Class Struggle # 139 Summer 2021/22

Class Struggle 139 December-February Summer 2021/22

Editorial
The Future is the Commune!
Dying capitalism beset by contradictions. The dull compulsion of the hidden hand is not
working. It is left naked without clothes. The increasing anarchy of the market in the age of
imperialism is now compounded by the terminal crisis of overproduction. Capitalism has
exhausted its historical mission destroying nature, the material base of its own existence.
Crises accumulate and overtake it threatening the future of humanity. Marx’s metabolic rift
predicted the breakdown between nature and society. The ruling class is desperate to smash
the revolution with fascism. Forward to socialist revolution and the international Commune!

But who will resist this destruction? Only humans profit to avoid the onset of terminal crisis. The
who are an integral part of nature as they once were restoration of Russia and China as rampant
before the onset of class society – that is the capitalist rivals only prolongs the agony.
Commune. Marx in Grundrisse spoke of the
As capitalism decomposes, it exposes the rotting
commune as a society in which collective ownership
corpses of previous modes of production in its
land and labour ruled. It corresponds to what is now
bowels. Slavery, serfdom and unfree wage labour
called the lineage mode of production in which
return with all their reactionary cultural crap rising
matrilineage is the organising principle. Work and
to the surface. Nationalism, racism and sexism eat
the product of work is allocated by mothers among
away at the material gains of class struggle since
kinfolk according to their productive ability and
the 19th century, provoking the long overdue
reproductive need.
backlash as nature reacts to capital’s barbarism.
The overthrow of the original Commune created the
Marxists recognise the class war between labour and
first class divided society, the patriarchal mode of
capital as the contradiction between nature
production, where men exploited women’s
reproducing itself, and capitalist society destroying
productive and reproductive labour as domestic
nature. This contradiction is expressed as the class
slaves. But Marx and Engels did not acknowledge the
struggle for the socialist revolution to end
existence of a distinct patriarchal mode, nor its
capitalism, return to nature and create the
survival embedded in the later tributary and
conditions for a post-capitalist future.
capitalist modes.
It was clear to the young Marx as a student of the
Yet as an exploited and oppressed class confined to
scientific advances of the enlightenment, that
slavery women fought against their defeat. Their
capitalism was its own worst enemy and would end
resistance over 10,000 years is the historical thread
up as the anarchic, self-destructive mode today.
that carries the life of the Commune through
The rise of the irrational, the cult of the individual,
successive dominant modes as women’s class
mired in the particularity of nation, race and
struggle for liberation.
gender, acts to destroy the secular, scientific, and
This was true of the Commune of Paris 1871 when universal truths of life in the material world.
women played an active role in the insurrection
The battle to defeat the Climate deniers and the
against the reactionary capitalist patriarchy of
Covid deniers illustrates perfectly how ignorance of
France. It was also true of the Russian revolution of
science and reason, expressing itself as a cultural
1917 which laid the foundations for an international
war, is really the class war between humanity,
Commune only to have the promise of world
reproducing itself within nature, against capital’s
revolution destroyed by global counter-revolution.
destruction of nature.
Today the essence of the Commune is kept alive
This contradiction between labour and capital
in the growing struggle against capitalism’s drive
puts the working class on the side of nature.
to destroy the historical power of the proletariat
Humanity must restore itself as nature and return
to end rotten capitalism as the last class society
to its material roots to wage the class war. Our
to make way for the return of the Commune.
survival depends on winning this war, ending class
Neoliberalism was the last chance for dying society and building the international Commune.
capitalism to restore profitable production. It failed
to exploit workers sufficiently to make enough Viva La Commune!
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Class Struggle 139 December-February
BRIEFS
China vs US again
The warmongering is coming mainly from the US.
China is blustering in defence. China is
outperforming the US so does not need war to win.
US has good cause to risk war because it has nothing
left to assert its global hegemony.
The money printing since 2008 is not going into
production but as you put it into speculating on
existing assets. These assets retain their original
value, determined by the labour value it takes to
produce them.
But speculation drives up price inflation, reflected
in a devaluation of money. The combination of
inflation and slow-down in production is
‘stagflation’. The US will face stagflation unless it
can use its military power to bully the world to get
cheaper inputs and retain the dollar as a world
currency which holds up its ‘value’ artificially.
China’s problems of are a different order as a
restored capitalist economy on steroids drawing on
its huge size and labour market. That is a problem
of youth compared with US decrepitude.
But China’s phenomenal expansion since 2000
cannot continue without correcting for the
distortions introduced by internal rather than
external pressures. Sooner or later its surplus
profits will exceed the demand for investment in
production and divert surplus capital into
speculation in existing assets. This has already
happened as capital floods into property creating a
fictitious bubble of wealth that is popping right
now.
While speculation in the US is a symptom of failure
to prevent the rate of profit falling, in China it
represents an unproductive drain on profits that
can be corrected by the state. Chinese state
capitalism is much more centrally managed than
anything the US could dream of. The US state is run
by finance capital and will never allow all the
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Summer 2021/22
speculative fictitious capital to simply be written
off. The revolving door between business and Govt
does not allow it since it doesn’t have the central
power to allow a massive depression to cuts costs.
In China the state has much more direct control
over capital and labour. Since 1990 economic
development is no longer driven by a plan but by
the market. While prices are now set by the value
of labour in the market, business remains state
controlled.
So, when capital is diverted to speculation in land
the state can respond by allowing inflated land
values to collapse cheapening land as an input
stimulating investment in production. Of course,
the property losses also hurt US speculators.
The state can intervene to manage this collapse. Xi
understands capitalism and proposes a land tax to
limit property speculation and promote ‘common
prosperity’. He has the power to take on the
billionaire parasites living off productive capital.
The Chinese state acts in the interests of the
'collective capitalist' since the CCP made the
transition from a Stalinist state to a bourgeois
state. Property speculation is a drain on the profits
of productive capital, and the elimination of this
drain gives terminal capitalism a temporary
remission from decline and death.
As long as the Chinese state can keep capital
pouring into expanding production in China and
increasingly around the world via the Belt and Road
project, its rate and mass of profits will increase
while US rate and mass declines. In the process it is
diverting value from its rival imperialist powers,
notably the US, to its own growing world empire.
It is this fundamental life and death contest
between the rising Chinese and declining US
imperialism that is shaping the outline of our
future. But it’s not a paint by numbers scenario.
The future is not fate. Workers everywhere must
unite against all their ruling classes as the enemy
within and to turn our guns on the class enemy.
This means that instead of rallying behind national
flags and following the ruling class into wars that
use us as nuclear fodder in a struggle for
supremacy, we ally with both Chinese and US
workers against their ruling classes. In the event of
war, we must refuse to join either side, but fight
the class war for our independence as the socialist
republic of Aotearoa.
Long live the world socialist revolution!
Class Struggle 139 December-February
NZ and 3 Waters
Big debate over water and the Labour Govt plan for
3 waters reform. Govt’s proposed sweeping reforms
to take control of 3 waters (drinking, runoff, and
sewage) is opposed by 70% or more of local bodies,
including the biggest city, Auckland. Despite
Minister Mahuta’s promise to take on their debt,
they see it as an asset grab and an attack on local
democracy. Chris Trotter, opposes the 3 waters
plan on these grounds. He offers a solution where
local democracy must control water and oppose
centralisation and privatisation.
Since colonisation NZ has had ‘local democracy’.
Then it was called ‘pork barrel’ politics. The landed
gentry used its control of local and central govt to
privatise the value of land, roads, rail, energy, and
