The International Bolshevik Tendency criticised CWG’s call for critical support for the NZ Labour Party http://www.geocities.com/communistworker/ scroll down to ‘Vote Labour Now to Smash Capitalism Later’. The IBT article is on its website http://www.bolshevik.org/ scroll down to ‘Spoil your Ballot’
Labour gone awol
First, the IBT says that workers no longer have illusions in Labour as a party that represents their class interests. It is therefore no longer a bourgeois-workers party. Its program hasn’t changed but it ha lost its historic roots in the labour movement. This is the result of a rightward move of the Labour Government since 1984 and the defeats suffered by workers over that period. The Labour Party no longer embodies a class contradiction between its bourgeois program and an organised labour base.
Is it true that class contradiction no longer exists? Has there been a qualitative change in the Labour Party? The moderate unions formed the Labour Party in 1916 as a reformist alternative to the Red Fed and IWW program of expropriation. While it’s program talked about the ‘socialisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange etc’ this was no more than the nationalisation of some key industries like coal, transport like rail, telecom and a central bank plus some income redistribution. The ‘welfare state’ made huge subsidies to private capital reducing their risk and boosting their profits in the period of the formation of the New Zealand capitalist economy.
Thus the historic class compromise of 1930s Keynesian policies of state intervention from the 1930s onwards partially suppressed the contradiction between the bosses program and Labour’s working class supporters for another generation. Where necessary Labour could back up these reforms with emergency legislation to break strikes and lock up dissidents. Despite periodic outbreaks of dissent, economic insulation created relatively full employment and a generous welfare state to keep workers loyal to Labour right up to 1984.
In 1984 the Fourth Labour government abandoned this compromise as the bosses demanded deregulation and restructuring to open the economy to the global market. This ‘revolution’ was necessary to overcome the barriers to profitability resulting from a limited domestic market. Cutting costs to become competitive on the world market meant cutting jobs and wages. While National continued these attacks in the 1990s it fell short in its attempts to complete the new right agenda and fully open the country to free trade and foreign capital investment.
Since 1999 Labour has reforged a new Blairite class compromise to suppress the basic contradiction once again. Labour uses state intervention to steer away from a ‘quarry’ economy where MNCs rip out unprocessed commodities for the global market in favour of increased productivity in a ‘knowledge’ economy. The state picks ‘winners’ by subsidising high tech industries to ‘add value’ to exports. Of course this extra productivity is due to the rising rate of exploitation of skilled workers, as well as the deteriorating wages and labour conditions of casualised workers.
Under Labour profits and CEO incomes have continued to rise rapidly. Skilled workers in the EPMU, the PSA and education unions, and the SFWU, have been able to claw back a small part of the extra surplus value they produce. Low paid or casualised workers, and long term unemployed, have their falling incomes partially made up by income transfers and Working for Families. While this Blairite compromise continues to suppress the class contradiction, critical support for Labour is necessary to put it in power in order to activate the class contradiction.
The question of the popular front
The second IBT criticism is that critical support for Labour under MMP is not permissible because Labour (assuming it were a bourgeois workers party) must enter a popular front with bourgeois parties like the Greens or NZ First. The reason we call these parties bourgeois parties like National, is that they were not formed out of the labour movement and have no claim to represent the interests of workers. Even the Greens who try to squeeze out of monopoly capital policies that favour small business is still a bourgeois party because the tendency of small business is to become big business at the expense of workers.
The IBT correctly opposes popular fronts because bourgeois workers parties can shift the blame for failing to implement a workers’ program onto their bourgeois partners and thus still suppress the class contradiction.
Since we do say that Labour is still a bourgeois-workers party, should we refuse it critical support because it may have to form a popular front? No, we call on it to govern without bourgeois partners. Obviously Labour would need bourgeois or petty-bourgeois partners if it failed to get a majority of seats itself. That’s why we called for the maximum working class vote for Labour, and at the same time oppose workers votes for any of the minor bourgeois parties.
We did not do what the left political ‘commentator’ Matt McCarten did, which was to assume that Labour could not get a majority itself and call for votes for minor bourgeois parties like the Greens, Maori Party and NZ First to provide Labour with coalition partners. (He even called for a vote for the National Candidate in Eden to stop ACT from winning seats and increasing National’s ability to form a government).
In the event that Labour does form a government with bourgeois partners we make this fact a fundamental criticism of the Labour Party to expose the class collaboration of the popular front and condemn its betrayal of the class interests of workers. In other words, we do not run in terror from the prospect of a popular front but try to block it in advance, and failing that, to oppose it in practice to explode the suppressed class contradiction.
Why does the IBT make these criticisms?
The IBT criticizes the Anti-Capitalist Alliance failure to offer transitional demands or means of moving from the most basic democratic or immediate demands to the seizure of power and a socialist republic. Yet the IBT then falls foul of the logic of its own critique when it is applied to critical support for Labour. Rather than follow Lenin’s method from the 1920s – that of communist workers entering a united front with reformist workers – the IBT fixates on superficial ‘facts’ that workers do not ‘see’ Labour as their party, because Labour’s attacks on workers have exposed it as an open bourgeois party.
Yes, the world situation is very different today from 1920. In 1920 a revolutionary situation existed in Europe. The majority of workers had not joined the communist party and despite being much further left than today, still had illusions in the Labour Party. Lenin argued that it was necessary for the mass communist party to vote the Labour party into government to expose it in practice and split reformist workers away from its bourgeois leadership and program. The tactic of critical support was a special form of united front in which the revolutionary movement would demand that the Labour bureaucracy and the Labour Party leadership implement a revolutionary workers program. When it failed to do so, its program and leadership would be exposed and detached from its working class body of support like a “rope supports a hanged man” so that these workers would then join the Communist Party.
Critical support and democratic counter-revolution
Today no such revolutionary situation exists, and there is no revolutionary party to put pressure on Labour parties to explode the suppressed contradiction. Since 1989, global capitalism has entered a period of democratic counter-revolution. This means that its attacks on workers are typically made under the cover of bourgeois democracy. In the former degenerated workers states workers voted for capitalist restoration. Capitalism has used right-wing social democratic parties to solve its crisis at the expense of their working class base. The large majority of workers who retain any trade union consciousness still vote for social democracy to defend their fundamental gains because they are caught up in a defensive reliance on bourgeois democracy. As yet there is revolutionary situation to put pressure on social democracy, and explode the class contradiction.
However, if the world economy enters a new period of depression and the isolated revolutionary upsurges today are generalised into new revolutionary period, we can expect pressure from below to split the Labour Party. Rather than write off Labour as already bourgeois it is necessary to prepare for its revival as a barrier to rising workers’ expectations. To both activate and to take advantage of a coming revolutionary upturn it is necessary for communists to maintain the united front tactic with social democracy to split its working class base from its bosses program.
