Who’s Making Poverty?

‘Making Poverty History’,  and the ‘Live 8’  campaign of ‘80’s ‘Live Aid’ promoter, Sir Bob Geldof has captured the media headlines. It always was the biggest blockbuster around. Billions spent while billions die. Who needs a Terminator when you’ve got Brad Pitt campaigning for Africa? The new vanguard of the poor is no longer the working class or even the petite bourgeois intellectuals, but pop culture celebrities. For liberals like Jeffrey Sachs more aid is in the interests of the rich as well as the poor. For left media gurus like Naomi Klein mass pressure from below can ‘force’ the G8 to deliver justice. But what if poverty is the only policy for capitalism?

So Bush and Blair have persuaded the G8 to ‘forgive’ 18 African states’ $40 billion in debts (equivalent to 20 days Pentagon spending). What happened to the poorhouse? Isn’t Africa one giant poorhouse suffering the equivalent of 10 Asian Tsunamis every year? Africa is supposed to be an object lesson, like Iraq. This is where you end up if you fail the civilization test, morally and economically bankrupt. Why abandon this cautionary tale?

The fact is the West isn’t giving up on debt. When the new World Bank head, Paul Wolfowitz is a key player you can be sure of that.

The imperialists are recognizing that their global interest does not depend on actually eliminating the human race, but exploiting it. Dead people do not produce much surplus labour. Born-again liberal Jeffrey Sachs puts the case well. Western aid needs to be increased to sustainable levels. If the US spends $20 billion (instead of $3 billion) a year to keep Africans alive this would still be 10% of Bush’s tax cuts to the rich.

It’s like the poor law, you create a bread line for people who work. If they don’t work they fall below the bread line. While it’s easy to blame the neo-colonies of Africa for their own fate, it doesn’t make profits. Africa needs a workhouse. So along come the celebrities to provide more and better charity for the New African Century.

Brendan O’Neil makes this point about MPH.  

. . .The first thing to note is that Make Poverty History, even by its own admission, will not make poverty history. Indeed, that is not, strictly speaking, its aim. Its goal is to eradicate extreme poverty by putting pressure on nation states to ensure that the Millennium Development Goals - which every member of the United Nations officially endorsed in 2000 - are met.

The first Millennium Development Goal on poverty is to cut by half the proportion of people living on less than one dollar a day by 2015 - which, if achieved, would still leave hundreds of millions of people living below the one-dollar threshold. The World Bank has set up a website dedicated to explaining and winning support for these Millennium Development Goals, and even that site admits that achieving goal number 1 would not make poverty history. '[W]hile poverty would not be eradicated, [it] would bring us much closer to the day when we can say that all the world's people have at least the bare minimum to eat and clothe themselves', the site says. …Even if Make Poverty History is successful in pressurising governments to stick to their Millennium Development promises, half of the world's poor will still live on less than a dollar a day and half will still 'suffer from hunger'. In short, poverty will not be history - far from it. The other Millennium Developpment Goals - relating to making primary education available to more children and reversing the spread of HIV-AIDS and the incidence of malaria - are also notable for their lack of ambition.

. . .Live 8 is little more than the pop wing of G8, and Make Poverty History is little more than a management committee making sure that America, Britain, France and the rest push through their Millennium Development Goals. There is little radical or even independent about Make Poverty History and Geldof's coinciding global pop jamboree. They might consider themselves punkish and edgy, but these pop and rock acts are merely shouting at the world powers to do what they had already planned to do - slowly and incrementally eradicate only the worst instances of poverty and starvation in the world today. Bob, Bono and the rest simply provide the soundtrack to officialdom's slothful anti-poverty campaign.

Naomi Klein goes one step better. Aid is not enough. It doesn’t touch the roots of poverty. She says Africa is a rich continent made poor by rapacious western corporations. True enough. So what about ‘using’ Africa’s own mineral wealth to save it? ‘Using’? Does that mean the West has to change its policies from pillage to patronage? Yes, and the united social movements can do it. Klein talks about the moving examples of the Ogoni people fighting Shell oil in Nigeria [when Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight others were executed], Evo Morales fighting the oil companies in Bolivia, and the General Union of Oil workers of Basra fighting the privatization of oil in Iraq. All these movements need is unity. A symbolic statement of this can be the G8 demonstration at Edinburgh on July 2’.

Bob Geldof and the Make Poverty History crew have called for a million people to go to Edinburgh and form a giant white band around the city centre on July 2 – a reference to the ubiquitous Make Poverty History bracelets. But it seems a shame for a million people to travel all that way to be a giant bauble, a collective accessory to power. How about if, when all those people join hands, they declare themselves not a bracelet but a noose – a noose around the lethal economic policies [neo-liberalism] that have already taken so many lives, or lack of medicine and clean water, for lack of justice. A noose like that one that killed Ken.

Unfortunately for Klein, the Nigerian people, the Bolivian masses, and the Iraqi oil workers, poverty is NOT the result of the wrong, bad news neo-liberal polices of the West. Poverty is the ONLY policy for capitalism. As Marx proved, Capital’s wealth is the masses immiseration. It cannot be fixed by simply ‘forcing’ (how?) the ‘multinationals’ to change policies. Their profits dictate that Africa, Latin America and Asia continue to be plundered and pillaged. Poverty is the result of systematic expropriation of the labour of peoples and classes for profit. 500 years of colonization will not be conjured away by the World Social Forum or civil society making symbolic nooses to ‘force’ imperialism to negotiate better terms of exploitation.

The illusion that poverty can be negotiated out of existence is the illusion that capitalism can be reformed. These are the illusions that hold back the independent, armed organizations of the workers and poor peasants in Nigeria, Bolivia and Iraq. Not until the masses free themselves from these illusions can they act to solve the problem of poverty – and take back the wealth that was created by generations of labour and to socialize and plan the world economy in the interests of people and not profits.

From Class Struggle 61 May-June 2005

DISPELLING BAUDRILLARD

The arty intelligentsia of Auckland recently flocked to a public lecture by infamous self-promoting French ‘philosopher’ Jean Baudrillard. Like many French Professors who have become the darlings of the chattering classes, Baudrillard is an ex-Marxist who now professes a world-view in which social reality has been replaced by ‘hyper reality’. To make the point, ten years ago he claimed that the Gulf War did not happen? By that he meant that peoples’ experience of the war was on TV. This Western professor did not stop to think that the Iraqis killed in this war, or the US and UK troops who suffered from uranium poisoning, were not actors in a Hollywood war movie.

