Tsunami - what’s natural about this disaster?

The left has criticized the hypocrisy of imperialist responses to the tsunami. But who has called the disaster capitalist? What would a socialist tsunami look like?

The South Asian tsunami is a ‘natural’ disaster that is just as much the result of capitalism as the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. And just as in Iraq a workers revolution is needed to create an Iraqi socialist republic, so is a South Asian socialist federation of workers’ and peasants governments and a planned regional socialist economy.

The left become liberal humanists
 
Most of the left is horrified that the imperialist states are not going to cancel the debt outright, and call on them to do it. Monbiot’s left liberal line is typical. How come ‘our leaders’ can afford billions to kill people but have to rely on charity when tsunamis strike? The problem must be a bad attitude and need for attitude change.

“…our leaders appear to have lost the ability to distinguish between helping people and killing them. The tone of Blair's New Year message was almost identical to that of his tear-jerking insistence that we understand the Iraqi people must be bombed for their own good. The US marines who have now been dispatched to Sri Lanka to help the rescue operation were, just a few weeks ago, murdering the civilians (for this, remember, is an illegal war), smashing the homes and evicting the entire population of the Iraqi city of Fallujah…While they spend the money we gave them to relieve suffering on slaughtering the poor, the world must rely for disaster relief on the homeless man emptying his pockets. If our leaders were as generous in helping people as they are in killing them, no one would ever go hungry.” 

Workers Power offers an example of so-called Trotskyists picking up the reformist demand "Cancel the debt!"

“Of course it is vital to send money, rescue equipment, medical aid to those in desperate and immediate need. We should do all we can to force our miserly billionaire rulers to cough up everything that is needed to help save the lives of the survivors and restore their homes and livelihoods. But we must also fight to ensure that an early warning system, the equal of that which protects the USA and Japan, is rapidly put in place so that never again does such an event find a population so unprotected. We should redouble the campaign, right up to the G8 meeting this July to demand a total cancellation of the foreign debt of these countries, indeed all the countries of the so-called Global South. The workers and anti-capitalist movement should send aid too, directly to the organizations of the farmers and fishing communities of the region so that the imperialist governments and their tame NGOs do not misuse it to "open up" their economies still more to the multinationals."

Forcing "our" billionaire rulers to cough up “to help save the lives of the survivors and restore their homes and livelihoods" is a pipe dream short of a socialist revolution that does not require death and destruction to make a buck. "Restoring homes and livelihoods" in countries were capitalism has enslaved, robbed and impoverished millions for centuries is to recreate the very social conditions that caused this disaster. The imperialists and their cronies in the third world are not motivated to prevent future disasters but only to prevent revolutions arising out of actual disasters caused by capitalist super-exploitation.

Bosses’ will not pay for disaster prevention in third world

Nor will the bosses agree to their military and scientific early warning systems to be installed unless they can make a profit or at least prevent a revolution. Trillions have been spend on MAD during the Cold War, and billions still spent on satellite spies in the sky. The Pacific Early Warning system is principally to defend the military bases of the US and its rich allies. Natural disaster protection is like social welfare, the bosses are only interested in paying out if there is something in it for them. The fact is that the third world loses many more killed from other preventable disasters – diseases such as aids, starvation, genocide etc – than from tsunamis. Revolutionaries have no business sowing illusions in capitalism which is indifferent to human suffering and destruction.

No one tells the member countries about the "earthquake". However, the US DOES WARN its military base in the area. And from this military base, part of the invasion of Aceh is proceeding with TWO AIRCRAFT CARRIERS and led by the U.S.'s pre-emptive invasion of Iraq leadership. "In a bitter irony, part of this operation is being coordinated out of America's Naval base in Diego Garcia. The US warns its naval base, though fails to warn Indian Ocean rim governments. "...the strike group, with its seven ships, 2,100 Marines and 1,400 sailors aboard, also has four Cobra helicopters..."

The oil rich Aceh area, which like Iraq, was suffering from a civil war making oil extraction difficult. THE AMERICAN NAZI ANSCHLUSS MOVES OUT FROM IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN--INTO ACEH [Anschluss: A political union, especially the one unifying Nazi Germany and Austria in 1938]. READ MORE

It is utopian and criminal for revolutionaries to give any political endorsement to aid that is being used to restore the exploitative and repressive social relations of colonial and semi-colonial capitalism. All bosses’ aid as well as NGO aid is designed to make a profit from reconstruction. Capitalists in Thailand are taking advantage of the displacement of the poor from the beachfronts to seize the land and build giant new tourist complexes. Look at Iraq and the ‘crony corporates’ that are swilling from the oil trough. That’s why the US imperialists and their agents are using the reconstruction to conduct repressive civil wars such as in oil-rich Aceh. The US created its client state in Indonesia by backing the Suharto coup against Sukarno in 1965. A million communists and nationalists died in the pogrom that followed. Shortly after, East Timor was invaded with over 250,000 dead before the UN granted it ‘independence’ in 1999. Now, in cynical disregard of this imperialist history, the US military is using the latest ‘disaster’ as a cover for it’s War On Terror against Islamic liberation movements in Aceh and elsewhere in Indonesia.