The failure to understand this, and to argue that Labour Parties have become open bourgeois parties in the last two decades is an ultra left response to the democratic counter-revolution. It rejects social democracy as necessarily counter-revolutionary when in fact it still plays the critical role of suppressing the class contradiction. It is this contradiction that will be activated first by the renewal of revolutionary movements and to ignore it is to abstain from revolutionary politics. It is a sectarian fear of becoming tainted by the almost universal opportunism, that today paints democratic imperialism as a progressive force. Instead of contesting opportunism and bourgeois democracy inside the gigantic malls where workers consume. the sectarians preach to passing workers from their boutique shop front about the picture of the revolutionary party in the window.
As we argue in our original article, workers will not break from social democracy until a revolutionary upsurge and a revolutionary program exposes the open treachery of the social democratic program and leadership, and the formation of independent working class dual power organs are in place capable of taking and holding onto power.
From Class Struggle 63 Sept/Oct 2005
Showing posts with label critical support. Show all posts
Showing posts with label critical support. Show all posts
Workers Vote Labour Back Let’s take the next step!
The 2005 general election has polarised voters and split parliament into two finely-balanced blocs. It is likely that if Labour’s majority survives the counting of special votes Helen Clark will try to form a minority coalition government with the Greens supported by the Maori Party on supply and confidence. It is unlikely that United Future or New Zealand First will support Labour formally with the Greens in government. On the other hand, the massive party vote for Labour in the Maori seats will cause a split in the Maori Party if Turia tries to reject Labour and make a deal with National. In this article we analyse the election and offer a socialist approach to the new political situation it has created.
Workers Reject Brash
Some commentators have mistakenly called the election ‘a swing to the right’. In fact, National managed to increase its vote at the expense of the minor right-wing parties, not at the expense of Labour. Overall, the election shows what every vote since 1993 has shown - that a majority of New Zealanders want a centre-left government that keeps some independence from the United States and intervenes in the economy to redistribute income.
Don Brash ran an aggressively right-wing campaign, calling for cuts to social spending, big tax breaks for the rich, and closer ties with the United States. Senior National leaders like John Key and Lockwood Smith enjoy very close ties to the ruling class of the United States, and a National victory would have meant the further Americanization of the economy, the swift resumption of nuclear ship visits, and more New Zealand contributions to George Bush’s War of Terror. But despite a lavish and cynical advertising campaign from National and a biased media, workers rejected Brash’s agenda.
The election also shows that Labour is still a ‘bourgeois workers party’ – a party with its roots in the working class despite its capitalist program. Labour was unable to rely on the support that the Business Round Table and American billionaires gave to National. Instead, it had to use the trade unions to do much of its campaigning work. Trade union delegates and organisers spent thousands of hours criss—crossing the working class suburbs of the major centres, knocking on doors and distributing propaganda for Labour. Unions used their access to big worksites to hold mass election meetings with their members. The Council of Trade Unions ran an advertising campaign for Labour, and a number of unions made large donations to the party.
But the weakness of the union movement and Labour’s failure to restore confidence in public services like health and education meant that Don Brash was able temporarily to tempt a section of the working class away from Labour with the promise of tax cuts, and with populist attacks on Maori, gays and ‘political correctness’. Keen to shore up its support amongst its core voters, Labour moved slightly to the left during the election campaign, promising a write-off of interest for student loans and aggressively attacking Brash’s support for the invasion of Iraq and support for the privatisation of health and education.
On election night, National’s big early lead was turned around as the votes of the ‘big battalions’ of the working class in the major centres swung in behind Labour. Labour’s support was particularly strong in the working class heartland of South Auckland, where the party took over 50% in many electorates and an incredible 71.6% of the vote in Mangere. A map of election results published in the Sunday Star-Times brought out the polarisation, showing a sea of National blue surrounding patches of Labour red covering the working class electorates in the big cities.
Greens fail to woo workers
The Green Party’s 5% share of the vote represents a failure. The party had gone into the election hoping to expand its base of support by filling the vacuum left by the Alliance’s implosion in 2002, and by Labour’s drift to the right in government. The Greens tried to add a slice of the working class to their traditional voting base of the radical petty bourgeoisie, liberal professionals, and students.
In an attempt to appeal to trade unionists, the Greens developed a new industrial relations policy which was well to the left of what Labour offered workers on the campaign trail. They touted other progressive policies for workers, like the abolition of youth rates and the raising of the minimum wage to $12 an hour. Partly as a result of these policies, a number of unions endorsed the Greens as the 'second-best option' for voters who could not support Labour.
The Greens attempted to appeal to the overwhelmingly working class Maori vote by forming a close relationship with the Maori Party and echoing the Maori Party line on issues like the seabed and foreshore. Near the end of the campaign they even received the 'second-best option' endorsement of Tariana Turia. But the Greens' attempt to expand their base looks to have been a failure. Their vote dropped from its 2002 level, and they performed poorly in both the Maori electorates and in working class strongholds like South Auckland.
The Greens' failure is a blow to its 'left' faction, which is represented in parliament by left social democrats Keith Locke and Sue Bradford. Locke and Bradford are ex-Marxists who still look toward the working class as the bedrock of left-wing politics. Both have worked hard to identify the Greens with workers' issues. By contrast, the right-wing faction led by Rod Donald finds its natural base in small business and the liberal middle class, sections of the population not usually attracted to policies like the extension of the right to strike and the lifting of the minimum wage. (A third Green faction, comprising members with a more 'fundamentalist' attitude to key environmental issues like genetic engineering, can be identified with Donald's co-leader, Jeneatte Fitzsimmons.)
Donald and his supporters are likely to push for more and more compromises on 'touchy' issues like genetic engineering, the War of Terror, and industrial relations, in an effort to get the Greens into the secure coalition with Labour which they think is necessary for political survival.
Maori Party Stumbles Rightwards
In the aftermath of the great seabed and foreshore hikoi and the by-election victory of Tariana Turia last year, many commentators predicted that the Maori Party would win all seven Maori seats. In the event, it has had to be content with four victories. The disappointment caused by the failure to achieve a clean sweep must be compounded by the low list vote the Maori Party achieved. Labour won more party votes than the Maori Party, even in the electorates that it lost to its new rival. Turia herself noted that the party was born out of a movement of 45,000 people, but a 2% party vote represents just over 40,000 voters.
The Maori Party's underachievement can be put down partly to the strategy that it has pursued since its formation. Despite its origins in the hikoi, the party has consistently counterposed vote-seeking to protest, insisting that the 'hikoi to the ballot box' is the key to advancing Maori interests.