What’s worst about Baudrillard is that this stuff is boring word games. His first mistake was to say that language is more important than economics. Tell that to your bank manager or the judge. In a book called the Mirror of Production written back in 1973 Baudrillard closed his account with Marx. He said that Marxism was obsessed with production which doesn’t happen in reality. There is only the word ‘production’ and no ‘production process’. We only consume words, and if we consume goods this is only to reinforce the words. Why? Because capitalism requires us to believe the words in order to consume. Consume what? Words!

The fallacy in this thinking is that words are never enough to live on unless you are a professor. Think about it. Only professors get paid to produce words (journalists and other writers circulate words but don’t really produce them). Workers get paid to produce commodities which the boss sells to make a profit. This is how capitalism still works. The problem with Baudrillard and the intellectuals who consume his words is that he mistakes an interesting side Marx long ago explained how capitalism falsely presents itself as creating wealth in exchange. Commodities took on a fetishised existence as owners of their own value. Production disappeared up nature’s backside and only the circulation and consumption of commodities showed up as real. What Baudrillard does is take this phony existence to its absurd end point by claiming that not even the things we consume are real, only the signs or words that describe them. When nothing is real except the hype then that is hyper reality. The Gulf War did happen because it happened on TV. So what.

From Class Struggle No 38 April-May 2001

DISARMING CAPITAL

Why read Capital they said.It’s unintelligible and boring. Besides Marxism is dead.Wouldn’t it be better to throw everything into the anti-capitalist movement against the WTO and big business?

No we said. You should take Capital with you on demonstrations for something to read between police riots. It might have something to say about what kind of capitalism you should be anti. Besides it makes useful padding stuffed down your shorts.

What, all three (or is it four) volumes?You could make a suit of armour out of them – six books in all.

They thought we were joking but we said No never more serious. Marx said that we had to turn the idea of weapons into the weapon of ideas. You’re never better armed than with at least Volume 1 of Capital preferably the hardback edition.

Vol 1 is the best weapon because this is where Marx brings out his heaviest ideas.This is where he explains that the origin of surplus value and profits is in the labour time of the working class. That is a powerful idea because it says outright that capitalism lives off the surplus-labour of the workers.

It’s also a revolutionary idea which motivates us to go all the way to abolish wage labour and capitalist property and fight for socialism. There can be no half measures favoured by middle class greens and/or parliamentary cretins (to use Lenin’s term) bishops and social workers who are anti-bad capitalists and for kindly, caring ones.

Then we add Vol 2 to our armoury.Marx shows that capitalism has to build up a huge banking and state apparatus including the cops and army just to keep the capitalists profits rolling in. So there’s no point just being anti- the World Bank or big governments because they are merely the paid lackeys of the giant MNC’s.

The most powerful weapon of all is in Volume 3 where Marx proves that capitalism cannot survive without massive destructive crises that force the capitalists to destroy wealth, attack jobs and drive down workers’ living standards, health and life expectancy.

So there is no way that capitalism can be tamed, humanised, reformed, prettified or Blairised.To survive the workers have to unite, fight back and take over the ownership and control of the global economy.

If you don’t read Capital and understand it you won’t know this and your ideas will be those that the bosses pay to have drummed into you from childhood by your teachers, Hollywood, Rupert Murdoch, Tony O’Reilly and all.

We are not pacifists. We read Capital every week at:

Labour Forum, Avondale Community Centre. Mondays 7-30/9-30 pm. Next to Avondale Library, Rosebank Rd.

From Class Struggle No 37 February-March 2001

WHY WE CALL FOR A FIFTH INTERNATIONAL

A number of comrades in various parts of the world have asked why we are Fifth Internationalists. They usually assume that we are hostile to the Fourth International. Either we are anti-Trotskyists, Maoists, Cliffites, Tony Bennites, or we are misguided ‘Fourthists’ who have not justified our rejection of the ‘Fourth’ adequately. Here we try to explain as briefly and simply as we can what we are on about.

We can dispense with the first objection easily. We are Trotskyists, who recognise the founding of the Fourth International in 1938 as the world party of revolution to replace the degenerated 3^rd International. We oppose state capitalists of all sorts as anti-Trotskyists. Their calls for a 5^th International are an act of betrayal of the founding of the 4^th International.

But while we recognise the founding of the 4^th International, we are against its ‘refounding’. For the same reason as the earlier 2^nd and 3^rd Internationals were replaced by the 4^th we replace the 4^th because it betrayed the revolution. There can be no rebuilding of an international that has historically betrayed the international working class. By this we mean that the act of betrayal changed history for the worse from a revolutionary to a counter-revolutionary outcome.

This is where our critics claim we are unable to defend our position. Our critics are usually Fourthists who recognise the historic degeneration of the 4^th, sometimes as early as 1946, but mostly 1948 or 1951. But this term ‘degeneration’ means that the 4^th has yet to betray and can be rebuilt, reborn, refounded etc. Degeneration is not as serious a crime as betrayal.

We think that this is a copout. Degeneration is used to shift the blame from the leadership of the 4^th to external factors that caused the 4^th to be too small, too weak and too isolated to lead workers against the bourgeoisie, the reformists and the Stalinists. We think that these external factors were clearly present but do not provide an excuse for betrayal.

What do you call the leadership that led to such clear betrayals as Indochina in 1945, Yugoslavia in 1948, Bolivia in 1952? It cannot be said that the 4^th had so little influence in these situations that workers in 4^th Parties took no notice of their leaders. The fact is that in where there were revolutionary situations, the potential for victory was real, yet the 4^thist leaders abandoned their revolutionary duty and joined or adapted to popular fronts with Stalinists and elements of the bourgeoisie. The consequence of each was an historic betrayal that changed history decisively for the worse.

Popular Front

Trotsky called the popular front the "question of our time", and it was on this question that the 4^th betrayed. But is this test of betrayal of the same order of importance as the betrayal of the 2^nd in 1914 and the 3^rd in 1933? Those betrayals seemed clear cut. They were historic betrayals because they led to historic defeats. There was no going back after the 2^nd sided with imperialism. There was no going back after the 3^rd sided with fascism against social democracy. In both cases the international leaderships handed the international working class over to their bosses and certain death.

