The "Bolivarian Revolution" expropriates the workers’ struggle!

Caracas: Meeting of the 6th Counter-revolutionary World Social Forum

From the 24 to the 29 of January the Sixth annual meeting of the counter-revolutionary international the World Social Forum met in Caracas, Venezuela. The LOI of Argentina, a member of the Leninist Trotskyists Fraction, gives its verdict.

The WSF, along with the "left" of the US Democratic Party, was responsible for betraying the US national ‘day of absence’ against poverty, racism and war called for the 1st of December by a Committee of more than 700 worker and antiwar organisations. This was the first time for years that militant elements in the US working class had coordinated a counter-offensive against the Bush government and the US capitalist class.

It is this same collection of social democrats, Stalinists, "Greens", Castroites, Maoists, and fake Trotskyists – all associated with the WSF - that have mobilised to contain the awakening US working class in response to the crisis of the Bush administration, such as we saw in the Transit strike in New York, to make sure it remains subordinated to the Democratic party of US imperialism.

At the Sixth WSF were all those dedicated to the suppression of US workers struggles and all the mass struggles in Latin America in the name of the much heralded ‘Bolivarian Revolution’.First up was Chavez declaring "it is necessary to go forward to 21st Century Socialism”, speaking of "socialism or death", shamelessly singing the ‘Internationale’ to close the meeting, and taking photo opportunities with Cindy Sheehan - the mother of the US soldier killed in Iraq who fights for the return of US troops – while at the same time he continues to sell the US regime the oil it needs to occupy Iraq and kill its people!

Or course Chavez never calls on the oppressed workers of Iraq, or the mothers, wives, or daughters of the thousands of Iraqi resistance fighters killed by the invaders, to organise for the military victory of Iraq and the defeat of Anglo-Yankee imperialism!

Following Chavez were all the supporters of Evo Morales, the new president of Bolivia, just finished appointing to his cabinet millionaire industralists like the ministers of Defense and Public Works, and ex-state employees of the former government of the murderer Goni overthrown in a popular rebellion in 2003, as well as peasants, miners and ex-union leaders.

In other words, the Sixth WSF was a meeting for all those backing the class collaboration of Morales who has already announced that he will respect and defend private property, allow the private exploitation of the Mutún mine (the largest manganese deposit in the world), made deals with the Santa Cruz bourgeoisie (home of most of Bolivia's oil and mineral wealth), with the Spanish firm Corona, and with the oil monopolies, to contine to plunder Bolivia’s gas wealth.

After the Morales cheerleaders were the supporters of the current Ecuadorian government of Palacios such as the Maoist MDP, the Pachacutik and the CONAIE. They had tried to prevent the removal of his predecessor, Lucio Gutiérrez, who fell at the hands of a revolutionary mass uprising. Today these same forces are once more trying to stop the new uprising of the workers and poor peasants led by students, who have been fighting for two weeks against the the signing of a FTA between the Palacios government and the US.

These same leaders went to the WSF to embrace Chávez, who only months ago openly lent millions of barrels of oil to Palacios, thus sabotaging the strike and a political uprising of the workers and farmers of the Ecuadorian provinces of Sucumbíos and Orellana against Oxy and other imperialist oil companies. With the aid of his friend Chávez, Palacios used the Ecuadorian army to fiercely repress the people and to militarize these two provinces.

They can both count on the support of the Cuban bureaucracy of Castro - as can Morales – which also comes to the rescue of the US client regimes of Lula, Kirchner, Tabaré Vázquez, Bachelet and Co., as it prepares to complete the restoration of capitalism in Cuba.

Not to be left behind, there were four ministers of the Brazilian government, representing Lula and the PT (Workers Party), one of the most servile lackey governments of the US (like Kirchner, who has paid off the billions owed to the IMF in cash) which allows its troops along with those of Argentina and Chile, to occupy Haiti in the service of the imperial master.

The Argentine delegation included the Kirchnerites of the FTV, Barrios de Pie, bureaucrats like Yasky of the CTERA and Gutiérrez of the UOM - today a supporter of Kirchner in parliament. During the WSF a number of workers were attacked and jailed by the police and local politicians in Tartagal and Mosconi (in the North of Argentina), while in Caracas the state servants of Kirchner, the ally of Bush, Repsol and the IMF, met with the union bureaucrats and pro-government officials of the piqueteros (unemployed workers movement), bosses' politicians like Mario Cafiero, the mst, and Nestor Pitrola of the Workers Party which voted for the popular front government of Evo Morales.

Playing a key role in the WSF are the fake Trotskyists who destroyed the Fourth International and became reformists. Today, all are fervent defenders of Chávez, Morales, the Castro bureaucracy, and the "Bolivarian Revolution". They have openly broken with the struggle for the workers and socialist revolution, and have adopted the old class collaborationist policy of "revolution by stages" of Stalinism, telling the workers to put their hopes in the "good", "progressive" bosses, the "anti-imperialist" military, and the "democratic" and "pacifist" imperialists.

So the ‘Bolivarian Revolution’, the ‘star’ of the Sixth World Social Forum, is no more than a cover to disguise the sordid deals the national bourgeoisies make with each other and with the imperialistic monopolies, to decide who gets what share of the profits, according to what resources are available, and how each country is slotted into the global capitalist division of labor. It is also a cover for the politics of the Castro bureaucracy that wants to restore capitalism in Cuba and to re-invent itself as a new bourgeoisie.

Socialist revolution is the triumphant insurrection of the workers and poor peasants that seizes the power, overthrows the bourgeoisie and expropriates the imperialistic monopolies and all the bosses. That is the only way that the anti-imperialist struggle can be carried through to completion, breaking with the imperilialists and their national bourgeois junior partners and making a planned socialist economy possible.

