FOR A SOCIALIST ALLIANCE

From Class Struggle 50 May-June 2003

The Labour government has moved right as part of a popular front government that is openly attacking workers in Afghanistan, Iraq and here at home. The Greens and Alliance are committed to the dead end parliamentary road to reform capitalism. We need to build a new working class alliance that can fight for socialism in the unions and on the streets. Is a Socialist Alliance the next step? We think that it is provided that it is a democratic united front that can draw workers into action and is not a bureaucratic exercise dominated by tiny left groups.

Time to build an alternative to Labour

After the last election we wrote in Class Struggle that what we need in NZ is a Socialist Alliance. This was clear from Labour’s move to the right during its first term 1999-2002. We went into the election with the view that Labour was still marginally a bourgeois-workers party (with an obvious bourgeois program, but with the support of significant sections of the union movement- weak as it is). For that reason, while thousands of ordinary workers in big unions like the Engineers, PSA and Service and Food, had illusions in Labour as ‘their’ party, it was tactically necessary to get Labour re-elected to rid these workers of any remaining illusions that Labour acted for the working class.

As we expected the re-election of Labour saw a further shift to the right and a retreat from any pretence of a pro-workers program towards an open accommodation with the US war aims and international finance capital (free trade agreements, GATS etc). Labour was now divorced from the Alliance (which after the split with Anderton and the Alliance Council broke over Labour’s pro-war position on Bush’s ‘war on terror’) and shacked up with a fly by night Peter Dunne’s ‘United Future’ Party. Perhaps the time was ripe for workers to strike out and form a new workers party that did put the interests of workers centre stage.

Nearly a year later we think that we were right. Not only is Labour now part of a popular front government (i.e. Dunne’s‘United Future’ is a petty-bourgeois democratic party) but its rightward trajectory is now confirmed with the hardening of its pro-imperialist stance advocating the UN cover for Bush’s war on Iraq(including new anti-terror legislation directed at NZers). Many NZ workers now see Labour as engaged in an attack on workers in Afghanistan, Iraq and in NZ. If there were an election tomorrow we would stand worker candidates based in the rank and file of the unions.

But standing on what platform? We don’t want workers to vote for the Greens or Alliance. They are reformist parties that compromise with the bosses and offer only the dead end of the parliamentary road. Nor do we want to create a new Labour Party to repeat the history of old Labour’s betrayals. We want workers’ candidates opposed to imperialist war, but also opposed to the causes of war –capitalism and imperialism. That means standing on a working class platform to end capitalism and replace it with socialism. A platform that starts with immediate demands for what workers need now, such as cheap power and jobs for all, and going on to raise the demands that will be necessary to get them, such as the social ownership of the means of production and a Workers Government to plan for a socialist economy.

Socialist Alliance in Britain and Australia

The British and Australian Socialist Alliances offer some lessons on how not to build a Socialist Alliance. The whole point of an alliance of socialists is to unite the revolutionary left into a high level United Front as the basis for building a mass revolutionary workers party.

However, for this to happen there has to be inclusiveness of the revolutionary left around an anti-capitalist program; democracy in the organisation where all groups have a voice in proportion to their size; and discipline in doing united front work.Such a UF would then force the divided left to democratically organise around common struggles and to openly and honestly debate their differences. This is the best way to ensure that those with the best method and program win mass worker support and defeat opportunist and sectarian currents in the workers movement.

In England there are problems with inclusiveness, democracy and discipline. The English SA began as a purely electoral alliance and is heavily dominated by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) as its own ‘front’. The SWP uses its size to pick and choose what issues the SA will campaign on making it little more than an ‘open branch’ of the SWP. The withdrawal of the Socialist Party (SP), the only other large left tendency, from the English SA has consolidated SWP control. Ironically, in Scotland, the SP has been influential in forming the Scottish Socialist Party and forcing the SWP to dissolve itself and form a faction inside it. The SP should return the favour in England.

But the result, in England and Scotland, is not genuine United Fronts. They are electoral fronts in which two dominant parties call the shots and prevent or limit the mobilisation of workers around important industrial struggles. This means that because strong united front actions are bureaucratically manipulated, the parties that run the SAs do not get their bad programs exposed.

In Australia the Democratic Socialist Party, which numerically dominates the Australian Socialist Alliance, has decided to liquidate itself into the ASA. Its points to the SSP as the example it wants to follow. This demonstrates that the DSP is confident of its size and program and does not need to use its party organisation to control the SA. The DSP would then become a tendency(like the SWP in the SSP) among others in a single organisation.

This move was opposed by the ISO (linked to the British SWP but much smaller proportionately then its British ‘mother’) and the Freedom Socialists, who want the SA to remain a ‘United Front’, and by Workers Power which wants SA to campaign to build a mass revolutionary workers’ party.At a recent meeting the DSP won its position and the Australian SA is now officially a ‘multi-tendency’ party. Formally, each ‘tendency’ is free to continue as an independent party with its own program, but in practice, the majority in the ASA will tend to be dominated by the DSP and independents who want to create a ‘left’ reformist party on a minimum program.

Socialist Alliance as a United Front

The question is: given the mixed experiences in Britain and Australia, how can an Alliance of left parties be built as the basis of a future mass revolutionary workers’ party in NZ? The answer is to build it as a United Front and not as a single party. People who call themselves ‘socialist’ differ greatly in what they mean by it and how to get it. They need to be convinced to become consistent revolutionaries by the testing of their ideas in practical actions. A NZSA should be based on united campaigns to advance the interests of workers –such as rebuilding the unions under rank and file control, anti-war action, defence of migrants, opposition to police state etc.

While unity on such campaigns is essential, at the same time there has to be complete freedom of criticism and action by all the groups that belong – that is the right to form ‘factions’ in the SA. This would allow all left groups to join – inclusiveness – the SA as a United Front where common actions, such as elections, strikes, anti-war action etc can be made – discipline – but at the same time be free to fight for their own political program –workers’ democracy.

Where groups differ in principle on basic questions, they should have the right to independent political action. For example, CWG is part of a regroupment process with revolutionary Trotskyists on two continents in an effort to unite ‘principled’ Trotskyists around a revolutionary program and in a Leninist/Trotskyist international.Our program has many points that would not be agreed to by the other revolutionary lefts currents in NZ. Our differences have been well aired in Class Struggle over the years.

An important difference today would be our position of ‘Victory for Iraq’ in the war against imperialism. Others in a NZSA would not necessarily agree to the slogan ‘arms to Iraq’. On this question we would insist on our right to act independently of SA.A healthy Socialist Alliance that worked as a United Front on this basis would create some of the conditions necessary for the formation of a mass revolutionary workers party.

We have argued that there is a need to form a SA-like United Front in NZ that will create a forum in which the revolutionary left can combine on common actions but remain free to debate their differences in the workers movement. We should start by calling on the other revolutionary left groups to discuss a principled basis for a Socialist Alliance.

To facilitate this CWG puts forward some basic foundation principles for discussion:

Capitalism as an exploitative social system cannot be reformed by parliament.

Our goal is socialism –the social ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.

Socialism will only come from the self-organisation of the working class.

An alliance of socialists should be based on the method of the United Front and of workers’ democracy.

Workers Democracy means complete freedom to debate and discuss and hold minority positions, but unity of action once majority decisions are taken.

Where fundamental political differences exist, members will be free to act independently (that is, in their own name) of Socialist Alliance without losing their membership rights.

