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March-April 2012
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March-April 2012
conditions, etc. The ECA stripped workers of the right and the ability to have a united workforce; a closed shop. It legalised the use of scab labour. A series of big disputes (Carter Holt, Air NZ etc) ended in defeats for the more militant unions laying the basis for a general decline in the labour movement. The Labour Govt in 2000 replaced the ECA with the Employment Relations Act (ERA) but left intact some of the worst aspects of that law. Very few unions were able over this period to resist the long slide towards poverty wages and casualised conditions. Very often plant closures (car, meat, carpet, clothing etc) led to large-scale unemployment. Some of the traditionally strong unions (most of them dating from the days of the Red Fed and who formed TUF when the CTU was formed in date) such as the Waterfront Workers Union and Seafarers were able to partially resist the worst attacks but even they had to make major concessions over the past twenty because the leaderships used their numerical weakness to oppose breaking the law. As with all other worksites, there has been a push towards de-unionisation and subcontracting of labour to eliminate the gains won in the past and open up labor to complete control by the bosses.
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Legally, the ERA is a bosses leg iron that means that workers have to obey it or risk being jailed. When workers are locked out or on strike legally the employers are prevented from hiring scabs to take their jobs. The Employment Court may fine them for breaches of section 97 of the ERA (see judgement on POAL) but in the end the law is designed to favour capital and unless workers take direct mass strike action, the employers will win. They have the funds to keep going back to court and to pay fines, which will sooner or later starve out the unions or demoralise the workers into looking for other work or going to Australia. POAL ignored the law and was only pulled up by the Court when growing public opposition to contracting out forced the Board to obey the law. But the return to negotiations leaves the workers back at square one. Talleys the AFFCO owners have been called corporate scum because they are anti-union and hostile to basic workers rights such as gender equality. They have locked out 1500 workers to bust the union. Oceania is refusing to pay their minimum waged Aged Care workers a cost of living increase. The workers strikes have failed to budge the employer. The only way to stop the bosses drive to bust the unions and casualise workers as slave labour is to build mass pickets where even the threat of this can force them to retreat. The recent example of the ILWU struggle at Longview in the US is a good example. But that is a start, as the only way to defeat capital in the workplace is workers occupations, ownership and control.
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This proves that it is the union bureaucracy in cahoots with the corporations that is the only barrier to rank and file power united with mass working class support revolutionising labour relations. The same applies in Aotearoa/NZ. To break out of the legal leg iron of the ERA workers have to resort to the only power they have to fight the bosses, that is their class power to close down production by using mass pickets. Where this has been attempted in the last 20 years the police have been used to break the picket lines and allow the scabs into the worksite. Therefore the only way to prevent this is to have sufficient numbers to make a police action difficult and at the same time demonstrate to the wider 80% non-unionised members of the working class what is at stake for them too. And when employers close down worksites in order to make workers redundant, the workers or organised enough to occupy and put the sites under workers management and control.
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this do or die struggle against the capitalist class fighting for its own survival by taking the side of the working class in the class war instead of the mythical community. The bosses are organised as a class with its control of the corporates, the media and the electoral process. The working class can only win if it too organises as a class on the basis of its independence from the state and the labour law. This means breaking with the Labour Party and the social democratic ideology of classlessness. The unions will only become a force in the class struggle when they are prepared to break the law and assert the higher law of rights of labour to claim the full value of what they produce. This means the unions have to be transformed into fighting, democratic unions in the tradition of the famous Red Federation of the early 1900s. The emergence of Occupy as a force among young workers can help in this process of reviving the unions as schools for revolution.
