Stop Israel’s fascist attack on the Palestinian People!

Leninist Trotskyist Fraction Statement

From the 28 of June, the Zionist-Fascist state of Israel, has begun a new military offensive against the Palestinian workers and people. With the pretext of “freeing” an Israeli soldier who was captured by one of the Palestinian militias, it has surrounded and invaded the Gaza Strip –a territory of 400 square kilometers with a population of one-and-a-half million people –with tanks, ships, artillery and troops. It has launched a massive artillery bombardment against the Palestinian people, already killing 54 of them – including 9 children – by the end of June. With this offensive, imperialism and its Zionist policeman aims a new counter-revolutionary blow at the Palestinian and Middle Eastern masses, and in particular at the heroic resistance of the Iraqi masses who are fighting a war of resistance against the US army and who every day send back to the US more dead soldiers in body bags. We reproduce in a slightly abridged version a statement of the FLT.

The situation of the oppressed people of is already a catastrophe and getting worse: the electrical power stations and the bridges were destroyed and all access roads closed. With a temperatures above 40°, the people do not have water, light, food, medicines, fuel, etc. One out of three new-born children dies for lack of basic medicines. Without power the hospitals cannot perform operations or maintain blood supplies or medicines, etc.

The vast majority of Palestinian workers are unemployed. The Zionist State in the last months cut from 88,000 to 11,000 the ‘work permits’ that allow Palestinian workers to be exploited in Israeli and imperialist factories in occupied Palestine. Thousands of workers risk their life every day leaving Gaza and the Transjordan without permits to work for food to feed their children. But today no worker can leave to work.

The Zionist army also entered Ramallah, in the Transjordan, bombing dependencies and detaining almost 100 civil employees of the “Palestinian government” –the so-called ‘Palestinian National Authority’ –accusing them of being ‘criminals’, ‘terrorists’, etc.

This is the true face of the Zionist-Fascist state of Israel, artificially created in 1948 by means of the military occupation of the territory of the nation of Palestine, the expulsion of its inhabitants, their systematic extermination and displacement on the assumption of an historic ‘Biblical right’ , and maintained since then by Anglo-Yankee imperialism as its police force to keep the Palestinian and Middle Eastern Masses subservient to the imperialistic powers and their demand for oil!

The new fascist offensive aims to smash all resistance and impose an apartheid state of Palestine

The Palestinian masses, with its nation under occupation, condemned to live as prisoners in their own land, are prisoners in “ghettos” and concentration camps that are no better than the Warsaw ghetto of the Nazis. This new military offensive is the continuation of the defeat of the huge revolution that the Palestinian people began in September 2000. It aims to complete that defeat, with the reimposition of a fascist barbarism by the Zionist invaders of the nation they have occupied for more than half a century.

At the same time, it is the response of US and British imperialism to the refusal of the Palestinian resistance to accept defeat of their revolution. Not one day has passed since 2002 when there has not been demonstrations against the apartheid wall in Transjordan, against the confinement of the people in ‘Bantustans’ and concentration camps surrounded by the Zionist army and the fascist colonies, against the recurrent massacres and murders of the Zionist army, struggles to liberate more than 10,000 Palestinian political prisoners in the Zionist jails, including over 500 women and children.

If the military offensive of the army of Olmert and Bush is victorious, then immediately we will see the imposition of the ‘Road Map’ to complete the formation of a “Palestinian state”, separated from an Israeli state, and consisting of small strips of barren, over-populated territory, without infrastructure and water, isolated from one another, behind walls like Transjordan, and surrounded by the Israeli army and the fascist colonies.

If they succeed in this offensive, imperialism and its Zionist agent will be more confident of being able to finally smash the heroic resistance of the Iraqi masses, of advancing its plans to attack Iran, and also to intensify its attacks against the workers of the United States and the European imperialist powers.

There is no middle road when facing the life and death struggle of the Palestinian people who have been fighting to throw out the Zionist occupants of their land more than half a century: one is unconditionally with the Palestinian people, or one is in the trench of the Zionist-Fascist state of Israel, and the imperialists Bush, Chirac, the UN and the other bandits.