‘Workers aid’ is no alternative

Calls for aid to be distributed through the trade unions is no alternative to bosses’ aid, unless the money is controlled by democratic rank and file workers and peasants organizations in the host countries.

The ‘official’ union organizations such as the ICTU, the ACTU in Australia and CTU in New Zealand are all virtually agencies of the capitalist states and are subservient to their bosses’ interests. Revolutionaries have no business promoting the bosses’ sickening ‘humanist’ moralism to rebuild capitalism among the ‘victims’ of the disaster. ‘Their’ morals are not ‘ours’, said Trotsky. It is immoral to recreate the social structures that will see more millions of workers killed by future ‘natural’ disasters.

Workers must challenge the causes of disasters. Like the so-called ‘natural disasters’ of the past three centuries in Asia, such as droughts and famines, tidal waves only kill people in large numbers because their traditional defenses against such disasters have been destroyed by colonialism and imperialism. Large populations dying from ‘El Niño’ droughts in India and China in the 19th century resulted from their forced shift from traditional agriculture where surpluses were stockpiled for such events into cash cropping for export where the surpluses were expropriated by capitalism.

Similarly the millions caught unprotected from floods in river deltas, or from tsunamis on the coastal strips, are the result of displacement of the peasant population and mass migration into rural and urban slums. This is why so many children rushed to the shore to pick up fish exposed when the sea retreated only to be engulfed by the next giant wave.

Workers Control of reconstruction

The aid that is being offered by bosses, by NGOs and by ‘workers’ organizations, will fall far short of what is necessary to create a viable economic base. Nevertheless, basic food, shelter and medical aid are vital to the very survival of hundreds of thousands of workers and peasants. But instead of accepting the bosses’ ‘strings’ attached to this aid, the workers and peasants of the regions suffering damage from the disaster must form reconstruction committees based on workers democracy and demand control over the distribution and use of this aid.

To escape the trap of the reconstruction of colonial and semi-colonial capitalism, workers, fisherfolk and peasants displaced by the tsunami must demand the collectivization of land and fisheries, and the socialization of industry, the banks, transport and communications, all under workers’ control. Where there are national or civil wars as in Sri Lanka and Aceh, the international workers’ movement must support these armed liberation struggles and their demands for national independence. Revolutionaries must seize this opportunity to propagandize for an end to capitalist disasters and fight for a socialist society.

Socialist disaster prevention

Disasters will never be prevented unless the people fight for and succeed in building a global socialist society. All of the technology and the social wealth that workers have created for centuries which is now stockpiled as the private property and military death machines of the capitalist rulers will be expropriated and converted to the use of the people. The people will decide how much of this wealth should be used to create disaster-prevention systems.

You can be sure that one of the first steps of any socialist plan will be the conversion of capitalist military satellite technology from bosses’ wars to early warning systems of the dangers of potential natural disasters. This will be followed by practical measures to harness nature’s resources for productive rather than destructive purposes. Socialist prevention of disasters will be first and foremost the elimination of the system that profits from the deaths of millions of workers and peasants – in peace and in war, in daily existence and in ongoing disasters –capitalism!

Imperialist hands off South Asia!

Imperialist Troops out of Indonesia!

Self-Determination for Tamil Eelam and Aceh!

For independent workers organizations in control of disaster relief!

From Class Struggle 59 January-February 2005

Cancun and Trade Wars

In homing in on Cancun the anti-globalist left shows once more that the workers’ movement is being distracted by a sideshow while the capitalists get on with the real business of exploiting our labour and ruling our lives. The WTO is the UN of trade, and like the UN its purpose is to create the impression that capitalism can be reformed by global democratic institutions. Those who promote either reforming the WTO, or abolishing it, in the name of democracy, are fixated on managing the market. We say that the market cannot be managed. The only way to make trade fair is to overthrow capitalism, and we must start now.

Chasing after global shadows

The protests at Cancun called for the abolition of the WTO because the WTO is dominated by the US and EU and imposes ‘unfair’ trading conditions on the ‘developing’ countries. For example EU farmers spend $2 a day on every cow when half the world’s people live on less. Guardian journalist George Monbiot writing on Cancun rejects the call to abolish the WTO. He says countries cannot retreat from trade to self-sufficiency without increased poverty and harm to the environment. No, say the Greens, local production can be sustainable. Replies Monbiot, only global trade can be sustainable. Yet both Monbiot and the Greens promote equally unworkable and ultimately identical utopias of fair trade.

