International MayDay, One Class! One Fight! Occupy, it’s our right!

On this day ever since the hanging of four workers in Chicago in 1886, arising out of a strike for the 8 hour day, workers around the world have come together in marches, rallies and strikes, to celebrate their common membership of an international working class that continues to struggle against all its class enemies for its emancipation from the chains of capitalism.

The struggle continues because international capitalism cannot survive without a constant increase in the exploitation and oppression of every worker who produces its profits. In the process it destroys resources, steals land, closes factories and expels workers from production. Most destructive of all, it recruits jobless workers to go to war and invade countries like Afghanistan and Iraq to seize their scarce resources.

When workers resist and try to reclaim their countries, their resources, schools and factories, they are asserting their right to own and control the means of production necessary for life. Here we can see the common factor behind all of these struggles; it is the spontaneous struggle of all those excluded from production or trapped in wage slavery, to assert their class independence and take control of the means of production to meet their basic survival needs.

Mayday 2006 Unite all the struggles around the world

Today many such struggles are taking place around the world. Peasants are fighting to retain or get land; factory workers are fighting to survive closures; women workers are fighting to keep their families together and against violence; young workers are fighting for an education, and decent jobs, a living wage and social rights. Unemployed recruited into imperialist armies or warlords militias are refusing to follow orders. Iraqis, Afghans, Africans, Melanesians, Colombians, etc. are resisting imperialist occupations and fighting for their national independence.

Peasants and agricultural workers in the Solomon Islands, in Bolivia and Brazil, India and China, Nigeria and South Africa, resist the removal of their land for capitalist agriculture, or extraction of oil, gas, timber or minerals etc. by the giant multinationals based in the imperialists countries. Many of these peasants are indigenous peoples who retain their own social structures and cultures. Their universal response to these attacks is to occupy the land.

Take the land, but join forces with workers and also take the trucks, the ports and the banks!


Industrial workers, whose wages and conditions deteriorate under the increasing exploitation forced on them by the IMF, World Bank and WTO, resist in many countries. In Latin America, around a third of the work-age population is without work, and another third lives in the ‘black’ economy of undocumented, super-exploited, dangerous, virtual slave labor. Where workers are cast out of production, their instinct is to occupy and continue production.

Turn the occupations into expropriations!

In the United States the 12 million undocumented ‘illegals’ have poured into the country from the South, West and East, and perform the most menial, dangerous and servile work. They are under immediate threat of being criminalised, arrested, deported, or turned into ‘guest’ workers regulated and repressed by Bush’s Department of Homeland Security. Wherever ‘illegals’ stand up and fightback, as they are doing today in the US, they are criminalized, deported or locked up in the Guantanamos of this world.

Long live the ‘illegal’ worker! We are all ‘illegals’!
Close down the Guantanamos!

Women workers continue to bear the brunt of the worst exploitation and oppression. On top of the burden of child care and support, women still do the low-paid, menial, insecure work. As the capitalist crisis of the 80s and 90s has shifted much industry from core capitalist states to the ‘third’ world, women have filled many such jobs in the maquiladores of Latin America, the shantytowns of Africa, and factory dormitories of China and India, and borne the brunt of family breakdown, rape and murder. Because of this women take the lead in struggles for land rights, indigenous rights, factory occupations, and human rights. They are asserting their right to break out of domestic slavery and to take ownership and control of the means of production.

Forward the woman worker!
Abolish domestic slavery!

Young workers are also among the most vulnerable, facing, unemployment, discrimination and ‘precarite’ - lack of job security. In December of last year the unemployed youth of the migrant communities in France rebelled against the police as the agents of capitalist repression. In March of this year university students, high school students and workers in auto, rail, and the state sector took to the streets to stop the latest reactionary labor law giving bosses’ freedom to hire and fire young workers. They occupied universities, schools, and blocked railways and roads to prove that they too can take over and control, if only symbolically for now, the means of production, distribution and exchange.

Occupy the schools and universities under student/worker control !
For free education to all!
 
Soldiers are workers or peasants in uniform, drafted to fight the wars of their bosses by killing and looting the peoples of the colonies and semi-colonies. They are mainly poor, unemployed youth drawn from peasant, migrant, or stateless families. If these troops refused orders the capitalist military machine would disintegrate. In Bolivia, Venezuela and Iraq some ordinary ranks have mutinied against their officers and sided with the masses under attack.

For rank-and-file control of the military! For the formation of rank and file councils!
For workers' and peasants' militias!


Socialism is the only way out

Global capitalism in the 21st century is in a crisis in which the forces of production are being destroyed so that capitalists can continue to profit. Marx long ago predicted that capitalism would ultimately dig its own grave by creating a working class that would overthrow the private owners to claim social ownership of the forces of production.

This is where we are today. Peasants, factory workers, women workers, youth, conscripts; the majority are being cast out of production. This is what Marx and Engels meant in the Communist Manifesto when they raised the slogan: “Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains”! Despite all those doomsayers who claim that socialism is dead, or those wheeler-dealers who claim that capitalism can be reformed by ‘democratic’ , ‘humane’ politicians, the system has them all in its grip. The producing classes cannot survive by placing any hopes in reforming the system. This can only lead to further social destruction, climactic disaster and fascist barbarism.

The only solution for the worlds’ workers is to expropriate the means of production from the private owners for our own use. When we are excluded from production, or forced into slave labor, we must occupy and put the means of production under our own control. Where workers have done this as in Argentina and Venezuela, they have proved that bosses are superfluous.

