Jesse Butler made a number of replies to the CWG’s Open Letter to the Green Left Weekly (see next post) in response to Butler’s article after it was posted on the indymedia news service. Here we reprint one of Butler’s replies and our response to him.
To the CWG,
Once again we are bombarded with the outdated rhetoric of the communist party, now focusing on Tariana's reasonable comment to work with anyone, including National, to obtain equality and justice in Aotearoa.
Where is the alternative system of the communist party? I hear a lot of bullshit from the sidelines yet very little in the way of an alternative game plan.
You’re not still waiting for your 'revolution' are you? Do you mean to say that the vast majority of the masses would rise up against the system that supplies them security, income and a future to your unarticulated communist system?
Surely, you are not suggesting another failed communist experiment experienced in Russia, China and North Korea to happen here in Aotearoa?
Communist dictators make Donald Brash look like a lollipop. And you want the New Zealand public to take you seriously?
No, I’m afraid your ramblings are blinded by ideology and obviously flawed in the political reality of this country.
My advice to you is to wake up and get off the sidelines, and have a real go at the opposition like we are. Basically put up or shut up.
We need all hands on deck against the neo-liberal onslaught, and sometimes that involves getting inside next to them so we can beat them at their own game.
Jesse Butler
The CWG replies:
Jesse’s response to our criticisms of his article shows very clearly that Green Left Weekly and Socialist Worker were wrong to print his accounts of the hikoi and the formation of the Maori Party. Jesse’s anti-communism would make Joe McCarthy and Ben Couch proud!
Anti-commie, anti-Maori
It's sad to see some supporters of the Maori Party engaging in a red baiting that belongs to the days the Cold War, because it was Maori who were regularly asked to go abroad and die in the US's wars against 'communist tyranny' in Korea, Malaya, and Vietnam. Thirty-two of the thirty-five Kiwi troops who died in Vietnam were Maori - what did they die for? Hasn’t Jesse learnt anything?
And Vietnam and Korea weren't the first wars that New Zealand fought against 'the communist menace'. The Waikato and Taranaki wars were crusades against communism, fought for the interests of settler capitalists who were infuriated by the Maori refusal to sell collectively-owned land.
Te Whiti and his followers at Parihaka was targeted by the warmongers not because they wore feathers in their hair but because they praised 'the miracle of collective labour' and refused to sell their collectively-owned land.
The gardens of the Maori kingdom in the Waikato were destroyed not because the people who worked them were using collective land ownership and labour to feed the fortress city of Auckland, where would-be land grabbers railed against 'the socialistic natives'.
The CWG remembers the communism of Te Whiti, as well as the communism of Marx and the communism of the occupied factories movement in today's Argentina. We want to see the foreshore and the whole of Aotearoa run collectively.
That’s why we reject the Maori Party.
Different party, same mistakes
The Maori Party's strategy is to capture the balance of parliamentary seats, and try to get good deals for Maori, and especially for iwi commercial interests, by using the balance of power in negotiations with the major parties. This strategy cannot succeed for two reasons.
In the first place, the ability of the major parties to influence the economy in favour of Maori business is limited, because the New Zealand economy is mostly owned offshore, by US and US-Aussie companies.
The domination of the Kiwi economy by US and other imperialisms means that iwi businesses have little chance of succeeding, or even surviving.
They do not have the capital to compete with the multinationals, and as little fish will inevitably be swallowed up by the big fish. But even if Maori capitalism were a viable venture, the Maori Party would not benefit many Maori, because very few Maori are capitalists.
The vast majority of Maori are workers or the dependents of workers. All Kiwi workers have an interest in better pay and conditions, and better social services like health and education.
These interests clash with those of capitalists, because capitalists make their profits from the wages of workers. It's no coincidence that employers' groups have been at the forefront of campaigns against pro-worker arguments and policies like the minimum wage, the right to strike, paid parental leave, and increased funding for public health.
Brown bosses are no more pro-worker than white bosses, and the mini-capitalists of the iwicorps are now fighting class wars of their own. Look at Ngati Whatua bosses wanting to sell off housing their own people won back in the Bastion Pt struggle. Look at the struggles against Robert Mahuta and more recently Tuku Morgan by Tainui Maori sick of corporate cowboy behaviour.
The Maori Party's strategy has been repeatedly tried and repeatedly found wanting over the past few years.
The tight five of NZ First and then Mauri Pacific tried to advance Maori interests in coalition with National, and ended up supporting the privatisation of Auckland Airport and rimu logging on the West Coast. In return they got fat salaries and some nice undies. Nice for them, but not so good for their supporters, who booted them out in 1999.