On the one hand Monbiot’s would-be multilateral world government has been wiped out by S 11. The US ignored the UN to invade Iraq and still rejects its demands to take over the rebuilding of that country. The US rejects trade liberalisation by giving its rich beef, grain and cotton farmers yet more protection. The US and EU are fighting to see who can be the most protectionist. So where is the prospect of the poor countries ganging up and forcing the rich countries to open up their markets? Trade wars in which the powerful nations dominate the weak nations are just one symptom of imperialism. The WTO is a weapon of imperialism, just as is the UN. When is suits them they use it, when it doesn’t they don’t. Right now the imperialists are embarking on trade wars with their rivals and poor countries don’t figure in this war except as victims of super-exploitation and oppression.

Monbiot’s dream requires that poor countries stand up to the rich and reform the WTO. But the poor countries are also pressured to sell off all their resources to the big multinationals to repay debt. ‘Neo-liberal globalisation’ is all about forcing poor countries to open up so that their assets can be owned and controlled by big business. So how can they resist further trade deals to earn foreign exchange to pay off debt unless they go all the way and reject the debt?

Maybe they can take a lead from Venezuela and refuse to make any further concessions on the sale of national assets until the rich countries open up to trade. But despite Chevez’ tough talk, and surviving two attempted coups, he is making deals to pay off Venezuela’s debt. None of his populist buddies, like Lula in Argentina, or Kirchner in Argentina, dare cut their ties with imperialism. Even his idol, Fidel Castro, is busy selling off Cuba’s resources to capitalist corporations.

Chasing local movements

Aziz Choudry (a founder member of the NZ anti-globalist group ARENA) writing in “Neoliberal Globalisation” (Green Paper #4 http://www.asej.org/) puts the case for the WTO rejectionists against the Monbiot-type WTO reformists.

“Can we seriously talk about humanizing or adding a “social dimension” to the exploitation and misery inflicted by market capitalism?” He says the attempts by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and Greens to insert “social” and “green” clauses in the WTO are merely smokescreens to hide its real purpose. He quotes Canadian union activist Dave Bleakney who says that a ‘social clause’ is like “fighting for guarantees that you have the right to be present at your execution”. Good point.

“We need to align our struggles for alternatives to neo-liberalism with the older struggles for self-determination, against all forms of imperialism and colonialism. We must de-legitimise transnational corporations and international institutions like the WTO, World Bank, the IMF and International Development Bank, and the other institutions and processes which advance neoliberal globalisation globally, regionally and nationally.”

So to reject the WTO we must also reject the IMF, WB and all the multilateral institutions that are the weapons of imperialism in the ‘developing world’. This leaves no option but for the poor countries to go it alone. Choudry answers Monbiot charge that this would lead to stagnation and ecocide by pointing to two examples of the strategy from below that can survive the collapse of the WTO.

The first is the Solidarity Economy championed by the Zapatistas of Chiapas in southern Mexico. The rebellion of the Zapatistas in 1994 was against NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement between US, Mexico and Canada) and the robbing of the traditional lands of the indigenous peoples of Mexico. While this was a brave attempt to resist privatisation and to promote self-reliance the Zapatistas remain marginalised and their example has failed to take root elsewhere.

The second example is that of the actions of the Argentine piqueteros (unemployed) who in December 2001 formed popular assemblies with employed and self-employed workers to occupy factories and fight the collapse of the economy.

Again, this popular and progressive social movement has yet to become a successful model to replace neo-liberal globalisation when the current Kirchner government is doing a deal with the IMF to repay $20 Billion in debt and at the same time repressing the workers movement.

Fair trade means ending capitalism

While these examples are the beginnings of social movements against neo-liberalism, in themselves they are incapable of defeating imperialism and replacing capitalism with a just society. They are limited by the type of analysis that sees ‘neo-liberal globalisation’ as something that can be resisted and reversed without challenging capitalist society (see article on Social Re-Forum Aotearoa). But there can be no ‘fair’ trade in commodities that already contain the expropriated labour of producers. There can be no ‘peace and justice’ in communities that remain dominated by global capitalism.

The rural-based movements such as the Zapatistas in Mexico or the FARC in Colombia, can be contained by imperialism because they do not link up with the mass workers movements of the employed and unemployed such as in Argentina.

But, even as in Argentina, mass workers movements that are not armed and mobilised to take power cannot defeat imperialism in their own countries. They remain hostages to the WTO, WB, IMF, UN peacekeeping forces, and open military repression. Only a united, armed working class and its class allies can win the war against imperialism (see article on Chile).

As S 11 proved to us all, ‘neo-liberal globalisation’ is nothing more than imperialism in crisis, forced to enter into trade wars and to re-colonise poor countries to privatise assets and super-exploit their labour. And when this is resisted as in Iraq, imperialism escalates trade wars into hot wars with military invasions. The WTO, like the UN, is nothing but a weapon to impose imperialism’s crisis on the poor. If it collapses imperialism will use more direct methods.