WHO ON THE LEFT PASSED THE IRAQ TEST?

From Class Struggle 50, May-June 2003
War concentrates politics even as politics concentrates economics. The US/UK attack on Iraq has brought to the surface all the contradictions and deep antagonisms of capitalism today. Who saw the war as the outcome of imperialism in crisis forced to recolonise Iraq to get its oil? Who on the left understood this and took the next step to defend Iraq against imperialism? Those who did are the core of a new revolutionary international. Those who didn’t must be condemned as betrayers of the socialist revolution.

We can dispense with the reformist left who looked to the UN to deal with Iraq. These forces already conceded that the UN had the authority to impose sanctions on Iraq.They wanted a UN backed invasion. In other words they rejected the fundamental revolutionary position that Iraq is an oppressed country and must be unconditionally defended against imperialism. The UN is a ‘den of thieves kitchen’ and represents the deals that the imperialists make to advance their interests.

But the thieves fell out when the US/UK invaded Iraq unilaterally instead of backing the French and German imperialists plan of using the UN to disarm Iraq. So the reformist left championed the ‘peaceful’ imperialists against the US and UK. Thus the reformist left sides with one set of imperialist powers, with just as bad a history of colonial oppression, against another. In the event that the rivalry between these powers turns to open war, these reformist leaders would send their workers to war on the side of their imperialist bosses just as they did in 1914.

There was another more leftwing tendency however, which did not look to the ‘peaceful’ imperialists to deal with Iraq. This is the pacifist left who rejected the UN sanctions on Iraq as much as they rejected a UN backed invasion. They saw that the so-called ‘peaceful’ imperialists opposed the US and UK invasion because that would mean risking their own oil concessions in Iraq. This tendency therefore did not back the UN solution, but instead put their hopes in building a mass movement that would “stop the war”. They even attempted to mobilise workers in unions to take industrial action to prevent the ‘coalition’ military forces from being deployed in Iraq.

They saw that this was a war by the US and UK for oil. It was an attack by a rich and powerful country against a weak and largely defenceless country. Under the pressure of the war on Iraq, when millions marched against the war, and when thousands of Iraqis fought against the invasion, there was a move of some on the left, such as the CPGB, towards a ‘defence of Iraq’ position. But in practice the defence of Iraq was translated into ‘stopping the war’ at home. They said the best way to defend Iraq was to stop the invasion by a combination of sit-ins, marches and strikes. This fell far short of the necessary ‘defence of Iraq’ position of revolutionary Marxists. Why?

To turn the ‘defence of Iraq’ into ‘stopping the war’ at home fails to take the class logic of imperialist war to its necessary conclusion.The defence of Iraq means the ‘defeat’ of the imperialist oppressor not only at home, but also in Iraq. It means a ‘Victory’ to Iraq as an oppressed country.The responsibility of revolutionaries in the imperialist countries is to put their class before their country. They have to mobilise to smash the enemy at home, but they also have to try to smash the enemy wherever it goes to war against an oppressed country. Their duty does not stop at national borders. Class internationalism means that workers have no country.

The crucial test for revolutionaries in this war was to go beyond fighting the ‘enemy at home’ and to join with the oppressed in the trenches of Iraq. This meant entering a military bloc with the national leadership of Iraq, the Ba’athists, for the defence of Iraq. This meant worker volunteers siding with Iraq and being prepared to kill workers in uniform from the same oppressor country as themselves. And it meant doing so with a program that called for the workers to form an independent, armed force that would fight to take the lead in the defence of Iraq away from the Ba’athists and the Clerics.

Almost all the revolutionary left failed this test.Its ‘defensist’ position remained one that did not commit Western workers to class internationalism. The IST (SWO in NZ) took the opportunist position that Iraq should be defended by…its own people, which practically means under its existing leaderships. But should, or could, its ‘people’ defend it under such leadership? While the masses overwhelmingly wanted to defend Iraq, they did not have the means to do so.They were subordinated to a national reactionary leadership who disarmed them for fear that they would rise up against the oppressive regime.

That’s why revolutionaries do not sow illusions in clerical or bourgeois leaders being reliable anti-imperialist fighters. Their class interests are to compromise with imperialism not defeat it. Therefore, to call for the ‘people’ of Iraq to defend their country without putting forward any means of freeing the masses from their treacherous leaders, is not to defend Iraq at all.

Others, like Workers Action, took a defensist line that refused a military block with Saddam. They said that there was no “mass progressive nationalist movement” to support against Saddam. This made a united front to defend Iraq impossible. In other words revolutionaries should abstain from the struggle inside Iraq until Saddam was removed and some progressive nationalist movement came into being. How do these ‘revolutionaries’ think this was going to happen?

This is an ultra-left position similar to the Iraqi Workers’ Communist Party that was for the simultaneous defeat of Saddam and the US/UK forces. In effect this meant sitting out the war away from the fighting and waiting until history was ready for them to intervene.This ultraleft position is in reality no different from the opportunist one, imperio-centric, because ‘history’ by default is the victory of ‘democratic’ imperialism, overthrowing the Ba’athist regime and creating the conditions for the bourgeois democratic revolution.

What stopped these ‘revolutionaries’ from making a military bloc with the Ba’athists?The fact is that they are embedded in the racist, chauvinist,labour aristocracy or petty bourgeois layers of the labour movement.They will not side with the oppressed if this means that workers at home see them as unpatriotic or traitors. This means that their ‘internationalism’ is merely a mask for their ‘nationalism’.

In the case of the opportunists, their ‘internationalist’ tasks are defined to mean that they, the imperio-centric working classes alone, can defeat imperialism. Workers Action for example got completely carried away by the anti-war movement. “…we have seen the creation of a phenomenal political power across the globe that can start to challenge US imperialism. The anti-war demonstrations on February 15 have had an enormous impact throughout the world, and have opened up a new era in politics”.(Workers Action, 21, 2003 page 2). Shame this ‘new era’ in politics did not stop the war.

‘Talking up’ the anti-war mobilisation as a ‘serious challenge’ to US imperialism means ‘talking down’ workers going to other countries to kill workers in uniform from their own country and challenging colonial oppression as the material basis of the racism and chauvinism in the labour movement at home. If you cannot even confront racism and chauvinism in the imperialist working classes, how can you defeat imperialism?

The reverse side of this imperialist chauvinism is that it then becomes the national task of workers and peasants in the oppressed countries to resist imperialism. Why? Because that is their right to self-determination.

How, say the opportunists, can these peoples determine their own future if workers from other countries who are regarded as oppressors assert their duty to fight alongside them? Well, it doesn’t occur to these ‘internationalists’ that this is the surest way for workers from imperialist countries to prove that they are not oppressors but genuine internationalists.

In the case of the ultralefts, this is the flip side of the opportunist coin.Refusing to enter a military bloc with Saddam Hussein because he is a dictator is also a capitulation to the same imperialist racism and chauvinism at home that leaves the defence of Iraq to its own people. The fact that many in the IWCP are exiles in the ‘West’ and embedded in the same labour aristocracy as the Western left, underlines their ultraleft position. And it also explains why they then flipped to an opportunist line after the war calling for the UN to create a security force to allow Iraq to make the transition to democracy.For these pseudo communists, democratic imperialism is superior to an Iraqi dictatorship.