Mana Motuhake entered government in 1999, but Willie Jackson and Sandra Lee were as unable to win concessions as the tight five before them. They couldn't even stop Labour junking its weak-as-water Closing the Gaps scheme after National kicked up a proto-Brashian fuss. In return for his non-existent policy wins Jackson ended up having to back the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, on the grounds that 'The SAS boys are Maori and they want to go'.
Tariana played a key role in the Pakaitore occupation in 1995, but got sucked into the Labour Party by the promise of winning those elusive policy concessions. We all know how she got on there.
The hikoi could have turned into an alternative to parliamentarism – there were militant elements on it that rejected the failure of repeated attempts to work 'within the system'. Why get blisters walking from Te Hapua to Wellington, if you can influence policy from the comfort of the cabinet room?
Back to the future!
For these advocates of extra-parliamentary protest action, the hikoi looked back to the great days of the 1970s and early 80s, when Maori and their supporters waged a series of struggles which shook the Kiwi ruling class to its core.
The Great Land March of 1975, the epic occupation of Bastion Point, the struggle to reclaim the Raglan Golf Course, and the hikoi to Waitangi in 1984 were all examples of Maori direct action against 'the system'.
Before it got tied up in the red tape of the 'Treaty process', the Maori direct action movement managed to win a whole series of victories.
Make no mistake: Bastion Pt was won back by direct action, not parliament. The Maori land at Raglan is no longer a golf course because of direct action, not some cabinet seat.
Language nests exist today because Maori kicked up a stink in the streets in the 70s and early 80s, not because of Tau Henare or Tariana.
The partial victory Tariana helped win at Pakaitore in the mid-90s stands in stark contrast to the same woman's utter failure to influence Labour policy as a cabinet minister.
And the hikoi struck far more terror into the hearts of the establishment than the electoral triumphs of Tau, Willie and the rest of them combined. 'Wellington under siege!' the Herald screamed.
There was a palpable sense of relief when Tariana turned the final day of the hikoi into an electoral rally, and went on TV with Gerry Brownlee to announce her openness to a coalition deal with National.
Tariana played the same role in Wellington as Dame Whina played after the Land March. Dame Whina told the militant young Maori who set up an occupation of parliament grounds to pack up and go home and work inside the system, and the militants were right to refuse, and to lay the ground for the occupations that were to come!
Today Tariana is telling us to forget about the old hikoi, that the 'next hikoi will be the ballot box'. We should refuse her call too, and organise occupations of threatened sections of foreshore up and down the country.
While Tariana sets out her election stall and promises the same things as Tau and Willie promised, the theft of the foreshore proceeds, the American mansions go up on wahi tapu, and the 'free' trade deal gets closer and closer. Labour and the bosses aren't stopping, so why should we?
Browns and reds unite!
We can make sure occupations and other direct actions are successful by building on the tradition of Maori-communist struggle which Jesse mocks.
We have already mentioned the armed struggle to defend the collectively-owned and worked Waikato from capitalists in the 1860s, and the passive resistance to privatisation which Te Whiti is famous for, but Maori struggle against capitalism didn't stop in the nineteenth century.
There is a long history of collaboration between revolutionary socialists and Maori, a tradition which includes the solidarity the Tainui Maori showed to the Red Federation of Labour during the revolutionary General Strike of 1913, through the socialist and trade unionist presence in the occupations of the 70s, to the anti-Springbok protests of 1981, right up to the present day actions of communist Maori activists like Justin Taua.
Communists have always understood that only the muscle of organised workers can win crucial struggles like the Maori struggle for land rights. Unlike Tau or Tariana, communists recognise the common interests of Maori and Pakeha workers, and the importance of getting them together on the picket line.
Since we've mentioned it already we'll use the example of Bastion Pt to illustrate the point we’re making in more detail.
By the 1930s almost the only piece of land the 'friendly' tribe of Ngati Whatua possessed was a small strip of coast near Bastion Pt.
Auckland city authorities wanted to strip Ngati Whatua of this piece of land and the village that stood on it, but they reckoned without the alliance which Ngati Whatua's Tainui ally Princess Te Puea had made with the Pakeha-dominated trade union movement and with the Communist Party.
Tainui solidarity with the workers' movement went back to 1913, when iwi leaders urged Maori not to undermine the General Strike by signing on to do the jobs of strikers.
