of voters break from the warlike Labour parties to back parties like the Alliance and the Greens who have come out against a UN-sanctioned war?Should workers place their hopes in ‘peace-loving’ Alliance-led or Green-led governments?

History is against the Green Left.

Peace movements’ directed at pressuring bourgeois governments, no matter how left-wing, have always been impotent before the imperialist drive to war. Why?Because such ‘movements’ are composed of individuals who see only the symptoms not the causes of war. They see war as a bloody minded ‘policy’ of some sections of the ruling class (hence the personal attacks on Bush or his pro-war ‘camp’, and on Blair’s moral hypocrisy) and appeal to the ‘democratic’ and ‘pacifist’ instincts of more enlightened sectors of the ruling classes. But when these ‘democrats’ also go to war on the basis of high moral principles i.e. ‘defending democracy against fascism’, or in the name of the ‘UN’ or the ‘international community’, the ‘masses’ fall prey to their dressed-up appeals to nationalism and jingoism and are soon drawn into the defence of their virtuous fatherlands against some ‘axis of evil’.

The idea that left wing, even supposedly ‘socialist’ governments, are any better at opposing war is disproved by the betrayals of the leaders of the Second Communist International and the Stalinist leaders of the Third Communist International in the face of the First and Second Imperialist Wars.

On August 4, 1914, the leaders of the Second International of ‘socialist’ parties renounced their clear program of refusing to fight in imperialist wars and instead backed their own bosses to draft workers to kill each other. A hard core of revolutionary workers around Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin formed the Zimmerwald Left(see Class Struggle No 44, 45 & 47) to rally workers to fight against the war.Their position was that workers in each of the imperialist countries, including Russia, should ‘turn their guns on their own ruling class’ because they were the ‘main enemy’, not the workers of other countries.They would transform imperialist war into civil war overthrow their own ruling classes and go on to create a socialist, and ultimately a classless, society. By this means workers could turn the crisis of a bosses’ war into a solution for all humanity.

The example of 1917

That is why CWG repeats again and again that only organised workers’ action can stop war. And that to stop war, the cause of war, capitalism, has to be replaced by socialism. Workers as members of a class that is exploited by capitalism have a class interest in stopping war. They are the ones who are conscripted to kill one another – the cannon fodder – and they are the ones who are forced to work non-stop on the home front for the war effort.War divides them, but it also arms them and exposes them to the suffering of war, and teaches them that they can take action to end war.Historical examples abound.

In Russia the First Imperialist War was ended by a workers’ revolution. It was begun by the women textile workers of St Petersburg who went on strike on International Women’s Day in February 1917. Their strike set in motion the revolutionary process that led to the October Revolution. Trotsky has a powerful description of what happened in his History of the Russian Revolution:

“The 23^rd of February (old style) was International Woman’s Day. The social-democratic circles had intended to mark this day in a general manner: by meetings, speeches, leaflets. It had not occurred to anyone that it might become the first day of the revolution. Not a single organisation called for strikes on that day. What is more, even a Bolshevik organisation, and a most militant one – the Vyborg borough-committee, all workers – was opposing strikes…On the following morning, however, in spite of all directives, the women textile workers in several factories went on strike, and sent delegates to the metal workers with an appeal for support…Thus the fact is that the February revolution was begun from below, overcoming the resistance of its own revolutionary organisations, the initiative being taken of their own accord by the most oppressed and downtrodden part of the proletariat – the women textile workers, among them no doubt many soldiers’ wives.” (Vol 1 119-120).

This strike led to a mass strike where thousands of workers rallied behind cries for ‘bread’ and the slogans “Down with the autocracy!’ and ‘Down with the war!’ In five days the masses won over the rank and file of the soldiers fed up with war and went on to overthrow the Tsarist state. Trotsky recounts how relations between workers and soldiers developed in the days before the strike:

“Two weeks before the revolution, a spy… reported a conversation in a tramcar traversing the workers’ suburb. The soldier was telling how in his regiment eight men were under hard labour because last autumn they refused to shoot at the workers of the Nobel factory, but shot at the police instead.“We’ll get even with them’ the solider concluded. A skilled worker answered him: “For that it is necessary to organise so that all will be like one.” The soldier answered, “Don’t you worry, we’ve been organising a long time…They’ve drunk enough blood. Men are suffering in the trenches and here they are fattening their bellies.” (164).

The war in Russia did not end immediately. While workers and soldiers formed soviets and went on to make the October 1917 revolution, not until the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in early 1918 was the new Soviet government able to negotiate a peace with Germany.

On the wider European front the war was stopped by a soldiers’ and sailors’ mutiny in Germany at the end of 1918. The British and German general staffs rapidly agreed to stop hostilities for fear that the ‘Bolshevik Revolution’ would spread to Europe.Unfortunately, the revolutionaries were too poorly organised to be able to turn these mutinies into successful revolutions like in Russia. The defeat of revolution in Germany in 1919 left the workers’ movement divided and weakened. This created conditions in which workers became the target of rising fascist movements based on the ruined middle class and disaffected elements of the working class. The isolation of the Soviet Union soon led to the rise of a degenerated anti-worker bureaucracy under Joseph Stalin. From that point on the war policy of the Soviet Union was subordinated to the defence of‘socialism [ie Stalinism] in one country’.

From Revolution to 'democratic' war

In the period after 1924 the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union refused to build United Fronts of all workers to fight fascism - this which further divided the working class, handing a victory to fascism in Italy in 1923, Germany in 1933 and Spain in 1938. After 1935 the Stalinist Comintern then threw all of its energy into forming popular fronts between the communist parties and ‘democratic’, ‘peace loving’, elements of the bourgeoisie who were apparently opposed to fascism. Instead of the Bolsheviks’ policy of civil, or class, war as the best way to fight fascism, this was a policy of civil, or class, peace. Revolutions were sacrificed to the defence of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union.

Communists allied with ‘socialists’ (Labour parties) alongside petty bourgeois and ‘democratic’ bosses’ parties to fight fascism. They were part of the Popular Front (cross-class) government that came to power in France in 1936, and politically supported the Republican government of Spain against Franco’s army. This Stalinist betrayal meant that workers had to forgo revolution and submit to bourgeois governments so that they were divided and defeated by fascism. Franco won in Spain. Hitler gained in strength and prepared to go on the rampage across Europe, into Russia and North Africa. The ultimate proof of the bankruptcy of this ‘peace loving’ policy was the sudden zig when Stalin did a deal with Hitler in 1939 in a desperate attempt to stop an invasion of the Soviet Union. Of course when Hitler broke this pact Stalin zagged back to a popular front policy.