This is why in practice these ultra-lefts were prepared to leave the defence of Iraq to the Ba’athists and the clerical leaderships who would capitulate as soon as their class interests were threatened. This is exactly why these leaderships made the compromises they have made with the occupiers in the hope of doing deals with the US/UK to become the new rulers. This shows that, like the opportunists, the ultra-lefts are not serious about workers defending Iraq. They are prepared to leave the self-determination of Iraq to dirty deals between the Iraqi bourgeoisie, the Clerics and the imperialists.

The revolutionary way to fight the imperialist invaders was to mobilise the workers and peasants who were oppressed by the Ba’athists and Clerics to prove that only workers and poor peasants militias could defend Iraq. This meant calling on the Ba’athist and Clerical leaderships to arm the workers and peasants. When it became clear that the leaderships would not do this and instead would look after their own skins, workers could then decide how best to defend Iraq. But these questions of strategy and tactics could not even arise when the ultra-lefts did not offer any leadership to the masses under the oppressive control of the Ba’athists or Clerics.

Even those few groups that formally came out in ‘defence of Iraq’ such as Workers Power, and the International Bolshevik Tendency, did so in an abstract way.Workers Power quoted Trotsky on the “ duty of the international proletariat to aid the oppressed countries and their war against oppressors” but did not specify how that aid should be given.

(“The Left that Fails to Back Iraq” (http://www.workerspower.com/wpglobal/antiwarLeftfails.html)Not even a mention of arms to Iraq, and certainly no call for a military bloc with the Ba’athists.

The IBT, who condemn the Spartacists for ‘flinching’ in the face of charges of ‘treason’ at home, also took a defensist position. But nowhere in their statements on the war is there a call for a military bloc with Saddam, let alone a program for revolutionaries to take the leadership of the anti-imperialist struggle in Iraq (www.bolshevik.org).

We come to the conclusion that to our knowledge no Trotskyist groups other than the Group of 5 who signed the statement on Iraq lived up to their historic and revolutionary responsibility to fight for the defence of Iraq. (http://geocities.com/communistworker/iraq.html)

Who else called for the formation of a military bloc with the Ba’athists, with a program for workers to lead the defence of Iraq and for the formation of a Workers’ and Peasants’ state of Iraq in a Socialist Federation of the Middle East?If they exist and have put forward this position clearly, we want to contact them because they are principled communists.

Those who failed this test must be condemned as imperio-centric misleaders and betrayers of socialism. They are the rotten Stalinist and Trotskyist tendencies with opportunist/ultra-left positions that are a programmatic reflection of their integration into the racist, chauvinist labour aristocracy and petty bourgeoisie in the imperialist countries.

The healthy forces that blocked militarily with Iraq in its defence against imperialism with a program for permanent revolution have shown that they have the method and program to form the core of a new antiwar and anti-imperialist movement and open the way to the formation of a new revolutionary international.

MayDay Leaflet

OPPOSE BUSH’S WAR – GROUND THE ORION!

Leaflet from Class Struggle 49 March/April 2003

To Whenuapai workers – in and out of uniform!

We are picketing this airbase to protest the Clark government’s plans to send an RNZ Air force Orion to the Persian Gulf to support Bush’s war for oil in Iraq. Working with the frigate Te Kaha, the Orion will be asked to identify and plot the movements of every ship passing through the only sea access to Iraq. Information collected by the Orion and Te Kaha will be fed to the US aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. In recent months, the Abraham Lincoln has been involved in the bombing of Iraq and in planning for an invasion. By doing some of Bush’s grubby spying, the Orion and Te Kaha would help US ships and planes to focus on direct aggression against Iraq.

But the Orion can’t take off if there is no one to service, supply, or even fly it. Whether you are a worker wearing a uniform or a worker on civvy street, there are three bloody good reasons why you should join the global anti-war movement and blackballing this plane.

Reason #1:the Iraqi people will suffer terribly from the war the Orion would be supporting. According to a study by Australian doctors, 500,000 lives are at risk from an invasion of Iraq. ‘Collateral damage’ from bombs and missiles, contamination from depleted uranium shells, and disease are all expected to take a toll.

Reason #2:your fellow workers around the world are already suffering the effects of Bush’s War of Terror. Many workers recognise that Bush’s ‘War on Terror’ is a war on workers in the West, as well as a war on the peoples of the Middle East. The warmongers want to take long-term control of the region and boost their flagging profits by making Western labour as well as Middle Eastern oil cheaper. Bush used his war plans as an excuse to attack the West Coast waterside workers when they tried to strike last year, and is trying to use his post-World Trade Centre ‘Patriot Act’ to strip hundreds of thousands of state employees of their right to union membership. In Britain, Bush’s best friend Tony Blair has used the war as an excuse to threaten to ban the right of firefighters to go on strike for higher wages. (Refusing to back down, the firefighters have scheduled more strike actions.)We can trust Helen to pull the same ‘national security’ card out of the pack the moment she fears the prospect of working class militancy.

Reason #3:you will suffer from continued New Zealand support for Bush’s wars.
The Clark government is trying to trade military and political support for the War of Terror for a free trade deal with Bush. According to economic analysts, such a deal would mean the privatisation of the New Zealand health system and water services by U.S. multinationals, the removal of restrictions on Genetic Engineering, and the buying up of the New Zealand countryside by US bosses. This is what New Zealand workers in uniform are being asked to risk their lives for in the Middle East!

Unions representing 130 million workers from Australia to Togo have come out against the latest stage in the endless War of Terror.In Western Australia, 75,000 workers from nine unions have pledged to go on strike the minute any attack on Iraq begins, whether or not it is sanctioned by the UN. In Ireland, mass pickets have forced the US government to stop using the Shannon Air Base to move troops and supplies to the Middle East.In New Zealand, the Council of Trade Unions opposes a war on Iraq and calls on its members to protest. You should protest by blackballing the Orion!

Working class militancy can defeat this military madness!

Oppose Bush’s war – ground the Orion!

DAWA is at www.Yahoogroups.com?dawa_nz

Anti-imperialist Coalition is at www.antiimperialist.org.nz

EAST TIMOR: BUSH'S MAN IN DILI

from Class Struggle 49 March/April 2003

We note that Jose Ramos-Horta, the ‘Mandela of East Timor’, has joined Tony Blair and John Howard as a cheerleader for George Bush’s war against Iraq. In an impassioned article for the New York Times, Ramos-Horta recently condemned the global anti-war movement as unconcerned with the plight of the Iraqi and Kurdish peoples. Like the ‘leaders of the Iraqi opposition’ today, the East Timorese 'begged a foreign power to free us from oppression, by force if necessary’, this former guerrilla leader claimed.

Ramos-Horta’s new job as PR man for ‘regime change’ in Iraq will no doubt come as a nasty shock to the social democrats, Greens and fake revolutionaries who helped him sell out the East Timorese people in their hour of need in 1999. We remember Ramos-Horta being treated like a rock star when he arrived in Auckland to (mis)lead an East Timor solidarity march at the time of the APEC conference in September 1999. As the Greens and social democrats wept and hugged each other, Ramos-Horta took the mike at the pre-march rally and urged APEC leaders like Bill Clinton and John Howardto invade East Timor and thereby ‘save’ it from the Indonesian forces they had armed and funded for decades.

