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Class Struggle 92 Nov 2010-Jan 2011

Brief Stuff

NZ’s semi-colonial ‘sovereignty’

NZ is a semi-colony fawning over China for money and the USfor protection without seeing that it is being used by bothagainst its major imperialist rival. While John Key pays over$100m protection money to Warner Bros he also holds out hishand to China for economic salvation. But the US is master ofNZ. Key invites the SAS troops to tell him if they want tovolunteer for further deployment in Afghanistan. They sayyes. Key signs the US mafia deal, the

Wellington Declaration

to enlist as US deputy dog in South Pacific (Deputy to USMarshall Australia that is) to help ring-fence China. The NZcapitalist class finds it easy to sign away the livelihoods andlives of its workers in return for a few crumbs from the tableof the US and China.So while NZ getsnothing substantialin return - far from thebillions that Key brags will flow into the NZ economy -http://www.kiwipolitico.com/2010/11/small-feels-large-but-only-to-the-small/the local class of bourgeois parasites get afew free trips, and the bank balance boosted by their plan toprivatise the remaining public assets.What is NZ really joining. The US is building anAsianextentionof NATOhttp://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2010/10/21/southeast-asia-west-completes-plans-for-asian-nato/ ThePacific thrust of the USis to surround China.http://redrave.blogspot.com/2010/08/us-china-military-rivalry-threatens.html That is why the US is now pushing the TPPA [PacificPartnership Agreement] disguised as a free-trade agreementand building defence alliances to ring-fence Chinese andRussia expansionism in Asia-Pacific. The TPPA is just a pretextfor the US to reinforce its allies in the Pacific against thereality that China has stolen several marches in its influencein the region. Gordon Campbell takes a left Social Democratline which sees this as conscious NACT sellout of

kiwisovereignty

http://gordoncampbell.scoop.co.nz/2010/11/15/gordon-campbell-key%E2%80%99s-illusory-free-trade-gains/ But left liberal realist Pablo sees this correctly as weak the NZBanararepublicspeaking.http://www.kiwipolitico.com/2010/10/bananazelandia/ Against the NZ Labourite left who are really the onlydefenders of the NZ ‘sovereignty’ myth, realists of left, rightand centre recognise NZs semi-colonial dependence onAustralian mini-imperialism mediating its subservience to USimperialism. Aussie has virtually re-colonised NZ so that it isnow basically a servile state of Australia without the provisionmade in 1901 to join the Federation.Sadly the CWG revolutionary realists are alone in recognisingthe looming power of China as not some aberrant marketsocialist monster, coming down to breath fire on the Greens,but a newly emerging capitalist imperialism. The game beingplayed in the Pacific is not one of NZ benefitting from itsrelations with China or the US as a sovereign equal, but ratherits increasingly insignificant role as a pawn of both giants, andits trans-Tasman big brother. NZ’s future is therefore in thehands of its working class will have to take the lead in thefight for NZ’s independence of imperialism by making asocialist revolution.

NACTs pushing Privatisation

Key has nailed the NACTs privatisation plans to the election

year mast. Flogging off 49% of the energy SOEs to ‘mums anddads’ at the same time as he is about to concede to the TPPAthat they have no preference over US pension funds. Alreadywe have Whanau Ora as a model for privatised welfare butthat is not profitable except for the Maori Party which ishappy to get a few multi-million dollar contracts to run familywelfare and privatised prisons as the price for betraying itsworking class voters. Coming next to a school near you areplans to privatise education after nearly 30 years of pre-market research; follow the British and sell off schools.Allowing Auckland Grammar to reject NCEA in a state schoolis welcomed by the NACTs. Then health minister, Razor Ryallis already going round the countrysacking electedHealthofficials who oppose his cuts that are shifting health spendingfrom the diseases of the poor to the health of the rich!

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PA1011/S00278/eight-dhb-chairs-to-be-stood-down.htm

Labour’s and Green’s critiques of this are weak. Labourpromises to restore some of the cuts. Labour will timidlyimpose a tiny surcharge on incomes over $120k that will noteven pay for cutting GST on food. The Greens are a bit betterproposing a capital gains tax on all income apart from thefamily home.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PA1011/S00278/eight-dhb-chairs-to-be-stood-down.htm

Green Social Democracy has no answer to the attacks of theNACTs to make NZ workers pay for their capitalist crisis.Capitalism in crisis cannot be managed by redistributingincome from rich to poor, as the rich have all the money andthe power and will not voluntarily hand it over. We are for aWorkers Socialist Party that will expropriate the wealth of theparasitic capitalist class and then redistribute it as unpaidback wages to all workers including those forced into self-employment to cut their wages and screw up theirexploitation. (see

New Left Party?

In this issue

)

From Welfare to Forced Labour

The Nazis had a slogan ‘work makes you free’ to signify thehigher duty that forced labour was to serve in the realm offreedom. i.e. Nazi Germany. For Marx and Engels the realmof freedom is only attained when wage slavery is ended andthe free exchange of labour realised in a socialist society.Like the Nazis who misappropriated the realm of freedom tosmash the struggle for socialism and the Hayekian free marketfundamentalists who glorify ‘free labour’ against the socialist‘road to serfdom’, the NACT razor gang on welfare alsoassume that forced labour for beneficiaries is the road tofreedom. (Channelling Paula Rebstock).