Cynically, the world bourgeois media worries about the fate of the Israeli soldier taken prisoner, while it couldn’t care less about the deaths and the suffering inflicted on the millions of oppressed Palestinians that try to defend their land from the occupyers. As revolutionary Trotskyists we defend the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to defend themselves and to fight against the Israeli occupying troops with any means at their disposal. The right to fight to defeat the Zionist invader and to destroy the Zionist state, is an inalienable democratic-revolutionary right of the Palestinian people.

The Palestine bourgeoisie of Al Fatah and Hamas: prison guards of the enslaved Palestinian people

At the same time, we say very clearly that the long suffering of the Palestinian people will only end with the destruction from the Zionist-Fascist state of Israel. This will not be won under the leadership of the Palestinian bourgeoisie. No, on the contrary, it will be necessary for the working class and the exploited people to break all ties to the national bourgeoisie.

The Palestine bourgeoisie betrayed the historic struggle of thePalestinian people for its national liberation and it have become the prison guards of its own people, first by making the Oslo agreement and today by supporting the ‘Road Map’ that implements the Oslo Agreement.

In 1993, by signing the Oslo agreements the PLO and Al Fatah, headed then by Yasser Arafat, openly renounced the struggle for the destruction of the State of Israel, recognizing its ‘right to exist’, and accepting the plan to create the fiction of a ‘Palestinian state’ coexisting by its side. Those agreements introduced the farce of the “Palestinian territories” under the so-called government of the Palastinian National Authority and its police, as prison guards of their own people as slaves confined to ghettos and concentrations camps.

It was against that new system of control that the masses revolted in September of 2000, starting the heroic Palestine revolution. The oppressed workers rose up, took the police stations from the ‘Palestinian National Authority’, disarmed it and forming their own workers and peasants militias in the towns and camps. Breaking from their own bourgeois police guard and arming themselves, the Palestinian workers and peasants immediate raised to a higher level, the struggle for national liberation, and opened the road to the the destruction of the Zionist-Fascist state of Israel.

To smash that revolutionary upsurge, the the Zionist state sent in the army to disarm masses while at the same time protecting the bourgeois leadership of Palestine by locking up Yasser Arafat and his cabinet in Ramallah. By ensuring that Arafat survied the revolution, the Zionist state rearmed the Palestine bourgeoisie (channelling Billions of “international aid” through international companies such as the one that supplies the cement for the wall around Transjordan) to control its own people behind the apartheid Wall. The brigades of Al Aqsa and Al Fatah, and then the brigades of Ezzedine Al Kassam of Hamas, at once began to repress the workers and peasants militias proving that they were in fact the new “Palestine” police whose task was to suppress the revolutionary masses.

Hamas succeeds Al Fatah as the jailhouse guards

Because it openly attacked the Palelstinian people the bourgeois leadership of Al Fatah was widely discredited in the eyes of the masses. This is why another bourgeois fraction, represented by Hamas (the fraction of the commercial bourgeoisie, related to the bourgeoisie of the Bazaar of Iran) replaced Al Fatah as the leadership of the “Palestinian Territories’. It was this fraction represented by Hamas, that won the legislative elections last February, and formed the new government chosing the Prime Minister and cabinet, while Al Fatah is now represented only by the Presdident Abu Mazen.

Hamas demagogically won the elections with its policy of the destruction of the State of Israel, manipulating therefore the feeling and the aspirations of the vast majority of the Palestinian people. But as soon as it became the Government, Hamas made a ‘truce’ with the Israeli state for 10 years. That is, it guaranteed the existence and survival of Isael by undertaking the task of policing its own people. This proves yet again, that the liberation of the Palestinian people can only be won by the working class leading the poor peasantry, and destroying the Zionist-Facist state of Israel.

Hamas has already renounced the historical fight for the destruction of the State of Israel. But it has tried to convince the Israeli state that the best way to control the Palestinian people that the it still fights for the destruction of the State of Israel. With those arguments, Hamas tried to get the Zionist state to release the “international aid” and withheld taxes to the Palestinian government.

But the Zionist bourgeoisie – backed by US imperialism – rejected this deal with Hamas. They want to see all the fractions of the Palestine bourgeoisie on their knees before Israel. So while the prison guards fight among themselves, the Zionist state sends in its military forces to make clear who commands the jail.