That is why there are only two roads for the working class and the exploited masses of Latin America: either the ‘Bolivarian Revolution’ in which the proletariat submits to the continued exploitation, misery, massacres and imperialistic sacking of our nations; or, the struggle for a victorious workers socialist revolution on the road to the Socialist United States of Central and South America which can plan production where the gas, iron and managnese of Bolivia, the meat and the soyabean of Argentina, the copper of Chile, the minerals of Peru, the oil of Venezuela, the industry of Brazil, etc., are all used to meet the needs of the vast majority of the exploited and oppressed workers and poor peasants.

Today the most important step along the socialist road for all workers and poor peasants of the continent is the fight for the victory of the heroic revolution of the Bolivian workers and peasants which the popular front goverenment of Evo Morales, backed by the counter-revolutionary WSF, is today trying to destroy.

• Against the WSF, expropriator of the struggles of the masses! 
• For the Workers' and poor Peasants' Revolution! 
• For a Socialist United States of Central and South America!

Translated and condensed from Supplement to Democracia Obrera 3rd February 2006

From Class Struggle 65 Feb/Mar 2006

Workers Vote Labour Back Let’s take the next step!

The 2005 general election has polarised voters and split parliament into two finely-balanced blocs. It is likely that if Labour’s majority survives the counting of special votes Helen Clark will try to form a minority coalition government with the Greens supported by the Maori Party on supply and confidence. It is unlikely that United Future or New Zealand First will support Labour formally with the Greens in government. On the other hand, the massive party vote for Labour in the Maori seats will cause a split in the Maori Party if Turia tries to reject Labour and make a deal with National. In this article we analyse the election and offer a socialist approach to the new political situation it has created.

Workers Reject Brash

Some commentators have mistakenly called the election ‘a swing to the right’. In fact, National managed to increase its vote at the expense of the minor right-wing parties, not at the expense of Labour. Overall, the election shows what every vote since 1993 has shown - that a majority of New Zealanders want a centre-left government that keeps some independence from the United States and intervenes in the economy to redistribute income.

Don Brash ran an aggressively right-wing campaign, calling for cuts to social spending, big tax breaks for the rich, and closer ties with the United States. Senior National leaders like John Key and Lockwood Smith enjoy very close ties to the ruling class of the United States, and a National victory would have meant the further Americanization of the economy, the swift resumption of nuclear ship visits, and more New Zealand contributions to George Bush’s War of Terror. But despite a lavish and cynical advertising campaign from National and a biased media, workers rejected Brash’s agenda.

The election also shows that Labour is still a ‘bourgeois workers party’ – a party with its roots in the working class despite its capitalist program. Labour was unable to rely on the support that the Business Round Table and American billionaires gave to National. Instead, it had to use the trade unions to do much of its campaigning work. Trade union delegates and organisers spent thousands of hours criss—crossing the working class suburbs of the major centres, knocking on doors and distributing propaganda for Labour. Unions used their access to big worksites to hold mass election meetings with their members. The Council of Trade Unions ran an advertising campaign for Labour, and a number of unions made large donations to the party.

But the weakness of the union movement and Labour’s failure to restore confidence in public services like health and education meant that Don Brash was able temporarily to tempt a section of the working class away from Labour with the promise of tax cuts, and with populist attacks on Maori, gays and ‘political correctness’. Keen to shore up its support amongst its core voters, Labour moved slightly to the left during the election campaign, promising a write-off of interest for student loans and aggressively attacking Brash’s support for the invasion of Iraq and support for the privatisation of health and education.

On election night, National’s big early lead was turned around as the votes of the ‘big battalions’ of the working class in the major centres swung in behind Labour. Labour’s support was particularly strong in the working class heartland of South Auckland, where the party took over 50% in many electorates and an incredible 71.6% of the vote in Mangere. A map of election results published in the Sunday Star-Times brought out the polarisation, showing a sea of National blue surrounding patches of Labour red covering the working class electorates in the big cities.

Greens fail to woo workers

The Green Party’s 5% share of the vote represents a failure. The party had gone into the election hoping to expand its base of support by filling the vacuum left by the Alliance’s implosion in 2002, and by Labour’s drift to the right in government. The Greens tried to add a slice of the working class to their traditional voting base of the radical petty bourgeoisie, liberal professionals, and students.

In an attempt to appeal to trade unionists, the Greens developed a new industrial relations policy which was well to the left of what Labour offered workers on the campaign trail. They touted other progressive policies for workers, like the abolition of youth rates and the raising of the minimum wage to $12 an hour. Partly as a result of these policies, a number of unions endorsed the Greens as the 'second-best option' for voters who could not support Labour.

The Greens attempted to appeal to the overwhelmingly working class Maori vote by forming a close relationship with the Maori Party and echoing the Maori Party line on issues like the seabed and foreshore. Near the end of the campaign they even received the 'second-best option' endorsement of Tariana Turia. But the Greens' attempt to expand their base looks to have been a failure. Their vote dropped from its 2002 level, and they performed poorly in both the Maori electorates and in working class strongholds like South Auckland.

The Greens' failure is a blow to its 'left' faction, which is represented in parliament by left social democrats Keith Locke and Sue Bradford. Locke and Bradford are ex-Marxists who still look toward the working class as the bedrock of left-wing politics. Both have worked hard to identify the Greens with workers' issues. By contrast, the right-wing faction led by Rod Donald finds its natural base in small business and the liberal middle class, sections of the population not usually attracted to policies like the extension of the right to strike and the lifting of the minimum wage. (A third Green faction, comprising members with a more 'fundamentalist' attitude to key environmental issues like genetic engineering, can be identified with Donald's co-leader, Jeneatte Fitzsimmons.)