Partly because of Tariana Turia's bitter experiences in government, and partly because of the advice of Matt McCarten, the party has tried to avoid declaring its support for the election of a Labour government, insisting that it is open to political alliances with any party. Even 'radical' candidates like Hone Harawira have insisted that the Maori Party is 'neither left nor right'.
The refusal to rule out some sort of arrangement with the parties of the right was compounded by Turia's disgraceful votes in parliament against Civil Unions and Paid Parental Leave, and the vague, almost evasive quality of much of the party's 'policy', so that many potential voters got the impression that the Maori Party was not interested in the traditional causes of the left. Harawira and co may think that categories like 'left' and 'right' are out of date, but most Maori voters do not agree with them.
Labour was able to seize on the Maori Party's equivocal attitude to National to run a very effective scare campaign in the Maori electorates. Again and again, Labour warned Maori voters that Maori Party MPs could let National into power, and thus bring on the destruction of Maori seats and cuts to funding for institutions like kohanga reo and iwi-administered health clinics. Under pressure, Turia was forced late in the campaign to hose down speculation about a coalition with National, but she continued to refuse to promise to support a Labour government on confidence and supply, even if Labour won more votes than National. Instead, Turia endorsed the Greens, a party with little following in the Maori seats, as the 'next-best option' to the Maori Party.
The Maori Party's blunders mean it will have to be content with the re-election of Turia and the scalps of the mediocre Dover Samuels, the obscure Mita Ririnui, and the discredited John Tamihere. Parekura Horomia's prized East Coast seat has escaped the new party, despite the fact that Horomia was the frontman for Labour's hated seabed and foreshore policy. The 'neither left nor right' strategy has also badly affected the building of the Maori Party, robbing the organisation of support from the trade unions and the Pakeha left, disorientating grassroots party activists, and allowing all manner of right-wingers and opportunists to campaign in the party's name.
The finely balanced result of the election is likely to tempt the Maori Party to try to continue its 'neither left nor right' strategy by attempting to play the two main party blocs off against one another, in an attempt to score some minor policy wins on narrowly 'Maori’ issues. Besides provoking a revolt from the rank and file, such an approach will only increase the uneasiness which the trade union movement, the Pakeha left, and the many Maori who still vote Labour feel towards the new party.
Lost to the left of Labour
Based on programs well to the left of Labour’s, the election campaigns of the Alliance Party and the Anti Capitalist Alliance attracted only tiny numbers of voters. The Anti Capitalists’ most successful candidate attracted only 95 votes, while the Alliance scored only 0.07% of party list votes.
A third grouping to the left of Labour, Matt McCarten’s ‘Workers Charter movement’ sat on the election sidelines, but announced its intention of becoming ‘a mass party sooner rather than later’.
Both the Anti Capitalist Alliance and McCarten claim that Labour is no longer a party with a working class base, but the election result proves otherwise. Workers were not interested in throwing away their votes when faced by the threat of the return of nuclear ships and 90s-style scorched earth neo-liberal economic policies.
The Next Step for Socialists
The unity the working class against showed Brash proves the correctness of our call for a critical vote for Labour. Critical support was necessary to keep out Brash and keep Labour in power, so that workers can learn from experience that Labour cannot serve their interests, and that a new, extra-parliamentary force capable of taking state power for the working class is necessary.
In the context of a likely Labour-led government and a weak union movement, what are the best tactics to advance the cause of workers?
We need to get the unions and working class voters that support the Labour Party to challenge the party’s policies. Labour is only in power because of the campaigning of trade unionists and the votes of workers, yet it pays more attention to the voices of business and of the US government than it does to the needs of the working class. For instance, Labour has already told its trade union supporters that its third term will not see any major change to New Zealand’s restrictive, anti-strike industrial relations legislation. The party is much more interesting in courting business and in pursuing a free trade deal with the US.
The Action Program we published a month ago is the sort of program we need to fight for in the unions to put pressure on Labour. However, the likely presence of minor parties with no base in the unions in and around a Labour-led government complicates this tactic. Labour can try to use deals with these parties as alibis to hold back on worker-friendly policies.
We have to fight to make Labour act for workers and to reject any alibi that says Labour can't act on behalf of workers because of its agreements with minor parties. Labour has to be held responsible for its betrayals, not its partners. There is plenty of common ground with the Greens and with the Maori Party that we can use to put pressure on Labour.
While the Greens don't have an official base in organised labour, they are now getting regular endorsements from the unions. Let's make them deliver to the unions rather than to small business! Like all petty bourgeois parties they should back labour if they think it is stronger than the right. If they won't then their ability to con workers is that much less. The Maori Party has a working class base, so we should force the party to listen to that base. If it doesn’t it will split along class lines sooner or later.
All of the demands below (and any others that become obvious) should be concretised and advanced in the union movement to pressure Labour and appeal to the best supporters of the Maori Party and the Greens.
A WORKERS’ ACTION PROGRAMME
- Jobs for all on a living wage – for 35 hour week and a 24 hour free child care!
- Tax the Rich; Tax Capital Gains!
- No ‘free’ trade deal with the United States!
- Open the borders to worker migrants!
All the centre-left parties claim they want skilled worker migrants. The Maori Party’s worker base will be sympathetic if their jobs are not threatened by migration. Full employment based on reduced hours would reduce job competition. Nationalisation of key sectors of the economy under workers control would extend naturally to workers control over worker immigration.
- Re-nationalise Rail, Telecom etc. with no compensation and under workers’ control!
1) major export players like Fonterra and Carter Holt Harvey need to be nationalised. Investing the Cullen find in forests is a step in the right direction. But Carter Holt Harvey should not be compensated. Both of these core primary industries have been hugely subsidised by generations of past labour, workers and working farmers. Fonterra's producer ownership needs to be protected by public ownership like the old Dairy Board.
2) vital energy resources such as the oil refinery at Marsden Point must be nationalised. Especially in the light of the price gauging of the oil companies. We should call for bilateral trade in oil and agriculture with Venezuela!
3) the Kiwibank should be a state bank, not a State Owned Enterprise, so that the combination of state subsidy of Kiwibank and regulation of the big Australian banks can remove their stranglehold over the economy.
- Troops out of Afghanistan!
This is a concrete example of the general demand that Kiwi troops not be used in any US, NATO or UN sponsored war. The Greens and the Maori Party could be pressured by their rank and file into standing up to Labour over Afghanistan, exposing Anderton and Labour as only slightly less blatant supporters of US imperialism than Brash.
- For a Workers·’ Government!
From Class Struggle 63 Sept/Oct 2005
British Election Leftovers
The recent election in the UK which saw the return of the Labour government with a much reduced majority didn’t give left parties much to celebrate. What the results show is that the British hard left has failed to capitalize on the massive anti-war feeling of recent years. The victory of Galloway standing for Respect did not change that. The main beneficiary of the anti-war vote seems to be the centrist Liberal Democrats whose position was the same as the NZ Labour Party – the UN should have decided whether or not to invade Iraq.