water for themselves. We are still living in the same
system. Business controls both local and central
government. The modern gentry takes water for
granted as a property right.
Typical is Sir Russell Coutts, a member of the new
gentry, a mega yachtie and now a prominent South
Island landowner. He demands water rights to
include a private golf course which already has local
council consent to expand to 18 holes. He goes
through the legal process to resolve a conflict with
his neighbours, some whom are members of the old
gentry.
So, there is no ‘local democracy’ regulating water
today other than the taxpayer agreeing to subsidise
the de facto privatisation of water overseen by the
heavy hand of centralism. Localism is actually the
profiteering of pork barrel central politics, serving
only the interests of the gentry.
The real question is: which class controls water
from the centre? Is it the delegated power from the
working masses, the Māori Treaty claim of
ownership, or the entitled power of the capitalist
class? Clearly the latter. There is no ‘democracy’ at
any level in NZ as demonstrated by the Govt sacking
of the Canterbury Regional Council (better known
by its PR label Environment Canterbury or ECan)!
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Summer 2021/22
When ECan refused water rights to farmers, in 2010
the National Govt sacked the elected members and
appointed commissioners. It took away ECans
responsibility for water management and created a
new Canterbury Regional Water Authority. Here was
central Govt replacing a regional body to meet the
local yokel water rights needed for the 60% increase
in dairy herds between 2002 and 2008.
‘Green Party co-leader Russel Norman said ECan
was paying the price for standing up to the dairy
industry and refusing water consents. “Everyone
now has a clear message. If you stand up to protect
water, you're going to be taken out”’.
Water is a scarce resource and all life is dependent
on it. Ask the Palestinians or Syrians. Capitalism
regards water as a property right to extract
monopoly rent. Hence as demand grows and rent
obtained from water rises, rent seeking increases.
That’s why we endorse the push by Māori and their
supporters to put it under direct central state
control to put an end to ‘pork barrel’ politics. There
is no guarantee that the Labour Govt will clean up
water, but the dirty politics around water will
reveal the economic interests of those who are up
to their necks in it. Just follow the dirt.
The Govt response to Covid has exposed the
conflicting interests of business and public health.
Yet there would have been no Covid response
without central Govt. So do the 3 Waters demand a
central Govt plan to undo the damage done by local
bodies where business is firmly in control.
So long term, in a country of only 5/6 million, our
central govt is still very local, serving a small,
dependent decaying semi-colonial economy being
sucked dry by global capitalism. If Aotearoa is to
succeed in protecting its water among other
resources from imperialist exploitation, it needs a
workers’ Government based on the democracy of a
national federation of workers councils.
So, let’s see the Govts 3 water policy make the
landed gentry and big business concede control
over water in the face of the mass demand for equal
rights of access, to clean up 3 waters, and restore
ecological health and biological diversity, no longer
subject to greedy privatisation and naked
profiteering.
This is the first and only major policy from this
neoliberal government that directly acts to take on
climate change. Let’s fight for it and in the process
demonstrate what it takes to bring about real
workers democracy in Aotearoa.
For a Socialist Aotearoa!
Class Struggle 139 December-February
Trans and Fascism
The so-called left is deeply divided over trans
ideology. Some are mystified by this ‘regression’.
Some take the side of identity politics, other
oppose it on the basis of class. But few have worked
out why identity politics has blossomed in the neo-
liberal period into something that threatens to
destroy the unity of the working class. We put
forward our analysis here.
If you want an explanation for this 'regression' try
sexism on steroids. Capitalism in terminal crisis is
throwing up all the old crap of ages in preparation
for fascism that divides and destroys the working
class. It draws on the slavery and serfdom of prior
modes as it cannot squeeze more profits out of
wage labour to deliver sufficient profits.
Casualising wage labour breaks down the solidarity
of social labour and replaces it with the
disorganised anarchy of lumpen, atomised labour.
Marx on the ‘Absolute General Law of
Accumulation’ in Capital One says: “…within the
capitalist system all methods for raising the social
productiveness of labour are brought about at the
cost of the individual labourer; all means for the
development of production transform themselves
into means of domination over, and exploitation
of, the producers…”
Marx points out that this is a law of capitalism not
a hangover from pre-capitalist modes of production.
Yet as if to rub our noses in this historic
decomposition of social labour, capitalism today
dredges the underworld to make a new iteration of
the patriarchy in the form of the trans cult which
seeks to destroy women whose historic resistance is
the unbroken link to the original slavery that
signified the overthrow of the Commune. Men
become legal women to destroy women's sex-class
agency against the rise of fascism.
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Summer 2021/22
Women’s resistance to the threat posed by trans
ideology has been countered by increasingly
extreme arguments that they are transphobes, even
fascists, to justify open violence by the ‘left’ to
shut them up.
Judith Butler, a US academic influential in the
argument that gender trumps sex, recently argued
that those who criticise trans gender people are
motivated by the alt-right and are fascists. Gender
critical women are therefore fascists. But Butler
gets it all wrong. Fascists defend the patriarchy. So
does gender ideology which insists that transwomen
with penises are women. Therefore, for alt-right
and alt-left, the common enemy is women who lead
the resistance to patriarchal capitalism. The L
versus the T.
Butler is wrong because she is a liberal. She glosses
over End Stage Capitalism and argues for human
rights despite capitalism’s inability to deliver them.
She rejects the determining influence of capitalist
social relations. She takes the post-modern line
that individuals can self-determine their identity as
a matter of free choice. This is an idealist erasure
of production relations by exchange relations. The
market rules and freedom is freedom of choice. Into
the vacuum left by the missing production relations
she validates the alienated exchange relations of
bourgeois individuals.
The theory of ‘gender’ demonstrates this perfectly.
Production relations under capitalism are class
relations. Gender identity denies the production
relations of labour and sex and the necessity of
class struggle to revolutionise these relations.
Instead, the alienated subjectivity of exchange
relations defines self-identity as the buying and
selling of commodities to meet social needs; the
‘performance’ of self-determination.
The performance of gender miraculously erases the
historical oppression of gender grounded in the
exploitation and oppression of sex by the
patriarchy. By privileging gender over sex, men re-
define women as determined by their gender, that
is subordinated to their oppression. They attack
women’s agency as a revolutionary force that can
overthrow the patriarchy as part of the socialist
revolution.
Fascism is the extreme reaction of capitalism to
smash the working class as the gravedigger of
capitalism. That is why it will be women, and
lesbians in particular, that lead the antifascist
struggle against trans ideology, and against the
attacks on all women’s rights by the patriarchy,
as part of the socialist revolution that ends
capitalism and builds socialism.
Class Struggle 139 December-February
Eliminate Capitalism
For capitalism, ‘elimination’ means ending any
threat to its existence from working people who
refuse to pay for its terminal crisis of declining
profits, climate collapse and many more
pandemics. For workers elimination means
eliminating capitalism.
From the outset Covid told us that it was caused by
capitalism and that to defeat it we had to defeat
capitalism. We wrote about this over a year ago in
‘From the Coronavirus to the Commune’. The cause
was capitalism’s disruption of the ecology forcing
viruses to jump from the wild species to humans.
Everything about the origins of SARS CoV-2 proves
this.
Since capitalism’s downward spiral into its End
Stage (article below) is likely to create the
conditions for many more pandemics, we cannot
expect it to offer any solution. In fact, the opposite
is true. The progress of the pandemic proves that
capitalism will not divert profits to maintain the
survival of the working masses. Capitalism does not
have the health of workers in mind unless it is vital
to keeping their labour-power alive to exploit for
profit.
The proof of this is in the massive reserve army of
unemployed used to fill the jobs of those who need
replacing due to overwork, starvation and
pandemics. Eugenics is the name for this unnatural
selection where the rich and powerful eliminate the
poor and weak.
Big business which has had a massive Covid bailout