Donald and his supporters are likely to push for more and more compromises on 'touchy' issues like genetic engineering, the War of Terror, and industrial relations, in an effort to get the Greens into the secure coalition with Labour which they think is necessary for political survival.

Maori Party Stumbles Rightwards

In the aftermath of the great seabed and foreshore hikoi and the by-election victory of Tariana Turia last year, many commentators predicted that the Maori Party would win all seven Maori seats. In the event, it has had to be content with four victories. The disappointment caused by the failure to achieve a clean sweep must be compounded by the low list vote the Maori Party achieved. Labour won more party votes than the Maori Party, even in the electorates that it lost to its new rival. Turia herself noted that the party was born out of a movement of 45,000 people, but a 2% party vote represents just over 40,000 voters.

The Maori Party's underachievement can be put down partly to the strategy that it has pursued since its formation. Despite its origins in the hikoi, the party has consistently counterposed vote-seeking to protest, insisting that the 'hikoi to the ballot box' is the key to advancing Maori interests.

Partly because of Tariana Turia's bitter experiences in government, and partly because of the advice of Matt McCarten, the party has tried to avoid declaring its support for the election of a Labour government, insisting that it is open to political alliances with any party. Even 'radical' candidates like Hone Harawira have insisted that the Maori Party is 'neither left nor right'.

The refusal to rule out some sort of arrangement with the parties of the right was compounded by Turia's disgraceful votes in parliament against Civil Unions and Paid Parental Leave, and the vague, almost evasive quality of much of the party's 'policy', so that many potential voters got the impression that the Maori Party was not interested in the traditional causes of the left. Harawira and co may think that categories like 'left' and 'right' are out of date, but most Maori voters do not agree with them.

Labour was able to seize on the Maori Party's equivocal attitude to National to run a very effective scare campaign in the Maori electorates. Again and again, Labour warned Maori voters that Maori Party MPs could let National into power, and thus bring on the destruction of Maori seats and cuts to funding for institutions like kohanga reo and iwi-administered health clinics. Under pressure, Turia was forced late in the campaign to hose down speculation about a coalition with National, but she continued to refuse to promise to support a Labour government on confidence and supply, even if Labour won more votes than National. Instead, Turia endorsed the Greens, a party with little following in the Maori seats, as the 'next-best option' to the Maori Party.

The Maori Party's blunders mean it will have to be content with the re-election of Turia and the scalps of the mediocre Dover Samuels, the obscure Mita Ririnui, and the discredited John Tamihere. Parekura Horomia's prized East Coast seat has escaped the new party, despite the fact that Horomia was the frontman for Labour's hated seabed and foreshore policy. The 'neither left nor right' strategy has also badly affected the building of the Maori Party, robbing the organisation of support from the trade unions and the Pakeha left, disorientating grassroots party activists, and allowing all manner of right-wingers and opportunists to campaign in the party's name.

The finely balanced result of the election is likely to tempt the Maori Party to try to continue its 'neither left nor right' strategy by attempting to play the two main party blocs off against one another, in an attempt to score some minor policy wins on narrowly 'Maori’ issues. Besides provoking a revolt from the rank and file, such an approach will only increase the uneasiness which the trade union movement, the Pakeha left, and the many Maori who still vote Labour feel towards the new party.

Lost to the left of Labour

Based on programs well to the left of Labour’s, the election campaigns of the Alliance Party and the Anti Capitalist Alliance attracted only tiny numbers of voters. The Anti Capitalists’ most successful candidate attracted only 95 votes, while the Alliance scored only 0.07% of party list votes.

A third grouping to the left of Labour, Matt McCarten’s ‘Workers Charter movement’ sat on the election sidelines, but announced its intention of becoming ‘a mass party sooner rather than later’.

Both the Anti Capitalist Alliance and McCarten claim that Labour is no longer a party with a working class base, but the election result proves otherwise. Workers were not interested in throwing away their votes when faced by the threat of the return of nuclear ships and 90s-style scorched earth neo-liberal economic policies.

The Next Step for Socialists

The unity the working class against showed Brash proves the correctness of our call for a critical vote for Labour. Critical support was necessary to keep out Brash and keep Labour in power, so that workers can learn from experience that Labour cannot serve their interests, and that a new, extra-parliamentary force capable of taking state power for the working class is necessary.

In the context of a likely Labour-led government and a weak union movement, what are the best tactics to advance the cause of workers?

We need to get the unions and working class voters that support the Labour Party to challenge the party’s policies. Labour is only in power because of the campaigning of trade unionists and the votes of workers, yet it pays more attention to the voices of business and of the US government than it does to the needs of the working class. For instance, Labour has already told its trade union supporters that its third term will not see any major change to New Zealand’s restrictive, anti-strike industrial relations legislation. The party is much more interesting in courting business and in pursuing a free trade deal with the US.

The Action Program we published a month ago is the sort of program we need to fight for in the unions to put pressure on Labour. However, the likely presence of minor parties with no base in the unions in and around a Labour-led government complicates this tactic. Labour can try to use deals with these parties as alibis to hold back on worker-friendly policies.

We have to fight to make Labour act for workers and to reject any alibi that says Labour can't act on behalf of workers because of its agreements with minor parties. Labour has to be held responsible for its betrayals, not its partners. There is plenty of common ground with the Greens and with the Maori Party that we can use to put pressure on Labour.

While the Greens don't have an official base in organised labour, they are now getting regular endorsements from the unions. Let's make them deliver to the unions rather than to small business! Like all petty bourgeois parties they should back labour if they think it is stronger than the right. If they won't then their ability to con workers is that much less. The Maori Party has a working class base, so we should force the party to listen to that base. If it doesn’t it will split along class lines sooner or later.