A Repectable result?
On the left voters were faced with a large array of socialist and Marxist candidates, maybe too many which may have led to many people opting not to vote at all. Given that the UK has a first past the post voting system it was always inevitable that the two main parties would be the winners, with the Liberal Democrats managing to win a few seats as well.
Some of the left (such as the Socialist Workers Party) hailed the results as a victory for the left, choosing to focus on one of the few seats where Respect did well. George Galloway’s victory in Bethnal Green and Bow was seen as a great victory for the left and the anti-war movement.
However, as the Weekly Worker pointed out, this was not so much a victory for the left but rather a victory for “the largely phantom right (Muslim) wing in Respect” which “sets the parameters.” Galloway is hardly progressive, having right wing views on issues such as abortion and immigration. The seat he won had a large Muslim population, which no doubt contributed to his result. Indeed, the other seats in which Respect did well all had high Muslim populations. The average vote for Respect of 6.97% went down to 2.7% when the top five (Muslim dominated) seats are taken out of the equation.
Galloway’s victory and the good results in those other four seats reflect the deep hostility to the UK/USA war of terror amongst the Muslim population rather than a turn to the left by voters. The vote for Galloway cannot be completely dismissed as a failure for the left. There is no doubt that it was a slap in the face for the Blair-led Labour government. They had kicked Galloway out of the party on ridiculous trumped up charges that he received money from Iraq. Clearly the voters didn’t buy a bar of this nonsense.
Popular Front
However, what Respect represents is a popular front and the danger of the left being captured by the right. The left should be seeking to win right wing Muslims to a socialist agenda, not forming a party with them and bowing and scraping to every reactionary principle put forward by them. The Socialist Workers Party showed by its actions in Respect how ideologically bankrupt and opportunist they are. As the main drivers behind the party they have been prepared to move any remaining principles they had out of sight in order to achieve a tiny bit of electoral success.
There is no future in this sort of popular frontism that obliges the left to bury its programme. The left must focus on a programme which they put to workers without trying to sanitise it for opportunist reasons.
If Respect didn’t do as well as the SWP like to think it did, the results for other parties on the left were even more dismal.
The Scottish Socialist Party dropped from just over 3% in the 2001 election to less than 2% in this one. This was partly to do with the divisions within the party over the forced resignation of Tommy Sheridan.
Scargill’s Socialist Labour party got an average return of 1.14% and Peter Taft’s Socialist Party dropped from an average of 2.11% in 2001 to 1.57% in the seats in which they stood this time.
All in all, not much comfort for the left which raises two major questions. Why can’t the left capitalize on worker disenchantment with Labour and score better results? Secondly, is it even worth putting up candidates if you are a Marxist or supposedly Marxist party?
Why don’t workers vote ‘socialist’?
One reason left parties do so badly is that Britain still has a first past the post system and a vote for a small party is seen as a “wasted” vote. However, even with a proportional system such as we have in New Zealand, it is doubtful that the parties would be able to muster enough votes to get more than 5%. The various small parties would probably cancel each other out, which would probably also contribute to electoral failure. In some situations, in-party fighting contributed to poor results (such as with the Scottish Socialist party).
Having said that, it is legitimate for the left to push for proportional representation as the current system is so manifestly undemocratic in the UK. Labour won a majority in the House of Commons with just 35.3% of the vote. The fact that people feel the system is a waste of time and doesn’t really change anything also contributes to a continuing decline in people bothering to vote - particularly young people.
Probably the main reason is that like Respect the ‘socialists’ all acted like they wanted to get voted into parliament to reform capitalism.
Because there was no chance of this and workers knew the election was going to be closer than the previous one, Blair managed to frighten them into voting Labour in case their vote for a left party bought about a Tory victory. This brings us to the second question. Is it worth left and pseudo left groups even bothering to put up candidates at all?
Watered down electoral ‘socialism’
For revolutionaries who know that parliament has to be overthrown it is still important to use elections to put your revolutionary agenda in front of people and try to convince them that there is an alternative to what passes for so-called democracy in countries like the United Kingdom and New Zealand.
The Weekly Worker reports that the Socialist Party claimed that their leaflets reached 700,000 households and their fighting fund was increased. However, revolutionaries must make it clear to voters that you have no faith in parliamentary democracy to delver the goods for workers.
But the Socialist Party doesn’t stand in the British election to put forward a genuine revolutionary platform. It stood as part of a Socialist Green Unity Coalition.What do we find in response to privatisation? Not a call on workers to occupy workplaces under workers control but a bland statement against privatisation. The public sector unions threat to strike on election day against Labour’s pension plans, or the Rolls Royce workers call to occupy and nationalise the plant facing closure, should have been turned into the key electoral planks.
What do we find on the Iraq war? No call for workers to mobilise to strike against the war, to appeal to the rank and file military to mutiny, but a bland appeal for “Troops Out Now”. How will the Troops be removed. Nor do we find any support expressed for the self-determination of Iraq, victory to the anti-imperialist forces, or defeat of the British Army!
What do we find on racism and the targetting of immigrants? This was the most salient issue during the election. It saw a section of Muslims back Respect, but it also saw more white workers back the proto fascist British National Party. We do not find any call for workers to mobilise in defence of migrants, or to strike against racism in the workplace.
Instead of ‘open borders’ or ‘smash immigration laws’ which are policies that organised labour can fight for, we have ‘recognition of migrant workers rights’. How might these rights be recognised? SGUC MPs will vote for legislative protection of migrants rights of course. Here we have the classic watering down of a socialist program to that acceptable to workers who still have illusions in parliament.
Tactical Support for bourgeois workers parties
There is always the temptation to water down the program because in putting up a revolutionary program workers might well say, “Why should I vote for you if you have no faith in the system and are unlikely to win in any case?” This is a valid question. At the moment most workers still harbour illusions in social democracy being able to deliver the goods. Labour Parties were set up to convince workers that they could get socialism via the parliamentary road. Despite decades of betrayals, the lack of any alternative road finds most unions and workers still desperately clinging on to these parties.
While that is the case revolutionaries must offer tactical support to get these ‘bourgeois workers’ parties elected so they can be further exposed as anti-worker. Lenin spoke of this ‘critical support’ tactic as supporting the British Labour Party like a “noose supports a hanged man”. By standing as revolutionaries and offering the support of a ‘noose’ to Labour parties, we can win workers to a revolutionary program.
This tactic has been turned into a long-term strategy in countries like the United Kingdom and New Zealand. The expectation is that as conditions change for the working class, splits in bourgeois workers parties (social democracy) will occur and revolutionaries may even be elected to parliament. Inside parliament their role is to stand on a revolutionary program as Liebknecht did in Germany in 1914 when he opposed the government voting for money to be spent on war.