and is reaping huge profits. But it wants open
borders to clear the supply chains. Most pressure
especially in Auckland is coming from small
businesses and a growing anti-vaxx movement that
resents lockdowns and want its ‘freedom’ now.
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Summer 2021/22
Antivaxxers are risking the lives of many more than
their own children. Europe is undergoing a new
surge in cases due to the antivax movement which
is getting more violent against the state. This is a
movement the believes that its freedom is being
taken away by a state that represents some
international elite of globalists, socialists or
communists. It looks for an easy explanation for the
loss of income and status caused by the capitalist
economic, Covid and Climate crises.
Unlike a workers’ movement that fights for
socialism against the capitalist ruling class and
looks for allies among other oppressed groups,
fascism builds a reactionary movement based on
the petty bourgeoisie and lumpen workers directed
against the working class. Its main enemy is not the
capitalist ruling class but the working class which it
blames for its decline, while it looks to the ruling
class to restore its former social position.
So, when it comes to workers uniting with political
allies in Aotearoa to fight the pandemic, we have
to distinguish between the poor and oppressed who
are under attack by a Govt putting business before
health, and those who reject the government
because its Covid policies clash with their business
interests and their views on personal freedom.
Therefore, we must oppose the feral and lumpen
elements of society that blame the Govt as elitist
or communist, but at the same time are allying with
business against the interests of workers. The
hardcore antivaxx movement is plugged into the
global resistance building against lockdowns and
vaccinations which is ultimately anti-worker.
This explains the fate of Covid ‘elimination’ in
Aotearoa. Elimination of the virus which threatens
most the poorest and weakest of the working class,
will always come distant second when it threatens
the elimination of rent and profit extracted from
the working class.
This explains why the Labour Government has
adapted to capitalist elimination. We will now
‘learn to live’ with Delta through herd immunity,
sacrificing the deaths and Long Covid suffering of
the poor and weak, so that white settler colonial
capitalism may live to survive another day.
But why should we be interested in a return to
capitalism as usual? We have said for more than a
year, that for workers to live capitalism must die.
To do that we need a strategy for workers to take
power, to end capitalism and its destruction of
humanity, and build a socialist society in harmony
with nature.
Class Struggle 139 December-February
GET READY FOR END STAGE CAPITALISM
Prime Minister and Prime Celebrity Jacinda Ardern at Super Saturday Vaxathon
Hope Super Saturday went well and Aotearoa gets
90% of the ‘eligible’ vaxxed by Xmas. I missed it
doing other things. I asked myself how could we go
from a desperate but successful L4 that needed to
be strengthened to eliminate Covid, to opening up
to a Telethon event in 2 weeks.
Super Saturday is a token of defeat. Its appeal is
not to social solidarity, but to the mass psychology
of the ‘event’- Telethon fuelled Celebrity – a
recognition that we are alienated individuals
stripped of our social solidarity by end stage
capitalism.
Instead of being empowered with the knowledge to
act for ourselves, we are being sucked into a
sideshow for big business. Because even if bribing
us and hyping this event gets us to 90%, it is based
on crass psychology and not a social solidarity
grounded in working peoples’ consciousness of the
causes of the pandemic in the ‘capitalocene’.
Meeting Delta
For what should be by now obvious reasons, Delta
is a killer strain and has some way to go before it
gets replaced by a bigger killer strain Delta +. The
strain that came out of Wuhan had a RO
(reproduction number) of 1 or 2. Delta has a RO of
5 or 6.
So, with a vax rate of 90% we are going to see Delta
rip through the unvaccinated to take out the
weakest of us. Not just the aged and unhealthy, but
healthy young people and children.
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Summer 2021/22
And for those double dosed already, a booster is
already being advised as the vax loses its
protection. Not only that, Delta leaves its card. It
damages the organs which it infects producing Long
Covid, a sort of ME/CFS (chronic fatigue syndrome)
as a likely lifelong disability.
So even with 95% or 100% (including children over 5
years) vaxxed and boosted, the technology has to
race to keep ahead of the virus. A pharma industry
run by Big Pharma, for all the social solidarity and
goodwill of the scientists and technicians involved,
is motivated by profit, not public health. It will
always be playing catchup and never catchup. Just
look at the gap between the vaxxed vs non-vaxxed
worlds.
Kick out Plan B!
It’s clear that Plan B, ‘open the borders to the vax
passport’, is the strategy of the market and big
business. This is the presupposition that capitalism
imposes on us with its fetish of the market. There
is ‘no alternative’ to the market when clearly the
market cannot prevent nor eliminate Delta. Yet this
presupposition rules OK.
It’s the imperative behind the whining of the SME
mob and the big business lobby. It’s what is used to
‘balance’ public health with the economy. It’s all
the reasons that justify giving up on lockdowns and
putting our faith in High Tech vaccines.
The power of the business lobby to end lockdowns
led the Govt to shift prematurely from Level 4 to
Level 3 in Auckland on 21st September against the
Class Struggle 139 December-February
advice of epidemiologists. The graph [below] shows
cases falling until a few days later when they start
a relatively steep climb following interventions by
ex-Prime Minister John Key attacking the
‘elimination’ strategy, and an outdoor rally by
Destiny Church that abused the Level 3 rules
But Plan B advocates don’t want it to be seen as a
naked play for a return to business as usual, they
want it to look like it has the mental health of
workers at heart. And right on cue (Key’s press
release at 5 am on 26 Sept), the Government that
put profits before people, starts to abandon
‘elimination’ concerned for the people suffering
from ‘lockdown fatigue’ who break the rules.
Business has been bailed out, increased its share of
national ‘wealth’ and happily restructures so that
the biggest get bigger (e.g., Big Tech). But so
strong is the market imperative that it gets away
with it. And mental health is appropriated by Plan
B and demands a return to the market as a solution
to a problem which it caused.
That is why the familiar mantra of balancing the
concerns of public health with economy growth is
such bullshit. There can be no equilibrium or ‘happy
medium’ struck between the health of profits and
the health of the workers who produce them, in a
pandemic that is symptomatic of End Stage
Capitalism.
End Stage Capitalism
End Stage Capitalism is parasitical capitalism dying
as it kills of its host, nature. It cannot afford a
public health system worthy of the name. Like all
social welfare measures since the onset of the great
neo-liberal depression in the 1980s, public health
has been run down and milked by the market. End
Stage Capitalism must claw back value by making
cuts in state spending on the social wage, and
driving down real wages.
Neo-liberalism is an attack on workers and poor
farmers worldwide to restore profits as the life
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Summer 2021/22
support for dying capitalism. By digging out much
of the Earth’s resources in the last 50 years it
sacrificed nature and made the giant leap towards
climate collapse today. The habitats of all species
were disrupted forcing extinction and zoonotic
jumping species for survival.
The pandemic is therefore without question the
direct result of End Stage Capitalism, dying and
rotting on its feet, destroying nature and disrupting
climate and species habitats. What is symptomatic
of capitalism in its decline and fall, cannot be
corrected by attempts to put it on life support.
Capitalism survives only at the expense of killing
nature. Our lives, threatened by starvation, disease
and human extinction, cannot be saved unless
capitalism dies and nature is revived.
On to Survival Socialism
We need now is the mass movement to end
economic exploitation, climate collapse and
extinction. Against stage-managed ‘events’ where
our alienation and anger at the system in
breakdown is misdirected into keeping the ruling
class in power, we need the class consciousness
that activates us to fight for the end of capitalism.
Instead of restoring the profits of capitalism
expropriated from working people, we need to
restore nature as the ecological support system
of survival socialism. Instead of worrying about
‘lockdown fatigue’ we need to factor in ‘long
Covid fatigue’.
We need to start now to fight for Zero Covid; to
build a public health system under workers’
control; to create a welfare system that supports
human life; to form workers’ organisations strong
enough to resist fascism; and to elect a workers’
government capable of taking back the wealth
stolen from working people for centuries, making
the transition from capitalism to socialism
possible.
Long Live the World Socialist Revolution!
Class Struggle 139 December-February Summer 2021/22