All of the demands below (and any others that become obvious) should be concretised and advanced in the union movement to pressure Labour and appeal to the best supporters of the Maori Party and the Greens.



A WORKERS’ ACTION PROGRAMME
 

• Jobs for all on a living wage – for 35 hour week and a 24 hour free child care!

If the pressure comes on, none of the parties of the centre-left will want to be the one that says no to full employment and 24 hour child care.·

• Tax the Rich; Tax Capital Gains!

After surviving a campaign between the greedies and the needies, which of the parties of the centre-left will want to appear as soft on the rich? A capital gains tax on all speculative gains should be common ground for all of these parties. If Labour pulls back for fear of upsetting foreign investors, or the Maori Party or the Greens want tax breaks for small business, we need to fight for tax breaks for collective ownership, and capital gains for private windfalls from speculation in land, shares etc.

• No ‘free’ trade deal with the United States!

Much of the momentum behind bad pieces of Labour legislation has come from a desire to ‘prepare’ the New Zealand economy for a ‘free’ trade deal with the US. Barriers to US investment like Maori control over resources like the seabed and foreshore or restrictions on foreign ownership of Kiwi land have to be cleared away by a Labour government desperate for a deal with Bush. Green and Maori Party leaders must not be allowed to backslide on their opposition to the Americanization of the New Zealand economy. Labour supporters who hate Brash and Bush must realise that Labour leaders share much of National's attachment to Americanization.

• Open the borders to worker migrants!

All the centre-left parties claim they want skilled worker migrants. The Maori Party’s worker base will be sympathetic if their jobs are not threatened by migration. Full employment based on reduced hours would reduce job competition. Nationalisation of key sectors of the economy under workers control would extend naturally to workers control over worker immigration.

• Re-nationalise Rail, Telecom etc. with no compensation and under workers’ control!

We should raise these demands now. These assets have become cash cows for the rich. They should be taken back without compensation under workers control. We need to extend this demand urgently to nationalisation (socialisation) in several other areas.

1) major export players like Fonterra and Carter Holt Harvey need to be nationalised. Investing the Cullen find in forests is a step in the right direction. But Carter Holt Harvey should not be compensated. Both of these core primary industries have been hugely subsidised by generations of past labour, workers and working farmers. Fonterra's producer ownership needs to be protected by public ownership like the old Dairy Board.

2) vital energy resources such as the oil refinery at Marsden Point must be nationalised. Especially in the light of the price gauging of the oil companies. We should call for bilateral trade in oil and agriculture with Venezuela!

3) the Kiwibank should be a state bank, not a State Owned Enterprise, so that the combination of state subsidy of Kiwibank and regulation of the big Australian banks can remove their stranglehold over the economy.

• Troops out of Afghanistan!

This is a concrete example of the general demand that Kiwi troops not be used in any US, NATO or UN sponsored war. The Greens and the Maori Party could be pressured by their rank and file into standing up to Labour over Afghanistan, exposing Anderton and Labour as only slightly less blatant supporters of US imperialism than Brash.

• For a Workers·’ Government!

For all of the above demands to be implemented, the development of independent working class power and ultimately workers' councils and defence committees able to launch a workers' government would be necessary. In other words a workers' government only becomes a reality when it takes power from the bourgeoisie, but along the way the class organs necessary to support this government have to be built. The occupied factories, collective farms, and neighbourhood assemblies that have appeared in recent years in South American countries like Venezuela and Argentina provide rough models for a workers' government. See also:http://www.redrave.blogspot.com

From Class Struggle 63 Sept/Oct 2005

New Right Backlash: COMPENSATION FOR CRIMS?

Once again the politicians and the media are trying to outdo each other to show how right-wing they can be on the law and order issue. This time the catalyst is a recent High Court decision that inmates at Paremoremo prison are entitled to compensation for cruel and inhumane treatment they have received while being locked up. The court said that what happened to them was a violation of their human rights. Political parties from all parts of the spectrum (with the exception of the Greens) and media outlets could hardly contain their outrage at what they saw as a travesty of justice. The truth is that these politicians are exploiting this moral outrage to jump on a populist bandwagon. But why all the fuss?

Winding up the mob

“What about the victims,” was the outcry. “How come they don’t get any compensation,” everyone said. Holmes played a particularly despicable interview with the mother of a girl murdered by one of the inmates who is to receive compensation. The reporter managed to exploit this poor women’s grief to maximum effect for prurient public gratification with stock questions like “how did you feel when you heard that the murderer of your daughter was to get compensation.”

There are a couple of points that have been largely and conveniently overlooked by the politicians and the media. The first is that just because someone is in prison does not mean they cannot be a victim. The inmates were part of the now thoroughly discredited “behavior modification” programme. The second point overlooked is that it doesn’t have to be an ‘either-or’ situation. The cry of “why should these people receive compensation when their victims haven’t got any” could easily be replaced by the question “why shouldn’t the original victims get compensation in the first place.”

Speaking on Kim Hill’s Face to Face programme on 6 October lawyer Tony Ellis (who represented the inmates in court) made this very point, the only time it has been made. He challenged Phil Goff, Minister of Justice who was also on the programme to set up a Victim Compensation Board for ALL victims of crime.

Tony Ellis said:
“If the state is concerned about paying victims then it should set up a criminal victims’ compensation board to pay all victims. Why has it suddenly become concerned? The only reason it’s become concerned is because some prisoners have got some compensation because the state has treated them in an appalling and inhumane manner.”

Rather than front up and admit that our prisons are failing to achieve anything other than lock people up (in many cases over and over again) Goff just kept bleating on and on about the original victims of these inmates not getting any compensation. Amazingly, he also seemed to imply that these inmates are paying no penalty at all for what they have done. Tony Ellis quite rightly pointed out that they are serving long sentences, in some cases life, as their punishment.