However, though these bourgeois workers parties have moved a long way to the right, as yet no such revolutionary splits have led to the formation of mass revolutionary parties.
No tactical support for New Labour!
The left in Britain is divided over the question of tactical support for the British Labour Party. While we think that Blair’s “New Labour” is still a bourgeois workers party with links to the biggest unions, we think the expulsion of some unions and the virulent open attacks on workers doesn’t justify ‘critical support’.
New Labour has been a key US ally in the war of terror and the invasion of Iraq. It has passed draconian laws which attack civil liberties and fostered an anti-immigrant climate through laws which target immigrant groups. The list of anti-worker legislation could go on and on. Indeed every time you check the Guardian online or other liberal UK newspapers you learn of some new horror that Blair or his hatchet man Blunkett is dreaming up for workers.
One of the latest schemes is to get people to carry identity cards. This idea was dropped because it was so unpopular but has managed to make a come back with the Government trying to frighten people with the spectre of a terrorist and illegal immigrant behind every lamp post.
In summary, it is necessary to stand against such an openly anti-worker party, but only if it is on a genuine revolutionary platform and one which is honest. There is no future for workers if they enter into opportunist popular fronts with other candidates and other agendas which can in no way be seen as supporting a genuine left platform. Workers need a revolutionary workers party that fights to overthrow parliament and uses elections to expose the fraudulent claims of all parliamentary parties.
REPLACE LABOUR WITH A SOCIALIST ALLIANCE
[from Class Struggle 46 August/September 2002]
Shit that was quick. Clark and Labour are back. Catholic grey power guru Jim Anderton got back in coalition with his ex-socialist progressive Matt Robson to prop up Labour.(1) The ‘worm’, United Future, the creation of the media now holds the balance of power.(2) This means that Paul Holmes is really running the country. He can prime Peter Dunne on TV each week on all the top rating causes, child cancer, crime, himself, and put the ‘common sense’ spin on them all.(3)
What do we conclude? A defeat for the left and a definite swing to the populist centre. Turnout was down from around 86% to 79%. National bombed down to 21%. Labour’s share of the vote went up slightly and to the right. While some Labour loyalists didn’t vote, Labour won the party votes in all but three of the National seats. So Labour’s vote probably went up because National voters voted for them to give Labour a working majority to keep out the Greens. We don’t yet know how many Labour voters stayed at home or voted for NZ First, United Future, or even Act. So by voting or staying away many workers pushed Labour towards the centre. This centre is a swamp in which workers will drown.
The far right also lost out. ACT ran a hard right economic line but also headed towards the populist centre with its zero tolerance of crime policy.(4) Boxer Bill English tried to get heavy on crime too but he was fighting above his weight.(5) Neither got up after Winston Peters’ three-fingered knock out for the NZ First team. Winston, who smacks of a budding brown Pym Fortuyn but with hetero panache, bounced from 4% to 10% by baiting the racist redneck vote on immigration, Maori and crime. (6)
GE fundamentalism failed
Labour United/Future coalition?
This means that Labour’s rightward trajectory will continue. Last time it relied on the Greens on matters of confidence and the budget. Though the Greens are a petty bourgeois party they didn’t hold Labour’s minimalist social democratic program back. But this time, a formal agreement with the worm in the centre will commit Labour to right-centrist policies to stay in power. This is a classic popular front, where the social democrats (even right wing) are able to blame the centre party for its rightward shift. Now it can use the excuse that it had to swing right with the worm when it doesn’t deliver to workers.
So we predict that Labour will have to move further right. As a self-styled Blairite party its attempt to find a Third Way between left and right will become clearer. NZ Labour still has social democratic elements on the left based on the unions. But during its first term it developed stronger links to the newer breed of business leaders. This time the move right to the centre will see it try to redefine itself along the lines of Steve Maharey’s ‘Third Way’ lectures in the National Business Review. In the name of the centre it will try to distance itself from direct links to the unions and to business. It will preside over the ‘smart wired’ state that presents profits as a universal benefit.
Critical support justified?
The tactic of critical support aims to activate the contradiction between workers’ expectations and the failure of the government to deliver. The expectations were there in the unions on the one side, and on the other the new government will not be able to deliver to the unions. Why? Because profits come first and profits are in trouble. The poor performance of the world economy and NZ’s declining semi-colonial status will prevent any more real concessions.(12) The popular front character of the government will push it further right. Dunne voted against the ERA, so we expect Margaret Wilson’s plans to strengthen union rights will be dropped.
Labour will find itself unable to deliver on its residual social democratic programme. But why this is so has to be rammed home to workers. We have to give Labour arseholes to convince workers that Labour has really left workers behind. We have to work within the unions affiliated to Labour to make their support conditional on Labour strengthening of the ERA. When this doesn’t happen we have to push the rank and file to put up their own candidates on a program that is designed to meets workers’ needs.
Future of the Alliance
We predict that the Alliance will try to rebuild as a Social Democratic party in the vacuum left by Labour. It will try to gain a footing in the labour movement. We have to push for rank and file control of the unions to prevent the Alliance from creating a left union bureaucracy. Our objective is to expose Labour completely but also to prevent the Alliance from becoming a new force for reformism. We can do this by building a Socialist Alliance to compete with the dregs of social democracy.
We need a Socialist Alliance
The question of affiliation to political parties should be debated and decided by the rank and file membership. Workers in the unions affiliated to Labour should make this support conditional on Labour delivering on a number of policies such as a shorter working week to eliminate unemployment; the restoration of penal rates for overtime; labour legislation that brings casual and part-time workers under the unions; democratic rights for all; opening the borders to economic and political refugees; renationalisation under workers control of all privatised state assets; and NZ breaking from military ties with imperialist states such as the EU and USA. As workers lose any hope in Labour or the Alliance to represent their interests, they will put up their own candidates based on the revived unions.
Now that the world economy has entered a period of recession (see Brian Green’s article), the NZ economy will face a slowdown in growth. The Labour government will be forced to move right to defend profits at the expense of working people. This will bring about a renewal of working class struggle over jobs, pay, conditions and basic rights. Against the rightward move in Parliament, we have to rally the left around a socialist banner that begins to rebuild a strong labour movement and a genuine workers’ party dedicated to replacing clapped-out capitalist regimes with a workers’ government that can plan the economy for the needs of people rather than the profits of the capitalists.
Notes
(1) Anderton and Robson, respectively leader and deputy of the New Labour Party that split from Labour in 1989 to the left and which later formed the Alliance. Anderton (who at the time was deputy Prime Minister), Robson and several other MPs split from the Alliance in mid 2002 refusing to oppose the Government's support of Bush's war against Afghanistan. They formed the Progressive Coalition just before the recent election and gained 1.8% of the vote.
