Class Struggle 142 Spring September-November 2022

Aotearoa: Mobilise against Fascism!

The documentary Fire and Fury about the February, 2022, occupation of
parliamentary grounds, largely confirms the position we took at the time. The
leadership was made up of a small group of influential individuals who had
links to the growing fascist movement internationally. Key players openly
supported Trumpism and the Steve Bannon backed Counterspin Media. They
are committed to the violent overthrow of the state in the name of ‘freedom’.
Their ability to do this requires the mobilising of a ‘mob’ of disaffected
alienated individuals as “fascist fodder” composed of declassed petty
bourgeois and lumpen workers from various social backgrounds. The analysis of
the occupation offered in the video by Kate Hannah of the Disinformation
Project, among others, is mainly confined to explaining conspiracy theory and
the role of ‘influencers’ in spreading it to vulnerable individuals. We argue
that fascism is much more than an ideology.

Occupation Camp at Parliament

Fascism’s roots in NZ smash it and the capitalist system it defends,

Fascism is the ultimate tool of finance capital
to mobilise the declassed petty bourgeoisie
against workers’ revolution. It seeks to divide
and rule by playing off the declassed petty
bourgeoisie against the working class. Because
fascism poses a mortal danger to the
proletariat, only the united, organised
revolutionary working class, led by a
revolutionary communist international, can
2
opening the road to socialism.
Fascism’s roots go back to the colonisation of
NZ in the 19th century when settler capitalism
was born out of the destruction of Māori
society. It expressed the fear of the petty
bourgeois settlers that the land grab would be
stopped by armed Māori resistance. Not until
after their victory in the land wars and
expropriation of the bulk of Māori land opened
Class Struggle 142 Spring
the gates to a new flood of white settlers, did
their fear abate.
But the roots of fascism did not wither as its
enemy the working class was also born out of
colonisation. Many settlers remained landless
and found jobs in primary industry and
transport where they organised radical unions.
Willis Airey describes the Liberal Government
by the turn of the century as “invoking the
state as the embodiment of community, thus
taking the path towards fascism” such as the
rise of the Italian Corporatist state that
emerged in 1920, and the Fascist regime of
Franco in Spain in the 1930s.
NZ was proto-
fascist in the
sense that it
had a white
settler state
subordinated
to the British
state, acting
as the local
agent of
British
finance
capital
engaged in
Massey's Cossacks in action against striking workers
global
expansion. The colony would be sucked into
the inevitable imperialist war and play its part troops in Europe. In NZ the pre-war “Massey’s
in servicing the national debt to pay for it,
and to suppress any opposition to war coming
from Māori society and the emerging labour
movement.
The state’s ability to manage labour relations
was soon put to the test. As the global crisis
of world capitalism worsened, so did the drive
by imperialist and colonial capitalists to
attack wages and conditions. The radical
unions broke from the state Arbitration Court
and formed the Federation of Labour, or “Red
Fed”, in 1908 embarking on strike action that
led to the General Strike of 1913 and its
September-November 2022
suppression by the military, “Massey’s
Cossacks” and scabbing workers.
Yet again, with the onset of the ‘Great Wrong
War’, the suppression of strikes by the
wartime government did not remove the
threat of revolution. The success of the
Bolshevik revolution inspired mass support
among workers, soldiers and poor peasants
around the world. War created revolutionary
conditions as it armed millions of workers
opposed to war. It also armed the counter-
revolution. Resistance to war in the ranks, and
in the labour movement, was met by brutal
force from police and military.
As
revolutionary
armed workers
rallied all over
Europe the
bourgeois
states enlisted
paramilitary
forces based on
the petty
bourgeois
peasantry to
smash the
workers and
poor peasants.
These were the first organised fascist shock
Cossacks” mobilised against the General Strike
of 1913 had already flagged the move toward
employing fascist paramilitaries in times of
war and revolution in the settler colonies.
WW2: The ’war on fascism’
The Great Wrong War did not solve
capitalism’s problems. The power of the
antagonist classes, bourgeoisie and
proletariat, was in the balance. The
imperialist expeditionary forces who invaded
Russia to smash the ‘Bolshevik Revolution’
were defeated by the Red Army led by Leon
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Class Struggle 142 Spring
Trotsky. The 3rd Communist International
formed in 192O reminded that arch nemesis of
the proletariat, Winston Churchill, that the
day of reckoning was looming. In Germany
revolution was suppressed in 1919 but not
defeated until 1923 by the mobilization of
fascist corps. The 1920 workers insurrection in
Italy was smashed by Mussolini’s fascist army.
Such national civil wars were rehearsals for
the next world war that would re-order the
relations between imperialist powers.
Then came Great Depression in the late 1920s
making workers pay the price for the collapse
of the world economy with their poverty and
misery. Hitler’s Nazi Party grew in influence
building a movement to bring fascism to
power in 1933. The success of the fascists
confirmed its ability to defeat the revolution
if the workers forces were divided.
In Spain the fascist Franco invaded Spain with
his Moorish troops to overthrow the
Republican Government in the civil war lasting
from 1936 to 1939. Franco won because of
military aid from Mussolini and Hitler and the
collaboration of Stalin. The Soviet Union and
Mexico alone stood by the Republicans as
representing ‘democratic’ imperialism. The
Soviet Union valued its alliances with the
democratic imperialists, so its agents in Spain
shot revolutionary socialists and anarchists