Most of the people committing criminal acts against people and property have no money. They are at the bottom of the socio-economic heap so they are hardly in a position to pay compensation, with one exception which we will come to shortly.

The fact that Goff and the other political opportunists in this country have no intention of setting up a Victims Compensation Board is no accident. They aren’t prepared to take victims seriously. They would rather use them as a political football in their populist campaign to demonize inmates.

White Collar Crime

On the same day this television debate took place another event occurred which though reported will probably be forgotten very quickly. This was the release of this year’s report from the Serious Fraud Office head David Bradshaw. In this report he spoke of his frustration at the light sentences that white collar criminals get in this country compared to other convicted inmates, most of who come from the bottom of the heap.

In his report he said:
“The outrage at offending should be no less simply because the offender is clean shaven, lives in a ‘good’ neighborhood and supports worthwhile charities. If anything, we should be more outraged at the double standards of the white collar offender”

It will be a cold day in hell when Goff and most other politicians take white collar crims seriously. How often do we hear calls for reparations from these offenders, hardly ever. Even if there are attempts made to get money from them, it is often a fruitless exercise since their money is tied up in trusts so it can’t be touched. . Greg Newbold, a Christchurch academic calculated that white collar crime costs the country 40 times in dollars terms what street crime costs.

Many white collar criminals emerge from prison to return to their nice house and car and manage to get on with their lives pretty well. Famous fraudster Allan Hawkins of Equitycorp served 2.5 years of a 6 year sentence – a good investment at about $35 million a year. The same can’t be said of the vast majority of offenders who emerge from prison with little or nothing and end up on the dole.

Then there are the ‘insider trading’ allegations that David Richwhite, of the famous merchant bank partnership, Fay Richwhite who made millions from the sale of state assets in the 1980s, also made many more millions by selling his Tranzrail shares just before they crashed in value. This sort of fraud is the most profitable of all and few get charged let alone convicted.

The disparity in sentencing is no mystery though. The working class are never going to be treated the same as middle and upper class people in our system. Judges are from the ruling class and it is no surprise they look after their own when sentencing. The message is this, to bash one person is more serious than to rip off many people. It’s almost as if the state is saying in a free market if people get defrauded by a member of the ruling class then it’s more of an accident than anything else. Indeed, some radical capitalists believe that in a true free market, it would be tough luck and your own stupidity if you got defrauded. They are really only taking capitalism to its natural conclusion.

Ruling class law

It has been said that the ruling class maintain their rule by a combination of fear and fraud and therefore when someone of that class strays they are treated more like an errant schoolboy than a criminal. Whereas when working class kids transgress, they get labelled, arrested, slammed up and abused, and then denied compensation. After all, if these young workers won’t work then we’ll make them an example to keep the other workers in line!

In conclusion, compensation should be paid to the victims of our corrupt jail system just as it should be paid to the victims of crime. However we also need to realize that this will not solve the underlying issues that we can’t make the system “fair.” The way that our so-called justice system treats different kinds of offenders brings us back to a realization that nothing will ever change for victims of crime until we change the system that gives rise to all forms of oppression in the first place.

From Class Struggle 58 October-November 2004

Alliance search for workers ends in split

Break the unions from the state

Matt McCarten's move to the Maori Party is the last act in the sorry decline of the Alliance Party. Here we argue that the remaining ‘left’ of the Alliance needs to draw the obvious conclusion from more than a decade trying to influence the Labour Party in office, turn away from the electoral road and rebuild itself as a new workers party with a revolutionary socialist program.

New Labour, ‘old’ labour recycled

When the New Labour Party was formed in 1989 it held out the promise of uniting the left against the anti-worker policies of the Fourth Labour Government. But workers failed to follow it and Jim Anderton and Matt McCarten turned the NLP into their own voting machine to piss on Labour from outside the tent. They forgot that they were also pissing on Labour's worker supporters who came back to Labour in large numbers in 1993 to almost secure a Labour victory.

Anderton and McCarten antagonised these workers big time when they refused to support Mike Moore's push to form a minority government in 1993. Instead of drawing the obvious conclusion to go back into the Labour Party it was as if Anderton saw himself as the messiah and that only he could save Labour.

Had Anderton backed Moore to form a minority government there was a fighting chance that it could have won the numbers and put a stop to National's anti-worker agenda in 1993.This would have given the left the chance of exposing Labour in office. The militants in the NLP could have pissed on Labour from the inside. We could have rallied the unions to repeal the ECA and restore the benefit cuts. That could have led to a fight for renationalisation of the privatized state assets under workers’ control. But the leadership of Anderton and McCarten was never going to submit to the Labour Party bureacracy except on their terms.

Anderton shacks up with middle class

Failing to act on this lesson the NLP and Mana Motuhake rank and file got dragged after Anderton looking for any political partners that could give him more seats. They took on board the Greens, a middle class outfit, the remnants of the old Social Credit movement in the Democrats, and populist Gilbert Myles personal vehicle, the Liberals, to form the Alliance. They buried whatever small worker support there was for the NLP along with Maori support for its sister party, Mana Motuhake, in this populist pot of stew.

Breaking up Labour's constituency left the field open to that other populist Winston Peters to campaign for the Maori vote. Leading up to the 1996 election Peter's conned Maori into deserting Labour on the promise that he would never go into government with National. He then exercised the 'balance of power' under the new MMP system to put National back into office. This was the first time a party abused Maori voters to split them away from their Labour base since Ratana made its historic alliance with Labour in the 1930s. Maori learned the hard way as Peters and the Tau Henare rat pack grandstanded at the expense of their jobs and welfare.