Only the workers of the whole Middle East can destroy the state of Israel and imperialism

The undefeated Palestinian people have suffererd more than half a century of massacres and betrayals, because the leaders of the national liberation struggle are the national bourgeoisie. The Palestine bourgeoisie, like all national bourgeoisies, are the junior partners of imperialism. They would prefer to go to prison like the Hamas leadership today, and that its people got killed, than arm the masses.. It knows that if the Palestinian people were armed not only would they destroy the state of Israel, but as already happened in 2000, they would destroy the national bourgeoisies power and private property. Therefore, it hides the weapons so that the masses cannot get them, and forces them to face the murderous attacks of the fifth biggest army in the world, armed to the teeth by imperialism, with empty hands.

The only then way then, that the Palestinian masses can face the Zionist military offensive, is to break all political subordination to its own bourgeoisie, and take the leadership of the national liberation struggle into its own handes. It must form workers and peasants militias and arm the Palestinian people and fight for the destruction of the Zionist-Fascist state of Israel. Otherwise the blood of its martyrs will again be used by the Palestinian bourgeoisie as a currency in its negotiations with imperialism and the Zionist state.

In that way, the masses of occupied Palestine can be united in struggle with the millions of Palestinians expelled from their land by Zionism and who now live Lebanon and Jordan. The heroic masses that resist in Gaza and Transjordan, have a powerful rearguard in the millions of Palestinian workers and who live in the south of where their militia forced the Israeli army to retreat in June 2000 in first engagement of the coming Palestinian revolution! There are many battalions able to confront the Israeli army on the East Bank of the Jordán River, in Jordan, where almost half the population is Palestinian.

Break with the bourgeoisie of Al Fatah, Hamas, Hizbollah, etc., so that the Palestinian masses can be armed to defeat the Zionist offensive and open the road to the destruction of the State of Israel. Break with Hizbollah so that the Palestinian masses in Lebanon can engage the Zionist state with their armed forces. Break with the Jordanian bourgeoisie - whose monarchy is responsible for terrible massacres against the Palestinian people, to allow the Palestinian masses of Jordan to split the Jordanian army and unite with its brothers and sisters in occupied Palestine. Build workers and peasants militias to take the leadership of the national liberation struggle, and retake the road of the revolution of 2000 that leads to the victory over imperialism. For a workers and peasants revolution capable of destroying the state of Israel, and creating a secular, democratic and nonracist Palestinian State where the workers and of all religions can coexist peacefully!

Re-entering the road to revolution, the Palestinian working class can lead a united struggle in the Middle East to defeat the imperialist troops in Iraq, stop any attack on Iran, and win a new Vietnam war that buries in the sands of the desert both imperialism and its Zionist policeman.

Stop the ‘oil wars’ of the imperialists and their national bourgeois junior partners!

The national bourgeoisies of the Middle East states, “condemn” the new Zionist offensive, but do not move a finger to support the Palestinian people. This is because these bourgeoisies are the junior partners of imperialism in plundering the oil of the region and the superexploitation and oppression of their own workers. Such is the case with the Iranian bourgeoisie and French imperialism; the Iraqian bourgeoisie –Sunni and Shiite – and US and British imperialism. Those national bourgeois regimes –from North Africa, to Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran, are exploiting and repressing hundreds of millions of poor workers and peasants who live in the most extreme poverty and misery, while under their feet are the greatest oil reserves in the world. They also get their share of the profits from the million of workers who move from country to country to work in oil wells living in squalid camps and guarded by the mercenaries of the oil companies.

The bloody occupation of Iraq, the warlike threats against Iran, and the Zionist offensive against the Palestinian people, are all part of the “oil wars” of the imperialist powers and the national bourgeoisies of the region. For that reason, the Egyptian bourgeoisie sent 2500 police to the border with Gaza to guarantee that no Palestinians can escape to Egyptian territory. The Syrian bourgeoisie, although equipped with artillery, allowed Israeli helicopters to fly over Damascus in a clear military threat, but did not more than verbally “repudiate” that action. The Iranian bourgeoisie, that constantly threatens a “mother of all battles” against the state of Israel and the imperialism, does nothing but request that the UN Security Council meets…that same den of imperialistic thieves that imposes sanctions against Iran for its nuclear development!