AUKUS ON THE WARPATH AGAINST CHINA!

No to Imperialist wars! For World Socialism!
The arrival of AUKUS, the recent military alliance between the US, UK and Australia, is
another fateful step towards World War 3. Why? Both previous World Wars resulted from the
economic rivalry of the great powers to repartition the world in their interests. But capitalism
in its imperialist epoch is in terminal decline and each world war brings it closer to total
destruction. This time, a WW3 will arise from the outbreak of hostilities between the US bloc
and the Russia/China bloc, driven by the laws of capital to take their economic rivalry to the
political/military level.

The emergence of Russia and China as new
imperialist powers nearly two decades after
capitalist restoration, can be tracked back to the
Soviet Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent
partition of the capitalist world from the soviet
world over what we can call the ‘short Soviet
Century’ from 1917 to1991. The threat of socialist
revolution spreading to Europe explains the rise of
fascism between the wars. That in turn, split the
imperialist powers, freeing the Soviet Union to join
the fight for ‘democracy’ against the fascist Axis,
to extend its border into Eastern Europe and to
sponsor a wave of decolonisation that culminated in
the Chinese national revolution in 1949.
The expansion of the soviet bloc was countered by
the Atlantic Alliance between the US and Europe,
and the formation of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty
Organisation) in the attempt to contain the ‘red
menace’. The ‘cold war’ (from 1948 to 1991) was
essentially the Atlantic Alliance raising political and
economic blockades against the soviet bloc, driving
the Stalinist leaderships towards capitalist
restoration. Despite the defeat of the Soviet Union
and opening up of China to foreign investment,
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China and Russia have emerged from these defeats
resisting re-colonisation by the West. The relative
independence from imperialism, achieved by
permanent revolution in the USSR from 1917-91and
China from 1949-92, afforded Russia and China the
breathing room to avoid subordination as semi-
colonies after the capitalist restoration and the
tools to emerge as new imperialist powers in the
subsequent decades.
Far from the dismemberment of the soviet bloc and
a return to imperialist exploitation, Russia and
China retained control over most of Eurasia, and
embarked on an imperialist course themselves,
emerging around the new millennium as rivals to
the US and EU powers.
China and Russia become superpowers
The arrival of QUAD and AUKUS signifies the US
ramping up its military containment of China
because it is losing the economic contest for
Eurasia. China and Russia have both made big
economic gains against the US bloc in Eurasia,
penetrating the EU and challenging NATO
members’ loyalty to the US.
Class Struggle 139 December-February
The defeat of the US in Afghanistan and the Middle
East marks the failure of 20 years of US military
intervention to win control of Eurasia. It has handed
US, British and French influence over to Russia,
China, Turkey and Iran. Russia has survived pressure
from NATO to break-up the Russian Federation,
annexing Crimea, reaching a stalemate in Donbass,
and stabilising the Caspian region. Putin’s 2021 New
Security Strategy spells out the need for
a multilateral world in which Russia acts to ‘deter
the US, ignore the EU, and partner with China and
India.’ Turkey while still a member of NATO is also
tied to Russia’s security reach into Syria against
‘terrorism’, in order to contain the Kurds. In the
aftermath of the US defeat in Afghanistan, Russia,
China, Turkey and Iran are poised to share the
rewards of a new client state in the battle for
Eurasia, and as a potential member of the SCO. The
fissures in NATO are widened in spite of the NATO
2030 agenda, an out of touch plan that ignores the
inter-imperialist competition among its own
members.
On the strength of a more self-reliant and self-
confident Russia and an expanding China globally
(BRICS and Road and Belt) China’s Xi ‘thought’ and
Russia’s Putin ‘thought’ both see a multilateral
world as the goal in which China and Russia are
strong, independent, strategic partners, alongside
the US and EU powers. SCO can be presented as
defensive rather than offensive because they are
winning the economic war. The weakness of the
SCO is that India (also a member of BRICS), Pakistan
and Iran (the new regime is expected to get full
membership this month), do not share in the super-
profits of the economic war. Clearly the Indian
ruling class resents China and is hostile to Pakistan,
and rejects sharing the defence of its neighbours in
a war with the US. India, under Modi, has preferred
the alternative of hanging onto the coat-tails of the
fading Anglo-American alliance to boost the
national ambitions of his clerical fascist regime.
US in decline faces more defeats
The US in decline is forced to meet this strategic
defeat in Eurasia, by rallying its remaining allies
and recruiting new ones to contain the Russia-China
bloc.
QUAD brings India, Japan and Australia into a closer
political alliance with the US against China. It
exploits India’s internal crisis and drives a wedge
between it and Russia which regards it as a ‘special
strategic partner, weakening the SCO. Including
Japan escalates the provocation as Japan is an
historic enemy of China. Australia has long played
the role of a ‘deputy sheriff’ of US imperialism in
the Pacific, and is engaged in a rowdy trade dispute
10
Summer 2021/22
with China over minerals, and an international
debate about China’s agents of ‘soft power’ taking
over Australia.
AUKUS brings the historic Eurocentric, white
supremacist Anglophile nations, the UK, US and
Australia together in a military alliance targeting
China in the Asia-Pacific, plugging Australia into the
South China Seas with US supplied nuclear
submarines, and a British Pacific fleet, to complete
the steel ring from India to Japan to contain
China. It ‘shares’ the pathetic Trumpite illusion of
making the US great again, and reliving the
memories of the glorious British Empire of Johnson
and Morrison, with the Abe-ist project of reviving
the Japanese ‘warrior greatness’ of the ‘Forever
War’ (1895 to 1945) as a grotesque empire revivalist
comic opera.
‘Make America great again’ was a Bonapartist
venture by Trump to rally the populace behind the
flag while pulling back from engagement in Eurasia
to face China in the Pacific. Biden’s pivot to the
Asia Pacific is a feeble attempt to follow where
Obama went, reconstituting the failing Atlantic
alliance as an Asia-Pacific Alliance. But this time
most of the EU don’t want to know, France is
positively hostile at having its contract to build
submarines for Australia cancelled, and Germany is
far too dependent on Russian gas to play Oriental
war games. Australia, the Wild South mining state
owned by the US, is sucking up to Biden to police
the South China Sea with the big boys’ toys – nuclear
powered and conventionally armed submarines
with stealth-like capabilities. These rag-tag states
pulled along in the orbit of the US death star will
all go down in history as a Quixotic gesture
attempting to bully China into submission.
China’s Response
As the AUKUS military provocation was being
announced, China formally applied to join the
CPTPP, the trans Pacific trade pact between Japan,
Canada, Mexico, Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia,
Peru, Singapore, Vietnam and New Zealand. China
responded pointedly to the US Asia Pivot by seeking
to advance its economic interests with countries
that are increasingly dependent on trade with it. A
few days later, Xi Jinping pointedly announced a
halt to the financing of coal mining outside China.
Australian mining could be the biggest casualty of
this policy. No doubt this move is part of China’s
strategic course plotted by the ‘President for life’.
Xi’s ‘thought’ begins with China’s historic grandeur
and its humiliation by imperialism. The members of
the QUAD and AUKUS comprise China’s main historic
enemies. Britain from the Opium Wars in the 1840s,
Class Struggle 139 December-February
Japan from 1895 to 1945, the US from 1949 to the
present, and India under Modi. But his solution is to
make China great again by out-capitalising and out-
imperialising his rivals at their Great Game. Xi’s
thought, seconded by Putin’s ‘thought’, is more
than a match for the Trumpite remake of US, UK,
Indian, Japanese and Australian ruling classes’
deluded dreams.
The US, clearly failing to maintain its economic
lead, allied to decaying crisis-ridden imperialist
Britain, and its bankrupt former colonies India and
Australia, are forced to adopt military provocations national bourgeoisies, we workers fight for national
to disrupt such plans. The prospect of military
flashpoints such as in the South China Sea and
Taiwan escalating into wider regional wars,
dragging many other states into a conflagration, is
becoming more likely.
World Revolution
The
imperialist
Yeu Yuen Shoe Strike (Nike Adidas) over unpaid pensions 2014
epoch is that
of wars,
revolutions
and counter-
revolutions.
As capitalism
comes to the
end of its
life, facing a
terminal
crisis of
falling
profits,
climate
collapse and
pandemics, destroying nature by exploiting it to
death, it has no way out but counter-revolution.
The declining imperialist states led by the US, is
leading that counter-revolution inexorably to war
against the Russia/China bloc.
Revolutionaries need to make it clear that we
reject imperialist wars between the two blocs in a
fight to divide what is left of nature’s resources,
and that the only alternative to total counter-
revolution is socialist revolution. For that to
happen, workers must be better organised than the
global capitalist ruling classes, formed into armed
workers’ councils and led by a revolutionary
communist international party of class- conscious
workers to the seizure of power.
In the imperialist countries revolutionary workers
are for the defeat of both sides in the event of war,
Summer 2021/22
as the lesser evil. We are prepared for the defeat
of our ‘own’ country because as workers we have
no country that exists by super-exploiting and
oppressing other countries. We turn our guns on our
own ruling classes, to overthrow the state and to
bring the working class to power. In the process we
become part of a united international working-class
war against imperialist war, making the permanent
revolution to prepare the conditions for world
socialism.
In the semi-colonies, dragged into war by their
independence against imperialism, and against the
national bourgeoisies that serve one or another
imperialist bloc. We oppose our nations’
involvement in all imperialist wars, but at the same
time defend ourselves from imperialist attacks,
leading the permanent revolution to liberate our
nation as a socialist republic that joins forces with
others in a
global
union of
socialist
republics.
Our
program
against war
is that the
class
enemy is at
home.
• We
demand
the closing
of all
foreign
military bases.
• We call on soldiers, sailors and air force
personnel to organize a COME HOME NOW
movement on every overseas base.
• We oppose forced conscription and the
“economic draft” into the capitalist state.
• We refuse to fight workers in other
countries, and call for mutinies in the
ranks, that raise the question of power –
which class shall rule, the class that
destroys nature and can only survive by
wars, or the class that can unite workers
internationally to overthrow that ruling
class and create a socialist world.
For a new World Party of Socialist Revolution
grounded in the method and program of the
Fourth International.
11
Class Struggle 139 December-February Summer 2021/22

Argentine Elections:
How revolutionary workers participate
Argentine workers, like most in the Global South, are trapped between the vise of the Western
imperialist bloc and the hammer of the rising Chinese/Russian imperialist bloc. Decades of
enslavement to the IMF enforced by CIA incursions, dictatorships, threats of the return of
military rule, and Peronist/Bonapartism have disappeared, murdered, attacked, beaten,
harassed militant workers and have infiltrated and weakened the workers movement in
general and the revolutionary left in particular. The working class struggles to find its
independent pole and its workers’ government but is held back by the Peronist Popular front
and the reformist parliamentarians of the left who sell their wares in the shadow of the
popular front.