Communist Party unionists returned the favour by championing the grievances of Waikato Tainui, who since returning from exile in the Rohe Potae in 1883 had struggled relentlessly to regain their confiscated lands.
When word went out that the government was about to move on the Maori village near Bastion Point in 1937communists in Auckland's trade unions swung into action.
Ron Mason, who was organising with the General Labourers Union, put out an urgent call to the city's builders, and four hundred of them descended on the threatened settlement.
With the help of Ngati Whatua and Tainui, the builders worked non-stop to fortify the village, laying tall palisades in a concrete foundation. Workers prepared to defend the village, and the government backed down.
It was not until sixteen years later, in 1953, that the government was finally able to burn the village of Orakei to the ground.
It is no coincidence that this act of ethnic cleansing took place after the defeat of the radical workers movement in the Great Waterfront Lockout of 1951. Without the support of organised labour Ngati Whatua were weakened. The fortunes of the workers' movement and Maori have always been linked.
When the struggle for Bastion Pt and surrounding land revived in the 70s, trade unionists and a new generation of communists were amongst the vanguard.
Unionists took the issue into their organisations, raising thousands of dollars in aid and bringing in work teams to help the occupiers build a new village on Bastion Point. Communist organisations turned their dinky printing presses to the task of publicising the cause.
When Muldoon sent in the armed forces to crush the occupation at Bastion Point, trade unionists and communists stood on the picket line, and thousands of workers walked off the job around Auckland in a spontaneous protest strike.
Carpenters and truckies who had been called out to a mysterious 'big job' refused to work, when they found that they were being asked to help demolish the Bastion Point settlement.
Solidarity continued into the 80s, when Ngati Whatua were finally able to recover their land. The degeneration into corporatism of the leadership of Ngati Whatua doesn't wipe out the victory of Bastion Point, but it does show once again that without a strong workers' movement the Maori flaxroots are weak.
Occupy for sure!
Today we need to revive the spirit of Bastion Point by building on the support for the hikoi shown by unions like the National Distribution Union, the Service and Food Workers Union, Aste, and the Manufacturing and Construction Union.
Neither Pakeha nor Maori unionists will ever back a party that makes overtures to National, but many of them will back occupations of a foreshore which all ordinary New Zealanders value and worry about losing.
By occupying the foreshore and inviting ordinary Pakeha to join them, Maori can take the wind out of the sails of the right-wingers who say that the hikoi was about Maori privatisation, while at the same time thwarting the iwicorp opportunists who think that Maori sovereignty means Maori capitalism.
Sea farming and tourism ventures can be controlled by workers, not by brown or white capitalists.
And if the foreshore and its industries can be socialised, then why not the whole economy? A movement to socialise the whole of Aotearoa can take inspiration from the occupied factories of Argentina and the collective farms being established in Venezuela, as well as the indigenous communism of Rangiaowhia and Te Whiti.
This is the argument that the CWG made on the hikoi and has been making at Maori Party hui.
The argument from which this reply is taken can be read in full here:
From Class Struggle 57 August-September 2004
The main outcome of the Hikoi of 2004 is the birth of a Maori Party. Tariana Turia is standing in Te Tai Hauauru. Is this the way forward for the vast majority of Maori who are workers? No. It subordinates the interests of Maori workers behind a few Maori who are politicians, bureaucrats and bosses. Maori workers should break with Labour but organise to occupy land and foreshore to meet their needs rather than follow some of their leaders back into the parliamentary dead end. What's the alternative to parliament? Look at where Tariana Turia comes from. In 1995 she, along with Ken Mair, a public servant, and Niko Tangaroa, an Auckland union leader, combined to lead the occupation of Pakaitore (Moutoa Gardens) in Wanganui. The Treaty process was stalled under National and the Wanganui iwi wanted to speed things up.
This was the last of the big occupations. Bastion Point won back land for Ngati Whatua before the onset of the 1980s' neo-liberal counter-revolution and has since become a major land owner in Auckland city. Pakaitore could not deliver these results. It was too little and too late. But pressure was exerted on the National government and a face-saving deal was done. The occupiers left with dignity, and the Labour Party made unspecified promises to deal with grievances.
Labour courted Tariana Turia and co-opted her into the party with the promise of making her a Minister and promoting Maori issues. Several times she expressed her impatience with Labour as it pulled back from defending Maori but she and her mentor, Helen Clark, remained allies until the F&S (Takutai Moana) issue blew up.