Once again, most workers in New Zealand, and in every other country, put their hopes in ‘left’ parties that claimed to represent workers, or the people, against warlike bosses. From 1941 the communist parties sided with the ‘democratic’ bosses in the hope of defeating the ‘fascist’ bosses, and the result was a disaster for workers everywhere. Instead of rising up against all bosses to stop war, workers went to kill each other to defend the bosses’ ‘democracy’ (the right to rule the masses by means of parliament). Where workers attempted to rise up in revolution at the end of the war as in Italy, Greece and Czechoslovakia, they were weak and isolated, and despite their valiant sacrifices, were defeated. Only in the colonial countries were workers and peasants were more united against their colonial overlords did wars of liberation result in important victories.

Stalinists betray the colonial struggles

But even in the colonies, as in Europe, the betrayal of the ‘left’ saw Stalinist parties, allied to the old ‘socialist’ parties, rally to defend their bourgeoisies against workers and peasants revolutions. Yalta saw Stalin do a deal with Roosevelt and Churchill to divide the world into ‘spheres of interest’. Stalin got Eastern Europe as ‘buffer states’ to defend ‘socialism in one country’ and in exchange he ordered the communist parties to collaborate in the repression of workers’ revolutionary wars in Europe and the Far East.

In China, Korea, Cuba and Indochina, colonial wars were brought to an end, some much earlier than others, by organised peasants and workers armies with little or no help from Stalin. In fact in Indochina, national liberation was set back 30 years because the Stalinists collaborated with the French in the hope of gaining independence peacefully. The result was the massacre of thousands of Trotskyists and other revolutionaries and the French re-occupation of Indochina. In Algeria and in Nicaragua reactionary settlers or landlords were expelled by workers’ and peasants’ militias actively opposed by the Stalinist Communist Parties. In Algeria the French Communist Party sided with the French state in putting down the Algerian insurrection. In South Africa the Communist Party ‘conned’ the workers and peasants into stopping short on the road to national revolution and to ‘share power’ with the white ruling class.

In all of these cases, popular and working class wars of liberation were stalled, or reversed and in most cases defeated, because of the intervention, not only of imperialist ruling classes, but more significantly, of the ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ parties. Where some of the historic gains of these wars of liberation remain (eg in Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea) it is because the national liberation struggles were forced to overthrow the national bourgeoisie when they openly sided with imperialism, and as yet imperialism has yet to impose decisive and historic defeats on these interrupted revolutions.

Back to the Future

What about the ‘anti-war’ Greens and Alliance-type parties today? These are parties based on the petty bourgeoisie or the labour aristocracy. They are run by a caste of labour bureaucrats. They do not even have the official support of organised labour. People like Keith Locke and Mike Treen do not want to make a revolution, they want to make a parliamentary career. They too sacrifice the interests of the working class to prop up capitalism so that they can represent the small business owners and managers, or serve the bourgeoisie as bureaucrats, politicians and flunkies, and reap their financial rewards.They are reformists who believe in their ability to manage capitalism and make a peaceful and democratic transition to socialism – so long as they are in the driving seat!But the bureaucrats have never been able to do anything other than drive the workers movement off the road.

Today the reformists’ hopes are pinned on the World Social Forum (see the article below) and in particular on the prospects of the Lula government in Brazil to challenge globalisation from below. Just like in the previous imperialist wars, the reformists of the WSF see themselves as the answer to the new imperialist ‘war on terror’. Theorists like Toni Negri present the WSF as a movement of the ‘multitude’ against the Empire. Negri argues, like Chomsky, that the US is a rogue state, which reverted to a more primitive imperialist international posture after S11 by declaring its right to ‘regime change’ by unilateral and pre-emptive military strike.Negri puts his hopes in the multilateral ‘rationality’ of the European Union ruling classes, and the ‘democratic’ fraction of the US ruling class, to constitute a world Empire in the guise of new multinational states like the EU, a revamped UN, giant transnational corporations, and a body of international law.

So like the Mensheviks of the First Imperialist war, and the Stalinists of the Second Imperialist war, today’s WSF reformists think that capitalism can be tamed by appealing to the self-interest of ‘democratic’ capitalists in all countries to join forces and act together to avoid war. This is just like Kautsky’s 1914 theory of ultra-imperialism. Kautsky said that capitalists should not go to war because they have investments spread across the hostile countries. War could end if the workers’ movement persuaded the bosses that war was bad for business.

What today’s post-imperialists overlook is the fact that the conflict between the EU and the US is not a slight reversal of ultra-imperialism caused by a rogue US state, but the reassertion of the inter-imperialist rivalry over the division of the world’s resources and markets. The only reason that the major EU states adopt multilateralism, trying to work through the UN, is that they do not have the military dominance to impose a unilateral line on the US.

To stop the betrayals of a new reformist WSF international, trapping workers in Popular Fronts with the ‘democratic’ bourgeoisie, revolutionaries have to urgently mobilise a new revolutionary International, based on the lessons of the Zimmerwald left of 1915 and the Trotskyist Fourth International in 1938. The CWG is currently engaged with 4 other tendencies in working on a joint document that calls for another Zimmerwald and a new revolutionary international to fight the renewed drive to imperialist war.

WORKERS CAN STOP THIS WAR!

From Class Struggle 49 March/April 2003

The following letter was written by comrade Justin to a Syd, a fellow activist in the National Distribution Union (NDU). It talks mainly about the work of the Anti-Imperialist Coalition (AIC) and the importance of organising workers against the imperialist war plans to attack Iraq. It criticises the current Council of Trade Unions (CTU) stand supporting the Labour government joining the UN-sponsored war against Iraq, and the NDU petition backing this position circulated on the February 15^th mass anti-war marches. Justin points the way forward out of this gutless subservience to Labour Government policy by calling for rank and file workers to rally on May Day this year to strike against imperialist war.

Tena KoeBrother,

A bit of history of the Anti-Imperialist Coalition.

Our United Front organisation the Anti Imperialist Coalition has been in existence since shortly after Sept 11 2001, not too long after the Carter Holt Harvey Interion strike here in Manurewa. Quite consciously different from the rest of the anti-war movement, our orientation has been trade union and worker based with a heavy emphasis on the “Rank and File.” Whilst we have no formal membership structure, workers and individuals from all of the main unions including the NDU, PPTA, ASTE, SFWU, Rail and Maritime, FINSEC, AWU, AUS, University Students etc and the “Engineers,” have made valuable contributions and continue to do so.