Trade wars can only be stopped by workers’ revolutions which overthrow imperialism and its client comprador capitalist agents, and replace the market with socialist plans.

The alternative to trade wars under the domination of global capitalism is the building of socialist economies based on workers production and exchange, that spread from national bases to regional bases in Latin America, Asia and Africa, and then to a global socialist economy that includes Europe and North America.

It is not enough to back the revolt of the poor countries leaders against the rich countries in the imperialist WTO. It is necessary to overthrow these leaders too, along with the whole system of capitalist production and exchange, to expropriate the means of production and exchange and to put in place a World Socialist Trade Organisation.

It will take more than Zapatistas and Piqueteros to make revolution. For that we need an organised and armed working class in every country that can lead all the oppressed and exploited in the struggle for socialism and defend it from every imperialist act of war, repression and counter-revolution.

Victory at Cancun? Think Again

The collapse of the World Trade Organisation talks at Cancun was an important even in international affairs, comparable to the crisis in the United Nations over the United States invasion of Iraq. Like the UN, the WTO is being weakened by the breakdown of multilateralism as an instrument of US and European imperialism.

As their economies become increasingly crisis-ridden, the main imperialist powers are competing head to head to gain market share and cut the cost of raw materials in the semi-colonial economies.

The UN debacle was all about the failure of the Franco-German leaders to win a deal with the US that would give them a share of Iraq’s oil and of strategic influence in the Middle East and Central Asia. For a crisis-ridden US economy, Franco-German cooperation was simply too expensive . At Cancun, the US and the Europeans were on the same side, united in their opposition to cutting agricultural subsidies and united in seeking greater access for their multinational companies to Third World economies. But the refusal of either the US or the Europeans to cut a deal with the Third World nations represented by the ‘G 22’ group reflected the decreased commitment of imperialism to multilateralism. The US seemed almost to relish the collapse of talks, with Bush boasting that he would ‘aggressively pursue bilateral deals’ in the aftermath of the talks. Both the US and the Europeans are also moving to consolidate regional trade blocs.

Anti-globalisation gurus like Britain’s George Monbiot and New Zealand’s Jane Kelsey have hailed Cancun as ‘empowering’ and a ‘victory’ for the poor countries. In fact, bi-lateral deals and regional trade blocs will speed up globalisation by cutting through the red tape and the compromises of the WTO. Globalisation will become more political and military as well as economic, as both the US and the Europeans tie ‘security issues’ to trade. It is likely that the US, Europe and the East Asian economies will form fully-fledged rival economic blocs that will confront each other in ‘contested’ zones like the Middle East and Central Asia. Cancun coincided with the beginning of an aggressive campaign by the US to force Japan and China to raise their ‘undervalued’ currencies and thereby make US products more attractive in their domestic markets and help to cut the US’s massive trade deficit.

Economic nationalists like Kelsey hope that the end of the WTO might lead to globalisation bypassing pockets of the semi-colonial world. Kelsey argues that semi-colonial countries and regions like South America should attempt to ‘delink’ themselves from imperialism and build up their own indigenous capitalisms.

The economic nationalists dream of a return to the 1950s and 60s, when nations like Brazil, Argentina, and to an extent New Zealand used high tariffs and state subsidies to create a sheltered domestic economy, and to fund indigenous industrial development. But the ‘independence’ of the 50s and 60s was illusory. Sheltered semi-colonial economies were underwritten by the post-war economic boom in the imperialist countries.

Kelsey forgets that New Zealand’s 1960s ‘national capitalism’ was funded by massive agricultural exports to Britain. When the long boom unraveled in the 70s and Britain joined the European Community, New Zealand’s economy went into a tailspin. Today New Zealand could only experience a new era of national capitalist development if one of the main imperialist powers simultaneously opened its doors to New Zealand agricultural exports and accepted the re-imposition of 60s-style tariffs on goods coming into New Zealand. In the era of globalization, when the economy is largely owned by global corporates, such an arrangement is unimaginable, unless you are Israel.

As a media pundit, Kelsey can afford to square the circle and ignore the absurdities of economic nationalism. Would-be economic nationalists in power do not have the same option. One of Kelsey’s idols is Brazilian President Lula de Silva, whose Trade Minister led the ‘G 22’ at Cancun. After the talks failed, Lula was cast by many on the left as a hero who stood up to the bullying West. In fact, Lula was desperate to strike a deal with the big boys, but found that they would not budge an inch from their demand for the further opening of poor economies to Western multinationals.