Is capitulation to a popular front a betrayal of the same order? Let’s hear what Trotsky had to say about this when the POUM joined the Popular Front and signed its program during the civil war in Spain. There is no doubting that Trotsky condemned this as a ‘betrayal’. He called on Spanish Trotskyists to "condemn and denounce mercilessly before the masses the policy of all the leaders participating in the Popular Front". "To grasp in full the wretchedness of the leadership of the "Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification" (POUM) and especially the former "Left Communists" – Andres Nin, Andrade, etc. –and to portray them clearly before the eyes of all the advanced workers." (The Spanish Revolution, p.214 Pathfinder ed). So there is no doubt on this question Trotsky referred to Nin and his party as the "Spanish betrayers" (p. 220).

Then follows Trotsky’s best known statement on the Popular Front:

"The question of questions at present is the Popular Front. The left centrists seek to present this question as a tactical or even as a technical maneuver, so as to be able to peddle their wares in the shadow of the Popular Front. In reality, the Popular Front is the main question of proletarian class strategy for this epoch. It also offers the best criterion for the difference between Bolshevism and Menshevism. For it is often forgotten that the greatest historical example of the Popular Front is the February 1917 revolution. From February to October, the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries, who represent a very good parallel to the "Communists" and the Social Democrats, were in closest alliance and in a permanent coalition with the bourgeois party of the Cadets, together with whom they formed a series of coalition governments. Under the sign of this Popular Front stood the whole mass of the people, including workers’, peasants’, and soldiers’ councils. To be sure the Bolsheviks participated in the councils. But they did not make the slightest concession to the Popular Front. Their demand was to break this Popular Front, to destroy the alliance with the Cadets, and to create a genuine workers’ and peasants’ government. " (p. 220 emphasis Trotsky’s)

So it is clear that Trotsky saw entry into a Popular Front and agreeing with its program as an historic betrayal making the difference between Bolshevism and Menshevism, and thus grounds for expulsion from the 4I. It remains to be seen when and how the Fourth International betrayed the revolution after his death, and whether these betrayals were historic, in changing the course of history.

How many historic betrayals is enough?

We will attempt to prove our point by looking at the cases of Indochina (1945) Yugoslavia (1948) and Bolivia (1952). In the cases of Indochina and Bolivia, colonial or semi-colonial sections were sufficiently large to be able to challenge the Stalinists for the leadership. Neither small size nor class composition provided excuses or mitigating circumstances for the betrayals that occurred. In each case the FI leadership played a supporting role by misleading these non-European sections into the traps of popular fronts.

The betrayal of the Vietnamese revolution was a failure of Eurocentric leadership of the 4I to overcome its own divisions to give a strong lead to correct elements of the Trotskyist movement that had illusions in the Stalinists. As a result the movement was split and one group, La Lutte, condemned the other, the LCI, for organising armed action committees to defeat the allies and the Stalinists in 1945 (Revolutionary History 3, 2, 1990).

In other words, the more petty bourgeois layers of VietnameseTrotskyists who looked to France for guidance were already adapting to the Eurocentric perspective that the Stalinists could be a progressive force. This was a tragic defeat because large sections of the workers and peasants voted for the Trotskyists rather than the Stalinists in 1939, and in 1945 were mobilised and armed and could have been won over from the Stalinist misleadership by uniting around a correct program. This betrayal was second only to that of Stalin in China in 1927, but this time the International Trotskyist leadership and not the Stalinists was responsible.

By 1948 the perspective that Stalinism could be progressive was to become official after a victorious Marshall Tito in Yugoslavia was pronounced an "unconscious Trotskyist" by the 4I leadership. From here on in, Trotsky’s perspective that Stalinism was a counter-revolutionary force in the worker’s movement became turned into its opposite – a progressive force able to create and defend workers’ states independently of a Trotskyist revolutionary party. The lessons of the Stalinists’ role in suppressing revolutions in Europe and IndoChina were forgotten in the enthusiasm of the Pabloite perspective of a long period of Stalinist rule.

In 1952 Bolivia was the first test case of this perspective. In 1952 a mass workers organisation, the COB (Bolivian Trade Union Centre), that had endorsed Trotsky’s Transitional Program, was led into a national popular front government by the Bolivian 4I party! Even more than in Vietnam, the masses were under the clear leadership of Trotskyism, only to be sacrificed within reach of the seizure of power to the popular front. Here there was no question of who was responsible since the 4I leadership openly endorsed joining the MNR government ( see J. Villa "A Revolution Betrayed?" in Revolutionary History 4, 3, 1992 or at http://www.geocities.com/guiamarx/).

Each of these betrayals has a common cause and it is the misleadership of the Imperio-centrist dominated centres and the breakdown of democratic centralism that resulted in the adaptation to the Stalinist popular front.

Failure of dialectics

Our explanation for these betrayals is that the imperialist based sections developed before and after the war an imperio-centrist deviation from Trotsky’s program in adapting to the labour aristocracy. Trotsky had already recognised the dangers inherent in the small international going into a world war inadequately prepared. He dealt with the hesitancy of those who opposed the founding of the 4I in quick measure. Bolsheviks had no option but to fight for the leadership of workers in an imperialist war or else by default that leadership would remain in the hands of the popular front.

This danger was unavoidable but could be lessened by rearming the leadership with Marx’s method and in revolutionary strategy and tactics. This meant removing the petty bourgeois intellectuals and their hostility to dialectics from the international leadership and basing the sections in the industrial working class for whom Trotsky said dialectics was natural. The decisive test was the war.

In Britain, Europe and North America the strategy was to turn imperialist war into civil war. The tactic was to counter petty bourgeois pacifism with the Proletarian Military Policy. The tactic was for the revolutionaries to enter the military and to agitate for a civil war perspective, counterposing to the chauvinist, racist and authoritarian policies of the military, proletarian policies of antiracism, workers internationalism, and rank and file democracy against the officers.