(2) The worm is a moving line on a graph which rises and falls in response to preferences of a studio audience of ‘undecided’ voters. Peter Dunne's rise in popularity as leader of the United Future (a fusion of two 'parties' led by Dunne who entered parliament as a Labour MP in 1984) is almost completely the result of one TV studio performance in which the worm rose to new heights in response to the most bland, middle of the road, common sense statements.
(3) Paul Holmes is NZ's foremost 'tabloid' TV host who specialises in promoting popular causes to boost his ratings.
(4) ACT, short for Association of Consumers and Taxpayers, formed by Roger Douglas, former Minister of Finance responsible for the neo-liberal agenda of the 4th Labour Government until 1988 when he was sacked by the then Prime Minister David Lange, for continuing to press for neo-liberal reforms. He formed ACT to continue the neo-liberal agenda. ACT is on the extreme ‘new right’ and has never got more than 8% of the vote.
(5) Bill English became leader of the National Party in 2002. He took part in a boxing match for charity and referred to his ‘fight’ for ‘the NZ you deserve’ during the campaign. Obviously 79% of the voters didn’t think they deserved Bill English’s NZ.
(6) Winston Peters, maverick politician, former National Minister of Maori Affairs, and leader of NZ First, formed a short-lived coalition with National after the 1996 elections. Peters is a rabid populist who rallies ‘middle NZ’ on racist issues. During the election campaign he appeared with 3 fingers raised in the image of Bob the Builder who could “fix” the three issues of immigration, crime and Treaty settlements. Unlike Fortuyn he’s heavily hetero.
(7) Hager’s book was written to expose the failure of the Labour government to prevent the release of GE-contaminated seeds. Hager’s publisher was no 3 on the Greens party list. In the debate that followed it was disclosed that the scare resulted from a ‘false positive’ probably caused by contamination of the seeds tested by soil and talcum powder. The most damning revelation was that hardcore Greens demanded a 100% confidence level that seeds were not contaminated. This, said a scientist employed by Otago University but contracted to Novatis and Heinz Wattie, would require every seed to be tested and therefore destroyed.
(8) ‘Paintergate’ refers to a painting painted for Helen Clark to sell for charity, but signed by her. Clark was baited constantly by the opposition and media until she refused to talk about the episode, and walked out of an Australian TV interview.
(9) Paul Adams, a prominent United Future candidate, called in 1993 for HIV sufferers to by ‘locked up’, and still believes they should be publicly identified.
(10) ‘Revolution’ is a small group of leftists based at Canterbury University in Christchurch. The IBT (International Bolshevik Tendency) is a split from the Spartacists. Its NZ section is the Permanent Revolution Group based in Wellington, NZ. The Spartacists (International Communist League) have one member in the Anti-Imperialist Coalition in Auckland NZ.
(11) Three unions are still affiliated to the Labour Party: the EPMU (Engineers, Printing and Manufacturing Union) which is the biggest and most influential union in NZ; the SFWU (Service and Food Workers Union) a more ‘leftish’ union the organises many low-paid hospital and hospitality workers; RMTU (Rail, Maritime and Transport Union) that organises rail workers and has branched out into call centres. The overwhelming reason given for a union vote for Labour was to prevent any return to the Employment Contracts Act, which was passed by National in 1991 and designed to replace collective agreements with individual contracts. The ECA saw union membership slump from around 50% of the workforce to around 17%. Labour’s Employment Relations Act restored some influence to unions and has seen the membership of unions creep back up to around 22%. The unions wanted to see Labour returned to give more teeth to the ERA – in particular, they wanted legislation to help workers made redundant when companies close and to remedy the casualisation of workers re-employed on contract.
SHOULD WORKERS VOTE IN CAPITALIST SOCIETY?
Communists view elections to parliament as a democratic right that workers have won over more than a century. They won the right to form unions and to vote as part of their struggle for inclusion into bourgeois society as equal citizens. They believed that the state was ‘neutral’ and that the majority ruled. These were important victories because they created better conditions for the building of workers organisations as a step towards socialism. However, elections in themselves cannot revolutionise capitalism because the state is really the bosses’ state enforcing and protecting their private property. As Lenin might have said, elections allow workers to stop work only long enough to vote for their oppressors.So why should workers bother voting?
The reason is that workers can only come to the realisation that the state is not neutral but serves the bosses through experience of oppression. The capitalist nature of the state is not immediately obvious. The state passes itself off as class-neutral, managing capitalism for the benefit of all. In doing so it reinforces the ideology that rather than exploit workers as a class, capitalism treats all individuals as equals in the market. (1)
It was the experience that some individuals were more equal than others in the market, that led workers to first form unions. They found that striking led to their defeat at the hands of the cops, armies and scabs. So they created Labour parties in the belief that a workers’ government could reform capitalism or even create socialism. We call such Labour parties ‘bourgeois-workers’ parties because, while they have a bourgeois program to manage capitalism, they are based on the collective consciousness of trade unions or organised labour.
These Labour parties were a progressive step because they created platforms on which organised labour could raise demands that could not be met. The state’s ability to meets workers‘ needs came into contradiction with its actual role in guaranteeing profits. This is particularly true in periods of depression and war when ‘workers’ parties openly attack their trade union supporters.
Therefore to free workers from the illusion that it is possible to reform capitalism in their interests, it is necessary to vote ‘their’ parties into office until their attacks on workers destroy any remaining illusions that capitalism can be reformed through parliament. This would prove in practice that the parliamentary road was a dead end..
We call the united-front to vote bourgeois-workers’ parties to power in order to expose them, critical support. This means that we support their election only to destroy them in office. We never abandon our independent communist program to suggest that these parties are capable of reforming capitalism. This tactic was first developed by Lenin during the period immediately after the First World War to destroy the illusions in mass Labour parties in office and to win workers to communism. It is based on two pre-conditions.
First, the illusions that workers have in ‘their’ parties are ones that reflect a level of class-consciousness found in an organised trade union movement. It is not sufficient that individual workers have ‘illusions’ in a party. For example, some workers vote for rightwing, even fascist parties, but that is not a reflection of their class interests, rather it’s an attack on their own class. Second, we must withdraw critical support as soon as a bourgeois-workers’ party is elected and intensify workers’ attacks on the government to activate the contradiction between the bourgeois program and the workers suport to explode it.
Therefore, critical support is only justified when a party has ‘organic roots’ in the organised labour movement and is not openly attacking that movement. Critical support is never more than a tactic to destroy bourgeois workers parties and to advance the level of working class consciousness for the overthrow of the capitalist state. Much of the left has applied this tactic as if it was a strategy, entered Labour Parties and built long term uncritical support for reformist parities. This is a reversal of the tactic of critical support because it suppresses the class contradiction by adapting workers demands to what bourgeois-worker parties can deliver.