Inter-imperialist conflict ignored exploitation. Indeed, the Argentine oil mogul

Eurnekians recently bought Argentina’s oil fields
Standing in the November election, the Frente back from the Sinopac. And the Belt and Road
Izquierda de los Trabajadores (FIT) is an electoral initiative competes in Argentina for major projects
bloc composed of four self-identified Trotskyist which threaten the environment such as the Santa
(PST, PO, IS, MST) groups each with significant Cruz River, the Nestor Kirchner-Jorge Cepernic
memberships and leadership roles in the trade Hydroelectric Power Plant.
unions. Each organization has its program and, in
the struggle, they are divided because of
“program”, but in elections there is no discussion
about it.
The particularity of FIT is that they are all
“Trotskyists”. Certainly, each party has a reformist
program and as such their programmatic
differences do not pose a problem for them in
forming a front in the election. In the actual class
struggle, in the unions and on the streets, unity is
not possible because they are different. But in the
elections, their parliamentary cretinism brings
them together in a rotten bloc that holds the
masses back from the Marxist analysis of the world
situation and the revolutionary program.
The program of the FIT unites the workers
movement around a mono-polar world view of US By not identifying the actual imperialist players the
imperialist hegemony ignoring the relative decline FIT mobilizes the workers against the deadly yet
of the western bloc and the rising inter-imperialist declining threats of Western imperialism while
competition from the China/Russia bloc. This ignoring the deals cut between the Argentine
silence on the class nature of China/Russia ignores bourgeoisie and Chinese imperialism competing for
the actual role these Great Powers play in Latin a slice of the workers’ flesh.
America and the developing inter-imperialist
conflict. The program claims to protect the
Parliamentary Cretinism
fisheries, yet not a word about the ongoing The ILTT finds the FIT electoral bloc to be a unity
incursion into Argentine fisheries by the Chinese of political varieties of national Trotskyism, united
which resulted in the sinking of a Chinese vessel by especially for reformist perspectives on the
the Argentine navy after which the poachers have parliamentary terrain and in agreement not to
adapted by ‘going dark’ and continuing to exploit acknowledge the immense operations of Chinese
the fisheries. imperialism in the Argentine economy, even
extending into the military and aerospace spheres.
In the sphere of energy, oil contract deals
Further, this is not a united front, whatever the
favourable to China have been cut by the Argentine
pretensions of the common program, as any mass
bourgeoisie with nary a word from the FIT about the
labour struggle is likely to separate the front into
12
Class Struggle 139 December-February
conflicting programmatic groupings. Nowhere does
this program call for a workers’ international, in
effect abandoning questions of international
strategy to popular front politics with Chinese
“socialism”, and in Latin America, with
Bolivarianism.
The program of the FIT raises with much gusto and
vigor many of the needs of the working class, but
stops short of developing a revolutionary
transitional program to form a workers’ state that
can build socialism. The militant worker reading the
program would walk away thinking that Eduard
Bernstein, Jeremy Corbyn, Lula/Dilma and Bernie
Sanders are right! All the workers have to do is win
51% of the electorate and the victory is at hand.
For revolutionary Marxists the capitalist’s elections
in particular and bourgeois democracy in general
are nothing but the dictatorship of the capitalist
class and its sideshow of democratic forms. For over
a century revolutionary Marxism has advocated
participation in elections. Not to take control of the
capitalist state apparatus but to use the opening
afforded by the window of “electoral democracy”
to mobilize the workers for the struggle for power
by the methods of the working class – mass
assemblies, national delegated workers congresses,
preparations for and the actual indefinite general
strike, mine, farm and factory occupations and the
smashing of the capitalist state.
The Paris Commune
As the Paris Commune proved, the state cannot be
smashed without the formation of organized,
disciplined, armed and coordinated worker’s
defense guards mustered by every union and
workers organization.
The FIT program makes a mockery of the 1938
Transitional Program of the Fourth International,
which all bloc members claim as their own. They
have individually and collectively removed the
spring from the clock, rendering their program a
path toward defeat, not victory.
13
Summer 2021/22
Among the many omissions from the
program of the FIT are:
• The section on jobs for all does not call to
shorten the work week but only to share the
work
• There is no direct call to establish price and
wage committees based on the unions and
workers organizations.
• Opposition to the pro-Zionist definition of
anti-Semitism which was a capitulation to
bourgeois ideological terminology and an
embarrassment for the militants who
elected representatives who claim to fight
for Palestinian self-determination.
• Capitulating to social backwardness the FIT
abandons women’s health. The call for No
Restrictions and Free Abortion on Demand is
unstated, while the FIT celebrates the
recent “green tide” abortion reform with 14
weeks limits allowing the capitalist state
restrictions to remain unchallenged.
• A call for a national assembly of the workers
representatives of the base (rank and file)
to prepare the indefinite general strike to
establish a workers’ government.
• The call for the workers’ government does
not explain to the workers how such a
government can be established only by the
workers’ own assemblies from factory and
neighborhood committees to national
councils of workers deputies and how its
decisions must be defended by the armed
masses.
• The workers governments mission is to
expropriate the national bourgeoisie, big
capital monopolies, banks, finance capital
and imperialist properties and carry out the
socialist tasks to build a centrally-planned
socialist economy based on workers’
democracy and workers’ self-management.
How does revolutionary Marxism
advocate critical support in elections as a
tactic?
We give critical support only when workers have
illusions that the reformist or centrist bloc has a
program that will deliver social revolution. The
masses to varying degrees trust or have faith that
the bloc, in this case the FIT, has the ability to
deliver if only it is elected. We don’t share these
illusions at all and we say so! Our critical support is
not to be mistaken for political support. Our
critical support is like the rope supporting the
hanged man, with the object of exploding such
Class Struggle 139 December-February Summer 2021/22
illusions and the reformist and centrist We have seen the tactic of critical support
leaderships that foster them. degraded into a reformist strategy across the world
to the point that the “revolutionary Marxists”
The tactic of critical support was developed by
forget about the rope! They grab the hanged man
Lenin in “Left Wing Communism” for communist
by the feet and try to hold him up! Sometimes even
parties not strong enough to run their own
sticking their own necks in the noose. Our intention
candidates to intersect with workers voting for the
is not to elevate the FIT but to help the masses,
Social Democrats, the bourgeois workers parties
who want socialism, navigate their way past all
and even the Socialist Party USA which under Debs
rotten political blocs, bourgeois workers parties,
had not navigated its way to the 3rd International.
reformist and Stalinist usurpers and find their own
“If the Hendersons and the Snowdens reject a bloc with revolutionary workers party and revolutionary
the Communists, the latter will immediately gain by international that fights for socialism with
winning the sympathy of the masses and discrediting the proletarian methods, not parliamentary
Hendersons and Snowdens; if, as a result, we do lose a
pipedreams.
few parliamentary seats, it is a matter of no significance
to us. We would put up our candidates in a very few but Support FITU like a rope supports a
absolutely safe constituencies, namely, constituencies
where our candidatures would not give any seats to the hanged man!
Liberals at the expense of the Labour candidates. We
would take part in the election campaign, distribute
leaflets agitating for communism, and, in all
constituencies where we have no candidates, we would
urge the electors to vote for the Labour candidate and
against the bourgeois candidate. Comrades Sylvia
Pankhurst and Gallacher are mistaken in thinking that
this is a betrayal of communism, or a renunciation of
the struggle against the social-traitors. On the contrary,
the cause of communist revolution would undoubtedly
gain thereby.
At present, British Communists very often find it hard
even to approach the masses, and even to get a hearing
from them. If I come out as a Communist and call upon
them to vote for Henderson and against Lloyd George, The ILTT applies the tactic of a critical vote for the
they will certainly give me a hearing. And I shall be FIT candidates. The reason is to break the workers
able to explain in a popular manner, not only why the who have illusions in reformism from their
Soviets are better than a parliament and why the leaderships.
dictatorship of the proletariat is better than the
dictatorship of Churchill (disguised with the signboard We advocate workers challenge the FIT mono-polar
of bourgeois “democracy”), but also that, with my world view and build an anti-imperialist program
vote, I want to support Henderson in the same way that identifies the inter-imperialist conflict that
as the rope supports a hanged man (ed. emphasis exists today between the US led bloc and the
added)—that the impending establishment of a China/Russia bloc (including rejecting their
government of the Hendersons will prove that I am Bolivarian popular front partners who retail “21st
right, will bring the masses over to my side, and will Century Socialism.”)
hasten the political death of the Hendersons and the We reject the Stalinist/Castroist fictions that hide
Snowdens just as was the case with their kindred the capitalist restoration in Cuba. We take our
spirits in Russia and Germany.” [our bold] stand on a revolutionary transitional program that
We apply the same method to the FIT in Argentina distinguishes itself from the minimum/maximum
today. We support the workers in their struggle for FIT program.
class independence and admonish the fake The ILTT calls on vanguard and revolutionary
Trotskyists whose Kautskyian method has so workers to break from the PST, PO, IS, MST
watered-down Trotsky’s Transitional Program that reformism and form a revolutionary workers party
it is unrecognizable except as a replica of the that shuns parliamentary cretinism and leads the
Minimum/Maximum program, that leaves out the fight for power by proletarian means based on the
transitional bridge; the min/max program explicitly method advanced in the Transitional Program.
forbidden by the founding document of the Fourth
International.

14
Class Struggle 139 December-February Summer 2021/22

Defend Haitian Refugees!

Citizen Rights for Immigrant Workers!
“Our labor movement represents workers from all
backgrounds and from all regions of the world,”
said AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler. “We not only
advocate for dignity on the job; we are champions
for universal human rights. So, we are wounded
when we see human beings being treated
deplorably, without due process—let alone having
the ability to stand up collectively and advocate
freely for themselves.” (“The AFL-CIO on Haiti
Humanitarian Crisis”, 10/01/2021).
So says Sister Schuler, who otherwise has done
nothing and spent none of our dues to mobilize the
Union in defense of the refugees driven back into
Mexico from under the elevated highway in Del Rio,
Texas in September. Schuler is a 24/7 Democrat and
you will not be able to insert a piece of paper
between positions she takes and what Biden says.
Fobbing off the membership with exhortations to
rely upon and elect more Democrats in pursuit of
policy changes is where our money goes.
The above AFL-CIO statement is nothing other than
an expression of pressure from the union ranks,
emphasis on the nothing! The union bureaucracy
will no more mobilize the power of Labor to defend
immigrants than they will mobilize Labor to defend
our unions, which are decimated. We are not
“other” than Haitians!
An awareness of Haiti’s history is essential when
considering the current crisis at the Texas border
where thousands of Haitian workers gathered in
hopes of emigrating to the U.S. for a better life. We
see the Biden administration bending to the racist
anti-immigrant sentiment and political base of the
fascist petty bourgeoisie. In many respects, and
exactly in the mass expulsion of Haitians in the last
month, he follows Stephen Miller and the
Trumpsters; only his press is better. He has
castigated the Border Patrol horsemen for whipping
the refugees on camera, but he deports them in
numbers that remind us of Obama, the “deporter-
in-chief”.
We Are Historical Materialists!
Every discussion of Haiti, Haitian refugees, Haitian
politics and the current conditions in Haiti must
start with the history of slavery and
underdevelopment. American public education has
a miserable record where teaching real history of
U.S. international relations, Black history and the
slave trade are concerned.
After taking the island by force and wiping out the
indigenous people, Spain ruled the Island of
Hispaniola (now divided and known as Haiti and the
Dominican Republic) for two centuries; ceding the
western third of the island to the French in 1697.
Tobacco and indigo were the initial cash crops
cultivated primarily by white indentured labor. The
transition to plantations, African slavery and sugar
production was perfected by the French in the early
18th century. With mono-cropping, trade with the
13 colonies was essential to feed the hundreds of
thousands of enslaved people captured in Africa
and forced to work the Haitian plantations.
On average 14,500 Africans were robbed of liberty
and brought to Haiti annually during the 18th
century. By 1790 the 450,000 African slaves
outnumbered the 30,826 whites and 24,262 free
blacks and mulattoes. It was the unpaid labor of
these hundreds of thousands that enriched the
rising French bourgeoisie and provided the
economic basis for their rebellion against the
ancien regime. The sugar they produced distilled as
rum was also an essential leg of the “triangle trade”
that enriched plantation owners, North American
merchants and slave traders alike. Likewise, the
U.S. shipbuilders, their customers and their hull and
cargo insurance companies. The possibilities of