The lesson drawn by Tariana Turia and her supporters on the Hikoi is that Labour has now betrayed the Maori cause by confiscating the foreshore and seabed. This is true. But they are in danger of drawing the wrong conclusion - that this betrayal can be overcome by taking to the parliamentary road in a new vehicle – a Maori Party. It is the wrong conclusion because the parliamentary road is a dead end. Already the occupation of Pakaitore in 1995 had been weakened by focusing the struggle on parliament. This will not change with the formation of the Maori Party. It doesn't matter if a minority exerts pressure outside or inside parliament. It can never win what it wants. The reason is that parliament is a numbers game and governments will always put minority Maori interests last to keep majority pakeha support. The best a Maori Party will do is a deal with the multinational fish farmers to allow Maori to work for them - just like the forestry industry.
More importantly, Parliament is not sovereign, capitalism is, and today it is US imperialism that rules the world. So jumping out of Labour's bus into Hone Harawira's 4-wheel drive is not going to alter the numbers game or the parliamentary outcome. So long as it is added up in votes the numbers game will always leave Maori as poor cousins using its 7 seats to negotiate starvation rations with the majority. Worse, it divides Maori from pakeha workers and lets the bosses' maintain their parliamentary stranglehold on the only class able to throw out the bosses. So what's the workers' alternative? Make Pakaitore work this time! Pakaitore can be seen as a lost opportunity. It was a highly visible occupation of a key foreshore site near the Wanganui river mouth which could have become a flax roots occupation. Instead of using it as a tactic to pressure the parliamentary majority, Pakaitore could have been a new start for Maori politics. It could have been a model occupation for Maori and pakeha workers to assert workers control over key sites and resources. In this way, Maori could have stopped playing a minority support role like the Winston Peters and Tau Henares in parliament and could have called on support from a section of pakeha workers to break out of the dead end of the parliamentary road.
But for this to happen, the leadership of the occupation had to be won from the iwi leadership. Ken Mair is a bureaucrat who wants Maori to sit down at the table with pakeha. But the bosses have shown that even the Brown Table is permanently under the Round Table. The Maori elite of capitalists, lawyers and bureaucrats who want 15% of the profits of NZ Inc have not made it to 1%. The bad news for Ken Mair is that Maori capitalism is doomed to extinction. It cannot be a vehicle for the welfare of the mass of Maori. Just look at the way Treaty settlements have led to the creation of Maori capitalists whose loyalty to the boss class far exceeds their loyalty to Maori. Take Sealords. Sorry, you're too late, it’s been taken. Maori fishing rights under the Treaty were consolidated as a share of the quota owned by the Sealord corp in a half share with a Japanese corporation. In a capitalist economy, iwi or Maori corps are mainly sprats or at the most a few kahawai swimming in a sea of makos.
But was'nt Niko Tangaroa a staunch unionist? Yes, but in coming home to Wanganui, his ‘Ahi kaa’ (the home fires), he left his union support base behind to work for the iwi. This was sad and probably against his personal instincts, but his SUP Stalinist training was never centred on seriously uniting the working class, only containing it. While many unionists and leftists rallied to Pakaitore to show worker solidarity, the objective was always to win Pakaitore for Wanganui iwi and not for the united working class. So the Pakaitore leadership showed that they had a limited iwi perspective which did not want to turn the occupation into a cause to unite the working class. The opportunity to turn Maori from a parliamentary minority, always making concessions to the majority, into the vanguard of a new working class majority, was lost. Workers' Pakaitore everywhere! This lesson should not be lost on us today. We do not have to get stuck on the parliamentary road. The bosses' parliament and not lickspittle Labour is the real problem. Labour is scared of their US bosses spitting, not Tame Iti. Elections are only held for us to vote our oppressors back into power every three years. Every time we fall for this, the bosses laugh all the way to the Citibank. We have to replace our faith in bosses' elections with a belief in the power of workers' occupations.
In every iwi or hapu, there is a piece of foreshore and related seabed, river or lake, which is the traditional source of kaimoana. This customary right should be asserted by occupations backed by the unions. The leaders of the iwi or hapu who see these claims as mere pawns in some larger political or legal game should be replaced by flax roots leaders. The traditional concept of occupation-for- use can today become revived as the basis of property rights. This practical assertion of common ownership and use of resources to meet the needs of iwi, hapu and all workers living in the area, will create support from Pakeha, Pacifica, Asian and other workers. New Occupations, Old 'communism' Such occupations will prove to be very popular and not at all outdated. Rightwing politicians will say that this is a return to stone-age economics or 'primitive communism' against the market. These are the age-old racist objections to the Maori 'land-league' in the Waikato that refused to sell land to settlers in the 1860s, now being recycled again. What these racist apologists do not say is that the real challenge back then, and what they fear most today, is Maori producing all the food and produce the settlers needed to survive, independently of private property, by adapting 'iron-age' technology to their 'stone-age' collective property rights! In the same way, the now fashionable-among-liberals struggle of Te Whiti of Parihaka in the 1880s is remembered for its 'pacifism' and not for Te Whiti's defence of common ownership of land and the 'miracle' of collective labour.