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Trade Union militants and workers councils that would contest the Labour Party in as many seats as possible and under MMP challenge Labour from inside parliament as well as outside. As the NZ economy reverts back towards a giant farm and mine the only unions that will have any real power are those that run transport and communications. They rather than service workers can bring the country to a halt. But much work needs to be done to unionise this workforce as it has been turned into a subcontracted workforce where workers are forced to compete with one another. MUNZ members have gone along with this subcontracting as much as any union. The rot has to be reversed starting with rank and file democracy! Marx pulled apart the workings of capitalism and described the economic forces within capitalism that drive it into crises, wars and attacks on the working class. We cannot reform this capitalist beast: we need to overthrow it by taking control for workers control of all production including the financial system (we might still need some way of accounting). Revolutionaries fight for such as program inside the unions and any working class party that emerges from the struggles ahead. We call this a Transitional Program of immediate demands such as freedom of expression and assembly (against Search and Surveillance etc) through demands such as jobs for all on a living wage with a sliding scale so that hours are reduced without loss of pay until all those who want to work, can work (30 hour week to start). But capitalism cannot do this, so the fight for such basic needs to survive brings workers up against the need to take power and form a workers government to plan production for human need and not profit. Form worker activist networks as a left wing within the unions. For a Red Federation of Labour. Turn lockouts into strikes, and strikes into occupations of worksites, and set up workers control of each worksite, through elected (and recallable) worksite leaders. For Workers Councils: local councils of workers to run the towns and cities. Made up of representatives elected (and recallable) by the local worksites. For a Workers Government to plan a socialist economy. (Only by the above demands being met can a real workers government be formed i.e. not through a vote every 3 yrs). For a Socialist Federation of the Pacific.
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Smash the NACTs demonization of the poor. Unite the working class to make the bosses pay for their own crisis. Build democratic, fighting unions! Build the occupy movement globally!
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misdirect the labor movement into the Democratic Party and support "Share the Pain" and other give-back campaigns. 5) How to provide health care for all? Expropriate the assets of the entire for-profit health care industry, including the insurance companies, the for-profit hospitals, and the drug industry, and place them under workers 'control. 6) How to feed the people? Seize the big agra businesses, end petroleum based production! Put billions into organic farming practices to clean the land and the water and promote healthy, sustainable food production. Apply public resources to build local gardens to feed the communities and put youth and unemployed to paid work growing our own food. 7) How to protect our immigrant brothers and sisters? Form up labor/black/brown self defense guards to disarm the fascists, ICE, and La Migra, and unite the working class to fight for full citizenship rights for immigrants. Same boss and same job means same union and same contract, across all borders! 8) How to protect the environment? Take the profit incentive out of big industrial production. Apply valid science to the decision making process and place scientific resources under workers' control. Reorganize production for clean production. Build up local food production. Phase out polluting industries (nuclear, fossil fuel) and replace with wind, solar, geothermal and eco friendly, energy conserving, sustainable architecture. 9) How to defeat Wall Street's ongoing imperialist war drive and exploitation around the world? Massive indefinite general strikes will be needed to unite American workers with the people of the world to defeat the ongoing imperialist wars (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan), stop the threatened attack on Iran, and call a halt to the hundreds of ongoing covert actions by the CIA around the world, which are aimed at defeating the people and making their countries safe for imperialist exploitation. These are only suggestions for the type of program Occupy needs to employ to break out of its stagnation; prevent it from being co-opted by the likes of Move On, SEIU's Mary Kay Henry, and Michael Moore; and subvert the dominant paradigm that drives the masses back toward the capitalists' fake solutions offered by their electoral process. The general strike offers solutions only if we take it to the end - and that end is workers' power!
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Occupy do not present a clear alternative to the Democrats. This is the result of adopting key electoral slogans like Tax Capital or Tax the Rich that are directed at the political parties. On top of that there are prominent supposed radicals like Chomsky, who when it comes to the election will give critical support to the Democrats. Chomsky is a classic case of the celebrity anarchist who is trapped in the petty bourgeois politics of individualism that offers no way out of the existing state apparatus other than to adapt to it. Much pseudo radicalism is based on the notion of horizontalism ostensibly directed at the hierarchy of political parties. It implies Occupy can operate without a leadership and function on the basis of direct democracy. It can build a counter-power that does not need to challenge the bosses state power. But inevitably if you dont contest the power of the state uncompromisingly then you end up joining that state. Chomsky and Co are the reverse side of the anarchist coin to the Black Bloc. Both offer no alternative to capitalism because they have no program to replace it.