Why was Lula so keen for a deal at Cancun? Lula is an advocate of the sort of ‘national capitalism’ Kelsey advocates, a leader who constantly urges his restive working class and peasant followers to cooperate with ‘progressive’ Brazilian capitalists by avoiding strikes and land occupations. Lula wants workers and bosses to cooperate to build Brazilian capitalism, but he also wants access to imperialist economies for the exports Brazilian capitalists produce. At Cancun Lula found that the circle could not be squared. The imperialists were not interested in opening their markets to him, or even reigning in their own subsidy regimes. And the imperialists were not prepared to tolerate the meagre protections poor economies still enjoy, let alone consider the expansive new protections needed by economic nationalists! Jane Kelsey doesn’t know a victory from a defeat.

Clark and Cancun

The collapse of the talks at Cancun has created panic amongst New Zealand’s capitalist class and political elites, which had seen the World Trade Organisation as the best route to free trade with the United States. Now Clark has no option but to jump into Bush’s pocket.

In an editorial banged out a few hours after the talks were abandoned, the New Zealand Herald urged the Labour government to ‘do all it can’ to ‘improve ties’ with the United States.

A day later parliament debated Cancun, and opposition MPs rounded on Labour, accusing it of lacking a ‘Plan B’ to cover for the failure of its multilateralist strategy. ACT leader Richard Prebble took over where the Herald left off, demanding that the government immediately invite US nuke ships back to New Zealand ports. National leader Bill English played the same tune, accusing Helen Clark of ‘disloyalty’ over the war in Iraq.

When her turn came to speak Clark made a very vigorous defence of her government, pointing to Labour’s close cooperation with the US in the War of Terror. Clark recited her party’s record of collaboration with Bush’s wars, citing ‘the SAS in Afghanistan, frigates, Orions and Hercules in the Gulf, engineers in Iraq, and stabilisation teams in Bahrain’.

Clark’s speech was notable for several reasons. In the past she has often insisted that issues of trade and issues of ‘security’ are unrelated, and that Kiwi contributions to the War of Terror are unrelated to any quest for better trade terms with the US. After Cancun that rhetoric has gone out the window.

Clark also used her speech to link explicitly the New Zealand contribution to the occupation force in Iraq and the war against the Taleban and Al Qaeda. In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Clark followed the French and Germans by making a distinction between the invasion of Afghanistan, which she strongly supported, and a unilateral US invasion of Iraq, to which she preferred a Franco-German occupation under the banner of the United Nations.

Clark has tried to appease local anger at Bush’s war by making a distinction between a legitimate ‘War on Terror’ and a ‘regrettable’ invasion of Iraq. Clark has tried to walk a tightrope: on the one hand she has wanted to hose down anti-Bush anger felt by the Kiwi workers who voted for her, and on the other she has tried not to offend Bush and the US money barons on whose favour Kiwi capitalism ultimately depends. Cancun has pushed Clark off the tightrope, forcing her to side unequivocally with Bush and push the Pentagon’s discredited line that post-Saddam Iraq is the latest front in some sort of global war against the ‘enemies of freedom’.

Clark also followed Bush’s lead by denouncing the ‘G 22’ nations as the villains behind the Cancun collapse. In the leadup to the talks Clark and her Trade Minister Jim Sutton thought that they could piggyback on the G22’s criticism of the agriculture subsidies and protected markets of the US and the EU. But the G 22 emerged as a breakaway from the pro-free trade ‘Cairns Group’ because poor Cairns Group countries felt that they were being dominated by wealthier members like Australia and New Zealand.

Now, sensing blood, National and ACT MPs are pointing out that New Zealand is the only Cairns Group country not to either have joined G 22 or else to have a realistic chance of a bilateral trade deal with the US. New Zealand’s place ‘out in the cold’ reflects its peculiar economic status as a small advanced semi-colony of the US. New Zealand capitalism is too wealthy to share the immediate perspectives of G 22 countries like Brazil, but too small and too moribund to have a realistic chance of playing with big boys like Australia.

Clark’s commitment to multilateralism, in the UN as well as the WTO, made sense for a ruling class which is too weak to hold its own in the hurly burly of international unilateralism. But it is Clark’s multilateralism which now threatens New Zealand’s business and political elites with international isolation in the brave new twenty- first century world of unilateral wars and feuding trade blocs.

In her speech to parliament Clark defended the ban on nuke ships, and insisted that the WTO represented the best route to a free trade deal with the US. Anything else less would have been a humiliating climbdown. It is likely that behind the scenes Labour is reformulating its trade strategy. New moves will be made to try to win entry to trade negotiations between Australia and the US. Expect new military, diplomatic, and domestic policy gifts to the US, if not a lifting of the ban on nuke ships or an opening of the gates to GE food. Clark will also likely try to use the upcoming Apec meeting to push for a US-backed Asia Pacific trade bloc as a sort of cheap alternative to the global new trade order Clark saw in the WTO.