It became obvious from the inaugural meeting that the AIC was not going to be a “Peacenik” organisation, but one dedicated to militant struggle with workers in the vanguard. To date, our tasks have included organising the militant wing of the anti-war movement on all demos, rallies and pickets. Dissemination of non-mainstream information and politically educational material is a big part of AIC’s work. We have regular monthly solidarity actions with the PHRC (Palestinian Human Rights Campaign) and hold forums with invited speakers on all topics affecting workers. A talk late last year after the Bali bombing by a lecturer in Indonesian from Auckland University gave a valuable insight into the prejudiced perceptions being pushed by the West against Moslems and its flow down effects on all indigenous struggles including here in Aotearoa.

Our engagements with trade unions have been central to much of our activity. AIC has sent delegations along to stop-work meetings of the Watersiders and Seafarers unions to name but a few.

During the general elections last year, I and another member made two trips down to the Kinleith Timber Mill in Tokoroa as part of a fact finding tour. OK, so a big part of it consisted of getting pissed at the “Trees Tavern” in Tokoroa, but I was able to gauge the extent of the mess created by the “Engineers” – by the leadership of the Engineers’ Union. One bloke I met was so hacked off with the decision to go with the Engineers back in “91,” that he quit and became a screw at Waikeria. Politically a bad move I would have thought. I met a couple of truckies from Putaruru with the National Distribution Union Transport sector, who were worried about their jobs as a result of the Kinleith lay-offs. They must have realised that I wasn’t intimidated by a pub full of “Engineers” because they didn’t hassle me once for wearing my “Woodies” hi-viz jacket. Imperialism did come up as a topic of conversation especially after they got to read some of our material and related it to the Carter Holt Harvey’s owners, International Paper.

Our second trip to Tokoroa coincided with election night. We spent some time at local MP and Minister of Defence Mark Burton’s campaign HQ. There, we got to meet more Kinleith Workers and yet more “Engineers” – it was a very right-wing atmosphere with the local Chairman telling me that the Alliance were nuts for not backing the US War of Terrorism.

AIC/CWG’s most ambitious venture to date has been to send one of its members to Argentina to look at the revolution taking place there. We learned that the Argy Workers after being crapped on for so long took it upon themselves to occupy hundreds of factories left by their bosses. Some have even started exporting. Having turned their backs on all mainstream political parties and traditional unions especially their bureaucrats, they have organised themselves into site committees working closely with neighbourhood committees, who in turn have formed into Popular Assemblies. Many problems lie ahead for them, but they have resolved to oppose all attempts by the US and the UN to impose their rule through the World Bank, the IMF and the military. Politically they are light years ahead of us, but they point in the direction we should be headed in.

Because of AIC’s Anti-Imperialist Kaupapa, we realise that it is the Workers and their organisations who must lead the fight. So far, and it’s still early days, workers, and I include AIC, have had to tail after the: Peaceniks, Greenies, Churchies and anyone with an axe to grind. As you probably noticed on the march, Maori representation is almost non-existent. Each time that I’ve driven to an anti-war or political action, I’ve had to drive past sports fields crowded with our people indulging in organised nothingness designed by the ruling class. Don’t get me wrong, I love my rugby, but I’ve learned that my priorities aren’t what they used to be. It is important that we as Maori workers redirect that wasted energy toward the struggle. So far, the only ones happy with that status quo, are the “Bosses”, because a Maori with a rugby ball is not likely to be a “staunch politico.”AIC has organised public speaking engagements at Otara Flea Market in the past and similar venues with the idea of getting our people on board. Much interest has been shown, though this has not been greatly manifest by numbers on marches and so forth.

The so-called anti-war NDU Petition

The so called anti-war petition on Iraq being circulated by the National Distribution Union has come in for a considerable amount of flak due to its inference that war can be averted by working through the UN. The first of the six points outlined in the petition clearly states the NDU’s support for the Govt’s “consideration for military assistance” (support for war in any other lingo) against Iraq as long as it is mandated by the UN within international law. In effect the union would support the slaughter of Iraqi “workers” and their families. “International Workers Solidarity” and “Workers of the World Unite,” would become empty and meaningless. Even peace groups with pro-UN views in the past are beginning to recognise the Imperialist role of the UN and reversing their positions accordingly.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but support for Phil Goff by the NDU totally misrepresents the position taken by the anti-war movement since S11. Not only has he been burned in effigy and had reams of uncomplimentary stuff written about him, but he has gone on record as calling anti-war Green MP Keith Locke, “despicable” for opposing the US war. When I got my copy of the NDU petition in the mail the other day, I couldn’t believe it. It became the subject of an AIC meeting before the big demo and was roundly condemned. When my turn came to speak on behalf of AIC during the open mike session after the demo, I tore the bloody thing up. Unfortunately by that stage you blokes had gone. Promoting Labour Govt. foreign policy is not the job of the union.

Days later at a meeting of the Auckland CTU, a vote was taken to reject war even with UN backing, leaving the authors of the petition with egg on their faces. Stealing a march on their “Blue Collar” comrades last year, the PPTA and ASTE voted against war, UN or no UN. Again like “Springbok 81”, it is education sector unions taking the lead.

When the NDU calls on all workers to involve themselves in all anti-war activity, it should be saying that we lead them rather than become just another participant.

Without going into the finer details of the remaining points of the petition, I’d just like to say that the US has succeeded in one respect. It has focused “all” attention onto “Terrorism” and “Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs).” They have set the agenda by forcing the politically naive including the trade unions (see the Petition) to construct opinions and actions that presuppose that they are telling us the truth. Daily, they are exposed as liars trying to feed and sow paranoia that is only given legitimacy because many people put serious limits on the degree to which they would question what is going on. So far, like the mainstream mass media, the trade union movement has failed to publicly say that we are witnessing the biggest “red herring” deception in history. The anti-war movement has consistently spelled out “No war for oil” and yet the trade unions stick to the WMD and Terrorism agenda of the imperialists. We know that the war is about more than just oil. Iraq is being made an example of as a warning to any nation that dares to defy the will of the US. In other words, they shit on “Tino Rangatiratanga.” All union statements on the next stage of the US war (since we have already seen the first 12 years of it), must define clearly and loudly the real intentions of the US without kowtowing to the crap that they have been feeding us all this time. At the end of the day, the only thing standing in the way of a US Imperialist victory is the combined force of the “international working class” which is are imperialism’s arch enemy.