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be the circuit breaker that built mass support for port closures and forced the ILWU union bosses to expose themselves as in the bosses pocket at Longview. That is to say, as soon as Occupy, rebounding from the vicious attacks of the state forces, joined up with the militant union rank and file, the reformists strategy to recruit Occupy to Obama was blown out. What was blown out was the pacifist politics of electoralism where Violence is reserved for Obamas bombs and drones. In its place Occupy found that the mass picket justifies violence in defence of the 99%, and in the process confronting state violence put them in solidarity with the wildcat strike at Longview! The linking of Occupy and the ILWU rank and file at Longview also exposed the union officials who panicked by the fear of losing control of the dispute signed a sellout deal with the EGT bosses. To its credit Portland Occupy who were not shown the rotten terms of this deal, saw it as a small victory as part of the ongoing war against the 1%. There is a long way to go to build solidarity to the point where the unions take strike action against Taft-Hartley and return to the militancy of the early days of the US labour movement. The Occupy decision to reclaim MayDay as a general strike follows directly from the experience of solidarity with workers in struggle. It's a first attempt at a national strike which falls far short of a general strike. But it is a political strike that prepares the ground for a political general strike at the power of the 1%. But the labour solidarity at Longview and other struggles may not lead directly to militant class conscious struggle in the ranks of the unions or Occupy unless revolutionaries intervene directly. This is because neither the unions nor Occupy as yet has a Marxist analysis which explains that the labour bureaucracy act as the labour lieutenants of capital that keep the unions confined to the labour law. The labour bureaucracy is no friend of the workers! As Earl Gilman says, Yes, labor unions of course are prohibited from striking for political demands....they are prohibited from striking to support other unions, etc. The list of legal prohibitions on unions goes on and on...The reason the unions in the U.S. are gradually dying is because they obey the law. The law was made by the rich to protect themselves from the poor. The auto workers who occupied the Detroit auto plants were defying the law. John L. Lewis, when he was head of the miners during the Second World War, called strikes in defiance of the law. I don't think we on the Left should let the labor bureaucracy off the hook...so the courts throw them in jail for a few days...so what? But we have to educate/prepare/organize workers that defying the bosses laws are the only way to save their jobs. Thanking the union bureaucracy for "supporting" the movement with resolutions is political bootlicking! Fortunately Occupy has labour solidarity groups like #OOlaborsolidarity where revolutionaries can put forward analyses of what must be done. It requires the revolutionary Marxists to speak plainly and tell the
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truth. So this means Marxists advocating labour solidarity actions that unite workers' strikes against the employers with Occupy's commitment to 'breaking the law' to advance the 99%. In essence it means making Occupy MayDay General Strike the launching pad for an unlimited political general strike for an insurrection to bring down the ruling class and put a Workers' and Oppressed peoples' Government in power! The radical reclaiming of MayDay by Occupy is an attempt to generalise this revolutionary thrust. But its not enough. Lenin and Trotsky recognised the limits of Trade Union Consciousness as falling short of revolutionary consciousness. Trade unions operate as economist institutions that negotiate wages but do not fight to end the wage system! Without a revolutionary Marxist party neither the unions or Occupy cannot develop beyond an economist consciousness of capitalism into a class conscious revolutionary movement. Lets examine this point because it is central to the debate on what kind of revolutionary party is needed to lead workers to revolution. parties.