Only the working class can stop these “oil wars”, because it has no class interest that ties it to imperialism, only chains to break. The most urgent task is to unite the ranks of the working class of the whole Middle East, so it can use the most powerful “missile” of all against imperialism and the bourgeoisies agents: to attack its private property and its super profits with a generalised struggle to expropriate the imperialistic oil monopolies, and the nationalization without compensation and under working control of the oil and gas wealth in all the Arab nations, and the whole Middle East.

One world working class, one fight!

In order to be able to go in aid of its Palestinian brothers and sisters the workers of the Middle East must break all the chains to their own native bourgeoisies. The heroic Iraqian resistance must break with the Shiite and Suni bourgeosies to unite with the Palestinian masses in one fight against imperialism and the state of Israel. The Egyptian workers and exploited must break with their oppressive bourgeoisie to demolish the border that separates them from their Palestine brothers and sisters, and provide arms, food and medicines so that they can oppose the Israeli army. The workers and exploited people of Iran must break with their nation bourgeoisie and send arms, missiles etc to the Palestinian people. Defeat imperialism and expropriate its monopolies, destroy the State of Israel, overthrow the lackey bourgeois regimes, and create worker-peasant governments within a Federation of Workers and Peasant governments of the Middle East.

The fight to destroy Zionist-Fascist state of Israel is also task of working class of the imperialist powers that created Israel, finance it and supply it with arms. The proletariat of the US, Britain, France and other imperialist powers have the key to stop the Zionist offensive and to defeat imperialism in Iraq. Paralyse the imperialist war machine and the Zionist war machine by workers boycotts strikes, mobilizations and pickets. Stop all shipments of arms, equipment and provisions to the Zionist State and the occupying armies of Iraq. Provide the Palestinian masses and the Iraqi resistance with arms, food and medicines, so they can defeat the imperialists and the Zionists!

But to defeat imperialistic powers we have to defeat the labor bureaucracy, the labor aristocracy and the leaders of the World Social Forum that chains the workers and peasants to the popular front with the imperialists.The working class and the exploded ones of Latin America must take the lead in the defense of the Palestinian people. It’s long struggle for national liberation is the same fight as that of the workers and poor peasants of Latin America to remove the imperialist yoke.

But the World Social Forum leaders like Fidel Castro are demanding that the UN intervene to stop the Zionist offensive in Gaza and return to the ‘Road Map’! Kirchner, Lula, Chávez, Morales and Co., “condemn” the attack of the Zionist army, and plead for “peace”. At the same time they are preparing to sign at the Mercosur meeting on 20 and 21 July, a Free Trade Agreement with the Zionist-Fascist state of Israel, while the working class and the Palestinian people are killed and injured. Down with the FTA with Israel!

Therefore the first condition, for the workers and peasants of Latin America to support the struggle of our class brothers and sisters of Palestine, is to break with the bourgeoisies, their regimes and their governments, and the union bureaucracies, Castrioists, and fake Trotskyists, who are today part of the World Social Forum.
 
Emergency Call to the world working class

The Leninist Trotskyist Fraction (FLT) calls on the world working class to take up the revolutionary program of struggle for the liberation of the Palestinian people that we have advanced. Take to the streets to fight for the destruction of the Zionist-Fascist state of Israel, and for the defeat of imperialism and the victory of the heroic Iraqi resistance. Surround the US and Israeli embassies everywhere in the world; use stoppages, boycotts, pickets and general strikes to stop the shipment of arms to the Zionist state and the imperialist army in Iraq. Supply arms, equipment, food and medicines to the heroic peoples of towns Palestine and Iraqi that are fighting for their national liberation. The world working class, the only one that can defeat imperialism and its Zionist policeman, must fight side by side with its class brothers and sisters of Palestine, Iraq and the whole Middle East!


· Stop the genocidal attack of the the Israeli state and its army against the Palestinian workers people!

· Immediate and unconditional freedom for the more than 10,000 Palestinian fighters held in Israeli jails!

· Down with the “Road Map” of the imperialistic butchers, the Zionist state and the Arab bourgeoisies, that wants to create an apartheid Palestinian state!

· Paralyze the imperialist war machine and the Zionist war machine by workers boycotts strikes, mbilizations and pickets.

· Stop all shipments of arms, equipment and provisions to the Zionist State and the occupying armies of Iraq!

· Provide the Palestinian masses and the Iraqian resistance with arms, food and medicines, so they can defeat the imperialilsts and the Zionists!