But why is Labour so obsessed with a free trade deal with the US? A section of New Zealand’s capitalist class would benefit from a deal, but these people are mostly hostile to Labour. A free trade deal would not benefit the Kiwi working class, which still represents Labour’s electoral base. Writing in the New Zealand Herald in the aftermath of Cancun, political analyst Guyon Espiner noted that open-slather GE imports, a deregulated drug market, the weakening of existing labour and environmental legislation, and nuke ship visits would all have to be part and parcel of a deal with the US. So how can Labour keep the workers onside?

The truth is that Labour has no option but to go for free trade deals. And its survival depends on selling it to its supporters. When Labour was forced to abandon its economic nationalism and dismantle the protected economy in the 1980s, it lost the historic base in NZ manufacturing that sustained the post-war compromise of capital and labour. Today Labour is unable to fund even the very modest set of reforms it promised its core supporters who put it into office in the 1999 and 2002 elections.

Student fees are rising, hospital queues are long, and Maori wait impatiently for the closing of the gaps. Like the ‘knowledge economy’ hulabaloo, the free trade deal with the US is a mirage conjured by Labour to try to disguise the fact that there is no economic base for even the minimal reform programme laid out in 1999 and 2002.

This leaves Clark in the same position as Tony Blair and all the other right wing social democrats of trying to justify their economic retreat to neo-liberalism by the benefits of globalization. Clark and co need a free trade deal as the economic miracle that will dramatically boost the government’s tax base and make social democracy possible again. At the beginning of the twenty first century, social democratic ideology looks a lot like cargo cultism. 

From Class Struggle, 52, September-October 2003

The Social Re-Forum of Aotearoa

From Class Struggle 52, September/October 2003

The Social Forum Aotearoa is meeting in November at Porirua to gather together those ‘social movements’ in NZ that are broadly anti-globalist and anti-capitalist.  The fundamental problem with these WSF currents is that they are reformist, believing it possible to overcome the defects of capitalism internationally without overthrowing it. The reason for this is that the gurus who dominate the WSF like Naomi Klein, George Monbiot, Noam Chomsky and Walden Bello, say that capitalist exploitation is caused by unequal exchange driven by powerful elites who can be replaced by more powerful masses.  We agree that a ‘A New World Is Possible’. But this must not be the old world order in new clothes, but a new socialist world.

The purpose of this article is to explain why this understanding of capitalism is wrong and why it leads to such disastrous consequences. Some anti-globalists like Monbiot argue that globalisation can only be resisted by an international civil society developing out of the institutions like the UN. This tendency is theorised in the book Empire by Hardt and Negri. Others seek to reclaim national sovereignty from these globalising forces. In NZ, ARENA, the Alliance, some Greens, and academics like Jane Kelsey, take this position (see article on Trade Wars).  These two positions overlap considerably, but can become somewhat antagonistic at the extremes.

We shall show that logically both of these approaches are two sides of a false coin which wrongly mistakes globalisation for a ‘transnationalisation’ of the location of power and wealth.  That is, international capitalism has centralised its power by undermining and then transcending the power of nation states. The question then becomes how to match this global power on an international level, and/or how to fight to reclaim national sovereignty at the local level?

Both strategies result from a common conception that the capitalists use their power to enforce unequal exchange between capital and labour. This inequality can be corrected at either global or local level by mobilising the counter-power of the masses to take over the capitalist state. For example, the ‘anti-globalisation’ movement adopts the strategy of attacking the global headquarters of multinational capital, while others favour the strategy of organising and linking local resistances to globalisation.  

Market fetishism

The key to understanding the different currents of the WSF is to see where they go wrong in their theory of capitalism.  They misunderstand the nature of capitalist political power. They see capital as exploitative because capitalists use their power to extract surplus from producers by underpaying them for their labour during the process of exchange. For them what is wrong with capitalism is the unequal exchange in the market that robs the producers and enriches the bosses.  Therefore exploitation can be resisted by workers mobilising their power and struggling until wages become equal to their value, and by nationalising the wealth accumulated from their past unpaid wages. This is political logic of the exchange theory of David Ricardo the foremost classical political economist critiqued by Marx in Capital.

The problem with Ricardo’s theory of capitalism was that he took the exchange relations of capitalism to be the basis of exploitation.  He equated capitalism with the market rather than with a set of historically unique social relations. 

For Marx, what distinguished the capitalist market from the earlier development of the market was the way it turned everything into commodities which exchanged more or less at their values (the socially-necessary-labour-time –SNLT, or the normal hours of workers using typical machines –required to produce them).

However, Ricardo could not explain why the value of one ‘commodity’, labour, which he agreed created the value in commodities, was paid less than this value. As Marx pointed out, Ricardo failed to understand that capitalism had created a new form of exploitation by making labour-power into a commodity. The capitalist bought the worker’s labour-power in order to create value. Labour-power was the only commodity capable of producing more value than its own value. Its own value was the socially necessary labour-time (SNLT) required to produce the commodities workers needed to consume to replenish their labour-power (i.e. the workers consumption). Because Labour was equal to the value of the product of labour-power the two could not be equated.