15
Class Struggle 139 December-February
discussing this real history of profit-by-barbarism
with public school youth has sections of the
bourgeoisie trembling, even apoplectic.
Slave rebellions
Many enslaved Africans escaped from Haiti’s
plantations to the interior, formed communities
known as Maroons and conducted raids on the
plantations for decades. The class conflicts,
factional battles among the free populations that
resulted in the revolutions of 1776 in the U.S. and
1789 in France did not resolve the ultimate
contradiction of slavery, which the victorious
bourgeois and merchant class depended on for their
wealth and survival. This contradiction could not
stand forever and while it took another ‘four score’
years to explode in the U.S., the brutality,
relationship of forces and emergence of an
effective revolutionary leadership in Haiti defeated
slavery by 1804.
On August 22, 1791 the uprising of hundreds of
thousands of slaves was launched with the burning
of plantations and cities. Thirteen years of
revolutionary struggle defeated the French and sent
shivers of fear across the slavocracy from Virginia
to the north to Brazil in the south. Indeed, the
victory in Haiti inspired slave revolts across the
Americas.
Nevertheless, victorious Haiti was dependent on
trade to continue with both France and the U.S. to
sustain its people. Although defeated, the
dependence on trade and the military might of
France saddled Haiti with burdensome indemnity
reparations, such as the demand for 150 million
francs in 1825 in exchange for recognition. This
drain on capital stock set the stage to subordinate
the former colony to the position of a semi-colony
with a population immiserated in perpetuity.
Such debts could not be paid in full, and France sent
warships to collect in 1838, ultimately negotiating
the indemnification to 90 million francs (equivalent
to U.S. $21 Billion in 2004 dollars). France was not
paid off in full until 1893, and that was
accomplished with loans secured in the U.S. The
interest on those loans was finally paid in full in
1947 to the predecessor bank now known as
Citibank.
With debt transfer from France to the Banks of Wall
Street, the formally independent nation became a
semi-colony of the U.S., which has used the Island
as a destination for ‘run-away’ shops escaping
16
Summer 2021/22
higher wage demands on the mainland for the
miserable wage-slavery maintained until today by
decades of U.S. military interventions and brutal
dictatorships. All attempts at formal democratic
rule were crushed by coups and military occupation
under the weight of trade deficit; external debt
stability is not possible under capitalism.
Hundreds of thousands of Haitians have emigrated
across North, South and Central America and
remittances from their labor form the primary
source of Haiti’s foreign exchange. The recent
extension of protections for Haitians living in the
U.S. (the Temporary Protective Status) was the
news event that inspired tens of thousands of
Haitian expats to migrate north in September.
Already stuck in Northern Mexico, tens of thousands
of Haitians who were rejected for entry under
Obama in 2016 joined the gathering in Del Rio,
Texas.
Central America post 2008’s world capitalist crisis
not having been or even today being a great place
for employment opportunities, this was made worse
by earthquakes in 2010. Upheaval by assassination
of the executive, with U.S. and Colombian drug
involvement, was followed by another earthquake
this summer. Haitians have every justification for
leaving home, justifications second to none!
How do the North American Capitalists
see Haiti?
James Dobbins, a Rand corporation fellow and
former Clinton “special envoy” to Haiti put it this
way, “Haiti is a burden…not an asset.”
When effectively controlled by brutal dictatorships,
small investors and “runaway shops” could count on
the brutal Tonton Macoutes to keep the workers in
line. Today, on a world scale of ease to conduct
business, Haiti is ranked 174th. Not only is labor
running away but Capital is not interested.
Liberalism, a la Aristide, and the expectations the
masses had in La Vallas party, could not abide the
needs of imperialism to ensure payment on foreign
debt and protect investments and was not long
tolerated. Today in the failed state, chaos,
corruption and ‘wild west’ conditions reign as a
result of the underdevelopment that slavery,
perpetual debt peonage and brutal enforcement
brought. Internecine warfare among corrupt wings
of the native bourgeoisie resulted in the murder of
President Jovenel Moise.
Class Struggle 139
Haiti has always been a source of cheap labor, much
of it oppressive in the extreme. Perpetual poverty
breeds perpetual corruption. This can make for high
costs of doing business, yet there is renewed
commercial penetration by “the Core Group,” a
consortium of interests of the U.S.-led & European
imperialist bloc. The U.S. is the main import
partner with 39% of Haiti’s trade. Likewise, there is
sudden inter-imperialist competition from China,
which already has a 22% share.
The inter imperialist component, U.S. vs
China and our class obligations
From the standpoint of the worker in Port Au Prince
or industrial towns, what the nationality of his
absentee employer/exploiter is, is a detail, yet
inter-imperialist friction can be expected to impact
every aspect of the life of the working class and
that of the island’s poor. Haitian workers and
farmers must not become cannon fodder in future
U.S.-China warfare.
The U.S. working
class has the twofold
obligation to defend
Haitian workers
against such a war
and fate, while at the
same time
demanding freedom
of immigration and
no favoritism or
immigration quotas
based on
nationalities or A section of a Diego Rivera mural showing Trotsky, Cannon, Marx and Engels
ethnicities. The holding the banner the 4th International, the world party of socialist revolution! inescapably
obtaining U.S. laws
are 1965 rehashes of the 1923 system enacted when
open Ku Kluxers were prominent in the U.S.
government. The U.S. left has failed the Haitian
workers miserably in this latest Del Rio test and we
must ask whether organizations like DSA or
movements like Black Lives Matter have been so
Biden-honeymoon-co-opted as to refrain from even
suggesting expression of mass outrage at the
treatment of Haitian refugees, Central American
refugees and the still separated families and kids in
cages!
The aftermath of the world capitalist crisis of 2008
saw the Dominican Republic’s ruling class enact
Haitian-excluding citizenship laws to try to reserve
jobs for hereditary Hispanic citizens. This although
a great chunk of Dominican wage labor is ethnically
December-February Summer 2021/22
Haitian, i.e., of post-1929 immigration across the
island. We say this situation mirrors the political
crisis and underdevelopment across the region and
cries out for a Caribbean-wide socialist federation,
with workers-led governments organizing a rational
economy of meeting human need and development
driven by human liberation.
The Haitian masses can never achieve liberation as
a semi-colony within a world capitalist system.
National liberation and the democratic aspirations
of the masses can only be won through workers’
revolution. This is the program of Trotsky’s
Permanent Revolution: that the unfinished tasks of
democratic revolutions, long ago completed in the
imperialist metropolises, cannot be accomplished
as any separate, preliminary “democratic stage” of
liberation.
The national bourgeoisie in colonial/semi-colonial
nations are tied in thousands of ways to their
imperialist masters and cannot conquer national
independence of any significance. They cannot
transgress their
private property in
land, in factories, in
bank capital, in
trade agreements, in
military affairs, or at
all in the era of
imperialist decline.
Democracy can only
be conquered today
as workers’
democracy, carried
to fruition
and
uninterruptedly, as a component of the socialist
revolution.
Haiti needs a revolutionary workers party, a section
of a new revolutionary international that leads the
world socialist revolution. A Haitian workers
revolution would have to spread and not be
isolated, or eventually it would end up defeated
like Cuba through internal counterrevolution or just
outright crushed by U.S. imperialism. The
revolution would necessarily have to spread
throughout the Caribbean, to the Dominican
Republic, Cuba, Jamaica and Puerto Rico, and
especially the US to survive.
Haitian-American and migrant workers in the
United States are a bridge of consciousness to the
American proletariat, as are Puerto Rican workers.
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Class Struggle 139 December-February
A Black-led socialist revolution in Haiti could spark
the fight for Black liberation in the United States
against racist cop terror and the brutal segregation
of the black population under US capitalism. The
fight for Black liberation in the US is tied to the
fight for socialism in thousands of connections, in
flesh and blood.
Social progress in the US has always made the most
gains when the fight for the democratic rights of
Black people has been taken up and championed,
from the abolitionist movement, through the Civil
War and Reconstruction, to the labor struggles of
the 20th Century, to the Civil Rights Movement.
These struggles have driven social progress and the
fight for democratic rights for all, such as the
women’s and LGBTQ rights movements that
followed in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement.
The Black Lives Matter protests of recent years have
inspired the world. But bourgeois consciousness is
traveling in the retrograde, backwards direction!
How should workers in the United States
respond to the ongoing humanitarian
crisis at the border?
It is in the class interests for workers in the United
States and internationally, who themselves have
been pushed to the wall, to defend immigrant rights
and the democratic rights of all of our class sisters
and brothers. We will either rise together or fall
separately….and right now we are all falling pretty
fast. The time to fight is now!
No deportations! For mass labor-centered
mobilizations to defend Haitian migrants and all
migrants against Border Patrol, ICE and National
Guard terror!
For the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops
from the border! U.N. out of Haiti!
No one is illegal! Tear down the fences and
disband the Border Patrol! Abolish ICE! Asylum for
all refugees! For free movement of all workers
across the border! No fines or fees!
Full citizenship and employment rights for all
workers! Reunite the kids with the parents and
drop all charges!
Down with racism and racial profiling! No
scapegoating of oppressed peoples! Down with
English-only bigotry! For mass Labor/Community
militant actions to stop ICE raids and
deportations!
18
Summer 2021/22
For labor political strikes to defend immigrant
workers! For labor defense guards to defend
immigrants at the border and to drive ICE from
the workplaces and the communities!
Free all detained undocumented workers! Down
with E-Verify!
Let workers choose where to work by demanding
that all workers who do the same work get the
same contract, same wages, and same working
conditions, regardless of border! Demand the
“prevailing rate” in the western imperialist
center to become the international standard
wage.
• An injury to one is an injury to all! For
international working-class struggle!
• Fight for full employment at full union
rates and benefits for all!
• For 30 hours of work for 40 hours pay to
spread the available work and do the
neglected, socially necessary
environmental remediation!
• Nationalize major industries and the
financial sector without compensation
under workers control to provide
adequate access to credit and to get the
wheels of industry rolling again!
• American workers: The main enemy is
right here at home and it is the U.S.
capitalist ruling class!
• U.S. military out of the Middle East! Defeat
U.S. imperialism in Latin America, in the
Middle East, and everywhere!
• For the independence of Puerto Rico!
• Break with the Democrats and
Republicans! Their policy is threats and
wars abroad and racist and sexist wage
suppression at home!
• Build an internationalist fighting
workers’/labor party to struggle for a
workers’ government to abolish capitalism
and its system of national borders!
• For a new revolutionary Workers
International, the World Party of Socialist
Revolution!
• Workers to power in Haiti! For socialist
revolution throughout Latin & North
America and the Caribbean!
• For a Socialist Federation of the Americas
and the Caribbean!
• Workers of the world unite!
Class Struggle 139 December-February Summer 2021/22

Sudan: Down with the Coup!