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What Binh is arguing here is that today left parties are tiny sects modelling themselves on the mythical Leninist 'vanguard' and competing in a sectarian way to win support in Occupy and meeting resistance. He looks back to Leninism as he understands it for the model of a broad class party that contains workers at different levels of political consciousness, where the different factions compete to demonstrate how a Marxist program can be applied to solve the problems of the 99%. There is some truth in this as the Bolsheviks did function as a faction in the old RSDWP until 1917. Yet that faction acted more as a vanguard party within a much broader party from 1905 when it declared itself to be a separate party, and after 1912 became a separate party. The Bolsheviks growing split from the Mensheviks was necessary to defend the Marxist program. The basis on which the Bolsheviks formed a faction/party distinct from the rest in the RSDWP was a programmatic principle: the refusal to 'liquidate' the proletarian class into subordination and even political alliances with the exploiting classes. In other words the Bolshevik faction stood for the independence of the workers as the revolutionary class against those who 'liquidated' this class independence into cross-class or popular fronts with the bourgeoisie. Allied to the 'liquidators' were the 'conciliators' who while formally opposed to liquidation, in practice vacillated towards the 'liquidators'. The liquidators in various degrees all took the Menshevik position that 'backward' Russia would have to go through a prolonged bourgeois revolution before it was ready for a socialist revolution. The long battle against 'liquidationism' faced the critical test over the question of whether the RSDWP would give 'conditional support' to the bourgeois Provisional Government in Russia after the February 1917 Revolution. Up to that point the Bolsheviks had won support for a Bourgeois revolution led by the workers and peasants (the 'Revolutionary Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasants') since the bourgeoisie was too weak and dependent on Tsarism. The Bolsheviks would give 'conditional support; to a bourgeois government 'insofar as it acts in the interests of the revolution'. That is, mobilise workers and peasants to control it and push it left (for peace, land, and bread) to complete the tasks of the Bourgeois revolution and so prepare for the socialist revolution. Yet when the workers rose up in February and a Bourgeois provisional government was formed Lenin rejected 'conditional support' for this government as 'liquidation' into the class enemy. He argued that the working class was capable of completing the
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bourgeois revolution uninterrupted, or in Trotskys terms, in a 'permanent revolution' for socialism. Subordinating the workers and peasants to the Provisional Government would leave workers defenceless against a Bourgeois/Tsarist counterrevolution. There would be no peace, land or bread. No road forward to socialism, only back to barbarism. The lesson for Leninism in Occupy today is that after 1903 the Bolsheviks formed a faction in which the principle of revolutionary independence of the working class against any political alliances that subordinated it to the bourgeoisie was the test of membership. When revolution broke out in Russia the Bolsheviks had the history of building an organisation with a long experience of both democracy and discipline to act to defend this principle and change its program from one which involved a 'popular front' with the bourgeoisie, to that of socialist revolution. The change in program defeated the counter-revolution and made the revolution. So if this is the Leninist party we need today how do we go about building it?
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Leninism is about how Marxists lead in the wider working class struggles. This means a program for socialist revolution. It means to fight against today's liquidators and conciliators who want to bury the Marxist program into the popular front of the workers, petty bourgeois and bourgeois elements that make up the 99%. Leninists intervene to oppose the politics of all those who claim to be anti-capitalist yet act as the agents of the popular front with the bourgeoisie. Lenin's tactic of a Bolshevik faction engaging in patient explanation combined with contesting the leadership of the class struggle would weed out those among the 99% who are agents of the bourgeoisie. Cops, Ron Paulites, libertarians, etc. yes. But more dangerous are those that pose as workers. We oppose pacifist and reformist appeals to the 1%, the cops, the middle class, the Democrats, Social Democracy and the labour bureaucrats of the trade union federations. We do this by calling on Occupy to Occupy to follow Occupy Oakland's lead and unite with the union rank and file members to Occupy all the strategic sites of production of profits - the workplaces, the banks, transport and communications, schools, hospitals etc - to demand workers administration and control. Reformists will expose themselves opposing direct action, and radicals will join with Leninists to build workers councils and workers militias capable of smashing the capitalist state and installing the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. We advocate reading Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, and Luxemburg but not the petty bourgeois radicals Zizek or Chomsky, Bourdieu or Badiou. The latter offer no revolutionary answers as in their various ways they oppose the Leninist-type party and the practice of democratic-centralism. For us the only way that the Marxist program can be tested is if a majority agrees to unite in action to test it, and then to debate the results democratically to see if it works or not. That is the basis of democratic centralism, or, dialectics - which in its highest form is the class conscious intervention of the vanguard of the working class to resolve the contradiction between socialised production and private profit by means of a socialist revolution. That is the method of Leninists in Occupy. The crisis of capitalism is destroying the working class and driving it to resist its destruction. Leninists are Marxists; we do not separate ourselves from the masses, but champion their class interests locally and globally. We intervene only to help workers become class conscious fighters, organised in strike committees, democratic councils of action, defence militias, and as militants of an international party of socialist revolution, able to unite internationally as a force to smash the capitalist system and its military machine and replace it with a socialist society producing for need and not profit!