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PA1011/S00277/welfare-working-group-cries-crocodile-tears.htm

For a NZ Marxist critique of Hayekian Welfare-to-work seehttp://www.scribd.com/doc/36826019/Dependency

Class Struggle 92 Nov 2010-Jan 2011

NZ CAPITALISM

Pike River Mine Disaster

This is not a national disaster but a disaster for the workers and their families. Key’s class of bankstersand profiteers are facing a financial hit but hardly a disaster. They are using the same approach to the failure of this mine as the failure of South Canterbury Finance. Inside traders get paid in full by thestate for investing in a state bailout. The banksters get away with murder while posing as nationalleaders in national disasters. There is only one national disaster and that’s the NACT frontier capitalistneo-colonial lackey regime that serves the interests of Australian, US and Chinese imperialism!

NZ Oil and Gas would have been happy to pay their $500,000conscience money, recover the bodies and after a decentinterval reopen the mine. Even if they were found responsiblefor the disaster they could hide behind a cowboy governmentinto strip mining and a greedy petty bourgeois class wantingits share of the spoils. As soon as the explosion died downthere was already a campaign underway to blame the disasteron the difficulties of ‘surgical mining’ forced on the companyby the ban on opencast mining on Conservation land. Eventhough the company pointed outthis was technically impossible thishasn’t shut the cowboys up.But as it played out, the company,the NACT regime and big business,closed ranks and played thedisaster for sympathy to create asmokescreen over any company orGovt negligence. And now themine is closed and the bodies areunrecovered, the Official Inquirywill have to speculate on whatwhen wrong and why.Well we won’t allow this frontier boss rule politics to shift theblame from the operation and management of the mine ontothe miners, the contractors, the Greens or some freakaccident. After all it was Coasters that started coming outwith ‘blame’ comments right after Friday, November 19.Former mine workers commented on safety defects in themine. Then the MSM got into the act. They have their reasons(keeping the disaster movie interesting) but they did hit somepay dirt.

Investigate Magazine

summarised most of thisinformation in its January, 2011 Issue. As was immediatelyevident at the time of the explosion, and with plenty ofwarning signs, the mine exploded because it was a ‘gassy’mine without an adequate ventilation system.

Investigate Magazine

puts a lot of emphasis on reports thatcontractors tampered with the methane sensors so that theywould not lose pay in the event of gas leaks causing a shutdown. But the possible failure of gas sensors sabotaged ornot, is not the main cause. Even if it was the immediatecause, it reflects company policy to used casualisedcontractors rather than company employees who would bepaid for down time. Moreover, it’s damning of both thecompany and the union that what was reported as a commonpractice was not acted on and stopped. However you read thesafety problems the mine faced, it is the history ofderegulation of health and safety requirements andinspections over the last 20 year allowing the mine to operatewithout sufficient margins of safety, that is the fundamentalcause of the explosion for which the company and bothNational and Labour Governments are clearly to blame.Similar mines in the US now have failsafe ventilation systemssince if the ventilation system fails in ‘gassy’ mines explosionsare almost inevitable. Disasters in the US today are due toowners’ negligence. So it’s no use talking about Pike River asthe ‘latest’ such mine. Peter Whittall, the mine manager,while developing Pike River himself reported that the Miningregulations needed updating and there was a shortage of mineinspectors. What he failed to mention was that only in NZ hada mine of such a type installed a ventilator fan inside themine where it could not bereached in an explosion, ratherthan at the top of the ventilatorshaft where it could beprotected from the blast.Both the Labour Party and theEPMU which covers most of theminers knew about a reportcritical of lack of inspectionmade in 2008 but they did notact on it. Pike River even had adangerous build-up a few daysbefore the explosion and workerswere out for the 20 hours it took to clear the gas. At thatpoint the EPMU should have stepped in and insisted that thecause of the build-up be investigated and better ventilationput in place.Of course we won’t know the full facts even when the OfficialInquiry is completed. The mine is closed, and importantevidence is lacking. So if the Inquiry was always going towhitewash the Company and Govt this is now certain.Meanwhile our solidarity should be for the workers familiesand not for the parasites that turned this disaster for theminers and their families into a face-saving exercise for theruling class and their NACT regime.The west coast miners have a proud tradition of unionism thatled the way in the fight to win improved conditions not onlyin the mines but in all workplaces. The west coast minersstood firm with the wharfies in 1951 until the navy was sentto scab on the miners. Today it is a scandal that the miners’union, the EPMU, should be included along with the companyand the Government as contributing to the conditions that ledto the Pike River mine disaster. Workers in this country shouldmake it their duty to revive the west coast unions along withthe rest of NZ union movement in the tradition of the militantunionism of theRed Fedand take control of the health andsafety conditions of workplaces so that disasters like thisnever happen again!http://redrave.blogspot.com/2010/03/more-wildcats-dead-fed-vs-red-red.html