This was a daring tactic expressing a dialectical transformation through the vanguard acting on the opportunites offered by imperialist war. Unfortunately these opportunities were turned into opportunism in practice by the leaderships of the US and European sections. The reactionary aspects of the war bent and then broke first the PMP tactic and then the Leninist strategy. In the US Cannon and other SWP leaders were arrested as war resisters. Instead of explaining in full their program they pulled back from confronting the chauvinism, racism and authoritarianism of the US military and ruling class that had permeated into the labor aristocracy, and instead referred to Fascism as the ‘main enemy’.

What influence Cannon and the SWP could have had in rallying the ranks of the military against the war was lost in the compromise to retain the support of the chauvinist labour aristocracy of the US working class. This chauvinsm has dire consequences for Latin American workers and poor peasants too. The SWP (US) characterised Argentina (like the rest of the LA states) as a semi-colony, but never spelt out the full implications of this as it would have meant the prospect of nationalist wars against the US running up against the chauvinism of the US labor aristocracy. This set the seal on the mishapen development of LA Trotskyism which split between the majority who entered popular fronts with the national bourgeoisie, and thel minority that abstained from the national question and took a sectarian line. This imperio-centrist misleadership made the 1952 Bolivian betrayal virtually certain.

In Europe, where the tasks of the sections were complicated by Nazi occupation, the 4I sections split between the majority who joined the underground alongside the Stalinists fighting for democracy against fascism, and the few who bravely fought alone against their own military. As we have seen this pattern was repeated in IndoChina where the French parent section promoted its disastrous popular front policy that surely led to the beheading of the Trotskyist movement in a situation when a permanent revolution against the nationalists and imperialists was on the agenda.

In all cases the post-war reconstruction of the 4I failed to see these ‘deviations’ as decisive breaks from the Bolshevik/Leninist program. These capitulations to the popular front could not be corrected because their main critics in the colonies and semi-colonies were not given sufficient representation to outvote the imperialist sections. The betrayal in IndoChina was such as to destroy the Bolshevik/Leninist leadership and as in China two decades earlier to forestall permament revolution. It eliminated a powerful force that could have helped counter the Imperio-centrist sections. The calls of other semi-colonial sections such as that of Munis and Natalia Trotsky for greater representation failed to win support and they could not prevent the 4I from rolling down its path the self-destruction.

The wartime 'deviations' therefore led unchecked to the post-war liquidation of the 4I into the popular front politics of nationalist socialism. The defeat of workers at the hands of imperialism and its Stalinist ally disoriented the 4I theoretically and politically. The imperialist sections turned their subjective defeat into objective wishful thinking. Faced with the choice between a revolution that had failed, and a fait accompli in which new ‘workers’ states’ formed by Stalinists ‘from above’ offered a progressive way forward, the majority abandoned dialectics and the independence of the working class vanguard and sought refuge in any progressive, democratic, or popular movement going. Thus Cannon in the US and Pablo/Mandel in Europe retreated from Trotskyism into a sort of Menshevik fatalism which proclaimed the war was not over, or WW3 was just round the corner, or that the struggle for democracy would last 1000 years. A minority rejected the new states as contradicting the Marxist theory of revolution and became state capitalists (see article on Cliff).

Liquidationists break

The first big break for the liquidationists came with Tito’s victory in Yugoslavia in 1948. As we have seen this in itself was not a decisive betrayal by Trotskyists. Unlike Italy, Greece and Indo-China they played no role in Yugoslavia. But in adapting to Tito, the 4I virtually abolished their separate existence. All sections of the 4I welcomed the victory inYugoslavia as evidence that a popular Stalinist movement could overthrow the bourgeoisie. As much Trotsky had anticipated in the Transitional Program, but he did not then go on to say that this fact made the existence of the 4I superfluous. The 4I drew the opposite conclusion revising Trotskyism in its fundamentals back into Menshevism.

First, Stalinism as a counter-revolutionary caste was transformed theoretically into a force with both positive and negative features. Its positive aspect was its ability to overthrow the bourgeoisie. The negative was its exclusion of the working class from democratic participation in the process. But if Stalinists could do the former then the latter could be left to the vanguard with the lesser role of fighting for democracy and workers control during the transition to socialism. And if the Stalinist bureaucracy could act on behalf of workers, why not the petty bourgeoisie or even the progressive nationalist bourgeoisie? After all, all that would be necessary in such popular fronts would be the participation of the vanguard as a partner dedicated to completing the democratic transition to socialism.

So by 1948 Menshevism ruled where before the war Bolshevik Leninism had ruled. This applied equally to the minority that rejected the new states as workers’ states and who ended up as state capitalists. Their position was an idealist one also since they rejected any gains from the overthrow of the bourgeoisie unless they resulted from the actions of the working class itself. While earlier state capitalists had taken the purges, or the Stalin-Hitler pact as evidence of the lapse of the SU from socialism, a new layer of state capitalists once more found new grounds in ‘soviet expansionism’ on which to question the credentials of the SU itself to be considered a workers state.

The scene was set for Bolivia and Ceylon and beyond. In 1963 the ‘re-united’ 4I overcame its European/US rivalry and agreed to the Menshevik scenario of the Stalinist bureaucracy, the petty bourgeoisie, and even the national bourgeoisie, playing a progressive role in the transition to socialism. The Cuban revolution was the catalyst. The SWP (US) could now claim its own ‘workers’ state’ led by Castro the "unconscious YankeeTrotskyist". In effect, a petty bourgeois nationalist movement transformed itself into a Stalinist movement and then into a socialist movement by an objective process without the subjective agency of the revolutionary vanguard.

The ‘new’ vanguard was made up of social movements such as youth, blacks women and petty bourgeois nationalists, rather than the industrial proletariat. This amounted to a fundamental rejection of the vanguard party and the industrial proletariat on which it is based, and the Transitional Program and the dialectical method that informs it. Permanent Revolution was junked for the Menshevik conception of the completion of the democratic revolution in some more or less peaceful transition to socialism. In our view that these betrayals, and the fundamental shift from BL to Menshevism that caused them, have destroyed the 4^th International beyond res-errection.

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In the first part of this article we argued that the Fourth International has betrayed the international working class, so that it is necessary to build a new international. We call for a Fifth International to make it clear to workers that we reject the false claims of degenerate Trotskyism to any rebuilding, reforging or renewal of a bankrupt movement. But this does not mean that we abandon the foundation documents of the 4I any more than we do the 3I and 2I as a part of the living legacy of revolutionary communism. Here we explain why we believe no new revolutionary international can be built unless it reclaims the revolutionary theory and method of Trotskyism up to 1940.

