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

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.