who saw behind the banner of Franco’s
fascism the imperialist powers pulling the
strings. The Anglo-US governments made
backroom deals with the fascist states to
appease the Nazi regimes and avoid the need
for war. Churchill notoriously proclaimed his
admiration for Mussolini in the 1930s. Long
before the war broke out in 1939 it was
expected as the “coming war against
fascism”.
Over this period, NZ remained a Dominion
within the British Empire. Its role in the war
was dictated by the opportunist policies of
Roosevelt and Churchill. While the allies were
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September-November 2022
officially ‘democracies’ going to war against
the ‘fascist axis’, in fact this war was between
rival imperialist powers for the re-division of
the world, using workers in uniform, and
untold civilians, as their cannon fodder. The
USSR was an exception, fighting for its own
survival. Stalin switched sides from Hitler to
the ‘democracies’ when Hitler attacked the
Soviet Union in June 1941.
Churchill was to cynically exploit this alliance
when to suppress the revolution in Greece,
the British army massacred thousands
of revolutionary workers in 1945 with the
complicity of Stalin. Just as in the First
Imperialist War, workers interests were not to
support democracy against fascism when both
employed them as cannon fodder, but to turn
their guns on their own ruling class,
democratic or fascist, in a global showdown of
class against class.
In NZ, during the First Imperialist War there
was some opposition to fighting for the British
Empire, notably among Māori, and at least one
soldier was shot for mutiny. But in the Second
War there was little opposition to fighting
fascism. For most New Zealanders, the Second
War was ‘against fascism for the defence of
democracy’. For a left-wing minority, defence
of the Soviet Union was defence of ‘socialism
in one country’ in line with Stalin’s popular
front with bourgeois democracy. For the tiny
number who rejected Stalinism the defence of
the Soviet Union was in defence of the gains
of the Bolshevik Revolution.
However, the faith in bourgeois democracy as
progressive, disarms workers in the face of
imperialism. Fascism and democracy are both
policies of bourgeois class rule designed to
oppress and exploit workers. Trotsky had
made it clear that the only defence of the
gains of the revolution in the Soviet Union was
socialist revolution against the imperialist
ruling classes.
Class Struggle 142 Spring
Workers cannot defeat fascism to defend the
gains of socialism by joining forces with
‘democratic’ bosses who interest is to make
workers fight wars to defend profits. We
defeat fascism only when we defeat the
imperialist ruling class and open the road to
socialist revolution. This history lesson is
important because the imperialist powers
always seek to cover up their wars against
their rivals as a ‘war against fascism’. The
current war in Ukraine proves the point.
Fighting Fascism Today
The recent death of the NZ soldier who took
time off from the army to fight as a
‘volunteer’ in Ukraine shows what imperialist
war is about. Prime Minister Ardern made her
official condolences and the former army
major and NZ First Minister of Defence, Ron
Mark, spoke of the soldier’s courage and duty,
and anticipated other NZ soldiers following his
path to Ukraine. Many others have gone to
fight in Ukraine in the belief that this war is a
‘war against fascism’. This is not surprising
since the US and NATO powers have sold this
war between ‘democratic’ Ukraine and
‘fascist’ Russia as a just war in defence of
Ukraine’s independence.
This is certainly how it appears on the
surface. But Russia is not fighting in Ukraine
because it is fascist. Nor is Ukraine fighting for
its freedom. When all aspects of the war are
taken into account this war is an inter-
imperialist proxy war being fought by Ukraine
on behalf of the US and its NATO allies against
Russian imperialism. It is a continuation of the
long war between the imperialist powers for
control of Eurasia since before the First
Imperialist War. Ukraine as the current
battleground in this wider war represents the
struggle between the Western alliance pushing
eastward to break-up Russia and to weaken its
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September-November 2022
alliance with China which remains the main
target of that alliance.
Since this is an inter-imperialist war, and not
a war against fascism, then there is no
justification for workers to take sides in
fighting this war. Workers should take a
position in Ukraine for the defeat of both
imperialist blocs in the war and for the fight
for an Independent Socialist Ukraine. We are
for the arming of workers and farmers to
defend themselves against both sides, against
the Russian invasion as well as the NATO
interests behind the war plans of the Kyiv
regime. This seems to be an impossible task.
But if we do what is necessary, we see what is
possible. We fight the meat grinder of war
deciding which great power bloc will win by
turning imperialist war into an open class war.
This is how we halt the terminal crisis of
capitalism which is destroying the conditions
for human survival, and advance to the
socialist revolution.
Back to the death in action of the NZ
‘freedom fighter’. Workers should not rush
overseas to fight fascism on behalf of a
reactionary Britain, a declining US Empire, or
of the Russia/China bloc, in the name of
national honour, freedom and democracy, but
remain at home and fight fascism in Aotearoa.
Let’s recognise that NZ is a semi-colony which
has yet to achieve its own national
independence. That will not happen while the
‘fascist fodder’ opposes the Māori struggle for
self-determination. The fascist appeals by
finance capital made to disoriented middle
class and lumpen workers to bring down the
government can be defeated by a united front
between Māori and Pakeha workers that wins
mass support for a workers’ government with
a program for socialist revolution to end the
death march of capitalism and the extinction
for humanity.
Class Struggle 142 Spring September-November 2022