By forcing workers off the land and into industry capitalists could buy this labour-power at its value, produced by workers during part of the working day –necessary labour time –but also force workers to work for a longer period –surplus labour time –to extract surplus value and hence profits.  (Marx said if capitalists actually paid workers the full value produced by their labour they were idiots and would soon go out of business.)

Marx discovered this because he used a method of analysis that looked beneath the level of market exchange to the underlying social relations of production. For Marx then, it was necessary to explain how capitalism falsely presents production relations as exchange relations so that workers could become conscious of the need to revolutionise the relations of production.

Marx’s theory therefore reveals to workers how production relations come to be fetishised (re-appear falsely in another guise) as exchange relations. This happens because workers do not see the underlying mechanism of surplus-value production and assume that profits are deducted from wages.   This fetishised ideology of the marketplace where individuals appear as actors exchanging their commodities is the material base of the bourgeois ideology of the state representing individual citizens who can mobilise electoral majorities and reform exchange relations. 

From this ideology flows the concept of class exploitation at the level of exchange, of workers participation in parliamentary politics in popular fronts (all those who are in some way exploited by unequal exchange including small capitalists and even national capitalists) and reformist policies of wealth ‘re-appropriation’ or ‘redistribution’ back to the producers as the property or income of all those ‘exploited’ by capital – e.g. the rationale for Hardt and Negri to replace class with ‘multitude’ i.e. all those exploited by unequal exchange.

But more than this, neo-Ricardian theory becomes a practical application of bourgeois ideology when it is actively used by the petty bourgeois agents of capital as social democracy or reformism. This political doctrine tries to eliminate the risk of revolution by putting ‘socialism’ on the ‘installment plan’. Socialism becomes achievable in easy, progressive stages of equalising exchange, first by means of exhausting the potential of the bourgeois state for reforms such as land reform, nationalisation, social welfare etc. so that at some indeterminate point in the future these reforms  will compound into full-blown socialism. But in effect all that is being ‘revolutionised’ here is the fetishised form of capitalist production relations – exchange relations.  Thus even this reformist agenda pre-supposes getting and using state power step by step to defeat the capitalists.

The problem is that capitalist state power is only incidentally a means of determining the value of wages. That is overwhelmingly the role of the labour market. The state’s real purpose is to organise the interests of the ruling class as a state force to guard against any threat to capitalist productive relations.  The ruling class will not concede any state power if it results in their expropriation.

Therefore capitalist state power has to be taken by force and replaced by workers state power to transform capitalist social relations into socialist relations.  But as long as reformists and their exchange theory socialism continue to dominate the labour movement capitalist state power and capitalist social relations will not be challenged and overthrown. Or worse, any challenge will be defeated because workers are not prepared to take power. 

Global anti-capitalism

This is why those who adopt the strategy of global reforms to take power and equalise exchange are wrong. Hardt and Negri are a good example. They say that the enemy is no longer organised into national capitalist classes, but is united into one global Empire. The bosses’ power is now concentrated in global institutions like the IMF, WB, WTO and the big multinational firms. Since these are no longer located within any one nation state, then the anti-global and anti-capitalist forces must also be organised ‘transnationally’. The struggle that results will allow the ‘multitude’ (or the ‘new proletariat’) to become global citizens, win a ‘social wage’ (i.e. a guaranteed income) and assert its right to re-appropriate’ of capital.

S11 and the war on terrorism proves this theory wrong. The enemy is still imperialism organised on a national basis. US imperialism is based on US national territory and its government and military are violently advancing its interests with the war on terrorism and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.  Hardt and Negri have been forced to explain the post-S11 imperialist war and growing rivalry between US and EU as a regression of US imperialism back to nationalistic politics. But instead of seeing that this is neither a regression nor something confined to the US alone, they pronounced EU multilateralism as a more progressive stage of transnational capitalism, or Empire, and the UN as the body that represents the reformist potential of transnational government that can made to deliver on the masses’ demand for global citizenship, social wage and re-appropriation.

S11 has therefore knocked down, along with the twin towers, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, the reformist illusion that transnational capital is no longer located in rival imperialist powers. On the contrary, the conflict between the US and EU was not about the US breaking from its multinational obligations, but rather the naked re-emergence of rivalry between US and EU imperialism for control of territory, resources and markets.  Far from reflecting a victory of the ‘new proletariat’ in Europe to pressure Empire to concede its demands, EU imperialism is busy driving down workers living standards, cutting their social wage and ‘re-appropriating’ the gains of past workers struggles.