Having helped the Nationals use the 1990s to attack workers, the Alliance actually made it into government in 1999 and formed a coalition with the Labour Party. But by this time the Labour Party was not only locked into the neo-liberal reforms of the 1980s but most of the 1990s economic reforms as well. Cullen swore by a balanced budget and an independent Reserve Bank. Rogernomics plus Ruthonomics added up to one hell of a 'social deficit'.

So Labour, as a capitalist government elected to manage kiwi capitalism, had to deliver growth in profits before it could try to make up the 'social deficit’ to its supporters. This forced it into a Blairite position where it made huge concessions to business in order to pursue its modest social agenda. The Alliance for the most part had to tag along.

When Labour went too far and supported the US invasion of Afghanistan, most of the Alliance split from Anderton. Without his seat, and failing to hit the 5% threshold in the 1992 election, the Alliance was out of parliament and questioning its future.

Radical stocktaking shows bankruptcy

Surely the time was overdue for a radical stocktaking. Sticking with Anderton had drawn a blank. Worse, the balance sheet of those 13 years was almost totally negative. Anderton's split in 1989 was too little and too late. When the NLP failed to win significant sections of union support in 1990 it should have seen the light and moved back into the Labour Party. Whatever the Alliance won for workers in government with Labour from 1999 it 2002 it lost a lot more by default in the previous decade.

The NLP stalwarts believed in the mission to replace Labour from the outside. They did not understand that the Labour Party will not be removed as a roadblock to the workers movement except as a result of an internal class struggle.

In NZ the history of the labour movement for nearly 100 years has been tied to the life of the Labour Party. It was formed in 1916 after the experience of bloody defeats in strikes to take the fight for socialism into parliament. It was the main vehicle for the rising prosperity of NZ workers after the war. Its shift to the right was dictated by the weakness of the NZ economy and the weakness of organised labour. Yet for most workers it’s still the only game in town.

This means that the working class will not develop any real independence until it stages a fight to the death to revive and split the Labour Party from inside the Labourite unions. And it can only do this by first rebuilding the unions under rank and file control. Trying to push Labour left from the outside without a base in the unions is a futile exercise that further weakens the labour movement and sets back the day of reckoning for Labour.

But instead of learning this lesson, what was left of the Alliance followed Anderton's main bother boy McCarten into his scheme for building a personal army of workers to get him elected in Auckland Central. This was a sort of caricature of Anderton's electorate machine in Riccarton.

Tragedy becomes comedy Central

McCarten took over the shell of UNITE! a tiny, almost stillborn union, founded by Alliance unionists including Robert Reid back in the mid 90s. UNITE! was set up to be a union of lowpaid workers, unemployed and beneficiaries. McCarten rebranded it as lowercase Unite without the emphatic (!), formed an ‘workers’ branch in Auckland and did his best to keep unemployed and beneficiaries out. McCarten and his left handyman, Mike Treen, ex-Socialist Action activist, set about recruiting show dancers, fast food workers and English language teachers.

The intention to build a union of the low paid (even without the unemployed and beneficiaries) is good and necessary. (See UNITE! report in this issue). To his credit, McCarten instinctively saw the need to unionise the thousands of casualised service workers left alone by the established unions. But he didn’t want to the burden of organising the unemployed and beneficiaries. He picked the eyes out of sites that could get him the numbers and financial backing to build his electoral machine.

Instead of creating a democratic union that could be a model for rebuilding the rest of the unions, McCarten created separate branches for each worksite where only he as the 'secretary' of all these 'unions' could control them. Not until this method of union building came into conflict with other Alliance members working in unions whose members were being poached, did McCarten come under fire. And even then it wasn’t McCarten's strategy but his poaching that raised the ire of other Alliance unionists. But by then McCarten was already preparing to take the Alliance and his 'Unite' into the Maori Party.

When Anderton supported the Labour Government in sending troops to Afghanistan, the stand taken by other Alliance MPs and the party against this was principled. The problem, however, was that the Alliance had no union base to mobilise against the war. McCarten's new union was not built on a political program but his personal patronage. Unite lite was no base to oppose the war.

Unite lite and Alliance left back cops

In fact Unite lite couldnt even oppose the cops. McCarten proved this when he crossed the picket line formed by UNITE! members of the UNITE! West Auckland, against his partner, Alliance member Kathy Caseys exhibition 'Comrades and Cossacks' that was co-sponsored by the NZ Police and publically opened by high-ranked police officers. As he crossed this picket line opposing NZ working class history being funded by policewho had played a key role in smashing the 1913 general strike, McCarten challeged the picketers to attend one of his recruitment rallies!

While McCarten got some internal criticism from other Alliance members for his fraternatisation with the cops, other Alliance ‘lefts’ also crossed the picket line relegating class struggle to academic ‘history’. Then McCarten was re-elected leader shortly afterwards. At the same time the Alliance left was regrouping around a new Manifesto in which the Alliance was identified as a 'socialist party' based on 'working people'. Yet nowhere in this Manifesto was there any serious orientation to the unions as the base of any 'socialist' party. Class struggle had been relegated to the history of ‘Comrades and Cossacks’ and Parliament remained the holy grail.

But the Alliance was still outside the Labour Party and with no prospect of getting a base in the wider labour movement. McCarten's search for an 'army' of workers to get him elected in Auckland Central was more like pissing in the wind. The demise of the Alliance looked certain when the political shit hit the Foreshore and Seabed fan.

Along Comes Tariana

At first the Alliance backed Labour's decision to block the Appeal Court's decision and turn the F&S into 'public domain'. But the Hikoi changed that when McCarten and Treen found a few thousand potential voters marching to Wellington. Never mind that the Hikoi was against putting the F&S into 'public domain' the Alliance turned on its toes and next thing we know is McCarten is offering to run Turia's election campaign in Te Tai Hauauru. The Alliance Council came out in support of the new Maori Party without any idea what its program would be.