· Workers and peasants militias and arms for all Palestinian people to take the leadership of the national war of liberation gainst the Zionist occupier!

· For the destruction of the Zionist-Fascist state of Israel!

· Only a workers government of the self organised and armed Palestinian masses can guarantee a secular, democratic and nonracist Palestinian State!

· For a Federation of Workers and Peasants Republics of the Middle East!

· For the military defeat of all the invading troops, and for the victory of the heroic resistance of the Iraqi masses!

· Out with all the imperialist troops from Afghanistan and the Middle East!

· UN and imperialist hands off Iran!

From Class Struggle 67 June/July 2006

Is Zionism Fascism?

We reprint below [in a separate post] the FLT statement in opposition to the Israeli attacks on Gaza. The FLT takes the view that the Israeli state is ‘Zionist-Fascist’. CWG has historically opposed the analysis of Israel as a ‘fascist’ regime as it is a form of democracy. We are opening this question up for debate in our group. Here a CWG member puts the outline of an argument in support of the ‘Zionist-Fascist’ position.

Fascism is an extreme social movement that arose in Europe between the wars in response to the crisis-ridden capitalism of the early 20th century. It emerged under the threat of a workers’ revolution when bourgeois democracy had exhausted its ability to contain the working class. Its function was to smash the revolutionary vanguard before it could mobilise the working class in a revolutionary uprising. It employed an extreme nationalist, racist ideology in order to bind together the middle classes with sections of the working class in the name of defending the nation from communism.

Zionism is the founding ideology of the Israeli state. It is based on several founding myths that declare Jews’ God-given right to be the exclusive occupants of Palestine. It defends that right by constant reference to anti-semitism and the ‘holocaust’.

Zionism as a doctrine fatalistically submitted to anti-semitism. In the Europe of the early 20th century anti-semitic movements called on all Jews to ‘get out’. Zionism took up this call to provide a homeland to escape to. Yet in doing so, Zionism made many deals with the European ruling classes, not least the Nazis, in return for their cooperation in transferring Jews to Palestine.

The cost of these agreements to Jews was millions of more deaths than would have been the case had the Zionists not existed. The Zionists agreements with the Nazis were to concentrate Jews for shipment to labour camps and extermination camps in exchange for the freedom to select and relocate some Jews to Palestine. Where the Zionists were weak, resistance to Nazi extermination saved the majority of Jews. In some countries active opposition prevented any transportation and killing (Denmark). Where Jews fled Europe into the Ukraine or Russia they survived in their millions.

Thus Zionism is not an antidote to fascism but its junior partner in the death and destruction of Jews. The sacrifice of Jewish workers can only be explained by a Zionism that is the class ideology of Jewish capital. The Zionists representing the interests of the Jewish bourgeoisie which needed a homeland to defend their capital. Jews as finance capitalists facing the collapse of European capitalism before and after WW1 were both bankrupted by national capitals with which they were associated and forced to flee. Those who could not move their capital to new countries wanted to found a Jewish state to protect their capital. Not only that, they wanted a Jewish working class, selected from the European working class to establish a capitalist economy in Palestine.

The price paid by Jewish workers who were rounded up by Zionist organisations to feed the Nazi’s labour and extermination camps proved that Zionism was motivated by exactly the same class interests as the Fascists in Europe. They wanted to select a racially pure and strong stock out of those ‘concentrated’ in Europe, take them out of the hands of the ‘anti-semites’ who would work them to death, and save them for shipment to Palestine where they would become the core of a Jewish working class. Just as the European capitalist powers were prepared to sacrifice millions of workers in wars to defend their capital, the millions of weak, old and otherwise defective Jews who would not be of any ‘use-value’ in Palestine were similarly sacrificed.

But if Palestine was already being formed as a racially pure Jewish state in collaboration with the fascists, could it be any less fascist? First, Zionist reactionary nationalism was the ideology of Jewish capital facing destruction during the capitalist crisis of the interwar years and organised bourgeois, petty bourgeois and working class settlers to found a national homeland for Jewish capital.

Second, the class collaboration with the Nazi’s scapegoating of Jews, betrayed working class Jews into the labour and extermination camps and played into the Nazi’s objective to smash the communist movement. This complicity was critical, since working class Jews were strongly overrepresented in working class struggles and revolutionary organisations and even more so in the leadership of these organisations. Where the Zionists were unable to separate Jewish workers from the rest of the working class their role in the resistance proved that this was the only way to defeat fascism.