Lenin in Occupy
The global capitalist system is facing a terminal crisis. The world economy must go through a deep depression to restore the rate of profit. No bourgeois or capitalist party can stop this, only a working class revolution. We face socialism or barbarism. The bourgeoisie cannot rule without invoking extreme repression, first smashing of democracy and then unless workers stop it, fascism. The workers cannot live with capitalism. For workers to live, capitalism must die. Lenin would call it a revolutionary situation where the extreme rottenness of global capitalism threatens destruction of humanity and where the working class is ready and willing to fight to the death but has yet to overcome a huge lack of class consciousness and organisation. So Lenin would recognise Occupy as a spontaneous mobilisation of objectively anti-capitalist youth and other workers but with its majority trapped into an economist ideology and still mislead about the possibility of reforms. However the severity of the crisis means that the capitalist attacks and resistance of Occupy to them will quickly prove that the capitalists must destroy rather than grant reforms. One term of Obama has gone a long way to destroy economist illusions. Several social democratic governments in Europe have been voted out after imposing drastic austerity programs. Even so the reformists are fighting like hell to hijack Occupy and stop its revolutionary development. So Leninists must join in this fight against all attempts to subordinate the working class to the bourgeoisie via the Democrats, Social Democracy and the labour bureaucracy, and raise instead the need to build an independent mass workers party with a revolutionary program.
Turn Occupy into revolutionary workers councils! For a new World Party of Socialist Revolution! 10
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This is a subject hotly debated in Africa where China has moved in a big way in recent years and is now threatening to displace US and EU powers. The West has responded with charges of Chinese colonialism propping up dictatorships with and exploiting land, minerals and labour. Of course African regard this as a huge joke given a history of Western enslavement and colonial occupation over several centuries. Deborah Brautigam has written extensively on this, in particular on cheap loans and Eximbank subsidies. Her main findings are that despite appearances (and being late on the scene) China is doing pretty much what Western powers have done for years - exploiting raw materials (but less labour) at a price pretty much comparable with the West. That means investing at a similar rate of return as others and being no more or less 'imperialistic' than its Western rivals. In other words China could not expand at the rate its doing overtaking the Western powers unless it is getting 'value for money'. That would figure since they are all capitalist countries and you cannot grow by printing money without causing inflation. So what we have is China emerging as an imperialist power having accumulated surplus capital from the extreme exploitation of labour (alongside the maquiladoras of Japan, Taiwan, US etc in the SEZs) and clever adoption of new technology, which is now being invested in the classic manner of the European and American imperialists before it (including in China), to plunder the resources of the colonial and semi-colonial (and of course rival imperialist) economies to extract super-profits. So what is new? The Crafar Farms issue shows that those in the working class most influenced by chauvinism and racism are those sectors that historically defend their jobs from non-white races. Those in the working class that oppose China buying the farms in favour of NZ ownership (and Maori ownership) are in danger of getting sucked into this anti-China racism. When Michael Fay, notorious for making millions from selling off state assets, and running off to live in Switzerland, forms a bloc with Maori Iwi leaders this is a fraction of the national capitalists aligned with imperialism. Fay sold BNZ and NZ Rail to major foreign corporates. He is part of the vulture capitalists that privatise NZ assets for foreign ownership. The vulture capitalists cant exist without partnerships with foreign ownership. Why? To survive, national capitalists must become agents of imperialism on its terms and get a small share of the plunder of NZ assets and labour for their efforts. Partnering Iwi