Stagflation & End Stage Capitalism

Stagflation is the necessary consequence of the failure of capitalism to invest
in the production of value. This leaves surplus money capital in circulation
which engages in speculation for existing assets driving up prices. But the
bosses refuse to take the blame for inflation and blame rising wages. Marxism
proves that chronic stagflation is a symptom of terminal capitalist crisis. We
argue here that the way to defeat stagflation is to socialise the means of
production, distribution and exchange. Once we realise it is the failure of
capitalism to extract value from workers and no fault of the workers, we can
concentrate on what must be done to build a socialist society.

The political challenge to Governor of the
Reserve Bank, Adrian Orr, for straying too far
from orthodox monetary policy and printing
too much free money and causing stagflation
doesn’t blame property owners who were the
beneficiaries of $1 Trillion in state handouts
over the last 3 years.
This is why bosses took their free money and
ran to the bank or stock exchange, buying
their own shares and even more property for
‘capital gain’ instead of investing it in
production for profit. They had no confidence
that they could extract surplus value in an
over-regulated labour market.

However, this apparent hypocrisy is rooted in
a deeper structural contradiction. That is the
failure of capital to invest in production to
supply enough to meet demand. In other
words, the charge that too much money is
chasing too few goods fails to mention that
capitalists diverted their free money into
speculation because production was not
profitable.
6
So, the problem is not the amount of money in
circulation stimulating too much demand
which leads to wages pushing up prices. It is
the decision not to invest money capital to
produce a supply of goods and services to
match the increased money supply, that
pushes up prices.
Class Struggle 142 Spring
The question that has to be asked is why
capitalists could not make a profit by
investing in production. The response of the
employers is to blame rising wages not falling
supply, and to call for higher interest rates to
slow the increase in the money supply, and at
the same time flood the labour market with
migrant workers to drive down wages.
Neo-libs, liberals and radicals
The neo-lib National Party response is to raise
interest rates to wind back the money supply
and dampen cost/price inflation. Opening the
labour market to immigrant workers will drive
down wage costs. Slashing spending on
climate change targets and total state
spending will allow tax cuts. Cost cutting will
then stimulate investment in production and
confidence in restoring the rate of profit.
The Liberal Labour/Green response tweeks a
few policy settings to protect wages and to
push for rising labour productivity to cut
labour costs. It also adds some criteria to the
Reserve Bank inflation targets such as ‘full
employment’ and ‘wellbeing’. However, the
Labour Party remains hostage to its neo-
liberal past and will not tax the rich nor use
the state to directly invest in delivering labour
productivity, climate reform and social
wellbeing.
The radical response is to go beyond the
liberals to a full-on Fabian state socialism.
Martyn Bradbury and Mike Treen for example,
on The Daily Blog raise demands that include
full employment, free housing, transport and
education as well as a ‘green new deal’. To
realise such a program a Labour/Green/Māori
party government would have to nationalise
production, distribution and exchange and pay
for it by printing money backed by production
of goods and services to meet a fleshed-out
socialist wellbeing standard.
Covid lessons in dying capitalism
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September-November 2022
Let’s see why Covid shows us why all the
above Lib/Lab/Rad bourgeois-type solutions
are unable to deal with stagflation. Briefly
they have no program to eliminate the Law of
the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall
(TRPF), the fundamental contradiction of
capital that dictates state economic policy.
During Covid the government demonstrated
that it is the ‘organising committee’ of the
ruling class. It acted as guarantor of the
system and put the capitalist class on
corporate welfare. It replaced lost profits and
wages to keep plant and machinery and the
labour force in a state of readiness for the
return to business-extracting surplus value for
profit. The result, as we have seen, was a