Finally, the very act of establishing the state of Israel mimicked the Nazi invasion and seizure of foreign lands. Palestine was already occupied by a large majority of non-Jews. The peasant and working class inhabitants were evicted, relocated in ghettos and concentration camps, and then terrorised by a policy of military genocide.

Dave Brown

From Class Struggle 67 June/July 2006

Black shirts and Gay hate is not Fascism

The Civil Union Debate

The current legislation before parliament which seeks to create access to “civil union” for both heterosexuals and gays has generated a lot of heat among liberals and conservatives. Are we talking Stormtroopers-in-a-teacup here? We argue that it is necessary to support this legislation as a civil right and take a stand against rightwing neo-conservative campaigns such as that of the Destiny Church.

Neocons or fascists?

Despite the alarmists, Pastor Brian Tamaki and his followers are not fascists. While in the recent march in Wellington Destiny Church members wore black and kept waving their fists in the air, black shirts and one-armed salutes by themselves are not fascist, any more than having a number 2 haircut is a sign of descent into such behavior. To be fascists Destiny Church would have to mobilise violently against not only gays and lesbians, but jews, migrants, and most of all communists.

During the heyday of fascism in the 1930’s Trotsky wrote that fascism arises in response to extreme crisis and organises the ruined middle class into a political movement to smash the labour movement to prevent a socialist revolution. “Fascism has for its basic and only task the razing to their foundations of all institutions of proletarian democracy.”(See L. Trotsky, Struggles Against Fascism in Germany.p. 159). The Destiny Church marchers are stormtroopers-in-a-teacup and fall far short of a fascist movement.

The Destiny Church are fundamentalist Christians. A bunch of narrow minded, bigoted individuals who like to worship so-called “family values.” Of course, when they talk of families they mean what they define as a family. Their notion of Mum, Dad and 2.5 children is some sort of throwback to a by-gone era which never really existed anyway. While glorifying a 1950’s heterosexual nuclear family structure they seem to conveniently forget that within this structure domestic abuse and abuse of children was often ignored and sometimes tolerated.

They also pick and choose their rules and values from the bible with gay abandon (pun intended), discounting what they don’t like (I bet Brian eats pork) and taking with extreme literalism what can only be described as cultural prohibitions written for a culture which existed a couple of thousand years ago.

They represent the extreme end of a wedge in our society which seeks to fetishise and almost deify the family. In this respect they are the wet dream of capitalists, who know these fanatics with their quasi-Calvinist work ethic are willing wage slaves given that they need to support their families. They help keep the wheels of capitalism turning and oil the machinery of their own oppression.

10% for Jesus on a Harley

Brian Tamaki is a businessman and the Destiny Church is like similar churches all over the world run along capitalist lines with the focus being on “strong leaders” (who are usually wealthy living off their members’ ‘tithes’ on their wages). Their approach to dealing with inequality is to look to charity as a way of helping out rather than questioning the structures in society that gives raise to the inequality in the first place.

It comes as no surprise that fundamentalists in the United States are squarely behind George Bush. They not only share his right wing moral views, they also bleat on about “personal responsibility.” If you are in the gutter, it is because you have put yourself there (or god has to test you). But the good news is that with god’s help you can be “blessed” with wealth. They see nothing wrong with being rich; in fact it is merely a sign that you are in the favour of the almighty.

From a sociological point of view, Tamaki is a recognizable and well-studied type. His church is largely a personality cult which revolves around him. He may be genuine, but it is probably the case that his followers are as much converted to him as fundamentalist Christian beliefs. Studies have shown that churches such as these often revolve around a central charismatic figure like Tamaki.

One morning, up early and watching TV for some reason I glanced at the Tamaki Tele-vangelist show. Brian was praising a couple who had been to a meeting he held in Rotorua, and had been so impressed they sold everything and moved to Auckland so they could attend the Destiny church and be closer to Brian. They seemed to delight in such menial tasks as parking the big man’s car. This cannot be healthy!