For Permanent Revolution

The ILTT condemns the military coup of October 25, 2021 and we support the mass actions
and general strike bringing the masses into the streets against the coup. The dissolution of
the trade unions is the chief indicator of the class allegiance of the coupists. We call on the
international labor movement to support the masses in their general strike to defeat the coup.
The call for an October 30 “march of millions” must be propelled into an indefinite general
strike in order to win. Sudanese labor needs militant leadership that will not accept military
dictatorship, today, tomorrow or ever. We note the Junta has no different foreign policy from
the unelected Hamdok regime and supports the regional war projects of the Saudi monarchy.
The Sudanese masses gain nothing and lose much from these wars.
The Hamdok government did not defend the rights partner in the whipsawing cold war between US
of the masses and their policies were not and Chinese imperialism.
defensible, they did not sustain or advance the
mass democracy that emerged in the general strike Hamdok’s primacy was as the facilitator of a
of 2019 that brought them to power. Their civil/military ruling class consensus that a two-year
erstwhile main prop has overthrown them and transition from military rule to democracy is
instituted a policy that recalls the Greek colonels warranted. International Capital likes to foster two-
of the ‘60s and hopefully not the Pinochets. year plans for the institutional bourgeois
democracy. It seems to be the formula they
Unlike some of our opponents who fetishized habitually employ to excuse military coups. We call
bourgeois democracy and see it where it does not on the workers and farmers to immediately
exist, we do not call for the reinstatement of the establish their own democracy with their own self-
Hamdok government which has made its peace organized mass organs tailored to solving social
with the IMF, Zionism and has subordinated the needs.
country to China. China is its major trading
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Class Struggle 139 December-February
To defeat the coupists and establish democracy, a
general strike with the goal of reinstating Prime
Minister Abdullah Hamdok misleads the masses into
a blind alley.
To win the masses need to abandon the popular
front and build a working-class united front that
establishes the workers government. The bourgeois
regime is not capable of either establishing
democracy or resolving the economic crisis.
To resolve the crisis a revolutionary workers
leadership must lead the masses to power. To win
the general strike it must:
• Establish local and national strike
committees with democratic structures with
representatives of all workers organizations
subject to immediate recall.
• The strike committee must organize the
unorganized workers, street vendors,
farmers and students to participate in the
strike and the leadership
• Convene an emergency national conference
of workers and farmers representatives that
authorizes and organizes the workers self
The PSTU and the Manifesto in defense of the
construction of a Socialist and Revolutionary Pole:
United Front or support for the Popular Front?
On last October 7, 2021, the PSTU, (the Unified
Socialist Workers Party), launched a MANIFESTO
calling for the construction of a Socialist and
Revolutionary Pole. A Pole, or a United Front (UF),
that brings together the socialist left, is
progressive, but here we want to denounce the
PSTU, warning that the Manifesto does not fulfil this
purpose, and demand a true United Front.
The unity of left-wing organizations and workers is
necessary to strengthen and advance the struggle.
In recent years, we have defended the United
Workers Front as a form of independent class
struggle. The workers are the only force capable of
defeating the bourgeoisie and fascism. Our defense
for the UF can be seen HERE.
The UF is a tactic advocated by Lenin and Trotsky
during several important moments in the class
struggle. The UF, which brings together the base of
the workers’ movement and its leadership, enables
unity of action and also confrontation and debate
of the organizations’ programs in a democratic way
taking in the experience of struggle. For Lenin and
Trotsky, the UF served to counteract the Popular
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Summer 2021/22
defense of the general strike and
democracy.
• Extend the general strike to the occupation
of the essential businesses and industries to
feed, and care for the people.
• Abrogation and publication of the secret
treaties with the IMF, Zionism and Chinese
and U.S. trading partners.
Crystallize a revolutionary workers party
with an internationalist perspective and a
transitional program, committed to leading
the masses from conquest to conquest, from
the consciousness of today’s general strike to
the political power of the realized socialist
workers’ state.
• For a new workers’ revolutionary
International!
• For the African socialist revolution!
• For a Socialist Federation of East
Africa!
• For World socialism!
Front (PF) policy of the opportunist leaderships,
based on the claim that an alliance with progressive
bourgeois sectors was necessary to advance the
workers’ struggle.
The UF policy was the main policy defended by
Lenin and Trotsky against the fascist threat of the
Kornilov uprising in Russia in 1917 and the rise of
Hitler in the 1930s. To combat Kornilov’s coup,
Lenin never defended an alliance with the
government of the popular front, he said that
Kerensky served only to “support the rifle” to shoot
Kornilov. Trotsky defended the united front against
fascism, fighting the sectarianism of Stalinism,
which accused social democracy of being equal to
fascism.
And both Lenin and Trotsky warned: the
Popular Front does not fight fascism, on the
contrary, it opens the way for fascism by
weakening the class independence of the
workers, which is the only force capable of
defeating it.
Class Struggle 139 December-February Summer 2021/22
We are facing the terminal crisis of capitalism. The The Manifesto does not make its aim clear
global crisis is ultimately the cause of the Workers’
If, according to the manifesto, in the struggles of
Party (PT) fall and Bolsonaro’s rise in Brazil. The
the class and against the government we must be in
economic growth of the Lula era is over and the PT
the Frente Ampla (FA/ “broad front”), what
cannot continue to give the small concessions and
objective does the Pole have? The Manifesto says
crumbs it made then to the workers. Imperialist
that revolution and socialism are needed, but if not
capitalism cannot recover the economy other than
in struggles, is it to be the Pole for elections?
by exploiting the working class and nature more,
and promoting wars. As we have denounced for years, the bureaucratic
bloc of trade union centrals and the “Campanha
The rise of fascism around the world and the
Fora Bolsonaro” of which CSP/Conlutas and PSTU
Bolsonaro government in Brazil represents, on the
are part, is not a UF, but a populist front bloc,
one hand, the need for the bourgeoisie to change
where the opportunist leaderships of workers keep
its methods to contain workers’ resistance and
workers tied to the union bureaucracy and to
exploit them even more, and on the other, the lack
bourgeois sectors such as Paulinho da Força,
of a leadership with a revolutionary program that
Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB), Democratic Labour
brings the working class to power. To defeat
Party (PDT), etc, serving to curb the direct struggle,
fascism, misery, and prevent a climatic collapse, it
strikes and the real UF.
is necessary to end capitalism with a socialist
revolution. Since the outbreak of the
crisis in 2008, a “National
The Popular Front (PF),
Day of Mobilization” is
that is, the alliance with
called by the centrals at
the bourgeoisie, is what
all times of intensifying
divides the workers, and
class struggle (1),
diverts the class from its
dividing the workers base
traditional methods of
strikes and channelling
struggle, strikes, pickets
the struggle for the
and occupations, into
control of the leadership,
parliament and bourgeois
Women against Bolsonaro where the decisions are
institutions. To fight the
made between 4 walls
government alongside sectors of the so-called
where the workers base does not participate.
democratic bourgeoisie is to weaken the workers,
and create illusions in bourgeois democracy that In 2016, at the time of Dilma’s impeachment, we
the crisis can be resolved by reforming capitalism. already warned that the PSTU’s sectarian policy of
not opposing the manoeuvre of the bourgeoisie to
The liberal bourgeoisie cannot solve the crisis; the
overthrow the PT (Workers Party), saying there was
failure of neoliberalism to avoid the economic
no threat of fascism, was the “radical” face of its
collapse is part of the cause. Today the bourgeois
opportunist policy, that they would defend the
opposition persecutes and imprisons the
popular front to fight fascism. (2)
Bolsonaristas for “disrespecting” democracy and
the Constitution, tomorrow they will use the same The UF must include all the leaders of the
methods against the left organizations and the movement, including opportunists such as PT, the
struggling workers who do not want to pay the price Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB), etc, as well as
of the capitalist crisis. its worker bases. The PSTU goes from opportunist
deviations to sectarianism when it campaigns. It is
However, the PSTU and its Manifesto does not
part of populist front blocs and “broad front”
defend the UF to fight Bolsonaro and the “danger
(Frente Ampla) with bourgeois sectors and the
posed by a government that works every day to
union bureaucracy in the workers’ struggles. Then
implement a dictatorship in the country.” Making
it refuses to make the UF with the PT because of its
it very clear in its manifesto, the PSTU defends the
“reformist program” and alliances with the
Frente Ampla, that is, the popular front in alliance
bourgeoisie. Facing the impeachment, it refused to
with the “democratic” bourgeoisie: “Tossing out
independently fight the bourgeoisie in a true UF at
Bolsonaro and his government is the most urgent
a time when the ruling class was making an
challenge facing the working class at the
offensive not only to attack the PT, but the entire
moment… Therefore, it is necessary to continue
left and the communists.
strengthening a broad unity of action in the
struggle to continue occupying the streets….” For Trotsky, the united front was for unity in action.
The PSTU, which needs to proclaim Trotsky and