With Turia's overwhelming by-election victory the Maori Party seems set to challenge Labour for all the Maori seats. The scene is also set for a deal between the Alliance and the MP to campaign against Labour. But while the Anderton split with Labour damaged the Labour movement by pissing into Labour's tent, the Maori Party looks like splitting the labour movement and pissing into its own tend somewhere in 'middle ground' of parliament. The Maori Party has made it clear that it is organised on an ethnic basis and will canvass support for 'Maori' interests from both Labour and National.

Matt backs Turia, left splits?

By backing this move by the MP and taking his workersinto this party McCarten is creating a potentially more damaging split with the labour movement than Anderton did 15 years ago. While Anderton's Alliance spent a decade in the wilderness failing to renew the fight inside the Labour Party, McCarten's propospal for a Maori Party/Alliance shackup looks like taking Maori workers out of an already weakened labour movement into tribal politics where they will be abused as electoral fodder for a bunch of iwi bureaucrats, politicos and capitalists.

This is dragging the best working class fighters, who can revive the labour movement and lead the fight against imperialism and kiwi crony capitalism, into the arms of their class enemies – Bush and Brash. The corporate ‘warriors’ in the Maori Party who have benefited from the Treaty settlement process will try to use the 'balance of power' to pressure the bosses to get a larger share of the profits of kiwi capitalism distributed into their pockets.

But they will be even less successful than they were under the Treaty settlements that funded the birth of small-scale Maori capitalism over the last 20 years. The imperialist ruling class and its kiwi cronies will use MMP to buy off the Maori bosses at the expense of the vast majority of Maori who are members of the casualised working class.

What to do?

Those few hundred members of the Alliance who are serious about building a 'socialist party' based upon working people,who are for 'democratic socialism' in practice, must turn their backs on their attempts to rebuild the Labour Party from the outside.

The debates taking place inside the Alliance are still dominated by electoral strategy and tactics to recruit members (See Jill Ovens ‘Strange saga of the Alliance’ Red &Green No 3, 2004 p.75). Liquidating into the Maori Party or the Greens abandons the real fight inside the labour movement to build united democratic unions. But building an independent party of the left without a base in the unions also avoids the basic issue. The way to remove the Labour roadblock is to fight for a new workers party by smashing the labour bureaucracy’s hold over workers in the the unions.

Leon Trotsky writing just before he was killed in 1940 on: “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay” says that because the unions have become “semi-state institutions” it is necessary to “struggle to turn the trade unions into the organs of the broad exploited masses and not the organs of the labor aristocracy…The primary slogan for this struggle is: complete and unconditional independence of the trade unions in relation to the capitalist state.” http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1940/1940-tu.htm

Workers will remain trapped inside Labour until they begin to rebuild their unions under rank and file control and break from the bureaucracy and the state. Those Alliance members who are serious about socialism should dedicate themselves to the task of workers democracy and repudiate McCarten's sell-out into a Maori Party splitting the labour movement and diverting workers into 'cargo cult' deals with Brash or Clark and away from united working class struggle.

Communist Workers Group has made clear its stand on the necessity and urgency of mobilising a united working class to fight the sell-out of the F&S against the dead end of the parliamentary road. Equally we have insisted that such mobilisations will not happen unless all socialists put their practice where their rhetoric is and fight to rebuild the labour movement to break from the labour bureaucracy of the 'big three' unions and the Blairite ideology of the Labour Government.

Finally, none of this will happen if NZ workers remain trapped in patriotic alliances with any bourgeois party trying to negotiate deals with Australian, US or other imperialist interests to defend our jobs and freedoms. We have to build internationalist unions capable of defending the jobs and freedoms of workers everywhere. CWG pledges to play its part in all united fronts where socialists unite to “strike together, but march separately.”

Unite to Occupy the Foreshore and Seabed!

Build Fighting, Democratic Unions!

Solidarity campaign for Iraqi workers!

Endorse the Abdul Raheem Appeal! 

From Class Struggle 57 August-September 2004

Budgeting for profits again…

The Sunday Star Times (April 25) ran a feature about a Waihi ‘middle-class’ family that couldn’t live on $55.000 who wrote an open letter to Helen Clark. It was an indictment of the Social Democratic kiwi dream of a ‘milk and honey’ classless paradise that has turned sour. Than along came Labour’s budget that gave $2 billion in income top-ups to working families earning up to $55,000 over the next 3 years. Predictably, this was condemned as buying votes by the right. But in fact Labour was doing what it always does in its budgets, budgeting for profits. We explain how.

The celebrated Waihi family may be described as ‘middle class’ but in reality they are workers. Father teaches while mother minds the four kids. They both provide profits for the bosses out of their labour. Dad educates kids who then (he hopes) go on to be good workers. Mum does the same at home without pay, subsidising the cost of producing these kids to be exploited by the bosses. Topping up their wages in the budget package for working families is another subsidy to bosses because without it, bosses would have to pay for the complete training of their workers out of their profits.

Tax cuts are code for wage cuts

But to explain how this works we first have to get rid of the bullshit about tax cuts.

National and ACT made a huge fuss about Labour taxing people and then giving some of it back to buy votes in the next election. Admittedly, Labour had cynically phased in the benefits so that to get them it had to be re-elected. But all this talk about tax cuts is just a smokescreen to hide the real motive of wage cuts.

We pay taxes out of our gross income. This assumes there is a distribution of income between wages and profits (and rents for those who own property) that is like a ‘law of nature’. Workers get wages, bosses get profits, and landowners get rents. We are not supposed to disturb this ‘law of nature’ or else something like the global meltdown in the ‘Day after Tomorrow’ will destroy the world market.