Let’s look briefly at the peace-loving UN.

First of all, the UN represents Govts including dictatorships and monarchies none of which are friendly to workers. It was the UN that legitimised the forced removal of Palestinian “Tangata Whenua” from their ancestral lands by recognising the racist state of Israel in 1948. A raupatu that exists to this very day. The UN forced the separation of Korea into North and South in 1950, culminating in the US-forced crisis that has continued to the brink of a US nuclear attack. The UN stepped aside in Lebanon in 1982, while the Israelis committed mass slaughter with US weaponry. In East Timor, the UN did nothing to avert the genocide being committed by Indonesian soldiers trained by the Yanks, Brits, Aussies and Kiwis over a 35-year period. Only after anti-worker US stooge Suharto was dumped from power in ‘98, did the UN take the step to “stage” a rescue. Their bulwark against the threat of a worker-led uprising was no longer in power.The Kiwi and Aussie military who helped bring Suharto to power in 1965 merely became “Blue Berets” and phoney “Peace Keepers.”

To date however, the UN’s prize achievement has been the more than 1 million Iraqis who have died directly as a result of UN imposed sanctions. The weak-kneed UN General Assembly (which some misguided Social-Democrats see as a saviour) represents the overwhelming majority of Govts who have never effected any change through mass protest against the indulgences of the UN Security Council because they are kept in place by the purse strings of the imperialist US.

Workers must seek redress and solutions through their own organisations and international affiliations which account for far more people than the discredited and corrupt UN can ever hope to muster. After all, that’s what we are here for. We must force the issue of characterising the US leaders and their lackeys as international war criminals by supplying the overwhelming evidence that their actions amount to incitement to commit “massive” violence and violate every human rights protocol in existence. Their “mugs” should be plastered on international bulletin boards as the world’s “Most Wanted.” This has to be one of the key demands of all union anti-war activity. Screw the UN, let’s talk about “workers justice.” The cautious and conservative approach of the trade unions has served to undermine all efforts by the progressive Workers movement to combat the forces that we face. Like “Marae Justice” which is belittled by the mainstream, we must push these demands to the forefront of everything we do and nothing less.

Let’s join forces to organise a militant anti-war May Day

May Day will soon be upon us and with the war clouds gathering, we have the opportunity to make it like no other before it. AIC is promoting the idea of holding a May Day Saturday rally in South Auckland culminating in a festival of music with a strong anti-war theme. Of course union input together with the chance for recruitment would be paramount. If anything is going to get our Rangatahi and workers involved, it is going to be the chance to showcase their talents politically. I’m sure Jo and Roopu Kotuku would love to perform “Maa Te Reo” which has a social message to our people on stage. Think about it. It would be a coup for the NDU. The latest word I hear is that there are many young people who are starting to express their feelings about the US-led war in music etc. Over the years, we have seen political Kapa Haka and powerful messages coming from our Rangatahi with their Reggae, Hip hop, R&B and Rap. Its time to “Brown” this movement. Let’s give them a go. Let’s raise this in the NDU Maori Runanga. If any union structure is going to have a significant influence, it is going to be the Runanga.

Anti-worker laws posing as anti-terror laws

On a related subject, my home Marae of Nga Tai Erua is putting in a submission opposing the South Auckland Prison proposal at Meremere not because of Waahi Tapu or Taniwha, but because of the potential of union members or workers taking political industrial action against the state in the event of war and being incarcerated en mass. The Govt has threatened to invoke the Terrorism Suppression Act if Workers threaten a general strike or something similar that would disrupt economic infrastructure. Such a scenario already exists in the US, where purpose-built facilities are under construction. In Britain at the moment, the Fire Fighters union has threatened a general strike if Blair goes into Iraq. Blair has consequently threatened to brand them “Terrorists” and deal with them accordingly. In Aotearoa/NZ, no union has considered such a proposal in relation to Prison submissions. This is an expression of the extent to which AIC politics has had an effect.

AIC’s latest initiative is the formation of a new UF called DAWA (Direct Anti-War Action) which was created on Wed 19^th Feb at the Auckland Trades Hall. This is where we hold our regular meetings every Wednesday night 7.30pm. At the meeting there were members from GPJA (Global Peace and Justice Auckland) who organised the big demo and many unions especially the Seafarers and it was decided that direct action was necessary to deal with the looming crisis. This could include strikes, civil disobedience and directly interrupting the political and military affairs currently being conducted by both NZ and the US on NZ soil. DAWAs first action was a protest outside Whenuapai Airbase Sun 30^th at 12.00 noon.

So to conclude brother, I’d just like to say that the “X” factor necessary to give some “Kaha” to our struggle is for the “Leadership” to be taken by Maori workers with the Runanga being the starting point. If anything, it is the Runanga that has been the single most progressive element within our union or any union for that matter for a very long time, thanks to your leadership. It was the Runanga that stepped outside of the traditional economism of trade unions and took on the Steven Wallace issue, a courageous and political move that has set a precedent for all other unions and workers organisations.

Nuff said. Kia Kaha Brother. Kia ora koe ano Syd.

Justin

VENEZUELA: ANOTHER COUP ATTEMPT

From Class Struggle 48 November 2002/January 2003

Venezuela has become the latest Latin America country to enter a revolutionary crisis,
as the United States works hard to overthrow left-wing President Chavez.
We reproduce parts of an article written by supporters of Chavez, then outline the
Trotskyist response to the crisis in Venezuela.

Venezuela's 'National Strike'
by Justin Podur at Znet
The 'general strike' in Venezuela is the fourth called by the opposition over the past year, including the failed coup attempt in April.
The economy is suffering. On December 3, the anti-Chavez forces stopped a bus, doused it with gasoline, and set it on fire earlier
today to enforce the strike-only the driver was inside, and he escaped unharmed. On the fourth day of the strike the captains of the
oil tankers began a blockade on the transport of oil to and from Venezuela.

The 'Bolivarians', who support Chavez and his reforms, are fighting back. On December 10, they surrounded the TV stations,
a natural tactic in a country where the mass media is openly for the oligarchy and against the poor. On December 7, a peace march
brought 2 million out in support of the government, an event barely covered by the media. A week later workers at a Pepsi-Cola plant
in Aragua, Venezuela, took it over against the wishes of management in order to not join a national strike. Their slogan is "Fabrica
Cerrada - Fabrica Tomada", or 'Close the Factories? We'll take them over!" The government has sent troops to take over the oil
installations and there are reports that oil workers in some parts of the country are working. But the strike has slowed oil production
and the economy in general.