We believe that the founding of the 4I was necessary in 1938. Trotsky was correct to draw the conclusion in 1933 that the 3I was past reform. The betrayal of the German workers to fascism was a decisive betrayal of the same order as that of 1914. From that point on, it was a matter of preparing the ground for a new international. The rush to war made it necessary to found the 4I in 1938 even while its cadres around the world were small in number. There was no alternative. A new imperialist war would open up the possibility of new revolutionary situations and the 4I had to be prepared to challenge the Stalinists and Social Democracy for the leadership of the working class. As we saw in the first part of this article, Trotskyists did challenge for that leadership and in Indo-China and Bolivia come within reach of victory.

Programmatic Foundations

While the 4I lacked in numbers and implantation in the working class in most countries it was well armed in its theory and method. The Transitional Program condensed the method and theory of Bolshevik-Leninism for the period and the developing situation of war and revolution.

Trotsky’s pre-war perspective which led him to predict either the victory of capitalism or socialism, was proven incorrect. But the survival of the SU and the failure of revolutions and political revolutions would not have disoriented him like it did his feeble followers. In 1923 he had quickly adjusted to the defeat of the German revolution against those who were to adopt the "3^rd Period" ultra-leftism of Stalin, and the Mensheviks who abandoned hope in proletarian revolution for the fatalism of the march of history. There is every reason to suppose that Trotsky would have corrected his perspective and quickly set about rebuilding the international to meet the new tasks facing it.

For example, Trotsky was correct in anticipating revolutions in the East and in foreseeing the possibility of revolutionary pressure forcing the petty bourgeois Stalinist leadership to expropriate the bourgeoisie to defend and extend its parasitic privileges. After all he was able to point to this as it happened in Poland and Finland in 1939. He would have had no problem explaining the ‘buffer states" well before 1948. And he would have led the 4I in the unconditional defence of those states. It seems that only the Marcy-Copeland faction of the SWP (US) was able to apply this method consistently to the Degenerate Workers States in Eastern Europe in their unconditional defence of the Soviet intervention against the restorations Nay Government in Hungary in 1956.

We can see therefore, that Trotsky’s founding of the 4I as an organisation and based on fundamental programmatic documents served to provide the guidance for Trotskyists in struggles in both the colonies and semi-colonies and the imperialist heartlands during and after WW2. Similarly, they can serve once more as foundation documents for a new international, along with the revolutionary heritage of the 2I before 1914 and the 3I up to and including the 4^th Congress in 1924. Hence we adhere to the Documents of the Fourth International , specifically the Transitional Program of 1938, and the Documents of the Emergency Conference of the 4I of May 1940, which include the "Imperialist War and the Proletarian World Revolution", and "The Colonial World and the Second Imperialist War".

Regroupment

Regroupment is a term used these days to mean splits from degenerate tendencies, and fusions with other groups and tendencies that share an agreed program. For us regroupment has to be on the basis of agreement on fundamental principles of program. This must mean sharing a common understanding of the transitional method, or which is the same thing, dialectics. It is this method and the principles of program that flow from it that is missing from post-war degenerate Trotskyism. However, there are many tendencies and individuals who are moving left or are capable of moving left and open to discussion around method and program. Inevitably the ability of groups to reach agreement is tested by events such as the restoration of capitalism in the workers’ states, the bombing of Iraq, imperialist war in Yugoslavia and other crucial struggles.

We split, along with the Bolivian and Peruvian sections, from Workers Power (LRCI) in 1995 over fundamental programmatic differences. These were first, a rightward adaptation of WP to left imperialism over capitalist restoration. WP preferred bourgeois democracy to Stalinist rule in Germany, the SU etc. They mistook the initial popular movements against the Stalinist regimes for political revolutions when they were in reality popular fronts for restoration. Second, in Yugoslavia in 1995. WP did not oppose the NATO bombing of Bosnian Serbs outright thereby tailing democratic imperialism. A full account of this split and its documentation can be found on our website in the International Bulletins 1, 2 and 3.

Of course underlying these programmatic differences was a difference in method. WP had abandoned its attempts to apply dialectics to its characterisation of the degenerate workers’ states. It began to identify the Stalinist regimes with the state as a whole and to call this state a bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie. This is an inconsistent position between Trotskyism and State Capitalism since the class nature of the bourgeois state (were the bureaucracy must now fill in for the bourgeoisie as class) is in contradiction with the class nature of workers property. WP had made a break from state capitalism in 1975, but under the pressure of the democratic counter-revolution against workers internationally, they began to retreat back towards the state capitalist position.

These sections that split formed the LCMRCI, or CEMICOR in Spanish, which is not yet a democratic centralist organisation. Thus the CWGNZ position on the 5I is not shared by the other groups in CEMICOR. In 1996 we entered discussions with the WIL and Workers Voice. Both groups split as a result but we failed to recruit members all the same. We have since collaborated in a number of joint statements with the LBI and POR (Argentina) but have yet to open formal discussions with them. The documents that relate to these groups can be found in the Internationalist Bulletins on our website.

For a New Revolutionary Communist International!


From Class Struggle No 33/34, June-July 2000

AUSTRALASIAN MARXISM AND INDIGENOUS STRUGGLES: PART 2

Part Two: Towards a Socialist Polynesia

Towards a Socialist Polynesia (TSP) was written by Owen Gager in mid 1982. It was the NZ Spartacist League's (a forerunner to the CWG) response to the events of the previous decade culminating in the Anti-Springbok tour movement, and the publication of Awatere's Maori Sovereignty. Against the petty bourgeois nationalism of both Maori and Pakeha, TSP tried to present a materialist analysis of the real history of race relations as a result of NZ’s white-settler colonisation and ongoing semi-colonial development. Petty bourgeois nationalists came out against British imperialism and its NZ 'imperialist' pretensions at the expense of Maori, and identified with Maori opposition to imperialism. In this way the struggle was posed in nationalist/racist and not class terms.