These 'communist' traditions were rejected by land-hungry Pakeha settlers in the 1800s. But today they can be revived and supported by Pakeha, Pacifica and Asian workers who have no interest to dispossess Maori by force, and a common interest to re-possess capitalist property and resources as the class allies of Maori workers. The Treaty is a Fraud!
Occupy the Seabed and Foreshore under workers control!
From Class Struggle 56 June-July 2004
An Open Letter to supporters of the Maori Party
Kia ora comrades, We were proud to march alongside so many of you on the great seabed and foreshore hikoi. The hikoi has already taken its place beside the Great Land March of 1975, the waterfront lockout of 1951, and the anti-Springbok campaign of 1981 in the history of resistance to injustice in Aotearoa. We salute the courage and endurance of the marchers who defied the threats of politicians, the slanders of the media, and the verbal and physical attacks from racists and made Labour’s confiscation of the seabed and foreshore into a burning issue up and down Aotearoa. We were proud to hikoi with you to Wellington, but we won’t be travelling to Wanganui for the launch of the new Maori Party. It’s not that we’ve changed our minds about the seabed and foreshore – on the contrary, we think that events since the passage of Labour’s legislation confirm the arguments of the hikoi ten times over. We won’t be with you in Wanganui because we believe that the Maori Party represents a sharp turn away from the path of the hikoi. We don’t recognise the spirit of that great struggle in the Maori Party. In fact, we think that some of the pronouncements of the would-be leaders of the new party – Tariana Turia, Peter Sharples, and the rest – represent a betrayal of the politics of the seabed and foreshore hikoi. We think that you are setting out on a hikoi to hell, and we want to try to convince you change direction before it’s too late.
Hikoi to the Ballot Box? We’ve been disturbed by some of the korero at pro-party hui held around the North Island, and by the statements that leaders of the new party have been making through the media. Movers and shakers like Tariana and Sharples have announced that they want the new organisation to be a ‘centre’ party, which can sit between National and Labour and negotiate with both to get the best deal – or, at any rate, the biggest number of Cabinet seats - for Maori. Tariana tells us that the new party will be open to people of all political persuasions. Tuku Morgan has welcome at pro-party hui, and National’s Georgina Te Heuheu is being courted as a possible candidate in next year’s general election. Sharples has claimed that the new party ‘will have the same basic philosophy’ as Labour, and that Labour ‘would be fools to treat us as enemies’. On television with Gerry Brownlee soon after the hikoi, Tariana refused to rule out a coalition between the new party and National after the next election. Tariana’s by-election campaign manager Matt McCarten has defended the overtures to National as a ‘strategic’ measure designed to increase the Maori Party’s bargaining power. According to Tariana and McCarten, ‘the next hikoi will be to the ballot box’ and into a coalition with one of the big parties. But why were we on the hikoi in the first place? Why did Maori and their supporters need to march all the way from Te Hapua to Wellington? What were all those blisters for? Wasn’t the hikoi necessary because Maori seats in Cabinet were not able to get a better deal for Maori? Hasn’t Tariana tried and fail to influence government ‘from the inside’? And didn’t Tuku and the rest of Tau Henare’s brat pack try and fail to do the same back in the late 90s?