massive state transfer of value from worker to
employers and landlords.
Second, it exposed the fact that, rather than
investing these handouts in more advanced
plant and machinery to increase labour
productivity, they went into speculation in
existing assets such as land and shares. Wage
subsidies, when passed on, kept workers on
basic rations, and when not passed on, made
windfall profits. The lesson is that the neo-
colonial state cannot direct the ruling class to
use its corporate handouts to increase labour
productivity, leaving NZ is stuck as a low
wage, underclass-Pacific-reserve pool-of-
labour-semi-colonial regime.
Third, capitalists using state handouts for
speculative gains demonstrate that
‘financialization’ is not a mere deviation from
productive investment that can be corrected
by the right policy. Rather, it is the fusion of
banking and industrial capital - the essence of
20th century capitalism - experiencing the
breakdown of the productive system as
stagflation. At the most basic level it shows
that capitalism now faces the ultimate
contradiction; it cannot produce profits to
save itself without destroying itself.
Class Struggle 142 Spring
The final lesson is, that capitalism failing to
invest in labour productivity when provided
with handouts, demonstrates that even with
slave wages, pandemics interrupt labour flows
and cannot cut production costs sufficiently to
counter the LTRPF. At this point chronic
stagflation becomes terminal as permanent
recession and slump. The means of production
and labour-power necessary for production
face destruction as global warming leading to
nature’s blowbacks which then destroy the
conditions for future human survival.
As we have constantly warned for years,
Global capitalism is facing a crisis of long-
term falling profits because of the terminal
collapse of the conditions that allow it to
make a profit. It is disrupted by worsening
crises, pandemics, climate change and inter-
imperialist wars over which capitalists have
little control. In reality capitalism is failing as
a system because it is destroying the material
base in nature it needs for profitable growth.
End-Stage Capitalism: Solutions
Neoliberal solutions, fossil fuels and slave
labour, are exhausted, bourgeois regimes
become increasingly authoritarian and
reactionary. Calling for political reforms do no
more than keep alive illusions in bourgeois
democracy when end-stage capitalism has to
be ended and replaced by a workers’
government and workers’ state.
So when Mike Treen speaks of the breakdown
of capitalism and yet calls for a Green New
Deal, he is saying to workers that capitalism
has not reached its end stage and can be
reformed to stop climate collapse.
“A left-wing policy that protects working
people is theoretically possible without
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September-November 2022
unleashing inflation. But we need a different
type of government that prioritises working
people and the planet over private profit.”
Similarly, Michael Roberts still seems to think
that capitalism plagued by stagflation can come
back from yet another slump only three years
since the last slump.
“That means the major economies could enter
a period of stagflation, not seen since the
late 1970s, where inflation rates stay high,
but output stagnates. Indeed, it could be
worse than that. The risk of an outright
global slump is rising. If central banks
continue to hike their policy rates, all that
will do is increase of cost of borrowing for
consumers and companies, driving weaker
companies into bankruptcies and suppressing
demand across the board. Sure, that may
finally reduce inflation but only through a
slump.”
We say that chronic stagflation is symptomatic
of terminal crisis. Profits can be made only if
certain conditions are met. These can no
longer be met as capitalism is destroying its
own conditions of existence, land, labour and
capital. That is why the crisis of capital is
terminal and we are living through end stage
capitalism.
We need an international revolutionary
workers’ party and a workers’ program that
takes the necessary steps to take power and
install a workers’ government. Such a
government would socialise the means of
production, distribution, communications and
exchange, to plan the economy to produce for
the need of the working majority, and to build
the future commune where classes and the
state would cease to exist.
Class Struggle 142 Spring September-November 2022