The NZ Labour Party began as a bourgeois-workers party in NZ in 1916. It was formed by the unions after a period of bloody defeats by the state forces. Even in its early radical days, Labour’s program was one of class collaboration between workers and the industrial capitalists. Yet is was able to build a strong following in the unions on the basis of heavy state intervention in a protected economy even though this required the repression of strikes during the war and up to its defeat in 1949. It held office only briefly in 1957-60 and 1972-75 before it was returned as the Fourth Labour Government in 1984.
Despite its open attacks on workers during the period 1984-90 which drove many workers to abstain or vote for other parties, Labour retained its core support in the trades unions. There was no emergence of a left party aligned to the trades unions. The left split into the New Labour Party in 1989 did not gain much trade union support and rapidly turned into a mini popular front by aligning with bourgeois currents in the Liberals, Democrats and Greens.
The Labour movement was severely defeated by the economic and social reforms of the 4th Labour government, but Labour did this without smashing the unions. In fact Labour’s reactionary reforms were possible only because of its ‘partnership’ with the union bureaucracy.
It was National’s attack on the unions in 1991 that was designed to smash the unions by de-recognising the labour bureauracy. Workers recognised when they mobilised in their tens of thousands against the Employment Contracts Bill and in their thousands against the implementation of the ECA between May 1991 and the election in 1993. Whatever illusions that had been severely strained by ‘Rogernomics’ were quickly restored when they again voted Labour to get rid of National and its dreaded ECA in 1993. Thus the critical support tactic to return Labour to office remained the correct tactic in 1993.
In 1993 we (then Workers Power) took an ultraleft stand and refused critical support to Labour and the Alliance. We argued that Labour had abandoned workers and that the Alliance was a popular front because it included the bourgeois Liberals and Greens. Today we attribute our ultraleft posture during this period to our active participation in the high level of worker struggle which we incorrectly concluded proved that the working class was mobilising outside parliament. We were very wrong.
After 1993 we had corrected our position when it was obvious that workers were going nowhere but back to Labour. The Alliance still had bourgeois fragments in it but we thought they were weak compared with the NewLabour fraction. So in the 1996 election we called for a vote for Labour in constituencies and a list vote for the Alliance to avoid splitting the vote. We strongly opposed a vote for NZ First which went on to form a Coalition with National.
At the last election in 1999 we challenged Labour and the Alliance to govern together to live up to their promises to workers to shift away from 15 years of neo-liberalism and 9 years of open bourgeois rule.
However, we also recognised that the damage done to the organised labour movement by 15 years of neo-liberal reforms had decimated the unions so that many workers as individuals. We said that both parties would betray workers further and would move right towards Blairism.(2) The biggest test would be the Labour/Alliance commitment to rebuilding the labour movement.
In government, Labour turned into a left-centre Blairite party that openly oriented towards business (balanced budget etc) doing little for workers. It raised the top income tax from 33% to a mere 39% for those over $60,000. It abandoned its ‘closing of the gaps’ under pressure from business. Its social welfare reforms were based on the Blairite concept of individual social responsibility.Its renationalisation of ACC was opposed by the bosses but is partly paid for by charges like car registration that hit low paid workers hardest.
Most importantly, the Employment Relations Act (ERA) fell far short of reviving the conditions for a strong labour movement. Its underlying philosophy was to revive and empower the labour bureaucracy as a means of managing and regulating workers as individuals and containing union democracy and solidarity.
Margaret Wilson, its architect, is an admirer of the original Industrial, Conciliation and Arbitration (IC&A) Act of 1894 which was designed by the Fabian Socialist William Pember Reeves to use the state to prevent workers from engaging in struggle over industrial matters and damaging the ‘national interest’.At the time Harry Holland called the IC&A Act ‘labour’s leg iron’. So for Wilson, the ERA was a return to the Liberal ‘classless’ philosophy of the 1890’s and a sure sign that Labour had become a Blairite Party.
The Alliance despite its attempts at ‘social’ reforms got dragged to the right in the Labour/Alliance Coalition. Anderton and his faction was clearly bent on integrating the Alliance back into Labour. This showed up in the failure of Harre’s faction to get the employers to pay for extended Parental Leave, and the tiny amount of money put into Anderton’s regional development.
The Alliance amendments to the ERA failed to shift Labour’s liberal philosophy of class reconciliation back towards a active labour movement orientation. This was demonstrated when Harre allowed Anderton to publicly admonish her attempts to meet striking NZ Herald workers in 2001.
Therefore the point of our critical support in 1999 had been made; to vote into office and fight both parties in Government would help to expose their real bourgeois program. Both parties shifted to the right and their policies clearly showed that the needs of workers were subordinated to making profits. But does this mean that Labour or the Alliance have ceased to be a bourgeois-workers parties? Have they severed their historic organic links to the organised labour movement?
Labour has done in office what what Labour governments have done since 1935. Labour governments have always attempted to manage capitalism in the interests of the dominant fraction of capital. This fraction is no longer the domestic manufacturers but international capital which now dominates production in forestry, energy, transport and communications. Today the revival of the unions as ‘social partners’ serves international capital by managing the provision of skilled and ‘knowledge’ labour which is in short supply.But to do this the Labour/Alliance government had to reconstitute the unions as a fully-fledged '‘stakeholder” or “partner” with capital. This was necessary to discipline labour and extract higher productivity and therefore higher profits.
Thus the ERA is a ‘charter’ for the labour bureaucracy. It is a legal framework that recognises the rights of unions to organise and rebuild after the massive defeats imposed on unions under the ECA. This ‘rebalancing’ of industrial relations gives union officials more powers to regulate labour but also gives the rank and file more freedom to mobilise. These includes the rights of information, of access, of joining collectives and of building multi-employer collective agreements (MECAs).
Since it is the unions alone that constitute the base organisations of the labour movement, and are the potential for ‘revolutionising’ that movement (and all oppressed peoples), we have to defend the gains that the ERA represents over the ECA and use them to build a fighting, democratic union movement. We have to turn Blairite Labour’s ‘leg-iron’ into a ‘crutch’ for reviving the labour movement.
For that reason, in drawing up a balance sheet of Labour’s record for workers, the ERA represents a clear gain in keeping alive the organic link between organised labour and the Labour party. But because this link is mediated by a labour bureaucracy (which has to organise unions so as to control them in the interests of employers) the contradiction between the working class and the bosses becomes expressed directly as a contradiction between the rank and file and union bureaucrats. (3)
So the ERA has restored the union bureaucracy (National will abolish again if it gets into power). But this is at the expense of recreating conditions in which the rank and file can rise to challenge the bureaucracy. We see this in the increase in strikes in the last two years, and most recently in the case of the PPTA where the rank and file teachers engaged in wildcat strikes against their national leadership.