We are one class; the working class, and one fight; the fight for socialism

Standing between workers and socialism are all the enemies of their class. They are those who seek to contain and divert the workers struggle to expropriate the capitalists into compromises, deals, and sellouts to save the bosses skins. These are the false friends of workers – the union officials who are paid by the bosses state to prevent workers from running unions democratically; the political parties funded by the bosses state with false names like ‘labor’ , ‘socialist’, ‘worker’ or 'communist', that promise workers, land, jobs, health and education, but instead cut jobs, wages and benefits to guarantee bosses good profits.

Today the most dangerous class enemies of all the peasant, wage slaves, women, youth, and conscripts, who are struggling to take control of the means of production, distribution and exchange, are those false ‘socialists’ who tell the workers to put their faith in strong leaders who can bring about socialism from ‘above’; in particular, those in the World Social Forum who look to Castro, Chavez and even Lula, to solve their problems for them.

No! To defeat the class collaborationist World Social Forum we must build a new revolutionary communist international. The only guarantee of socialism is the independent, armed organisation of our One Class! Peasants, factory workers, women, and youth workers, united in workers councils everywhere; and our One Fight! Turn occupations all into expropriations as the basis of a socialist planned world economy!

Communist Worker Group (NZ) Member of the Leninist-Trotskyist Fraction

From Class Struggle 66 April/May 2006

CHINA RETURNS TO CAPITALISM

We follow up our report last issue of the NZ/Hong Kong trade and investment deal with a statement of our position on capitalist restoration in China. We recognise that when the 14^th Party Congress voted to introduce ‘market socialism’ in 1992 this put the revival of the market and the profit motive on th3e agenda. However the intention to restore capitalism is not the same as doing so. In fact it has taken another ten years to overcome the plan and re-introduce the law of value as the determining influence on the economy. Today we can say that joining the WTO has completed the process of restoration to the point where the market now dominates the plan. The class nature of the Chinese state is now capitalist.

When in 1991 the Soviet Union succumbed to 75 years of bourgeois encirclement and bureaucratic mismanagement, the attempt by the Yananev ‘hardline’ coup plotters to kidnap Gorbachev gave Boris Yeltsin the pretext he needed to seize power and fast-forward the ‘shock treatment’ restoration process. Both Yeltsin and Yananev were restorationists, but Yananev and Co wanted to avoid the breakup of the SU and keep the Communist Party in power overseeing a ‘slow track’ transition to capitalism so their clique could become the new bourgeoisie.

The defeat of their botched plot allowed Yeltsin to eliminate his rivals, begin the breakup of the SU and ban the CP. Within a year Yeltsin had implemented World Bank plans to demolish the workers’ plan, privatise key sectors of the economy and to open up Russia to foreign investment and trade. Between the seizure of power and the restoration of capitalism less than a year had elapsed.

In China that same year, 1992, the 14^th Party Congress took the decisive turn towards ‘market socialism’. In China there was no major section of the bureaucracy pushing for a fast track restoration. The plan would be phased out over the next decade as the economy was progressively freed up to capital investment.

By taking the ‘slow track’ to restoration the ruling party hoped that it could convert itself into the new national bourgeoisie without a Soviet-type social upheaval. But while the intention to restore capitalism clearly indicated that the bureaucracy was committed to restoring capitalism, it was insufficient to constitute a transformation in the class character of the state. The bureaucracy could not ‘will’ the market into existence overnight. It took another ten years before the bureaucracy could replace the plan with the market.

The point where a new class comes to power is easier to determine when a decisive revolutionary overturn occurs as in October 1917 in Russia, 1945 in Eastern Europe, or 1949 in China. Each of these overturns saw a new class take power by force of arms. In each case the armed workers or the Red Army took state power. If the bourgeoisie was allowed to continue production for profit this was to accumulate capital for use in the transition to a socialist state.

In each case, the new workers state operated a form of ‘state capitalism’. But as Lenin explained, this was ‘capitalism’ dominated by a ‘workers state’. That is, the market was subordinated to the plan. Only when the bourgeoisie refused to cooperate or began to threaten counter-revolution, was ‘capitalist’ property eliminated. However, in Yugoslavia, as the capitalist world allowed a form of private ownership to persist indefinitely, elements of capitalist production for profit remained part of the workers’ state.

Just as a workers’ revolution can coexist with some ‘capitalist’ social relations such as the New Economic Policy in the SU in the 1920s, the route back to capitalist restoration will usually begin with ‘market reforms’ as the bureaucracy attempts to stimulate the planned economy and defend their privileges.

. What is fundamental is the essence of property relations as either production for profit or production for use. The class nature of the state is determined by the social relations it reproduces. Therefore the change in class rule is given by the state’s actual reproduction of social relations of production for profit or for use.

In a DWS the turnover from a degenerate workers’ state into a restored capitalist state involves the transformation of the bureaucracy from a parasitic caste into a new class. As a caste the bureaucracy has usurped workers power and rules the state in order to preserve workers property as long as it can derive privileges from it.

But once the plan ceases to generate privileges the bureaucracy is forced to convert itself into a bourgeoisie. But if cannot do this by wishful thinking. It does not become a new bourgeoisie until it has destroyed the dominance of the plan and substituted the law of value. Thus the conversion of the bureaucracy into a bourgeois class comes only when it has been successful in restoring the dominance of the market.

In China, therefore, the change in the class nature of the state could only occur at the point where the state successfully introduced the law of value to re-value planned production in terms of market value. It took the Chinese bureaucracy a decade from 1992 to act on its intention to overturn planned production for use and restore capitalist production for profit.

. The decisive point of the turnover is the penetration of the law of value to the extent that ‘value’ is no longer determined by ‘use-value’ but by international ‘exchange-value’. In our view this became the reality when China joined the WTO agreeing to abide by its rules of free trade and investment.

For a Socialist Revolution in China!
Defend China against Imperialism!

Class Struggle No 40 August-September 2001