Gager's pamphlet shot through this nationalist front with a Marxist broadside. NZ was a capitalist colony. Capitalism was not imported into the South Pacific completely knocked down and ready for assembly. It had to be imposed by a process of bloody conquest and ‘primitive accumulation’. That meant dispossessing Maori by force if necessary. The object was not to destroy Maori society for its own sake (though some settlers regarded Maori as civilised only in their "graves" and one Atkinson, saw it as his scientific duty to "shoot the natives") but to destroy their primitive communist resistance to class society –capitalism. The Treaty was a fraud. It was a ‘trick’ admitted at the time, to pacify the savages while the pakeha ruling class was able to muster the imperial troops to take the land. All of this rotten history had one purpose –to convert tribal land into capitalist property, and to convert Maori into landless labourers so that they would be forced to work as wage workers and be exploited by capitalism.

TSP proved that this was the case by demonstrating that the history of Maori resistance to their expropriation and super-exploitation as waged workers was anti-capitalist. This process was part of the ongoing capitalist expansion into the South Pacific in the 19^th century and it set the pattern for NZ's semi-colonial development in the 20^th century. The post-war boom accelerated this process by propelling Maori from the rural reserves into the urban ghettos. But the end of the boom brought with it a massive shock as the new jobs, incomes and expectations were suddenly dashed. Awatere and the new generation of rebels expressed outrage at this betrayal of the dream of assimilation by economic progress. In its place they raised the demand "Aotearoa is Maori Land.!"

What TSP did was to point out clearly that it was a sham for a few petty bourgeois Maori to stage a national revolution when the majority of Maori were already detribalised and in the working class. Awatere was merely putting out the claim for a Maori fair share in kiwi capitalism. The sovereignty gambit was an opening shot designed to guilt-trip the petty bourgeois pakeha anti-racists behind the movement and to up the ante in the Treaty settlement process. TSP rejected this petty bourgeois nationalism as anti-migrant when Ripeka Evans, Donna Awatere's collaborator, called for Pacific Island migrants to "fuck off" home. Their "Black Unity" did not extend to their Polynesian cousins. But most pakeha anti-racists joined forces with petty bourgeois Maori nationalism at the expense of other migrants. To make it worse so did most of the so-called Left when they found reasons to call Awatere some kind of 'Marxist revolutionary'.

The Republican left.

TSP rubbished these so-called Marxists fawning on Awatere. For example, Peter Lee claimed that Awatere was some kind of antipodean Walter Benjamin (The Republican, #43 December 1982). Then Jesson took Awatere's reference to Gramsci at face value to mean that the Maori people could recover their "treasures" and lead the struggle of New Zealand's independence. He failed to notice that Awatere's ‘counter-hegemonic bloc’ fundamentally misrepresented Gramsci. Her bloc was not Gramsci’s class bloc where other classes were led by the working class. Rather it was an alliance where the working class was led by the Maori people! Thus the Republican Marxist" left of Jesson and Co took this to mean that the Maori Question could only be resolved by a national independence struggle in which the working class remained subordinated to the Maori as a people. (Jesson, "Reviewing the Maori Sovereignty Debate" The Republican, #48 December 1983; #49 February 1984). The Maori People were a liberating force who in alliance with Pakeha radicals had a common interest in a "Republic of Aotearoa" (The Republican, August 1984 "The Latest Contribution to the Maori Sovereignty Discussion"). But for Jesson the Maori as part of the proletariat and therefore as a force for socialism was non-existent. Since Maori People were a figment of petty bourgeois Maori nationalists, this was his way of putting the petty bourgeois in front of the working class in the national revolution.

Gager anticipated Lee's argument by showing that the European Marxist Walter Benjamin had long ago warned that appeals to tradition were not a basis for as progressive national movement but rather a reactionary ploy to divide and rule the working class:

"Walter Benjamin, in Illuminations, saw fascism's role as rendering politics aesthetic, while ‘communism responds by politicising art’ His understanding of the reactionary implications of making politics "cultural" still expressed the perspective of Leninism. ‘Cultural treasures’ writes Benjamin are the spoils of war between ruling classes which owe their origin not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries – in Maori society, all those who could not claim to be ariki or rangatira."

Gager continues: "Maori culture, as it is now, consists of the spoils of war which the white ruling class has plundered. Historical materialism, on the contrary, wishes to retain that image of the Polynesian past which unexpectedly appears to the Polynesian worker in crisis, singled out by history at the moment of danger. That danger affects both the content of Polynesian tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming the tool of the ruling classes. In every area that attempt must be made anew to wrest Polynesian tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. Only that militant will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the Polynesian past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from enemy if he wins. And that enemy has not ceased to be victorious". (TSP 22)

Stalinist Left

Even worse than the Republican left was the Stalinist left. Stalinist political groups such as the Workers Communist League (now defunct), the Stalinist SUP dominated trades unions and the Stalinophile (literally, loving Stalin) 'trotskyist' Socialist Action League (and their Young Socialists) flocked to the cause of Maori Sovereignty. TSP exposed them as racists who limited their support for Maori struggles to that of becoming equal under capitalism. But where the Republican left wanted Maori in the vanguard, most Stalinists wanted them in the rearguard. So when Maori workers overstepped their subordinate role in the labour movement they got dumped just as The Polynesian Resource Centre –Te Moana –was evicted from the Trade Union Centre in 1981 when Ripeka Evans criticised the white trade union leadership. "By 'allowing' Maori people to lead the 'anti-racist' struggle, but in limiting their demands to 'full equality' and 'minority rights', WCL actively suppresses the revolutionary potential of the Maori proletariat in order to maintain its 'leadership' of the white working class." (TSP, 9).

The reason for this was the rotten legacy of colonial racism embedded in the pakeha ‘labour aristocracy’ and ‘bureaucracy’, which were the class fractions the Stalinists were based on. This was amply demonstrated by the WCL.: "The Stalinist Workers Communist League claims it has a "class" analysis of racist and colonial oppression in New Zealand. But their programme itself is clearly racist. For them, the history of New Zealand's movement towards independence is a pakeha history, to which the Maori people are an appendage...For them, the achievement of white settler power based on denial of Maori suffrage in New Zealand is an "advance". The failure to see that white "independence" achieved at the expense of Maori independence assumed a reactionary and imperialist character leads logically to a recognition of Polynesian workers as a class with no revolutionary potential, and which must limit itself to a "miniumum programme" of democratic rights, forgetting 'independence' and 'socialism'." (TST 9)

Permanent Revolution

Against the petty bourgeois "Marxists" TSP argued that Maori were historically an oppressed people. It supported Maori self-determination up to and including secession if the majority of Maori demanded it. Support for self-determination by Pakeha workers would then be necessary to win Maori workers to the struggle for socialism. This was because Maori were trapped in the reserve army of labour and could not win equal rights under capitalism. Nor could the Treaty settlement process honour a fraudulent treaty. It could only fake this by creating local versions of Bantustans – like the independent Pacific Islands whose 'cultural treasures' were returned in exchange for the wealth that was spirited away. The whole process would have the effect of encouraging and reinforcing class divisions in Maoridom – an effect that capitalism could not possibly avoid – but in the name of sovereignty (now tino rangatiratanga). This would devolve the responsibility for poverty onto Maori themselves and not the oppressive racist state that has ruled over them for nearly two centuries. Therefore, Maori could only win their democratic rights by means of a ‘permanent revolution’ ie. socialist revolution.