This is why we argue that Labour is still a party that expresses (even if weakly) the class contradiction between workers and bosses, and that the Union leaders are the direct agents of the bosses. This means that to expose Labour’s attempts to regulate workers via the labour bureaucracy, the rank and file have to take advantage of the ERA and build a fighting, democratic union movement that can create the conditions for workers control and ultimately workers’ power.
In the process the Blairite Labour government’s attempts to regulate and contain the labour movement in a ‘partnership’ with capital will be exploded first by the renewal from below of the leadership of the labour movement, and second,by the building of a real workers party that stands on a socialist platform.
For this reason we would say that Labour as a degenerated bourgeois workers party should be returned to office until the labour movement class has the power to replace it with its own party and its own government. On that basis we urge workers to vote for Labour candidates on July 27, 2002 and prepare now to renew the fight with Labour in its second term of Government.
What of the Alliance after Anderton? This is a split to the left. It is the result of the rightward shift that we predicted in 1999 that created tensions between Anderton and the old NLP faction and came to a head over the war in Afghanistan.Getting rid of Anderton and the Democrats leaves the NLP and Mana Motuhake elements in control of the Alliance.
However, the fact that Harre has stuck with the Coalition Agreement and kept her job in Cabinet shows that Alliance Mk 11 still puts more stock in pressuring Labour to the left than to standing on an independent program on a union base. Harre’s Alliance shares Labour’s degeneration as a bourgeois workers’ party.
For the Alliance to become a re-generated bourgeois-workers party it has to find its own base in the trades unions. Nevertheless, as in 1999, we think that the Alliance is still a bourgeois-workers party, and call for a list or party vote for the Alliance in 2002.
Sooner or later as Labour continues to degenerate, workers will demand a new workers party to represent their class interests in parliament. They will demand that it stands on a workers platform (i.e. to express the workers needs side of the contradiction), that it stands against Labour, and does not join a coalition government with bourgeois parties, and that its MPs are recallable by the party base.The Alliance may split to become that new workers party,or a new party may be formed oout of worker-candidates that are selected directly by their unions. Either way we will fight to win such a party to a communist program to prevent that party from becoming yet another recycled bourgeois-workers party.
For communists an election program is only a very small part of implementing a revolutionary manifesto for organising workers in their unions and workplaces to fight for jobs, living wages and adequate health, education, housing and social services and to make the rich pay for them.
Our first priority is to take this manifesto to the workplaces and into the unions to revive them as fighting democratic organisations. We know that the employers cannot deliver on these demands, so we advocate that workers push for their own control of industry and for a workers’ government and workers’ state.
Communists use elections to tell the truth. We point out that workers needs can only be met by workers taking power and forming a workers’ and working farmers’ government.
This government must defend itself from all attempts to overthrow it, and set about planning the economy to meet the needs of all workers and not just the profits of a few bosses.
1Jobs for all!For a 30 hour week for 40 hours pay.For a programme of public works to build new public housing, schooling, roads and other infrastructure.No work-for-the-dole.
2A living wage! Minimum wage of $15 per hour for all ages. No youth rates.Restore penal rates.
Smash anti-strike laws.Wages and benefits adjusted to inflation by workers committees.
3Free health and education under workers control! Free 24hr Childcare. Affordable public housing,
No user-paysfor social services.Free contraception and abortion on demand.
4Tax the rich!For a steeply graduated income tax. For a capital gains tax on companies and speculators, and confiscation of property of corporate tax evaders. Abolish the GST and all user pays taxes.
Occupy under workers control companies that close down or sack workers.
5Take back Assets!Renationalise all privatised and corporatised state assets without compensation andunder the workers control including Telecom, railways, Air NZ, oil, gas, water,forestryelectricity, TVNZ, education, health, producer boards etc.Open books to workers’ inspection under workers’ control.
6Return stolen Maori land! State financial incentives to iwi corporations that are collectively owned and operated.Nationalise capitalist land (not residential property) with leaseback rights to small farmers and financial incentives for cooperatives.Nationalise Fonterra under worker/farmer and worker control.
7Defend democratic rights!Equal rights for women, gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered.
Defend the rights of youth and children.Freedom from sexual and other abuse.Freedom of speech, association and assembly.Stop the Terrorism Suppression Bill.Independent Inquiry for Steven Wallace.
8Citizenship rights for Pacific Island and Asian migrant workers.Smash bosses immigration laws.
Open doors to asylum seekers.Open the borders under workers control.
Fight in the unions to build workers' defence committees against racist attacks.
9Out of all military alliances! Take strike action to get NZ out of ANZUS. Break all military ties with Australia, the US, NATOand UK. Smash Echelon. NZ out of the UN and UN peacekeeping forces. NZ troops out of East Timor, Bosnia, the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan. No nuclear ships.
10For the independent workers’ organisations.For fighting, democratic trades unions!
For workers councils and organs of self-defence. For a Workers' Government that can socialise the banks and big business and plan the economy to meet the needs of workers rather than the profits of the bosses.
For a Socialist Republic of Aotearoa in a Federation ofSocialist Republics of the Pacific!
Notes
(1) The state appears to be everyone's state because it sets the framework in which all are equal in buying and selling commodities at their true value. Equal market exchange. But in reality the state presides over class society and attempts to suppress the contradiction between social production and private ownership. This contradiction then gets reproduced in the state. But the state must first create capitalist social relations of production and the market before production and exchange can happen. In the process it creates not only the market but civil society and bourgeois citizens.
(2) The New Labour Party of Tony Blair has deliberately distanced itself from the unions and positions itself as a liberal party of the 'Third Way' between neo-liberalism and socialism. While the majority of unions still officiallysupport New Labour, this is not to advance the particular interests of the labour movement,but to endorse the shift towards a 'new unionism'. This is the view that labour, capital and state are all stakeholders in society so that unions have no special interests. The ‘new’ unionism is a return to the ‘old’ liberalism of turning unions into citizens’ mutual aid societies. Third Way governments therefore, are ideologically committed to class neutrality, civil society, or the community. When this is the case to call for a vote for a Third-Way government is to uncritically endorse the class neutral ideology of the capitalist state.
(3) This is analogous to the role played by the bureaucracy in the former Soviet Union. Trotsky argued that the best way to understand the role of the bureaucracy in a degenerated workers’ state was to regard it as similar to the union bureaucracy in the trades unions in capitalist countries. Like the Stalinist bureaucracy, the union bureaucracy is parasitic on the working class but remains part of that class. The union bureaucracy has its own particular interests in acting as the agents ofthe bosses in the unions, but in order to do so it has to defend the unions against the bosses attempts to destroy them.
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