With Indonesian-backed militia on the rampage in the aftermath of a phony referendum on independence, Ramos-Horta and his crony Xanana Gusmao had been busy keeping their mutinous Falintil troops in isolated rural cantonments, so that they would not be able to antagonise Clinton by intervening to protect their people. Ramos-Horta was in Auckland because he was also keen to stamp out the strikes and boycotts that workers in a number of APEC countries had launched to stop the Indonesian military machine in its tracks.

Instead of supporting armed struggle at home and workers’ action internationally, Ramos-Horta appealed to imperialist leaders like Clinton! Fortunately for Ramos-Horta, and unfortunately for the people of East Timor, Clinton and stooges like John Howard and Jenny Shipley saw the opportunity of setting East Timor up as a UN colony and grabbing control of its oil wealth for the West. When the East Timorese objected to this carve up, the UN invasion force crushed their protests in a series of confrontations that climaxed in the Dili riots of mid-January 2000. Today resistance to the colonisers is once again increasing, with three students being killed in riots at the end of last year.

For his part, Foreign Minister Ramos-Horta has since 1999 made a lucrative career for himself as an advocate for imperialism around the world. Before coming to Bush’s aid over Iraq, he had been busy attacking the Palestinian people for having the nerve to resist Israeli occupation with armed force. According to Ramos-Horta, the Palestinians should be opposing Sharon’s tanks and machine guns with civil disobedience and petitions to the UN. Yeah, right.

As the bankruptcy of Ramos-Horta’s regime and rhetoric becomes ever more obvious, his former lovers on the Western left will no doubt spurn him, much as the Labour Party liberals who once cheered the ‘African socialism’ of Robert Mugabe today demand sanctions against Zimbabwe. Like Mugabe, Ramos-Horta will have become ‘corrupted by power’ and ‘out of touch with the people’. Clichés like these will help the liberals and fake revolutionaries who supported Ramos-Horta in 1999 avoid taking responsibility for their own role in turning East Timor in to a UN colony.

As Marxists, we have no interest in explaining history with clichés. We see the continuity between Ramos-Horta’s betrayal of East Timor in 1999 and his betrayal of the Iraqi and Kurdish peoples in 2003. We see the continuity between Mugabe’s capitulation to British imperialism at Lancaster House in the late 70s and his present attempts to rein in the land occupation movement and break the trade unions.

We argue that the ‘betrayals’ of the likes of Ramos-Horta and Mugabe are the product of the impossibility of national liberation struggles in the Third World achieving their aims without going all the way to socialism. We argue that it is only by turning national liberation into ‘permanent revolution’ by abolishing the market and breaking out of the global economic grid of imperialism that nations like East Timor and Zimbabwe can escape from the economic and hence political domination of powers like the US. Bush’s man in Dili offers plenty of evidence for our argument.

PAEDOPHILIA PANIC

Review of "A City Possessed: the Christchurch Civic Creche Case"

from Class Struggle 49 March/April 2003

By Lynley Hood, Longacre Publishers

“Blind Justice” was a series from the BBC which was screened here about ten years ago.It centered around the cases taken by a fictional Left wing team of lawyers.In the first episode actor Jack Shephard (who plays one of the main characters in the story) tells another lawyer what his philosophy is:“The law is a bulldozer, driven by vested interest.We can pull a few people clear but we can’t make it make sense.” But this is because each class in society views the justice system from its own point of view.

Right wing politicians never pass up an opportunity to whip up the public by calling for tougher sentences and complaining about people let out on parole.Victims feel let down by the system and by being on a conveyer belt which they have little or no control over.Several years ago when I approached a lawyer to ask for help with an immigrant friend accused of rape I was told such people are “grist for the mill.” On the other side, criminal lawyers spoken to, talk of the “intellectual dishonesty” of the courts when making decisions and accuse them of being too keen to believe the police and waive the rights of the accused.

For Marxists ‘making sense’ of the Capitalist Justice System comes down to the way the state regulates the lives of the working class.Workers need to be maintained in their bourgeois families according to social and moral rules that ensure that they are fit for work.Workers who steal, threaten violence, or break moral norms or sexual standards are punished and paraded before the public. When extreme transgression of moral standards occurs, public reactions are also extreme. Because of fears that such criminal excesses could overrun decent society, individuals suppress their own desire to ‘break the rules’ by joining in the ritual punishment of the transgressors.The outburst of public emotion that surrounds and amplifies such rule-breaking is called a ‘moral panic’.

Bourgeois media coverage of the justice system serves this purpose. It is selective and sensational, homing in on high-profile cases likely to rouse the emotions of a sexually obsessed public.Therefore, anything to do with sex and particularly, sexual abuse allegations is likely to get a lot of attention.The coverage of the Christchurch Civic Creche case was understandably reasonably saturated, by media standards.

So where has the ‘left’ stood on such issues and on this case in particular?The answer is all over the show.Many on the left (particularly those who would define themselves as feminists) believe that sexual abuse is an epidemic in our society.They therefore tended to believe that Peter Ellis was as guilty as sin.The women at the Christchurch Civic Creche presented more of a problem, since many on the left refuse to believe that women are capable of sexual abuse.But the problem is that it is difficult to see how the scale of abuse that Peter Ellis is said to have indulged in could have occurred without the knowledge of the women at the crèche.

The criticism leveled at people on the left if they challenge the above view is that they are not taking the issue of child abuse seriously.This response seems to be reminiscent of the attitude taken to people in the United States in the 1950s who dared to challenge the McCarthyism Witch hunts.They were accused of being communists themselves. It is ironic that today some so-called leftists are using the same tactics that were used against communists by anti-leftists in the 50s.

It’s a reasonable perception that the general public is fairly evenly divided on whether sexual abuse is as widespread as some say it is.They also seem to be fairly evenly divided on whether the events that were supposed to take place at the Christchurch Civic Crèche took place.

In such cases the media acts as a “gatekeeper” deciding what the public should know.The courts add their own gate keeping to this process and further limit what is known, particularly during the course of a trial. Ostensibly, this is done so that the defendant gets a fair trial and that alleged victims are not identified.Whatever the reasons, the end result is that the public and even the jury in a trial are often not aware of all the facts.Sometimes these facts emerge after the trial as was the case in the Civic Crèche trial.

Yet even when facts are released after the event, the media gatekeepers are still in a strong position to regulate what we know.Only a dedicated person, willing to research all the facts can truly give us a fully rounded picture of what a trial was all about.There is a social context for any case.What was happening to NZ society in the 1980’s that created a climate for moral panics and hysteria about sex cases? While the media and the trial lawyers focus on the so-called facts of the case it is important to understand the broader canvas on which the case is painted.

Lynley Hood’s book seeks to lay before us all the facts she feels relevant and to put before us the context in which the Christchurch case occurred.The result is a kind of snapshot of society and gives us a better understanding of the way the justice system operates.

It is notable that it takes over 160 pages before we even get into the events leading up to the original trial.In the first part of the book Lynley Hood talks of the evolution of the counseling and child protection methods which were used and also other non-related panics relating to child molestation and child pornography which occurred in Christchurch prior to the case. The overall impression Lynley Hood gives us in these first 160 pages is that it was not a case of if such an event as the Christchurch crèche case was to going to occur, more when it would happen.

In the decade before the Civic case we had seen a shift from media-stoked moral panics about gangs, and racism, to moral panics focusing on violent crime and the sexual abuse of children. In all cases the fears underlying these panics bear little relation to reality, and as they become more centred on children they become more and more detached from reality.