Much of this struggle is about oil. Venezuela is the world's fourth largest oil producer and its oil industry is critical to its economy.
Chavez's 'bolivarian revolution' argues for a role for the state in the oil industry, the redistribution of oil income, and the use of revenues
from this resource to build economic independence. But since 1974, the oil industry has been moving in the opposite direction. At that
time, the state-run-oil company kept 20% of its revenue in operating costs and turned 80% over to the state. In 1990 it was 50-50 and
in 1998, when Chavez was elected, the company kept 80% and turned 20% over. What the neoliberals had in mind in the late 1990s
was full privatization-not a reversal of the trend of the previous 20 years. Added to this, the administration of the oil industry is in the
hands of anti-Chavez forces, making it possible for them to go on strike in order to promote privatization.

What are Chavez's other crimes? Severance pay was restored in the constitution of 1999, after being eliminated in 1997. Social
security was set to be privatized in 1998, but was also impeded by the constitution of 1999. The Land Law, passed last year, was an
agrarian reform law that tries to make rural life viable for Venezuelans and slow rural-urban migration at the expense of large plantation
owners and real-estate speculators.

What is going on in Venezuela is a reversal of the situation in most of the countries of the world. Elsewhere, governments quietly
pass neoliberal laws, privatize state assets, and undermine agrarian reforms under the direction of local elites. The people-and quite
often the employees of the state organs to be privatized-protest, and are repressed by the government. In Venezuela, the neoliberals
tried and failed to take over the government in April 2002. Their remaining weapons are the strike, the media, and the dream of external
intervention.

Many analysts believe that a US intervention in Venezuela shouldn't be ruled out, and that Colombia's civil war will offer a pretext
for such an intervention. While the US has made it clear that it would recognize a Venezuelan government that successfully overthrew
Chavez, reparations for a direct military intervention do not seem to be in the works in the short term. 

Marta Harnecker, a Chilean sociologist, has been following events in Venezuela closely and recently interviewed Chavez for 15
hours. Just two weeks ago she stated her belief that "if Chávez wanted to lead an insurrection today, he would have the strength
to do it. That is, the people and the army at this moment would permit a victorious insurrection. The problem is what will happen
tomorrow. I think he's sufficiently mature to understand the correlation of forces in which he finds himself and to understand that
insurrection would not be the solution." The solution, instead, is to continue with democracy, to continue to struggle honourably
against opponents who fight dirty. Venezuelans should not have to face this battle alone.

Our Trotskyist Perspective

Trotskyists defend Chavez from U.S. coups and CIA-backed subversion, but deny that he can bring the improved living conditions
and wider democratic rights he has promised to Venezuela. Why do we take this position? Let’s have a look at the backdrop to the
Venezulean crisis in an attempt to get an answer to this question. 

Despite their talk about a Chavez ‘revolution’, those who give wholehearted support to Chavez tend to seem him as a left-wing
reformer who can, if given the opportunity, gradually increase the scope of democratic liberties in Venezuela, as well as gradually
boost living standards and the quality of social services like education and health. If the US would only leave him alone, the argument
goes, Chavez would be able to get on with improving the lives of Venezuelans. What this argument ignores is the way that it is the very
existence of limited democracy and some limited left-wing reforms that have created the crisis in Venezuela. 

Venezuela is a poor semi-colony, which means that most of its wealth is drained by multinational companies based in imperialist
countries like the United States. These companies are able to make such big profits because they pay very low wages for labour and
very low prices for raw materials. Because of this domination by foreign companies, not enough money is available in Venezuela for the
government to tax and spend on social services. When a government comes into power and under pressure from workers tries to enact
left-wing reforms, it quickly creates a crisis. If it wants to get enough money to pay for the reforms, it has to challenge the foreign
companies that have a stranglehold over the economy. These companies don’t want to see their profit rates threatened, and they are
backed by the governments of the imperialist countries in which they are based. They resist attempts to increase tax rates or to
nationalise their assets by getting imperialist governments to destabilise the regimes that threaten their profits.

The story is no different when left-wing reforming governments like Chavez’s increase democratic rights by, for instance, making it
easier for free trade unions to operate. Workers tend to use their new liberties to organise strike action to win higher wages and better
conditions from their employers, who are usually directly or indirectly multinational companies. Since higher wages and better
conditions cut into profits, the companies and their imperialist backers start to destabilise the government which gave workers greater
freedoms, in the hope that these freedoms can be rolled back. 

Time and time again, left-wing reforming governments have run into the brick wall of the domination of poor semi-colonies by
imperialist money. In Guatemala in 1954, in Chile in 1973, and in Fiji in 1987 reforming governments have been ousted when the
companies they have alienated have turned to the imperialist powers for support. In Chile in 1973, the Allende government angered
U.S.-based multinationals with its plans to nationalise key areas of the economy like the mining sector. Nationalisation meant an end
to superprofits, so the multinationals conspired with the CIA and with U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to organise the military
coup that put General Pinochet in power, killed thousands of leftists and unionists, and made sure that the economy stayed in U.S.
hands. 

Like Allende thrity years ago, Chavez is running up against the ‘wall’ that keeps poor semi-colonies in their place. The only solution
in Venezuela is to break out of the global capitalist system by socialising property, abolishing the market, and establishing a planned
economy that runs according to the needs of working class and poor Venezuelans, not the dictates of multinationals and the global
market. To get rid of imperialist domination and secure democratic rights, poor semi-colonies have to go all the way to socialism.
Trotskyists call this process a ‘permanent revolution’.

Chavez will never lead such a revolution: His interests are tied to the national bourgeoisie and his ‘radicalism’ amounts to a demand
for a greater share of Venezuelan wealth staying in the hands of the national bourgeoisie. This ‘Chavista’ bourgeoise is trapped and
powerless to alter the situation. There are only two courses open:  US-backed coup, or socialist revolution. 

 Only the workers of Venezuela have the ability to make a socialist revolution. Already, they have been organising themselves in
grassroots ‘Bolivarian circles’ to defend Chavez against coup attempts and CIA-backed right-wing protests. But Chavez has attempted
to stop the Bolivarian circles from taking to the streets in large numbers, because he is worried they will start to challenge the power
of ‘his’ army and police. 