All of the debate over the budget accepts this ‘law of nature’. We don’t question the plot. Taxes are a sort of theft of an individuals income, unless there is a national interest in taxing people to pay for ‘public goods’ like state funded health, education and welfare. The debate then comes down to whether or not people should pay for these things. Plots become conspiracies about who is out to screw whom?

But what if this concern about taxes is really a smokescreen that hides the reality of how the economy works? Karl Marx once referred to this ‘law of nature’ as the ‘holy trinity’ - a sort of blind faith in each class –worker, boss and landlord – getting their ‘fair share’ of the national wealth. But as Marx proved neither the boss nor the landlord create any wealth at all. Their ‘share’ is deducted from the wealth created by workers. He took delight in showed that this was a fact in the settlement of Australia and New Zealand, where landlords and bosses who had money and land, but couldn’t get any workers, made no profits and had to work themselves or starve!

So what is all the fuss about the Budget?

Of course the Nats and ACTs worship the ‘holy trinity’ that entitles them to profits as the reward for their innovation and sacrifice. They argue that taxing these profits to pay workers raises wages and cuts ‘their’ profits. In the past they were happy to allow some of ‘their’ profits to be taxed to boost wages if it was cheaper then pay higher wages themselves. The whole postwar period saw state-provided health, education and welfare contributing to profits until those profits started to fall dramatically. Not because workers wages squeezed profits, but because bosses could not screw enough wealth out of the workers.

But now that the economy has been opened up to international competition, the bosses have to cut their wage costs. They want to pick and choose skilled workers, pay them a market wage and refuse to pay for the education and health of the pool of unemployed and service workers. They also want benefits to be cut to force people to work for lower wages. In the twenty years since the onset of Rogernomics in 1984, the income gap between bosses and the poorest workers has grown much larger.

But if we reject this blind faith in the ‘holy trinity’ we see that the NATACTS attack on welfare is another way of extracting more wealth from workers to increase their profits. Instead of workers clawing back some of the wealth they create in the form of benefits, the bosses want to keep it all, blaming those they exploit, or make jobless, for demanding that the state taxes ‘their’ profits! They have the cheek to try to get workers onside by calling them ‘taxpayers’ too and not exploited workers!!

If this is what the rightwing bosses say does this mean that Labour’s tiny token redistribution of income back to the poorest families on a drip feed system over the next 3-4 years means a cut in profits?

Labour’s smartass subsidies to bosses

The NATACTs opposition to taxing profits to boost workers incomes is typical of bosses who own banks or run hotels and who want wage cuts in order to maximise profits. Their blanket attack on welfare is that it reflects the narrow interests industry where high tech productivity gains are not at stake. Yet the major growth points in the NZ economy today are in high-tech, high productivity, value-added areas such as pastoral production, biotech, forestry etc. The only way that NZ bosses can compete internationally is if they can out-smart their competitors.

This is what is behind Labour’s promotion of the ‘knowledge society’. It is the recognition that high-tech growth in the economy is necessary before any ‘social dividend’ to the most needy can be made. The idea of a ‘knowledge society’ is a society in which the blind faith in the ‘holy trinity’ has become politically correct. It takes the form of the ‘social partnership’ between the godfather (the bosses), the son (workers) and the holy ghost (government –as landlord).

Labour’s ‘Blairites’ (after Tony Blair’s ‘third way’ politics that takes a middle course between neo-liberalism and socialism) want to ‘balance’ the raw market with social policies that ensures that people are ‘included’ in the benefits of market. This is the smart state that backs winners in the knowledge economy, tailors state subsidies to education to match skills to jobs, and tries not to leave anybody ‘deserving’ person out. Labour’s shift of industrial law, the foreshore legislation, and the budget, are designed to ensure social harmony rather than social conflict or exclusion.

The problem is that this Blairite strategy requires rapid growth in productivity to create new jobs and rising incomes to offset the pool of unemployed and the downward squeeze on wages. But in the global economy high-tech itself cannot save the global capitalist economy as it cannot generate enough wealth to make sufficient profits. Therefore there is no surplus profit to be taxed to spend on boosting the incomes of the poor. The ‘social partnership’ is doomed to economic and political bankruptcy.

Capitalism is not sustainable

The anti-globalisers like the Alliance or the Greens say this is because of the greed of the multinationals operating globally to suck profits out of the high performance sector inside nation states where they own the resources or control the market. According to ARENA, foreign investment in NZ owns half of productive wealth, and in some sectors like the Banks all of it. The effect is a squeeze on wages and social spending inside Aotearoa/NZ to suck the profits out. The anti-globalists answer is to cut the pipeline and keep the profits inside Aotearoa/NZ. But this is a pipedream.

As Marx would say: capitalism is global. The corporates are driven not by greed but by the survival of the fittest. The enrichment of global corporates at the expense of the mass of impoverished does not respect national borders. The Blairite Budget in NZ 2004 is a futile attempt to keep the faith in the ‘holy trinity’. But this ‘partnership’ is doomed. God the father must betray the son, and the holy ghost hasn’t got a shits show in hell of doing anything about it.

This means that to break out of the bosses globalisation we need a workers globalisation. Workers need to take control of their own welfare; socialise the ownership of the means of production so that the wealth they produce is retained for collective use; renationalise and expropriate the property of the corporates and put them under workers control; take control of the state and expel the ‘holy trinity’ into the dustbin of history; build unions of socialist republics in the Pacific, in the Middle East, in Asia, in Latin America, in Europe, in North America, in Africa. 

From Class Struggle 56 June-July 2004

 

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