This is demonstrated by the extreme concept of Satanic and Ritual Abuse, no incidences of which have ever been proven to exist. Hood mentions the fact that prior to the Christchurch Civic case being investigated there had been an expose on “60 Minutes” of allegations about a pedophile-sex ring involving child pornography.The investigation by the police showed the whole thing was a load of nonsense but that didn’t stop it taking on a life of its own.

Our newspapers and TV news often feature stories of alleged pedophile activities and it seems that many television cop/investigation shows include plots involving pedophilia.In the week that I wrote this review there were at least three dramas on television involving pedophilia, child abduction by pedophiles and child pornography rings.It is the new TV obsession because of the current moral panic surrounding it.

What is interesting in this panic is the way that some people continue to believe that sex rings and ritual abuse exist, even when there is little or no evidence of them.It is hypothesized by the believers that there is some sort of vast conspiracy, reaching up to the highest levels, which is protecting the abusers.Like all conspiracy theories, people who believe this cannot be dissuaded by something as mundane as the facts, preferring instead to say that the reason no one is ever caught for ritual abuse is there is a cover up.They fall into the same category as believers in alien abductions and the members of the Flat Earth Society.

What happened at the Christchurch Civic Crèche seems to be symptomatic of the “culture of fear” that has intensified during the neo-liberal years of the 1980’s and 1990’s.As society was destabilised and more and more people marginalised, fears of social disorder grew rapidly and were projected onto certain social groups.

Writers such as Barry Glasner and Frank Furedi have written about how the media has hyped up certain issues and exaggerated their occurrence out of all proportion.An example of this is that although the number of child abductions by strangers has remained largely static for the last 20 years, there is a perception (bought about by media sensationalism of a few cases) that child stranger abductions are more common now.The results of such perceptions are wide ranging.

It is clear from early on in “A City Possessed” that Lynley Hood believes there were fatal flaws in the Christchurch Civic Creche case.She does not attempt a “balanced” approach, putting both sides of the argument, weighing up the pros and cons.Instead she clearly has a conviction that Peter Ellis and the women charged (who were acquitted) were innocent victims of a climate of fear and shonky interviewing techniques used on the children.

This is not a flaw, unless you start reading the book expecting a so-called balanced approach (whatever that means).If you read the inside jacket, you might expect something more middle of the road, but if you read the comments on the back you will not be under any illusion about the thrust of the book.

Lynley Hood also draws parallels early in the book with the sort of witch hunts that occurred in the USA in the 17^th century and the anti-communist witch hunt of the 50s and compares them to the pedophile witch hunts being carried out in our time.

A factor that emerges as a key ingredient in the Christchurch Creche case is the use of extremely questionable interviewing techniques.Over the past twenty years the number of people offering counseling in New Zealand (and other countries) has increased dramatically.Unfortunately, the standard has gone through the floorboards.It seems under our free market ideology that anyone can set himself or herself up as a counselor with no or little training.

Twenty years ago counselors were psychiatrists and psychologists and they had university qualifications and were members of professional organisations and subject to some form or registration.Now there is little way of knowing the qualifications (and value of the qualifications) of counselors.

There has also been a move away from a scientific approach to counseling towards acceptance of totally improvable concepts such as “recovered memory syndrome.”Counselors have developedseemingly magical powers by which they are able to recover memories of what happened to a person when they were four or five.We all know that our memory can be unreliable and we also know that we have little recollection of what happened when we were four or five.

Thus, whatever is ‘recovered’ by these counselors is extremely subjective and short of a confession from the perpetrator of abuse cannot be proven to have a foundation in fact.

Most of these counselors are little more than modern day shamans.They are spell-casters, waving their magic wand and conjuring up demons from the past.This wouldn’t matter so much if their spell- casting wasn’t taken so seriously be the police, media and judiciary.The consequences of their actions are often the imprisonment of people, some of whom I am sure are innocent.

This is not to deny that sexual abuse does take place.It irks me that I have to write this, but I do so because the criticism leveled at people who dare to challenge what is happening in our society is that they don’t take sexual abuse seriously or don’t believe it exists at all.Lynley Hood makes this point in her book.

There are many other points and issues that Lynley Hood raises in the book that deserve attention from our society.In addition to attacking the method of child questioning used in the case, she gives ample evidence that the children were coached by their parents and the interviewers.

She also rightly attacks the current rationale that children never lie about sexual abuse (unless they deny it happened).The book offers an interesting insight into the tactics of the police who behave as little more than licensed thugs (Chapter 9) and lays open the myth of the supposedly objective justice system (in particular Chapter 12).

From a Marxist point of view, the book fails to correctly analyze why the outcome was as it was.While Lynley Hood correctly gives us an overview of the climate leading up to the case she fails to realise that it was unlikely that any other outcome was going to occur for Peter Ellis once the ‘moral panic’ got rolling.There is a clear suggestion that had another policeman done the investigation the outcome may have differed. A similar, though understandably more guarded approach (given the laws for contempt) is taken by Hood to the Judge’s handling of the case.

As Marxists we are under no such illusions. It is possible that the outcome might have been different, but given the accumulation of circumstances that shaped the way the case was dealt with, it is unlikely.To return to the original quote about the justice system, you can’t “make it make sense.”Unless, that is, you adopt a Marxist perspective. The courts and police are not objective observers - they are instruments of state oppression and operate in the interests of the ruling class to protect their property and regulate the lives of the working class.

This criticism does not detract from what is, however, a very good book that seems at times more like a sociological study of an aspect of our society than a recounting of the events.Hood’s book is a valuable contribution and statement of where capitalist society is going at this point in time.Reading it makes one wonder if we have progressed all that much since the time of the Salem witch hunts.

Putting the issue of alleged sexual abuse aside, it is clear that satanic and ritual abuse is nonsense and nothing more than a modern day equivalent of religious mumbo jumbo.The fact these views are held by educated people does not give them any greater credibility.What it does show is the level to which moral panic has risen in our society and the importance of identifying the real class enemy and pointing out how superstitious beliefs are being used to deflect anger away from the real targets at which it should be aimed.

THE WORLD SOCIAL FORUM AND LULA LAND

From Class Struggle 49 March/April 2003

The Big Boys have taken over the World Social Forum, says anti-globalisation guru Naomi Klein. Boo hoo! What did she expect? Lula turns up at Porto Alegre and has 75,000 adoring fans who complain when he leaves for the World Economic Forum in Davos. He’s the boss. The WSF is really a reformist ‘movement of movements’ that wants to replace neoliberalism with democratic socialism. But the grassroots enthusiasms of the anti-globalisation troops post-Zapatistas and post-Seattle were always directed from above.It was a small group of PT (Brazilian Workers’ Party) leaders, Le Monde Diplomatique intellectuals and ATTAC ‘activists’ who set the WSF agenda in 2000.

Z Net editor and activist Michael Albert said as much. He found that as a member of the International Council the big decisions about what the forum was about, who would speak , and who would attend, were already made. The big issues, neo-liberalism and how to fight it, and how to make’ another world possible’ were already shaped by the politics of these reformist organisations.