Chavez should be defended from the CIA's counter-revolution, but workers should organise themselves independently of him - rather
than having illusions in him, or being part of a political alliance with him, workers should make a ‘military bloc’ with him to defend him
against imperialist coups and subversion only. 

Workers need to be independent of Chavez so they can get rid of him when he becomes an obstacle to the socialist revolution,
which alone can actually achieve the improved living standards and democratic rights Chavez promises. The win that independence
they need a revolutionary party and program which offers them a clear view of the road to socialist revolution. 

HANDS OFF VENEZUELA!

BREAK FROM THE CHAVISTA BOURGEOISIE

BUILD WORKERS AND POPULAR ASSEMBLIES

BUILD WORKERS AND POPULAR MILITIAS

Support an international trade union appeal to defend Venezuela from imperialist coups and subversion. 

To find out more, visit the following website http://www.marxist.com/appeals/hands_off_venezuela.html

DEFEND NORTH KOREA AGAINST US AND JAPAN

From Class Struggle 48 November 2002/January 2003

The Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, better known in the West as ‘North Korea’, is much in the news lately. It has pulled out of the Nuclear non-proliferation Treaty and is taking a tough stand against US attempts to bully it into submission. The latest attempt by the US to conciliate the DPRK with food in exchange for nuclear disarmament was met by a firm rejction. The US offer of food was likened to “wheat pie in the sky”.

Is the US right to label the DPRK a ‘pariah’ or ‘terrorist’ state? Whatever the North is, it is the result of a century of imperialist invasion, occupation and partition of Korea, first by Japan who ruled Korea as a colony from 1910 to 1945, then by the US, which fought a war in 1950 to force the partition and isolation of the North.

Today the U.S. continues to occupy South Korea, keeping 37,000 troops in a network of bases across the country.

What is the DPRK, if it is not a ‘pariah’ or ‘terrorist’ state? Trotskyists call the DPRK a degenerated workers’ state because property has been socialised and the law of the market has been ditched in favour of a planned economy, but a caste of bureaucrats have political power that should belong to the workers. These bureaucrats use their control to strike deals with imperialist countries like the U.S. and Japan. They are like the union bureaucrats who use their control of rank and file unionists to make deals with bosses.

Trotskyists want to get rid of union bureaucrats, but not at the expense of the unions that the bureaucrats have captured. In the same way, we want to get rid of Kim Jong Il and his regime, but we don’t want to see the privatisation of state assets and restoration of the market that U.S. intervention is aimed at bringing to the North. Deciding the future of the DPRK is a job for the workers of all Korea, not George Bush jnr.

Who Needs Nukes?

What about the North’s nuke programme? If the North has nukes, does that justify a U.S. invasion, or at least U.N. sanctions? Nobody should be surprised that the North has tried to develop nuclear weapons, because it has had to live its entire existence in the shadow of the threat of nuclear annihilation at the hands of the U.S. During the ‘Korean’ War General McArthur, leader of the U.S. forces, lobbied Washington for permission to drop ’30 to 50’ nuclear bombs across the middle of the Korean peninsula. Several times during the war the U.S. came close to using a nuclear bomb. In 1951 the US flew a lone B 52 bomber over the Northern capital Pyongyang in a successful attempt to create panic about a Hiroshima-style strike. From 1957 to 1991 the U.S. kept an arsenal of nuclear weapons on the southern edge of the demilitarised zone that divides North and South. To this day, the U.S rehearses for a nuclear bombing strike on the North.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that the DPRK bureaucrats feel the need to get some nukes of their own, so that the U.S. will think twice before attacking them. Nobody seriously suggests that the DPRK has more than a handful of nukes, and the North’s leadership knows that using them pre-emptively would mean certain destruction. The U.S. on the other hand is the only country ever to use nuclear weapons in war, has publicly signalled its willingness to use them pre-emptively if its interests are threatened, and today has 9,000 of the things, including bombs, missiles, torpedoes, and mortar shells. We suggest that the middle class peaceniks who have joined Bush in condemning the North’s nuclear programme get their priorities right.

Korea's secret weapon

Because they are bureaucrats not socialists, the leaders of the North can’t see that it is not nukes but workers who are the best defence against U.S. imperialism. Hatred of the U.S. and its continued military occupation of the South is common to Koreans on both sides of the border. Even right-wing South Koreans hate U.S. occupation more than the ‘communist’ state to their north. Young South Korean men especially hate the two years’ compulsory military service which forces them to act as dogs bodies on U.S. bases.

In New Zealand alone, scores of them live in exile rather than serve the U.S. It was mass protests by workers and students that helped force the U.S. to pull its nukes out of the South twelve years ago, and in recent months regular protests by tens of thousands have followed the unpunished killing of two Korean teenagers by U.S. troops. Unionists have marched in huge contingents, chanting anti-U.S. slogans, and squads of students have attacked and sabotagued U.S. bases around the South Korean capital of Seoul.

Protests like these point toward a solution to occupation in the South and bureaucratisation in the North. This solution is the reunification of the peninsula on a socialist basis. In the South the new President, Roh Moo Hyun, is pushing ahead for re-unification, but on the terms of global capitalism that will see the North remain an underdeveloped region in a US client state. The North is also moving in this direction, with Kim Jong Il and his mates looking to follow the ‘Chinese model’ and convert themselves from bureaucrats to capitalists.

But in the decades since the division of their country many Korean workers, students, and peasants have been inspired by a very different vision of reunification. In the late 40s and early 50s, for instance, workers and peasants inspired by the abolition of capitalism in the North staged a series of insurrections against the U.S.’s puppet regime in the South. In Cheju, the southernmost province of South Korea, a revolutionary government survived for two years before being betrayed by the bureaucratic leaders of the North and crushed by Southern troops in 1949.

Today left-wing workers and students in the South are again taking up the cause of re-unification within an anti-imperialist framework. By protesting the U.S. occupation in the South and the North’s refusal to demand that Japan pay reparations for its occupation they challenge both imperialism and Stalinism. Challenges like these can succeed, if they are backed by the anti-imperialist strike action of workers in the North and South, and by the solidarity of workers in Japan, the U.S., and U.S. allies like New Zealand. Predictably, the Clark government is already trying to earn brownie points with the U.S. by sounding off about the ‘danger’ presented by the DPRK. Kiwi workers should beware any attempt by Clark and co. to follow Bush into a confrontation with the DPRK.