TSP called Awatere and Co petty bourgeois nationalists. And hasn't she proved TSP right 1000 times as cheerleader of Maori in ACT! They were not the voice of the majority of Maori workers. They rapidly turned to "honouring" the Treaty. TSP predicted the role that petty bourgeois nationalists would play in getting "10% Kiwi capitalism" in the name of a re-invented cultural tradition. Events have proven Gager correct. The Treaty is still a fraud. The whole Treaty process has seen Maori coopted by class further into capitalism – a few have become bosses and the majority stayed workers with a widening gap between. It can be nothing else when the land, resources and labour-power expropriated for 150 years are now accumulated as capitalist private property. The token settlements that have been trickled back are little more than capitalised benefits advanced as seeding capital to spawn mini-corporations who will swim as sprats among the MNC sharks. The Treaty Settlements work like a local version of the World Bank/IMF. The local NZ state hands out seeding capital but locks everyone into the local economy, just as the IMF/World Bank locks it into the global economy on the terms of the imperialists.

Neo-Marxist analysis.

Who else has been able to see all this? What other left analyses have followed? And do they add or subtract from TSP? We can look as several recent attempts to develop an Antipodean Marxism on the Maori question before passing judgement on their strengths and weaknesses. They all put class before ethnicity or nationality and attempt to explain Maori politics in terms of the integration of Maori into global capitalism. Yet they all have problems in the way they integrate their analysis of the Maori struggle into the development of NZ's semi-colonial capitalism.

The strengths of Evan Poata-Smith's work is that it is based on an analysis of New Zealand as a capitalist country. Therefore Maori inequality/oppression is NOT the result of the primitiveness of Maori or the inherent racism of Pakeha. The Pakeha (and more recently the brown table) capitalist class is the problem. Poata-Smith recognises that what he calls "cultural nationalism" is not a strategy for liberation. It is similar to the concept of petty-bourgeois nationalism raised in TSP since it is middle class or petty bourgeois Maori who benefit from it at the expense the majority of working class Maori. "Real liberation for Maori will not occur without a fundamental transformation of capitalist society".

What weaknesses? These result from a failure to explain clearly how Maori fit into a class system or how the experience of exploitation of Maori workers by Maori capitalists will generate a break from the trap of a reactionary nationalism. So Poata-Smith does not explain how the transition to socialism has to have a concrete programme and revolutionary leadership to make it happen. While academic articles are not usually the place for calls for revolution, this failure is also evident in Andrew Geddes’ pamphlet The Way Forward to Tino Rangitiratanga which draws heavily upon Poata-Smith. Published by the Socialist Workers Organisation in 1997, apart from general statements about Maori liberation happening only in a "socialist society", there is not much indication in this pamphlet on how to get there.

Geddes uses the examples of fighting for democratic rights such as the funding of Maori language broadcasting, and the return of stolen land and taonga, as part of the struggle for socialism. True as far as they go. These are democratic demands that must be part of a transitional programme. But there are two problems with this. First, the SWO does not define self-determination to include the right to secede.

In anticipation of this, TSP stated that if the majority of Maori respond to their worsening economic oppression with a call for secession (independence), then pakeha workers must support them in order to win them to socialism. How this will happen needs to be spelled out. Specifically, pakeha workers need to give critical support the demands of urban iwi for inclusion in the Treaty settlements, and for a share of fisheries and other resources. But at the same time revolutionaries must fight to extend the struggle to the expropriation of all capitalist property on the grounds that both Maori and Pakeha have contributed generations of labour to create the wealth of the country. Concretely, this means supporting the return of Maori land, fisheries, compensation etc as part of a programme that, at the same time, calls for the nationalisation of the land and fisheries under workers' control (with Maori guaranteed traditional rights of use), the re-nationalisation of state assets without compensation, the expropriation of capitalist property, for a workers state able to plan the economy, and a workers’ militia to defend the state from the international bourgeoisie.

Second, the SWO does not integrate immediate, democratic demands with transitional demands that include many other demands to unite Maori and non-Maori workers in class struggle all the way to "workers power". Therefore there is a split between the immediate demands and the goal of socialism that becomes, like the petty bourgeois Marxists, a split between a minimum and maximum programme, in which Maori have minimum (democratic) rights, but Marxists have the maximum (socialist) solution. Ironically in a strongly Stalinophobic (literally a fear of Stalinism) socialist organisation, the petty bourgeois "Marxist" notion of stages is slipped into its politics in a disguised form of support for Maori liberation.

Against this petty bourgeois position, communists link immediate and democratic demands with fully revolutionary demands for workers’ militia and a workers’ state in a transitional programme. This requires concrete analysis to be fused with revolutionary practice. There is a need to relate the Maori and Class questions in a programme of action all the way to the seizure of power. First, the inability of capitalism to deliver to Maori has to be explained by reference to NZ's semi-colonial character, where the local economy is dominated by US, Japanese and Australian companies. Thus the polarisation of classes and divisions in Maoridom will intensify and further impoverish Maori workers and small farmers as well as squeeze Maori petty bourgeois and small capitalists down into the proletariat. The fate of the Sealords deal and the legal battle over urban iwis highlights the contradiction between class and nation dramatically. Only by applying the theory of NZ as a semi-colony in crisis to understand the clear limits to the Maori Nationalism struggle can it be turned into a united class struggle.

Pink-Greens.