New Party, Old Mistakes We think that Tariana is repeating the mistakes she made after the occupation at Pakaitore back in ’95. Tariana won a lot of mana as a leader of that occupation, which defied the power of the state and won back a piece of the Wanganui River foreshore for Maori. After the Pakaitore, Labour dropped Tariana a line, telling her that she should occupy parliament. Tariana bought Labour’s line, and the rest is history. Tariana lost a lot of her mana by becoming a Minister in a government which helped the US invade Afghanistan and Iraq, and which continued to implement National’s right-wing economic and social policies at home. Tariana’s decision to dump Labour for the hikoi has made her a hero again, but now she’s talking about going down the same old parliamentary road. Not only has Tariana not learnt from her mistakes, she’s hasn’t even learnt from the mistake of Tau and his New Zealand First mates. She’s talking about the possibility of going down Tau’s own road to nowhere, by forming a government with the Nats! Local Battle, Global War But why is the hikoi through parliament so hard? Why did Tau and Tariana fail? Why did Mat Rata fail? Why did Apirana Ngata fail? Why are Maori still second-class citizens, after more than a hundred years of Maori seats? To answer these questions, we need to step back and look at the big political picture. We hikoied to Wellington, because Wellington is the political capital of Aotearoa. Wellington is where parliament sits and the big bureaucrats draw their salaries. But Wellington is not the place where the most important economic and political decisions affecting Aotearoa are made. To go to the real heart of power, we’d have to hikoi to Washington DC, or to the Wall Street Stock Exchange in New York City. Aotearoa is an economic semi-colony of the United States, and that means that the US dictates the economic direction and general political programme of both National and Labour governments. Multinational companies based in the US and other imperialist countries control most of the biggest businesses in Aotearoa, and wealthy Americans are snapping up our land. US money has effective veto power over important economic and political decisions in Wellington. US military and spy bases are dotted around Aotearoa, and Labour’s participation in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is driven by a fear of offending US money and the US government. ‘Free’ trade treaties like GATT only tie government hands more tightly. The US exports its own economic problems to the rest of the world, and calls its export globalisation. In Aotearoa, globalisation has meant the privatisations and cuts in education and health spending of the 80s and 90s. Globalisation continues today, as Labour works hard to win a ‘free’ trade deal with the US by removing remaining barriers to foreign investment and the purchase of land, opening the door to GE, and doing the US’s dirty work in ‘little Iraqs’ like the Solomons and East Timor. It’s not hard to see why Labour is crapping on Maori. Those cheeky darkies who descended on Wellington are a threat to the smooth progress of globalisation in Aotearoa. The Maori Land Court and the Waitangi Tribunal threatened to tie the government up in red tape, when it wanted to get on with reducing the barriers to the US buy-up of coastal land, and the US colonisation of the sea farming business. And the Maori demand for better funding for kohanga reo, housing and other necessities runs straight into Labour’s concern to keep government spending down so that it can cut company tax and woo US investors. How they Hikoi in Bolivia The hikoi was a challenge to the politicians and bureaucrats in Wellington and to the globalisers in Washington DC. It was our local front in the global war against the imperialists’ globalisation. It’s no coincidence that many young people on the march identified with the Iraqi resistance, and that some wore the head dress of the Palestinians fighting colonisation in Gaza and the West Bank. And, there’s no doubt the hikoi scared the shit out of the local agents of globalisation. Helen Clark was too afraid to show us her face, when we made it to Wellington! (Of course, Helen will be much less worried about a Maori Party which refuses even to call her the enemy. She’ll be keeping that Cabinet seat warm for Tariana...) Maori and working class Pakeha have to understand that winning seats in parliament and at the Cabinet table means nothing, as long as their country is owned offshore. To defeat the enemy, we have to think globally, even as we act locally. We may have a powerful offshore enemy in US imperialism, but we also have a power offshore ally too, in the international working class. From Iraq to Argentina, US imperialism is being resisted by working class and oppressed people. When we talk about strategy and tactics, we should be looking at success stories overseas, not at local failures like Tau and Tuku. We all know about Iraq, but too few of us are aware of the massive anti-US revolts that have been shaking South America for two years now. South America’s workers and peasants are fighting US imperialism, and they are winning. In Argentina, workers have reacted to globalisation by occupying hundreds of factories that US-owned companies wanted to close down. In Venezuela, the CIA has twice tried to overthrow the anti-US government of Hugo Chavez with military coups. Bush wants to get control of Venezuela’s oil reserves, but he’s been defeated, because millions of workers have taken to the streets, and others have occupied their factories. In Bolivia, workers and peasants last year staged a hikoi of their won, pouring into their capital city La Paz to protest the US-backed government’s plans to wipe out coca farming and steal the country’s natural gas. In La Paz the