Smite the deviants  - save the family

They are the most visible face of opposition to the civil union legislation. The extent of the opposition has surprised many. Although most of those opposed do not subscribe to the extreme platform of the Destiny Church members, they are clearly not happy with gays and lesbians having some sort of state recognition of their relationships.

Many people seem to believe legislation such as the Civil Union bill signifies what is wrong in our society. Everything from crime and young people out of control to teen pregnancies are pointed to as examples of societal decay. Words like “promiscuous” and “immorality” have made a comeback. These terms haven’t had such a strong airing since the Homosexual law reform debate of 1985-86. It’s worth noting that many of the critics of that legislation predicted the imminent collapse of New Zealand society as a result of the passing of that legislation.

Rather than turning their anger on the real enemy (the capitalist system) they put their energy into fighting a battle against human nature. They fail to see that crime and other social ills are largely the result of a system which is manifestly unjust.

Steven Franks: Arthur or Martha?

And where are the liberals of the right on this issue? Right-wingers like Steven Franks don’t know whether they’re Arthur or Martha. Franks sees gays and Lesbians as just another group of consumers, but he also knows many of Acts supporters subscribe to a right-wing moral ideology.

Speaking on Linda Clarke’s Nine to Noon programme on Tuesday 24 August, Franks was all over the show saying he would support this bit of the legislation but not another part of it. He was clearly uncomfortable and so he should be. His hypocritical position shows up the internal contradictions of the Act party. On one hand they like to paint themselves as the “liberal” party, in favour of freedom, but when the crunch comes they retreat back into the shadows of the right. There freedom clearly extends to only to certain people and certain ‘acts’.

But while the right is largely united against the legislation, the left is divided.

Left divided

The left positions can be broadly summarized into three groupings.

The first (and largest) are those who support the legislation, such as gay MP Chris Carter. The second are those who believe that the Bill doesn’t go far enough and it should be marriage or nothing. Marilyn Waring spoke against the legislation at Select Committee hearings on the grounds that it was not giving equality to gays and lesbians (in that they were still excluded from marriage). The third point of view tends to find favour amongst radical gays and lesbians who don’t want to buy into heterosexual structures such as marriage.

These views all have valid points. Marriage is a bourgeoisie institution, so on that point there can be some agreement with the “queer” activists. And because ‘civil unions’ is not marriage, Marilyn Waring is right in this respect, that there will be inequality for gays and lesbians in the law.

Finally the Carter position that the legislation is a step forward for gays and lesbians is valid. After all, why should gays and lesbians be excluded from having their relationships recognized, even if it is by a state that props up a system of capitalist inequality.

It is interesting to note that when briefing papers were first put before Attorney General Margaret Wilson, one proposal, perhaps the most radical, was for the state to endorse a form of civil unions and for marriage to be consigned to a secondary position. This would mean people could go to a church to marry if they wanted but the state would have it’s own endorsement which would take precedence.

This idea would not rest comfortably with a lot of people because it strikes at many people’s aforementioned idealisation of marriage.

So, should workers support the civil union legislation.

Yes we should. The right of all couples to have a civil union which is recognized by the state, regardless of whether they are gay, lesbian or straight, is an extension of democratic civil rights.

The fact that ‘civil union’ gives couples legal equality without the need for marriage must be a good thing. It undermines the institution of marriage, and with it the often repressive gender relations that marriage sanctions. Anything that hastens the end of the bourgeois family is to be welcomed!

We need to recognize the nature of the attacks against the legislation for what they are. They attack the gay and lesbian community and single them out for lies and hatred. This was the case in 1985 when Homosexual Law reform was before Parliament and it is the case now. These are done in the name of ‘family values’ that reinforce the family as a bulwark of capitalist oppression. We need to defend our gay brothers and lesbian sisters from these attacks and stand with them against the bigots.

The fundmentalist attack on ‘civil unions’ today might under conditions of social crisis in the future become part of a more general reactionary attack on the democratic rights of all minorities. To prevent such a generalised reaction from becoming a full blown fascism workers have to organize to stamp out all expressions of intolerance and hatred now.

Nor should we foster any illusions that the capitalist state can ever deliver freedom from oppression for gays and lesbians. When the working class mobilises to get rid of the capitalist state and create a new society, individuals will no longer need the crutch of religion, and will be able to freely associate in ‘unions’ of their choice without discrimination.

From Class Struggle 57 August-September 2004