What about the liberal left like Jane Kelsey. Has their critique of Rogernomics as incompatible with the Treaty resulted in any serious analysis or programmatic options? No. Because the cause is defined as merely a neo-liberal elite that can be defeated in parliament. What of the latter day radicals like Tama Iti etc? Where have all their protests gone? Gone to parliament under MMP, which is the latest fraud to be perpetrated on the workers and oppressed. From Mat Rata to Mason Durie, the Maori intelligentsia envisages Mana Motuhake as sharing power in the bourgeois state. Maori will have their own economic base and governance. All that is required is for Maori to mobilise as a people and assert their right to share power under a new constitution. Even the centrifugal forces of globalisation can be offset by counter-hegemonic indigenous rights movements backed by international law.

For example, Elizabeth Rata applies Regulation Theory to NZ and sees tribal capitalism as a post-Fordist mode of regulation. That is, she recognises that Maori have been coopted into state-defined tribal entities to produce a settlement that is in the interests of international capital. The problem is that Regulation theory is neo-Ricardian rather than Marxist. It explains that the exploitation of Maori requires a political conspiracy on the part of the white ruling class to deceive Maori by reinventing tribalism so the white elite can keep most of the land and wealth ripped off under colonialism. ("The Theory of Tribal Capitalism" in Review –The Fernand Braudel Centre, Vol XX11 (3) 1999). This is similar to Kelsey’s view that if a section of the ruling class is imposing a neo-liberal mode(l) of regulation (capitalist conspiracy) then it must be possible to mobilise to remove that mode(l) by a process of radical social democratic evolutionary socialism. But while the pink-greens still regard the issue as about land or capital –ie. an economic base of sorts, to which end political and cultural movements are put, the post modernists see it as about indigenous rights and nothing else. The means become the dead end.

The promised land: post-modernism meets Maori

Now that most of the Maori compradors have been bought off and the pakeha liberal left have bought into the honouring of the Treaty the debate is now about how much? First the fiscal cap was imposed and rejected. Then a sped-up process of settlements by iwi rather than hapu. But the liberal nationalists are satisfied that the Maori nation can now take its place alongside the pakeha nation in a multinational commonwealth of difference. All that is required is some attitudinal change and goodwill. So we see the post-modern turn as Maori are transformed into fully blown 'subjects' in the marketplace –with the past "pardoned". The Treaty will be turned into the base document of a Constitution. What the new right and the postmodernists all agree on, is that the market creates the conditions for freedom and these can now be realised. Every ethnic group and nationality can take their place in international society – with their "difference" recognised and respected. The Treaty Industry becomes part of the 'culture industry' looking to protect Maori 'culture' as a commodity that can fund their ethnic "difference". This means that "difference" becomes reduced to consumer taste ie. a difference that the sovereign consumer notes when s/he buys a commodity. Maori have been re-landed and re-branded. The ‘promised land’ of liberation becomes the freedom to buy and sell in the market. But as we know NZ semi-colonial capitalism will deny that freedom to most Maori so long as we do not revolutionise the relations of production.

Proletarian politics

As TSP predicted, most Maori "honoured" as a reserve army of labour find themselves trapped still in the proletariat with the obvious consequences. There are few bosses. Not because of 'stone age' economics like neo-liberal mouthpiece Gareth Morgan thinks, but because if you didn't have individual title you couldnt raise capital. Talk about the new right blaming the victim. Today the corporatisation of iwi opens up the capitalist road, but too little too late to get anywhere. As we have seen, NZ semicolonial capitalism is in the hands of the MNC's. They won’t sacrifice their profits for the sake of any Treaty. We have "the GAP" instead. Maori still own no more than about $10 Billion in assets. The majority earn well below the average wage. Maori youth unemployment is over 20%. The new Maori bosses' economic prospects are as small fish among the sharks, not good. The self-employed have been dispossessed. Small farmers and fishers swamped by globalisation. Which class will benefit and what will the masses do? Are urban iwi any answer? No. But as multi-ethnic working class organisations they have potential. This potential is not to set up a separate backward economy for an urban peasant existence, or try to compete in the corporate rat race, but to mobilise Maori along with all workers through the unions to expropriate the national wealth as their historic stake in socialism.

So the answer is to transform the national question into the class question. It means not trying to survive in 'bantustans' like the Pacific Island neo-colonies, but taking a proletarian stand to take back the lot! Why stop at reclaiming bits of land etc on the bosses Treaty terms? That's still fraud. Maori as proletarians helped make this country. Accumulated generations of surplus labour is congealed as the wealth of the nation. The working class needs a revolutionary programme to unite the masses in the struggle for socialism. Nationalise the land under workers control with Maori rights guaranteed! Re-nationalise privatised state assets without compensation under workers control! Expropriate capitalist corporates! Fight for a workers’ and working farmers' government based on workers councils and militia! For a socialist republic of Aotearoa in a federation of Asia/Pacific socialist republics!

The Development of Capitalism in New Zealand: Towards a Marxist Analysis

John Macrae and David Bedggood

First published in Red Papers No 3, Summer 1978/79

1.0 INTRODUCTION

In this paper we present the outline of a Marxist analysis of the development of capitalism in New Zealand. Given the circumstances under which we are working, it is obvious that much that will be covered requires further research and further thought. Nevertheless, it reflects a point in the evolution of our thinking. It also repre­sents therefore as much a project of research as a definite statement of progress.

We shall show that N.Z.'s "national development" has been determined by its role as a semi-colony (white-settler colony or "colony proper" as distinct from colony) within the world-wide division of labour under capitalism. In taking this approach, we are engaged in theoretical class struggle against bourgeois conceptions of the causes of "development" which focus on there appearances and 'isolated instances' which are taken to represent the total social reality.

The method employed is that of Marx and Lenin, together with some reformulations and extensions of their work, which seeks to understand the working of the Capitalist Mode of Production (CMP) in terms of certain "laws of Motion" which operate not in any vulgar deterministic sense, but as a complex "structural causality" determined under spec­ific historical conditions of class struggle. Adopting this method, we intend to demonstrate its power in explaining the development of capit­alism in N. Z. as a complex inter-relation of economic, political and ideological causes which are determined in the "last instance" by the historic expansion of the CMP into the lands of white-settlement in the nineteenth century.

Rest of Part 1, and Parts 2, 3 and 4 can be found at
http://maximumred.blogspot.com/