Capitalism, Māori Self-Determination and

the future Socialist Aotearoa
NZ was colonised by the British Empire in the mid-19th century. It remains a
semi-colony since it has never had a war of independence to break from
imperialism. Under a Treaty that promised self-determination and equal rights,
Māori were subordinated to capitalist society as an oppressed people. Colonial
political institutions since have moved on from war, through assimilation, to
treaty settlements, in the attempt to buy consent in the hope of a ‘grand
settlement’. Yet Māori remain a colonised people whose fate is sealed so long
as capitalism rules. Self-determination for Māori will be possible only with the
unity of Māori and Pākehā workers in ending capitalist rule and building the
socialist republic of Aotearoa within a federation of socialist republics of
Polynesia.

Party sees the need to ‘honour’ the Treaty by

White ‘Settlements’
The failure of colonial attempts to completely
subordinate Māori resistance to oppression by
war and assimilation led to Treaty
‘settlements’ which fall far short of
recompense for the massively destructive
consequences wrought by the original colonial
Treaty ‘settlement’. Today, the gap between
‘settlements’ remains the principal fault-line
that destroys any illusion that NZ is a post-
colonial or decolonized society.
That is why the main fracture between the
two main capitalist parties in New Zealand,
Labour and National, is over power sharing
with Māori in Government. The liberal Labour
9
giving Māori a larger role in ‘co-governance’
over the distribution of economic resources.
The policies that flow from this are derived
from the belief that co-governance between
Māori and Pakeha is consistent with Treaty
obligations of ‘self-determination’.
Chris Trotter claims this liberal position has
thrown up an extremist Māori Nationalism that
creates a race-based power grab against the
right of “one person, one vote”, in effect an
‘Ethno State’. Māori nationalism has
generated its opposite political reaction in the
National Party, even more so in the minor
right-wing party, ACT, rejecting co-
governance as ‘separatism’, as a threat to
democracy and ‘one law for all’, and a
betrayal of the dominant pakeha white nation.
Class Struggle 142 Spring
In Trotter’s view both ‘extremes’ can be
moderated by a political movement of the
centre, such as a ‘grand coalition’ between
the major parties, based on an equal citizen
vote for “peace, unity and democracy”. This
idea is echoed by the centre-right Michael
Hooton and centre-left Bryce Edwards. But
such an outcome was never possible under
capitalism, particularly today when it is facing
its imminent demise as a system. It is a
reactionary utopia that diverts our attention
and squanders our efforts from what is
necessary to arrive at the possibility of a
peaceful, united and democratic resolution.
There is no comparison between radical white
supremacy and radical Māori nationalism. The
former represents the past and present evils
of class society and settler colonisation, while
the latter represents the ending of class
society and the transition to a future
egalitarian society. Let’s set the historical
context of the struggle over the past and
present that shapes the future of democracy.
Democracy is ruling class power
First, we need to see that ‘democracy’ is not
some universal, timeless concept of one
person, one vote. It is a reflection of the
social relations of production that prevail at
any given time. The history of democracy
reaches back to the ancient commune in the
time of hunters and gatherers before the rise
of class society around 10,000 years ago. The
democracy of the ancient commune is that of
the egalitarian non-class relations of
production that characterised society before
the rise of class society.
Democracy today has its origins in the French
Revolution and the victory of the bourgeoisie
over the feudal aristocracy. It is bourgeois
democracy, corresponding to the exploitative
capitalist social relations between the
bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Formally, all
individuals that buy or sell in the market are
citizens. Actually, bourgeois right is the right
to exploit labour for profit. Today that class
society with its bourgeois form of democracy