Bolivians built barricades and stormed government buildings. President Sanchez de Lozada needed a US helicopter to sneak him out of the country, as his government collapsed and the people took over the capital. That’s how a hikoi should end! Unity with Workers, not the Nats There are many lessons to be learnt from the victories in South America. In Bolivia, protesters united across ethnic lines, because they had a common interest in getting rid of Lozada, a wealthy businessman nicknamed ‘the Yank’ because he spoke with an American accent. The Indian coca growers the US was trying to ruin united with mixed race urban workers, against a common enemy. In Aotearoa, we need the same sort of unity between Pakeha and Maori workers. Many Pakeha trade unionists and leftists marched to Wellington, but the majority of non-Maori were sucked in by Labour’s promises that its legislation would protect their access to beaches. Now, only weeks after the first reading of Labour’s bill, the Department of Conservation has teamed up with Tourism New Zealand and some local councils to promote plans to charge the public for access to popular beaches, including Coromandel’s Cathedral Cove. In the south, Clutha District Council has plans to make motorists pay for access to the road that follows the scenic Caitlins coast. In the Hawkes Bay, locals are up in arms over local government’s decision to allow a US billionaire to desecrate the beautiful Cape Kidnappers by building chalets and tunnelling into a cliff. Pakeha are beginning to understand what Maori have been so angry about! We all know that the politicians and the media slandered the hikoi, by telling the country that it was made up of greedy Maoris who only wanted to privatise the foreshore and exploit the seabed to line their own pockets. The hikoi challenged those slanders: at hui after hui speakers reiterated their support for public access to the foreshore, placards on the march called for Pakeha to join in, and Hone Harawira constantly emphasised that the seabed and foreshore issue was one for ordinary Pakeha as well as Maori. By the time it reached Wellington, the hikoi had attracted a significant minority of Pakeha members, and the media had to drop some of its more outrageous slurs. But now, just when Pakeha are beginning to grasp the real meaning of Labour’s legislation, Tariana and other Maori leaders are discrediting all the arguments of the hikoi, by extending the hand of friendship to Labour, and even finding kind words for National! The Pakeha who took part in the hikoi were mostly left-wingers disillusioned with Labour. They understand Labour’s pro-globalisation agenda and oppose its involvement in wars in the Middle East as well as its racism at home. These people will be disgusted by Tariana’s and Sharples’ overtures to Labour. And the great majority of working class, Labour-voting Pakeha will be even more angered by the Maori Party’s overtures to National. Seeing Tariana cosying up to Gerry Brownlee will only reinforce these workers’ misunderstanding of Tino Rangatiratanga, and tie them more closely to Labour. For their part, working class Maori who have broken with Labour over the seabed and foreshore will also be alarmed to see that ‘their’ new party considers Brash and Brownlee possible coalition partners. If Tariana isn’t careful, these workers will rush straight back into the arms of Labour!
Occupy the Foreshore! Tariana’s ‘hikoi to the ballot box’ cannot solve the problems of Maori. It can only result in another generation of Maori being chewed up and spat out of Wellington’s political machine. Only direct action which takes back land and resources – land and resources stolen from working class Pakeha, as well as Maori – can reverse the tide of globalisation in Aotearoa. The time is ripe for Maori and Pakeha to unite and occupy threatened sections of the foreshore. We need to revive the spirit of Bastion Pt, Pakaitore and the seabed and foreshore hikoi, and safeguard places like Cathedral Cove, the Caitlins Coast, and Cape Kidnappers with direct action! Let’s occupy the foreshore, not Cabinet! Kia kaha, Communist Workers Group
From Class Struggle 56 June-July 2004
The public uproar over the Foreshore and Seabed raises fundamental questions about what workers’ need as opposed to bosses’ greed. We are for the socialisation of the F&S in the interests of Maori and the vast majority of New Zealanders who are workers. We are for the socialisation of all industry under workers control. A good example is forestry. We need to socialise not only the trees but the mills and all the assets of the forestry corporations. Here we explain why only socialisation of the F&S can meet the needs of Maori and of all workers, and why this socialist project should be applied to other key industries in a project to socialize Aotearoa! Labour tries to claim that the F&S is not a Treaty issue yet many Maori see it as part of honouring the Treaty. The problem is that the Treaty cannot be honoured by capitalism. The Treaty was always a fraud used to legitimate the expropriation of Maori land and resources. It is still a fraud because international capitalism far from giving it back has to steal more land and resources to restore its profits. This drive by imperialism to solve its crisis at the expense of workers and peasants worldwide is what is behind both National and Labour’s ‘Maori policy’. Brash and Bush Brash claims Maori are privileged by special treatment when Maori and Pakeha are ‘one people’ by virtue of the signing of the Treaty. Of course this was never the reality during the history of expropriation and oppression in the 164 years that followed. But Brash says the settlements must stop because legitimate Maori grievances have been redressed and now Maori are becoming privileged This is a ‘Maori policy’ in the