The WSF was the child of the PT, and now the PT leads a Popular Frontgovernment with its main leader, Luis Inacio de Silva, ‘Lula’ for short, the newly elected President of Brazil. So it’s not the WSF but the main attraction that has changed. The WSF still attracts the bevy of left-wing celebrities like Chomsky, Michael Albert, Arundhati Roy and Samir Amin, but the stars are now clearly the strong men of Latin American social democracy, with Lula, Chavez and Ecuadorian leader Guiterrez at their head and Castro as elder statesman (there were 50 Cuban Communist Party leaders headed by Castro’s daughter at Porto Alegre 2003). The fate of the WSF hangs on Lula’s political fate which itself turns on the balance between the US ruling class and his mass working class constituency.

Movements of Movements

Now that it is obvious that Porto Alegre mark 3 was a PR job to get progressive world opinion lined up behind Lula, let’s see how he can deliver on the promise that “another world is possible”.Ignacio Ramonet, a lead writer of Le Monde Diplomatique, reacted to Lula’s election enthusiastically. For Ramonet, Lula’s election marked “the beginning of a new historical cycle in Latin America. The preceding cycle began at the end of a dark period of military tyrannies, repression and armed uprisings, and lasted two decades, since 1983” (what about the Brazilian military coup of 1968 that lasted 20 years, Pinochet’s coup1973 that also lasted nearly 20 years,and the military regime in Argentina from 1976 to 1983?!).

Ramocet says Lula’s electioncrowns a string of left wing victories: the election of Chavez in Venezuela in 1998, the overthrow of President Mahaud in Ecuador in January 2000, the ousting of Fujimori in Peru in December of 2000, the downfall of de la Rua in December 2001, and the election of Colonel Gutierrez in Ecuador in November 2002. Are these regime changes signs of the end of ‘neo-liberalism’ and the opening up of a more democratic period?

Despite the US drive to war, both Chomsky and Roy see signs that grassroots democracy represented by many struggles around the world is ‘confronting the Empire’. They endorse the concept of a ‘movement of movements’. This is the idea that local movements such as the landless in Brazil, the peasants in Colombia, the piqueteros in Argentina, the Kurds in Turkey, the people of Cochabamba in Bolivia, and the poor farmers of India, will join their struggles together to make one big movement. Not only that, Chomsky thinks that the unprecedented and growing majorities opposed to the war on Iraq in Europe and before long in America, before any war has taken place, show that the ruling US and European elites are being threatened from below by a new mass resurgence of peoples’ democracy.

In her speech at Porto Alegre, Arundhati Roy echoed these themes.She asked: “How do we resist ‘Empire’ and make another world possible? The good news is that we are not doing too badly”.She listed a string of victories - Bolivia, Colombia, Peru, and so on - and pointed to the collapse of some of the world’s biggest corporations, like the notorious Enron, Betchtel, WorldCom, and Arthur Anderson. “We may not have stopped ‘Empire’ in its tracks – yet – but we have stripped it down. We have made it drop its mask, we have forced it into the open. It now stands before us on the world’s stage in all its brutish, iniquitous nakedness.”Like Chomsky, however, democratic resistance is a rather abstract tool with which to ‘lay siege to Empire’. Roy wants us to “To deprive it of Oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different to the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe”.

The problem here is that the stories that come out of the WSF are not very different to the ones that some sections of the imperialist elites tell us. ‘Empire’ here means the US out of control – Chomsky’s rogue state. According to Metzaros, in this new age of ‘global hegemonic imperialistic capitalism’ only the US is imperialist. That sounds like the French and German politicians trying to mask their rapacious oil concessions in Iraq as humanitarian aid. Painting the US as ‘fascist’ makes them look ‘democratic’. ‘Imperialism’ means the greed and power of a US elite which takes the form of neo-liberalism and globalisation. But this can be resisted and overturned by ‘movements’ fighting against injustice and greed. ‘Democratic’ countries can gang up in the UN to fight imperialism. This vision is boosted by Toni Negri’s view that the US represents a reactionary imperialism that has to be contested by …yes, the European states and the UN!And if ‘imperialism’ is open to reform by the movement of movements, then maybe capitalism can be reformed from below by means of ‘market socialism’. The tell-tale mark of reformists is their belief that a majority can rule the state and reverse the sign of the zero-sum society from rich to poor. Same old story.

Market Socialism

What do all the currents in the WSF have in common?It is the belief that capitalism is a zero-sum society based on unequal exchange that can be reformed by an alliance of workers, petty bourgeois and‘democratic’ capitalists (and/or progressive military leaders like Chavez) in cross-class governments. In ganging up against ‘fascist’ imperialist America, the European bourgeoisie can pose as democrats and mask their own imperialist interests.Entering governments and alliances with the democratic bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeois intelligentsia and the Stalinist and Castroist bureaucracy that dominate the labour movement claim that these governments are controlled by workers, when they are anything but! This is how they try to mask their service to the bourgeoisie in containing workers’ struggles.They have to claim that workers get the best of the deal with a shift from neo-liberal austerity to ‘market socialism’. To paint the politics of betrayal in rosy colours the WSF gets ‘revolutionary’ credentials by its association with a bunch of academic Marxists like Samir Amin and James Petras who dress up with revolutionary phrases reformist policies of socialism on the installment plan.

When such ‘Marxists’ endorse Lula they provide him with an alibi. They blame those who want to mobilise the working class to take power for frightening off the EU imperialists, or for provoking a US counter-revolution. They peddle illusions that workers can benefit from some ‘new deal’ that will alleviate their poverty and suffering!Already in Argentina, the left bureaucracy has turned the administration of poverty into an art form where they are paid by the state to oversee ‘work for the dole’ schemes.

Lulaland

But now we face the truly historic test of Lula’s promise to deliver ‘market socialism’ in Brazil. The election of Lula threatens to repeat the whole history of betrayals in Latin America in the name of the Brazilian PT!Lula wants to negotiate with the IMF and World Bank using his working class voters as electoral fodder.Ramocet praises Lula with no reservations. Lula gets a rapturous welcome in Porto Alegre.But how can Lula deliver to his supporters, the poor workers and landless peasants, unless he repudiates the national debt, nationalises the banks and renationalises privatised state industry?And he cannot do that without arming the workers and peasants to stop a military coup and US counterrevolution succeeding like it did in Chile in 1973.

Whatever the idealism of the WSF ‘story of stories’, or models of a ‘socialist’ utopia, these noble thoughts cannot measure up against the actual struggles on the ground. Story tellingdoes not arm workers and peasants against the military might of imperialism. Not unless one is telling the stories that explain the lessons of the bloody history of workers struggles in the 20^th century - stories that say that unless workers take state power they cannot participate in the economy as equals and managers.Or that workers cannot plan a socialist economy unless they expropriate the private property of the capitalist owners.Or that what is needed is a workers’ government and a socialist plan.

We already have clear evidence from Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Ecuador, Argentina, Venezuela, and Colombia, that workers must occupy their factories or workplaces, must make military alliances with the landless peasants, must arm themselves to defend themselves, must organise a general strike, must break with the bureaucrats, must win over the rank and file of the army and seize state power, before any real challenge to imperialism is possible.None of this is possible without the building of an international revolutionary party and program to lead workers along the road to revolution.Failing these measures, imperialism has, can, and will stage armed counter-revolutions and smash all resistance. But with these measures workers and poor peasants can create a United Socialist States of Latin America.

WHY THE GREEN LEFT CAN'T STOP THE WAR

From Class Struggle 49 March/April 2003

If Labour Parties are implicated in Bush's war, should workers try to build Green Parties or left Social Democratic parties like the Alliance? While their stand against the war appears better than Labour's would they be able to stop the war?