WILL NEW ZEALAND BECOME ANOTHER ARGENTINA?

From Class Struggle 48 December 2002/January 2003

Argentina goes from IMF ‘show case’ of economic development to’ basket case’. Is the same fate in store for New Zealand/Aotearoa? Here we put forward some ideas in the hope of stimilating a debate on this question. We make some further comparisons with Australia and South Africa which have similar origins. The solution we come up with is for Socialist Federations of the Pacific, Latin America and Southern Africa! We welcome feedback from readers aboiut where they think New Zealand/Aotearoa is going.

Some History

Some basic facts: Argentina 40 million people. NZ 4 million people and 40 million sheep. Both settler semi-colonies; dependent development based on pastoral exports in 19^th and early 20^th centuries and post WW2 economic insulation. NZ’s competitive advantage is agricultural - dairy production, meat processing, woool –textiles etc. The semi-colonial problem is dependence on exports to maintain imports of primary and secondary manufactures. NZ’s development was limited to import-substitution secondary manufacturing (eg car assembly, whiteware, electronics etc to serve local market)

Argentina has competitive advantage in pastoral production. Its balance of payments problem was lessened by protection. Argentina was able to substitute some heavy manufacturing, such as steel, petrochemicals etc. But it never became a big regional exporter of these commodities. Argentina’s heavy industry was highly protected and uncompetitive. Thus Argentina’s dependent-development was somewhere between that of NZ (which did not substitute heavy industry) and South Africa and Australia (who produced cars, electronics etc for regional markets). We suggest that the limits to dependent-development in each case are set by the extent to which a country has competitive advantage in the manufacturing of heavy machinery (i.e. capital goods).

Semi-colonial development and crisis

Dependent-development reaches its fullest extent with the export of a limited range capital goods on the world economy. Yet competitive advantage exists only during the periods of boom and fails during recessions as regional markets contract and the small-scale economies and higher costs in the semi-colonies cannot sustain competition.

Enter the MNCs to concentrate and rationalise production globally. This has been the story of so-called globalisation. In SA and Australia, the biggest operations were internationalised. In SA most of the major industries are Multinationals. In Australia minerals (BHP) General Motors Holden/Ford etc have been globalised.

De-industrialisation

In the case of Argentina where capital goods production could be integrated profitably it survived. But most was not competitive so Argentina was de-industrialised and its import substitution capacity in heavy steel and petro-chemical industry lost. Thus import volumes rose. Import prices were reduced as the peso was pegged to the dollar, but export prices rose with the US dollar, so that overall the trade deficit increased. The balance of payments was plugged with IMF borrowing until this exceeded the capacity of exports to pay and debt mounted.

So the crisis of a re-colonised dependent economy means bankruptcy and devaluation of assets which are then sold off cheaply to multinationals and big banks. Argentina’s plight is that of all semi-colonial economies whose capacity to develop independently has been destroyed by globalisation. But the severity of the crisis is directly proportional to the depth of restructuring in the primary industry sector. How does NZ compare?

New Zealand compared

NZ’s primary sector always involved foreign investment through banks and loan agencies and the export of profits. In agriculture (dairy, meat, textiles etc) production depended heavily on imported capital, technology and machines. New Zealand never substituted for heavy industry except in isolated, exceptional cases (NZ Steel based on Iron sands).

Thus NZ was always exposed to chronic balance of payments crises. The postwar development of import substitution in secondary manufacturing for consumer goods was a weak attempt to solve the ongoing dependency of the economy. This insulation reached its limit as soon as protected industry outgrew the local market.

So, unlike SA, Australia or Argentina, the neo-liberal reversal was less deep because it affected only the post-war import substitution in the secondary sector of the economy. De-industrialisation did not hit primary production as it was already partiallly globalised. Pastoral production has always been technologically advanced, and continues to be so. The primary agricultural sector (e.g. meat, dairy, wool etc) has become more internationalised with the giant dairy monopoly Fonterra, now a multinational in its own right. The problem with this however is that little of the rent from agricultural value-added production is available for redistribution inside NZ but falls into the hands of international capital.

To complete the comparison, Argentina was able to insulate itself from extreme economic dependence by setting up internal capital goods manufacturing. In some ways similar to the situation in SA where apartheid was like the military dictatorship in regimenting social production based on super-exploitation. Like SA, when the crisis came in the early 90’s, Argentina fell further and was more severly affected by the neo-liberal crisis measures than Australia or NZ.

Solutions

Argentina’s dependency, more like Australia and SA, is acute. Yet all these are relatively large economies with a broad resource base where there is the potential to resolve the crisis by socialising the economy. In Agentina the collapse of industry leaves the majority of the population out of work or underemployed. Half are under the poverty line. 20% are hungry or starving.

The most similar case is SA, and it is no accident that in Argentina the masses are frightened of becoming “Another Africa”. Like SA, nationalisation without compensation under workers’ control of the large businesses and banks is the way to revive the economy and feed the people. This has to become linked to revolutions in the rest of the region, to establish a Federation of Socialist Republics of Southern Africa, and of Latin America, to create potentially powerful regional socialist economies.

NZ’s dependency is chronic

NZ is in reality a tiny US and Australian dominated semi-colony. Its capitalist future will see it integrating with Australia as part of a larger US client state. Even that won’t buy much time for the bosses. Australia is in a similar position to Argentina. Marxism is not an exact science and predictions have to be reviewed constantly. But we would suggest Australia’s prospects over the next tens years are that it is likely to suffer a similar economic decline to Argentina.

If this is correct, NZ’s relation to Australia will see it sucked into this vortex. Therefore, workers in NZ must prepare to unite with Australian workers for the nationalisation under workers control of the assets of all the big banks and businesses and to socialise the economy as part of a Federation of Socialist Republics of the Pacific.

AREGENTINA: WHAT HAPPENED TO THE REVOLUTION?

From Class Struggle 48 December 2002/January 2003

One year after the momentous Argentinazo of December 19 and 20, workers and poor people flooded once more to the Plaza de Mayo in the centre of Buenos Aires. Unlike last year where the state forces killed 33 mainly young people and the level of protest forced the resignation of the De la Rua government, this year there was no confrontation and Duhalde’s government did not fall. A temporary stalemate exists. The bosses are relying on the union bureaucrats and so-called socialist parties to divide and rule the workers struggles. However, the forces on the militant left wing of the movement are regrouping around the occupied factories to defend the most important conquest of the revolution and to unite workers on a revolutionary action program. A member of CWG just back from Argentina reports on the prospects of the continuing revolution.