interests of the US imperialism that trampled on the native Amerindians, the Filipinos, the Mexicans, and many others, and now re-colonises the world, imprisoning ‘illegal combatants’ and killing ‘terrorists’ who stand up to it. Brash and Bush are blood brothers in the extinguishment of the rights of all peoples subject to US imperialism. Brash’s position is to return the F&S to the ‘status quo’ which means Crown property. This allows the Crown to sell rights to the exploitation of the F&S to all comers competing in the world market according to the ‘free market’ ideology of the neo-liberals. Labour’s social-democratic Maori policy by contrast draws on the notions of ‘indigenous rights’ established in the 1970s to make citizenship universal. Social-democracy is premised on the view of the equal rights of citizens to be eligible to vote and form a majority and reform capitalism. It holds to the concept of partnership and the ‘honouring’ of the Treaty principles to include historically marginalised Maori. But this does not allow any real economic redress for the colonial past. The Treaty process is one of token settlements between a new Maori bourgeoisie taking responsibility for ‘iwi’ and the crown acting for capital in general which is prepared to pay to remove any legal claims on the Crown for past grievances. Instead of improving the class position of most Maori workers, it increases the gaps between pakeha and Maori and divides Maori so that a Maori bourgeoisie exploits Maori workers. Labour’s ‘public domain’ Yet even this settlement is an intolerable interference in the market for neo-liberals. That is why they condemn Labour’s solution as an attack on the rights of all New Zealanders to get free access to the F&S in the hope of mobilising racist attitudes towards Maori against the Government’s settlement. This is a dispute between neo-liberals and social democrats on how best to manage capitalism. For Labour buying off the Maori corporate class who want to make commercial claims to the resources of the F&S is hardly going to bankrupt international capitalism. And the price may be worth it if it sidetracks the protests into interminable legal channels like the land protests of the 1980s. Labour’s proposal of ‘public domain’ is such a deal. It will probably give Maori iwi corporates customary title and some limited preference over commercial use. Any stronger title would be to give Maori capitalists a commercial advantage over others and represent a barrier to the free movement of capital investment so beloved of the US globalisers. So Labour’s solution is an attempt at compromise between on the one hand the legitimate claims of Maori to uninterrupted customary use of the F&S to keep them quiet, and on the other the claims of international capital to have access to exploiting the resources of the F&S to keep making big profits. But Labour’s ‘public domain’ is just another name for Crown or nationalised property. Some on the left claim that nationalisating the F&S is better than risking the F&S falling in private hands. This is because they mistake state property for non-capitalist or post-capitalist property. Nationalization is state property, but the property of the capitalist state, which acts on behalf of all (collective) capitalists. Today this means the biggest MNCs and their World Bank and IMF bankers who dominate states policies in every country. It’s true that nationalisation would remove private property titles (so-called ‘fee simple’) to F&S. The F&S could not then be traded as shares and there would be no immediate transfer of ownership into private hands. But this would not prevent the state from making joint ventures with corporates for profit under ‘free trade’ rules such as GATS which allows the privatization of these profits. And as with all nationalised property there is no class barrier to its legal privatization except the working class. That is why workers have to go beyond capitalist nationalisation to demand socialisation under workers control of the F&S and all capitalist property. From nationalization to socialisation Socialisation means expropriating the property of capitalists, individual or collective, so that becomes the property of collective labour. This can only be achieved by means of workers’ occupations and control. These occupations result from workers uniting and organising in democratic committees or councils. In the case of the F&S this would enable Maori, overwhelmingly members of the working class, to impose a new customary right, the collective right to use the resources of the S&F for iwi and hapu, and in the process to open up the F&S to the use of all workers on the basis of their needs rather than that of capitalist profit. Socialisation means that the F&S would be effectively expropriated to become workers property and pose the question of expropriating other capitalist property. Why? Because while the socialisation of the F&S would serve some workers needs, other branches of industry are much more important to the survival and reproduction of the whole working class. Forestry is a good example. When workers occupy strategic sites on the F&S and make it the property of collective labour they will see the need to occupy and expropriate other key branches of capitalist industry such as forestry and manufacturing. They will then have to defend this property against the capitalist state and its forces of law and order dedicated to protecting the bosses’ property. The only way to do this is to combine all workers committees or councils into a social base for a Workers’ and Farmers’ Government that can expropriate all capitalist property and defend socialised workers’ property. Aotearoa would then become a socialist republic as part of a socialist united states of the Pacific.
From Class Struggle 54 February-March 04