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corporates is merely joining forces with new players to suck them into the vulture compradors. Think Maori joint ventures in fishing. The fact is that international finance capital is contemptuous of borders. It only preaches nationalism and racism to keep the workers lined up behind national borders and ready to go to war to defend this or that imperialist power. Thats why workers as a class have to be even more internationalist than their bosses and not fall for the racist nationalism that divides and conquers them. NZ workers allies are not their own bosses, but all foreign workers. The best ally against Chinese imperialism is not Michael Fay or his tame Iwi partners but the Chinese working class that fights for workers control of the Chinese economy. NZ workers should do the same. Its not enough to demand nationalisation since that means the property is controlled by the state which is the state of the ruling class. The fact that China still has land that was nationalised by the 1949 Revolution, but can still restore capitalism and emerge as the most dynamic imperialist power proves this. Workers are internationalists; we have no nation if that means merging with the national capitalists. The nation we defend is that which belongs to the working class and our demands are to socialise the land, all state assets so they cannot be sold, all major corporate and banks, and put them under workers management and control. Aotearoa/NZ is a tiny pawn in this Pacific rivalry between the US and China so the only question that should be posed by what passes for the 'left' here is how does the Aotearoa/NZ working class avoid being dragged by national capitalist chauvinists to fight for one or other imperialist power in the new wars that are looming everywhere? The answer to that is not too difficult. Oppose ALL privatisation into the hands of all large capitalist enterprises and demand socialisation under workers control. Where private firms go bankrupt, do not bail them out, do not subsidise their sale to vulture capitalists of any nationality, but socialise without compensation all their assets. All land should be socialised and land users licensed via leases to produce meeting strict social criteria. That way the working class owns and controls the base of the economy and can plan production for need and not greed. At the same time the historic question of the theft of Maori land can be settled as Maori have first claim to perpetual leasehold of their historic lands.
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Kautsky, the main German defender of Marx until the Russian revolution which he repudiated. Wars and revolutionary crisis tested Marxist orthodoxy to the limit; some regressed like Kautsky, some became victims of their failure to build a Bolshevik-type party like Luxemburg and Gramsci, some vacillated as centrists like Trotsky, and others remained steadfast like Lenin.
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but then quickly rejected the single party state. They sided with the Peasant leader Makhno against the Red Army during the civil war, and backed the sailors of Kronstadt who staged an insurrection against the state for new elections without the Bolshevik party. Logically, then these opponents of Bolshevism had become anti-Marxists and counter-revolutionaries adding to the isolation and defeat of the revolution in Russia. Therefore they have no credibility in events since then including the attempts by Marxists to defend the Russian revolution from degeneration under Stalin, the defence of the Spanish Revolution, the fight against fascism, the tactics against social democracy etc etc. In class terms these currents are petty bourgeois. Their view of capitalism is one of unequal exchange where the capitalists cheat workers of part of the value of their wage. It falls to the petty bourgeois to correct this by reforming the state. We call this petty bourgeois current that uses Marxs name in vain centrists.
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labours historic gains prevent devaluation of living standards. But the basic point is that the system does not function by buying cheap and selling dear except at the margins. At the centre of all the big capitalist powers is highly developed monopoly industry that sets the value of commodities by the value of the labour power expended in production at a level set by a historic compromise between labour and capital.
March-April 2012
Welfare Rights are Under Attack! Stand Up Fight Back! Stop Nationals Attacks upon Mothers and Babies, Older Women and Youth!
No to the Social Security Amendment Bill!
Dont separate mothers from children! No Privatisation of Welfare! Living Benefits Now! http://waitemataunite.blogspot.com 8369104
0272800080 unitewaitemata@gmail.com
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Defend Marxism
While the economic conditions for socialism exist today, standing between the working class and socialism are political, social and cultural barriers. They are the capitalist state and bourgeois ideology and its agents. These agents claim that Marxism is dead and capitalism need not be exploitative. We say that Marxism is a living science that explains both capitalisms continued exploitation and its attempts to hide class exploitation behind the appearance of individual "freedom" and "equality". It reveals how and why the reformist, Stalinist and centrist misleaders of the working class tie workers to bourgeois ideas of nationalism, racism, sexism and equality. Such false beliefs will be exploded when the struggle against the inequality, injustice, anarchy and barbarism of
Communist Workers Group of New Zealand/Aotearoa, in a Liaison Committee with Humanist Workers for Revolutionary Socialism
Online http://redrave.blogspot.com Phone 0064 027280008 Email cwg006@yahoo.com http://communistworker.blogspot.com/
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