Argentina December 20 2002

The mass rally on December 20 this year (100,000 in Buenos Aires and 100,000 in the rest of Argentina) shows that a temporary stalemate exists between the two main classes in Argentina. On the one side Duhalde’s government was not challenged. It was able to pay the IMF $20 billion, make another 500,000 workers unemployed, and still rely on the union bureaucracy to buy off the majority of unemployed with US $40 a month. On the other side, an increasing number of the ranks of unemployed, employed and students are becoming angry at the treachery of the bureaucracy and the ‘left’ parties, and are openly looking for ways to break from their control and find an independent working class solution to the bosses’ crisis.

While the bosses were able to prevent the workers from using December 20 to make another Argentinazo, what was significant about this years rally, was the emergence of a class struggle left wing of the mass movement that marched separately and that broke openly with the control of the official union bureaucracy of the CTA/CCC and the unofficial ‘left bureaucracy’ that has emerged in the last year to administer the unemployment schemes.[1] Instead of of falling into the trap of trying to bring down Duhalde with street fighting, these as yet small forces rallied behind demands for strike action, for defence of the factory occupations, and for general strike leading to national workers congress in the new year.

On balance it seems that the stalemate continues but that the current situation opens the way for a deepening and widening of the revolution, to overcome the splits in the mass movement, and to break from the bureaucracy by mounting mass defence pickets of the factory occupations by all the sectors in struggle.

Brukman and Zanon leading the fight

The most visible sign of this healthy development was that of the Brukman and Zanon occupied factories leading their own column, closely associated with two other colums, that of the FTC and that of the combined forces of the RSL, SC and DO.[2] All of these columns marched behind the banners of strike and take the fight to the streets on D 19/20 (instead of a stagemanaged ‘commemoration’ organised by the bureaucracy); to fight the union bureaucracy; for a general strike to bring down Duhalde and “get them all out”; for all factories to be nationalised without compensation and under workers control; and for a 3^rd national workers congress of mandated delegates for every 100 employed, unemployed workers and popular assembly members.

It was important that Brukman led the way. Brukman is the factory that represents the most politically advanced workers who are calling openly for the nationalisation of their factory without compensation and under workers control.[3] For this reason the bosses are determined to re-take this factory to destroy it as an example of how socialism can work.[4]

Zanon is another leading example. Zanon is a large ceramics factory in Neuquen in the far west of Argentina whose workers are running it at 80% capacity and providing jobs for unemployed. Zanon was recently visited by Hebe de Bonafini a leader of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of the Dissappeared) who immediately saw that workers were in control and were capable of producing without bosses. She reported that Zanon was proof that workers could run society not only in Argentina but the whole world.[5]

ISACO joins the occupations

In an important symbolic act, on December 20 itself, another factory occupation took place. This was ISACO a factory that made car parts, at one time employing over 200 workers, and which shut down in December 2000. It was finally declared bankrupt on 24 November this year. When the sacked workers heard this they decided to camp outside to prevent the factory being stripped of machines. They reoccupied the factory at 7 am on the 20^th with plans to restart production under workers’ control. They took this decision conscious of the many other occupations that have already taken place.[6]

Defence committees

Almost all attempts by the bossses to get the police, the justice and the union scabs to retake these factories have so far failed. The recent retaking of the Halac medical clinic at Cordoba on the 17 December succeeded only because the numbers defending the clinc were too small to stop the police. The lesson being drawn is that all of the sectors in struggle have to unite to form mass defence committees against the bosses’ attempts to retake the occupied workplaces. Hence the common columns marching on the 20^th put up the demand for unity to defend the occupations, clearly against the bureaucrats’ measures to divide the movement.

Build for a general strike

The second lesson is that as well as these defence committees, the rest of the sectors in struggle (unemployed, employed, and members of PAs) have to unite behind a general strike to bring Duhalde down. They take seriously the demand raised spontaneously last December 20: “out with them all, not one must remain”. But instead of organising another Argentinazo to bring Duhalde down, the union bureaucrats are conducting negotiations with Duhalde and the IMF to do a deal to rescue the Argentinean economy and avoid a popular revolution. They are jockeying to contest the April elections, or they are taking a fake left line and calling for elections for Constituent Assemblies as if these would solve Argentina’s crisis.[7] That is why the class stuggle tendency in the movement united behind Brukman and Zanon puts the demand on the bureacuracy for a general strike to bring down the government now, and a National Congress of employed, unemployed and Popular Assemblies.

‘Workers to Power’

The third lesson is that is all very well to bring down a government, but who will rule in its place? Again the experience of the unemployed movement that has called for “workers to power” for more than a year, combining with the lessons of the factory occupations, that the bosses’ property must be nationalised without compensation under workers control, all points to one solution – a workers’ revolution. That is why these class struggle currrents have united around the demand for ‘workers to power’ and for a 3^rd national congress of workers early in 2003 that can become the basis of a workers’ government.

All the “left traitors” line up to serve the boss

Today the revolutionary situation in Argentina that was opened over a year ago by workers looking for their own solution to the crisis has been met by opposition from all the political currents across the spectrum of Argentina’s class structure top to bottom. Most workers have lost faith in any of the Bourgeois parties including the left Peronists like Duhalde (or De la Rua who is waiting in the wings with the retired General Rico as a running mate).

Nor are they enthusiastic to vote for left reformists like De Ellia and Zamora who promise ‘popular governments’ modelled on the popular front of the World Social Forum or on Lula’s government in Brazil. Hopes are being placed in Lula’s ability to help solve the Argentine crisis. As the pesos devaluation has restored the competitiveness of Argentina’s exports, the reformist left is looking to a revival of trade with Brazil to rescue the economy. But there is no way out of the crisis for workers via the bourgeois state. The most that can happen is that Argentina’s crisis will become joined with Brazil’s own ongoing crisis. This demonstrates clearly that the WSF is a reformist or ‘menshevik’ international that has to be confronted internationally by revolutionaries.[8]

Fake Trotskyists

The most treacherous of all are the self-proclaimed ‘workers’ parties and the left bureaucracy that put forward the solution of the Constituent Assembly. The Constituent Assembly is a bourgeois parliament that represents all classes. As we argued in Class Struggle No 43, the call for a Constituent Assembly when revolution is building is to reject the theory of Permanent Revolution. This theory makes it clear that in colonies and semi-colonies fighting imperialism, there can be no