Therefore if there is no transnational location of power which determines production of surplus, there can be no transnational location of resistance to take power and reclaim the surplus.  This leaves the global anti-capitalists in their millions, reading Monbiot, marching without direction on the streets, incapable of organising anti-imperialist movements to defeat the military power of the imperialist states, and incapable of forming military blocs with oppressed states under attack from imperialism.  Worse, they are diverted from the elementary task of rebuilding independent organisations capable of mobilising workers to combat the deadly popular fronts of the reformist left with the bourgeoisie, religious extremists etc in the name of ‘civil society’. So maybe those who say that the better strategy to fight globalisation is that of reclaiming national sovereignty have a point?

National anti-capitalism

The nationalists at least recognise that power is not globally located outside national borders. Therefore they are usually on the side of oppressed countries against imperialism. But they make the same mistake of fetishising the power of nation states (as opposed to transnational states) to overcome unequal exchange. They think that reclaiming political sovereignty at the national level will allow them to regain control over their economies and the distribution of wealth.

To refute the nationalist position all we need to do is point to the history of social democracy. Whenever mass social democratic parties have become the government and attempted to use state power to radically redistribute wealth or equalise exchange by nationalisation etc, they have been overthrown by imperialist-backed coups or imperialist invasions. The high point of post WW2 social democracy was the 1970s when Chile, Portugal and Nicaragua all attempted to introduce radical social democratic reforms and were all overthrown by right wing coups.

After such defeats, including the fall of the Soviet Bloc, social democracy retreated a long way to the right and adopted neo-liberal policies imposing the costs of imperialism’s crises on the backs of workers and peasants. Where social democrats have won elections, as today in Latin America, not only can they not roll back neo-liberalism and win any substantial reforms, they are forced to attack their working class supporters. For example, Lula’s Workers Party in Brazil, the most left wing party in power in Latin America, is forced to govern in a popular front with the big boss party of Alencar and implement the World Bank’s policies. Lula is now busy suppressing rising opposition within his ranks.

This means that the same state power that the reformists claim can be taken over to win back sovereignty and protect the economy, is inevitably used against them by international capital. The state is the agency of imperialisms’ crisis policies and the means of repressing all challenges to its rule. The reformists dream turns into the workers’ nightmare.

The only power that can win control over the economy is the workers’ power used to overthrow the state and to impose a workers government and socialist plan. And that will not happen unless the domination of the labour movement by reformists in the WSF is exposed as grounded in a petty-bourgeois neo-Ricardian theory of unequal exchange. Not until revolutionary Marxists in the workers movement can build a class conscious vanguard party with a genuinely revolutionary theory and program to leader the masses will the prospect of workers power become real.

 Conclusions

As we have seen,  the problem with the global and local strategies being debated in the WSF movement is not that one fights at a global level and the other at a national level, but that both are incapable of winning state power and taking control of, and planning,  the international economy.  This is because they fail to understand to real nature of capitalist production and the capitalist state.

By taking the fetishised forms of capital as real, the anti-globalisation strategy of the internationalists becomes a diversion from the real struggles that must initially be located within nation states. S11 has shown that faith in building an international social democracy on the basis of the UN or even the EU is utopian and dangerous.  It deludes those layers of workers and youth who are idealistically opposed to the effects of imperialism into the dead end of de-territorialised and directionless struggle against a non-existent transnational state. Instead these kids get beaten or shot by US, Italian or German cops and military.

On the other hand, while the nationalists are at least fighting on the ground where the worst effects of globalising imperialism are felt, their strategy is to sow illusions in social democrats winning state power from the capitalists without an armed struggle. As the history of Latin America demonstrates and today again shows, state power will not be conceded to the workers. It has to be taken by force and used by the masses to create workers governments that can take control of the national economies and begin to build federations of socialist republics and economic cooperation between countries.

The task of revolutionaries is to explain to those who are attracted to the WSF solution to capitalist imperialism that it is an adaptation to imperialism not a solution. We say that the WSF is a forum for the promotion of a reformist politics grounded in a fetishised ideology of capitalism. We say the leadership of the WSF hides their reformist politics behind a façade of ‘democracy’ that in effect denies workers’ democracy. The WSF leadership refuses to allow political parties to affiliate because it knows that this would invite serious debates leading to exposure and challenge of their reformist agenda.

As revolutionaries we want to break the rank and file participants in the WSF from its reformist agenda. The way to do this is to demand freedom of speech and organisation within the WSF. In this way those who see the necessity to expose and defeat the reformist agenda can challenge the WSF to take positions on the important questions of our time – the defence of Iraq against imperialism; against Lula’s popular front in Brazil; for workers occupation and control –without compensation –of factories like in Argentina etc.  CWG will do so on the basis of the 21 principles contained in the document calling for a conference of principled Trotskyists and revolutionary workers. As we say in that document, our urgent task is to refound a new world party of socialism that can unite the theory and practice of revolutionary Marxism in a program to overthrow capitalism and build socialism.