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Class Struggle 139 December-February
Marxism in order to be credible, has created a new
theory to justify its support for the PF, calling it
“unity of action.” It is a “unity of action” very
different from the UF, when it makes an alliance
with the bourgeoisie.
The Manifesto does not make it clear, but we
believe that the Pole is an electoral tactic of the
PSTU to try to circumvent its isolation during the
bourgeois elections. But as the Manifesto says, the
Pole should not be just for elections:
“The alternative we need to build cannot be
simply for elections. It cannot have the
perspective of class conciliation, the saviour of
the country, the maintenance and defense of the
current order. We are proposing another path:
building a Pole for a Socialist and Revolutionary
Alternative for our country.”
And as in the fights it makes in the Frente Ampla
(“broad front”), the Pole runs the risk of being the
left flank of the popular front in the direct fights of
the class.
Permanent Revolution or Revolution by Stages
The Manifesto, after
citing Bolsonaro, Lula and
the 3rd bourgeois way for
the 2022 elections
declares:
“To govern the country,
the same criterion of
broad unity that is
necessary for the fight
against Bolsonaro does
not serve. The criterion
of class independence is
fundamental…”
The PSTU’s program is not that of the permanent
revolution, but the reformist program of stages.
The fight against Bolsonaro will lead us to another
bourgeois government or “new elections” until we
someday reach the revolution. Hence, the absurd
dichotomy that the party makes in the program and
tactics between the union struggle and bourgeois
elections.
For revolutionaries, the program and class
independence are principles which we uphold at all
times in the class struggle. The class struggle does
not stop and the bourgeois elections are just a
moment, unfavourable for the workers, where
revolutionaries must participate precisely to
defend the revolutionary program and class
independence with the aim of reaching and
advancing the consciousness of the working class
for the revolution.
Summer 2021/22
Whether in the struggle against Bolsonaro or in the
elections, the defense of the revolution’s program
and class independence does not change, it
remains the program of the permanent revolution,
where the independent struggle must advance
towards the seizure of power. For the PSTU, class
independence is only for bourgeois elections, in the
direct struggle of the class we can be with the
bourgeoisie!
We defend the struggle against the Bolsonaro
government as part of the permanent revolution, as
the discontent of the workers with their
increasingly worse living and working conditions
mobilizes to overthrow the government that makes
the attacks. We say that mobilizations need to
adopt methods of direct-action struggles, strikes
and picketing, with grassroots organization. That is
why we have called for a National Workers’
Congress, a true UF, to debate, organize and lead
the struggle in an independent and democratic way,
so that the country’s leadership is not left in the
hands of the National Congress and the bourgeoisie.
The direct actions of the class must advance
towards the General Revolutionary Strike, taking
over the workplaces and
Indigenous against Bolsonaro
key sectors of the
economy, overthrowing
the bourgeoisie, towards
socialism.
We agree with the
Manifesto when it says
that to defeat the
bourgeoisie it is
necessary to destroy the
bourgeois state and for
the working class to take
power with a Workers’ Government. A government
that is only possible with the socialist revolution.
But what is the proposal of the Manifesto on the
tasks and program for the working class to advance
the struggle for the Brazilian revolution? Socialism
and revolution appear in the manifesto as pretty
words, unconnected with the concrete tasks of the
class in the current struggles.
As the Manifesto says, the Pole is for the struggle
for Socialism and Revolution:
“To end the control that this ruling class has
over the country, it is necessary to carry out a
revolution from “below” to overthrow that
“from above”, a socialist revolution to
overthrow the institutions of the state that
exists and maintains the people subjugated by
banks and big business. This must be done so
that the working class and the poor people can
take control of political power and govern the
22
Class Struggle 139 December-February
country: a socialist government of the working
class and poor people.”
For the seizure of power by the working class, its
greatest weapon, the General Strike, is needed.
The “need to build the general strike” is
propagated by the PSTU in the last decade, as
pressure on the union centrals where the
PSTU/CSPConlutas are together in a bureaucratic
bloc, at the forefront of all struggles in recent
years.
For the PSTU, as expressed in the Manifesto: “build
a general strike, stop the country, the factories
and the big companies, make it hurt the bosses’
pockets to force them to withdraw the support
they still give to Bolsonaro.”!!!
For socialism and revolution, such as grassroots
strikes, the struggle against Bolsonaro, against
poverty and unemployment, as the struggles of
minorities and youth, must advance towards the
formation of committees that organize the struggle
regionally and nationally, with a national congress
and general strike revolutionary. The general strike
must stop the capitalist economy, take over the
factories and strategic sectors, until the seizure of
power and the expropriation of the bourgeoisie,
and not to “pressure” the bourgeoisie for a
bourgeois exit with the impeachment of Bolsonaro!
If the workers are not prepared to take power, we
do not adopt a reformist program and abandon class
independence, feeding the false consciousness of
the workers, but we continue in their
uncompromising defense, advancing their class
consciousness, alerting the class that the
“democratic” bourgeoisie is not capable of
defeating fascism and reviving the economy.
We are intransigent about the popular front, we do
not give it any support, whether in the workers’
movement or in elections. We oppose the popular
front with the united front. The Pole as a UF should
serve as a unity for actions in direct struggle and
make demands and denounce the bureaucratic bloc
of labour centrals and parties like the PT that
compromise class independence by allying
themselves with the bourgeoisie.
As the Manifesto says: “In fact, we are already
living in Brazil in anticipation of next year’s
electoral campaign” and we see the call of the
Pole as the action of the PSTU aiming at next year’s
elections. The PSTU is a party with a syndicalist
deviation, has its main cadres in the unions where
they stay for years and thus maintain the structure
of the party. Just as PT and PSOL (Socialism and
Liberation Party) divert the struggle to win
parliamentary positions, the PSTU manoeuvres for
23
Summer 2021/22
positions in the unions and alliances with the union
bureaucracy.
This alliance is what prevents the PSTU from
forming a true UF, which imposes the responsibility
to denounce and impose demands on the labour
centrals and reformist parties, including calling
opportunist leaderships such as the PT, and its
base, to break with the bourgeoisie and become
part of the UF.
The Manifesto does not make its objective clear,
but in moments of intensification of the class
struggle, such as what we are experiencing now, it
is a moment where the programs of left-wing
organizations are put to the test. Polarization
shows where they stand and which side of the fight
they are on. These moments are where splits and
disruptions in organizations are most likely.
After the last PSOL congress, everything indicates
that the party will not come out of the 2022
elections in one piece. The UF, as a unity-for-action
tool, in which all parties and organizations can
compete for its program, is a good path for this
moment in which the class increasingly looks for a
way out of the attacks it has been suffering.
• FOR THE WORKERS’ UNITED FRONT! NOT
THE POPULAR FRONT!
• OUST BOLSONARO! FOR AN INDEPENDENT
WORKING-CLASS SOLUTION!
• FOR WORKERS’ SELF-DEFENSE COMMITTEES!
• CALL THE ARMY SOLDIERS NOT TO SUPPORT
ANY COUP INITIATIVE!
• AGAINST MISERY, INEQUALITY, INFLATION,
UNEMPLOYMENT, LABOR ATTACKS,
PRIVATIZATIONS!
• FOR NATIONALIZATION OF THE
COMMANDING HEIGHTS OF THE ECONOMY
AND A PROGRAM OF PUBLIC WORKS AND
JOBS FOR ALL
• RANK AND FILE COMMITTEES OF WORKERS IN
STRIKES AND MOVEMENTS!
• TOWARDS A NATIONAL CONGRESS OF
WORKERS COMMITTEES AND THE GENERAL
STRIKE!
• FOR A REVOLUTIONARY PARTY WITH THE
PROGRAM OF PERMANENT REVOLUTION!
• FOR THE WORLD PARTY OF THE SOCIALIST
REVOLUTION!
Reprinted and translated from the Grupo de
Trabalhadores Revolucionários do Brasil (GTR-
BR) The PSTU and the Manifesto in defense of the
construction of a Socialist and Revolutionary
Pole: United Front or support for the Popular
Front?
Class Struggle 139 December-February Summer 2021/22

International Leninist Trotskyist Tendency

Class Warrior: Theoretical Journal of ILTT http://www.cwgusa.org/?page_id=594

Revolutionary Workers Group of Zimbabwe (RWG-ZIM)

Email: rwg.zimbabwe@gmail.com
Website: www.rwgzimbabwe.wordpress.com
Revolutionary Worker (Paper of RWG-Zimbabwe)

Revolutionary Workers Group of Brazil (RWG-BR)

Email: gtrevolucionarios1@gmail.com
Site: https://grupodetrabalhadoresrevolucionrios.wordpress.com
Guerreiro da classe Trabalhadora (Paper of the RWG-BR)

Communist Workers Group – USA (CWG-US):

Email: cwgclasswar@gmail.com Website: Class War http://www.cwgusa.org/?page_id=16

Communist Workers Group- New Zealand/Aotearoa (CWG-NZ)

Email: cwg006@yahoo.com Class Struggle (paper of CWGANZ)
Websites: http://redrave.blogspot.com http://livingmarxism.wordpress.com

Class Struggle is online at https://www.redrave.blogspot.com

Archive of publications before 2006 http://communistworker.blogspot.com/
Phone +64272800080 cwg2007anz@hotmail.com

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