What ‘peace-loving’ capitalist governments?

At a recent GPJA (Global Peace and Justice Alliance) meeting Alliance activist Mike Treen began a talk on the impending war on Iraq with the statement: “I don’t think we can stop the war on Iraq, but we can make it more expensive for them to go to war”. What he meant was that we are unlikely to influence the Labour-Progressive Coalition Government to get them to recall the ships and planes. But we may make them unpopular and bring about their electoral defeat at the hands of political parties opposed to war.As a member of the Alliance, Treen clearly sees the Alliance rebounding into parliament at the expense of a Labour Government discredited because it won’t criticise the US policy of unilateral regime change. No doubt the Greens share this hope for a revival of their electoral fortunes too.

On the following Saturday, 15 February, New Zealand led the 12 million who rallied against the war. GPJA organised the Auckland rally of more than 10,000 people who marched up Queen Street to Myers Park. There an audience of at least 5,000 cheered loudly in support of resolutions that opposed a war against Iraq whether done in the name of the UN or not, and called on the Labour government to refuse to participate in this war. Water Pressure Group spokesperson Penny Bright got the loudest cheers of the day, when she condemned the UN Security Council and called for direct action at military facilities like Whenuapai Air Base.

On the following day at a‘Peace in the Park’ rally 2,000 people listened to similar speeches and a small group delivered a ‘letter’ with hundreds of signatures to the Prime Minister Helen Clark’s residence repeating the demand that Labour must oppose the war on Iraq. So clearly even if GPJA leaders did not think that they could stop the war, they had hopes of influencing NZ’s participation, or at least exposing Labour as a government committed to war, preparing the ground for political parties against the war to win support in the anti-war movement.

But what Treen failed to say, and what we in the Communist Workers Group and the Anti Imperialist Coalition constantly say, is that appeals to bourgeois governments of any sort cannot stop war. While they may claim to represent workers’ interests, Green and Social Democratic governments go to war to defend the profits of their own bourgeoisies. They do this because the labour bureaucracy that runs the unions and controls Labour Parties are paid for their services with a share of the bosses' profits, so have to prop up the profit system.

Lessons of History

In Australia, the Labor Party endorsed the First World War enthusiastically. Labor leader Billy Hughes traversed Britain holding public meetings to rally support for the war. What offended Labor workers in Australia was not so much Hughes’ jingoism as his parading around in a top hat sucking up to British royalty. Though Hughes was kicked out of the Labor Party this was over the issue of conscription not the war itself.In NZ Labour leaders like Peter Fraser went to jail rather than fight, but by the Second World War they were in government, and backed Britain’s war by introducing conscription and setting up a network of prison camps to house the thousands of workers who refused to fight for imperialism.

If that is the track record of past Labour governments, then Clark’s Labour-Progressive Coalition Government is no better. In fact the Greens and the Alliance say it’s worse because it took part in a secret war in Afghanistan where NZ SASS troops guided US bombers to their targets. But would the Greens or Alliance be any better in Government? What if the majority of voters break from the warlike Labour parties to back parties like the Alliance and the Greens who have come out against a UN-sanctioned war?Should workers place their hopes in ‘peace-loving’ Alliance-led or Green-led governments?

History is against the Green Left.

Peace movements’ directed at pressuring bourgeois governments, no matter how left-wing, have always been impotent before the imperialist drive to war. Why?Because such ‘movements’ are composed of individuals who see only the symptoms not the causes of war. They see war as a bloody minded ‘policy’ of some sections of the ruling class (hence the personal attacks on Bush or his pro-war ‘camp’, and on Blair’s moral hypocrisy) and appeal to the ‘democratic’ and ‘pacifist’ instincts of more enlightened sectors of the ruling classes. But when these ‘democrats’ also go to war on the basis of high moral principles i.e. ‘defending democracy against fascism’, or in the name of the ‘UN’ or the ‘international community’, the ‘masses’ fall prey to their dressed-up appeals to nationalism and jingoism and are soon drawn into the defence of their virtuous fatherlands against some ‘axis of evil’.

The idea that left wing, even supposedly ‘socialist’ governments, are any better at opposing war is disproved by the betrayals of the leaders of the Second Communist International and the Stalinist leaders of the Third Communist International in the face of the First and Second Imperialist Wars.

On August 4, 1914, the leaders of the Second International of ‘socialist’ parties renounced their clear program of refusing to fight in imperialist wars and instead backed their own bosses to draft workers to kill each other. A hard core of revolutionary workers around Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin formed the Zimmerwald Left(see Class Struggle No 44, 45 & 47) to rally workers to fight against the war.Their position was that workers in each of the imperialist countries, including Russia, should ‘turn their guns on their own ruling class’ because they were the ‘main enemy’, not the workers of other countries.They would transform imperialist war into civil war overthrow their own ruling classes and go on to create a socialist, and ultimately a classless, society. By this means workers could turn the crisis of a bosses’ war into a solution for all humanity.

The example of 1917

That is why CWG repeats again and again that only organised workers’ action can stop war. And that to stop war, the cause of war, capitalism, has to be replaced by socialism. Workers as members of a class that is exploited by capitalism have a class interest in stopping war. They are the ones who are conscripted to kill one another – the cannon fodder – and they are the ones who are forced to work non-stop on the home front for the war effort.War divides them, but it also arms them and exposes them to the suffering of war, and teaches them that they can take action to end war.Historical examples abound.

In Russia the First Imperialist War was ended by a workers’ revolution. It was begun by the women textile workers of St Petersburg who went on strike on International Women’s Day in February 1917. Their strike set in motion the revolutionary process that led to the October Revolution. Trotsky has a powerful description of what happened in his History of the Russian Revolution:

“The 23^rd of February (old style) was International Woman’s Day. The social-democratic circles had intended to mark this day in a general manner: by meetings, speeches, leaflets. It had not occurred to anyone that it might become the first day of the revolution. Not a single organisation called for strikes on that day. What is more, even a Bolshevik organisation, and a most militant one – the Vyborg borough-committee, all workers – was opposing strikes…On the following morning, however, in spite of all directives, the women textile workers in several factories went on strike, and sent delegates to the metal workers with an appeal for support…Thus the fact is that the February revolution was begun from below, overcoming the resistance of its own revolutionary organisations, the initiative being taken of their own accord by the most oppressed and downtrodden part of the proletariat – the women textile workers, among them no doubt many soldiers’ wives.” (Vol 1 119-120).

This strike led to a mass strike where thousands of workers rallied behind cries for ‘bread’ and the slogans “Down with the autocracy!’ and ‘Down with the war!’ In five days the masses won over the rank and file of the soldiers fed up with war and went on to overthrow the Tsarist state. Trotsky recounts how relations between workers and soldiers developed in the days before the strike:

“Two weeks before the revolution, a spy… reported a conversation in a tramcar traversing the workers’ suburb. The soldier was telling how in his regiment eight men were under hard labour because last autumn they refused to shoot at the workers of the Nobel factory, but shot at the police instead.“We’ll get even with them’ the solider concluded. A skilled worker answered him: “For that it is necessary to organise so that all will be like one.” The soldier answered, “Don’t you worry, we’ve been organising a long time…They’ve drunk enough blood. Men are suffering in the trenches and here they are fattening their bellies.” (164).

The war in Russia did not end immediately. While workers and soldiers formed soviets and went on to make the October 1917 revolution, not until the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in early 1918 was the new Soviet government able to negotiate a peace with Germany.

On the wider European front the war was stopped by a soldiers’ and sailors’ mutiny in Germany at the end of 1918. The British and German general staffs rapidly agreed to stop hostilities for fear that the ‘Bolshevik Revolution’ would spread to Europe.Unfortunately, the revolutionaries were too poorly organised to be able to turn these mutinies into successful revolutions like in Russia. The defeat of revolution in Germany in 1919 left the workers’ movement divided and weakened. This created conditions in which workers became the target of rising fascist movements based on the ruined middle class and disaffected elements of the working class. The isolation of the Soviet Union soon led to the rise of a degenerated anti-worker bureaucracy under Joseph Stalin. From that point on the war policy of the Soviet Union was subordinated to the defence of‘socialism [ie Stalinism] in one country’.

From Revolution to 'democratic' war

In the period after 1924 the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union refused to build United Fronts of all workers to fight fascism - this which further divided the working class, handing a victory to fascism in Italy in 1923, Germany in 1933 and Spain in 1938. After 1935 the Stalinist Comintern then threw all of its energy into forming popular fronts between the communist parties and ‘democratic’, ‘peace loving’, elements of the bourgeoisie who were apparently opposed to fascism. Instead of the Bolsheviks’ policy of civil, or class, war as the best way to fight fascism, this was a policy of civil, or class, peace. Revolutions were sacrificed to the defence of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union.

Communists allied with ‘socialists’ (Labour parties) alongside petty bourgeois and ‘democratic’ bosses’ parties to fight fascism. They were part of the Popular Front (cross-class) government that came to power in France in 1936, and politically supported the Republican government of Spain against Franco’s army. This Stalinist betrayal meant that workers had to forgo revolution and submit to bourgeois governments so that they were divided and defeated by fascism. Franco won in Spain. Hitler gained in strength and prepared to go on the rampage across Europe, into Russia and North Africa. The ultimate proof of the bankruptcy of this ‘peace loving’ policy was the sudden zig when Stalin did a deal with Hitler in 1939 in a desperate attempt to stop an invasion of the Soviet Union. Of course when Hitler broke this pact Stalin zagged back to a popular front policy.

Once again, most workers in New Zealand, and in every other country, put their hopes in ‘left’ parties that claimed to represent workers, or the people, against warlike bosses. From 1941 the communist parties sided with the ‘democratic’ bosses in the hope of defeating the ‘fascist’ bosses, and the result was a disaster for workers everywhere. Instead of rising up against all bosses to stop war, workers went to kill each other to defend the bosses’ ‘democracy’ (the right to rule the masses by means of parliament). Where workers attempted to rise up in revolution at the end of the war as in Italy, Greece and Czechoslovakia, they were weak and isolated, and despite their valiant sacrifices, were defeated. Only in the colonial countries were workers and peasants were more united against their colonial overlords did wars of liberation result in important victories.

Stalinists betray the colonial struggles

But even in the colonies, as in Europe, the betrayal of the ‘left’ saw Stalinist parties, allied to the old ‘socialist’ parties, rally to defend their bourgeoisies against workers and peasants revolutions. Yalta saw Stalin do a deal with Roosevelt and Churchill to divide the world into ‘spheres of interest’. Stalin got Eastern Europe as ‘buffer states’ to defend ‘socialism in one country’ and in exchange he ordered the communist parties to collaborate in the repression of workers’ revolutionary wars in Europe and the Far East.

In China, Korea, Cuba and Indochina, colonial wars were brought to an end, some much earlier than others, by organised peasants and workers armies with little or no help from Stalin. In fact in Indochina, national liberation was set back 30 years because the Stalinists collaborated with the French in the hope of gaining independence peacefully. The result was the massacre of thousands of Trotskyists and other revolutionaries and the French re-occupation of Indochina. In Algeria and in Nicaragua reactionary settlers or landlords were expelled by workers’ and peasants’ militias actively opposed by the Stalinist Communist Parties. In Algeria the French Communist Party sided with the French state in putting down the Algerian insurrection. In South Africa the Communist Party ‘conned’ the workers and peasants into stopping short on the road to national revolution and to ‘share power’ with the white ruling class.

In all of these cases, popular and working class wars of liberation were stalled, or reversed and in most cases defeated, because of the intervention, not only of imperialist ruling classes, but more significantly, of the ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ parties. Where some of the historic gains of these wars of liberation remain (eg in Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea) it is because the national liberation struggles were forced to overthrow the national bourgeoisie when they openly sided with imperialism, and as yet imperialism has yet to impose decisive and historic defeats on these interrupted revolutions.

Back to the Future

What about the ‘anti-war’ Greens and Alliance-type parties today? These are parties based on the petty bourgeoisie or the labour aristocracy. They are run by a caste of labour bureaucrats. They do not even have the official support of organised labour. People like Keith Locke and Mike Treen do not want to make a revolution, they want to make a parliamentary career. They too sacrifice the interests of the working class to prop up capitalism so that they can represent the small business owners and managers, or serve the bourgeoisie as bureaucrats, politicians and flunkies, and reap their financial rewards.They are reformists who believe in their ability to manage capitalism and make a peaceful and democratic transition to socialism – so long as they are in the driving seat!But the bureaucrats have never been able to do anything other than drive the workers movement off the road.

Today the reformists’ hopes are pinned on the World Social Forum (see the article below) and in particular on the prospects of the Lula government in Brazil to challenge globalisation from below. Just like in the previous imperialist wars, the reformists of the WSF see themselves as the answer to the new imperialist ‘war on terror’. Theorists like Toni Negri present the WSF as a movement of the ‘multitude’ against the Empire. Negri argues, like Chomsky, that the US is a rogue state, which reverted to a more primitive imperialist international posture after S11 by declaring its right to ‘regime change’ by unilateral and pre-emptive military strike.Negri puts his hopes in the multilateral ‘rationality’ of the European Union ruling classes, and the ‘democratic’ fraction of the US ruling class, to constitute a world Empire in the guise of new multinational states like the EU, a revamped UN, giant transnational corporations, and a body of international law.

So like the Mensheviks of the First Imperialist war, and the Stalinists of the Second Imperialist war, today’s WSF reformists think that capitalism can be tamed by appealing to the self-interest of ‘democratic’ capitalists in all countries to join forces and act together to avoid war. This is just like Kautsky’s 1914 theory of ultra-imperialism. Kautsky said that capitalists should not go to war because they have investments spread across the hostile countries. War could end if the workers’ movement persuaded the bosses that war was bad for business.

What today’s post-imperialists overlook is the fact that the conflict between the EU and the US is not a slight reversal of ultra-imperialism caused by a rogue US state, but the reassertion of the inter-imperialist rivalry over the division of the world’s resources and markets. The only reason that the major EU states adopt multilateralism, trying to work through the UN, is that they do not have the military dominance to impose a unilateral line on the US.

To stop the betrayals of a new reformist WSF international, trapping workers in Popular Fronts with the ‘democratic’ bourgeoisie, revolutionaries have to urgently mobilise a new revolutionary International, based on the lessons of the Zimmerwald left of 1915 and the Trotskyist Fourth International in 1938. The CWG is currently engaged with 4 other tendencies in working on a joint document that calls for another Zimmerwald and a new revolutionary international to fight the renewed drive to imperialist war.