is doomed to destroy humanity unless we
overthrow it and build a future society that
reaches beyond the limits of bourgeois
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September-November 2022
democracy towards the democracy of a new
commune.
How does bourgeois democracy relate to Māori
self-determination? Since British colonisation
the struggle for self-determination means to
win a bourgeois right – national independence.
In other words, bourgeois citizens vote to
form nation states to defend their private
property and conduct of business. This is
expressed in the Treaty as the equal rights of
citizens Pākehā and Māori, implying Māori
would self-govern their own land.
Yet this impression was fraudulent since
colonisation dictated the separation of Māori
from the land. At the time of NZ’s Treaty
Settlement the British Empire denied
bourgeois democracy to all those who did not
qualify as citizens since they were not owners
of private property. Clearly, in 1840 Māori,
women and most white settlers did not
qualify.
Bourgeois Democracy
Not until the late 19th century were
propertyless workers admitted to bourgeois
democracy as citizens when the right of wage
workers to sell their labour-power became
defined as a property right. Women had to
wait much longer to win citizenship by
achieving legal independence if not economic
independence from their spouses.
Māori, who lost most of their communally
owned land during colonisation, and who
joined the reserve army of labour, did get a
token citizenship and political representation
with the creation of Māori seats, but did not
get formal bourgeois citizenship until they
became members of the permanent labour-
force after World War 2.
So bourgeois democracy, naturalised,
normalised and formalised as ‘one person, one
vote’, has always excluded those who did not
own private property, or substantively sell
their labour power as a commodity on the
market, that is were outside the real
labour/capital social relation.
Class Struggle 142 Spring
Yet, the formal equality of bourgeois
democracy was always an ideological façade
hiding the fundamental class inequality
between those who owned the land as a
means of production, and those who were
landless and forced to sell their labour power
to subsist. This formal democracy masked the
actual material class inequality until the end
of the post-war boom when the onset of a
long depression in the 1980s unleashed
renewed class struggle between capital and
labour that burst through onto the surface and
stripped the façade away.
It follows that the struggle for bourgeois
democracy today between those who work as
wage labour and those who extract surplus-
labour is futile unless the social relations
underlying that democracy are transformed
by socialist revolution.
Māori nationalists who fight for the realisation
of bourgeois democracy may win more
grudging token settlements against the
resistance of white racist, separatist,
supremacists who view them as a mortal
threat to their private property right!
But nothing short of a social revolution will
win the right to self-determination, so it
follows that bourgeois democracy, and the
social relations it represents, must be
overthrown in order for workers’ democracy
to live. How will such a revolutionary
transition be possible?
The revolutionary transition
Māori nationalism is essentially about tino
rangatiratanga or self-determination. This was
the promise of the Treaty, almost
immediately ‘dishonoured’ by the drive of
settlers to turn Māori land into their private
property.
Today, self-determination means de-
colonisation to a level of self-governance of
land and resources that meets the common
needs of the working people, or it means
ongoing colonial subservience.
This cannot be won as a peaceful, united
resolution conceived by He Puapua as co-
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September-November 2022
governance? It will require a challenge to the
class relations supporting the bourgeois state.
Māori who currently believe that self-
determination is possible in New Zealand
today will learn from their struggle that they
have to go take the path of social revolution
to de-colonise Aotearoa.
How far Māori can go to realise self-
determination will depend on the mass
support of working class Pākehā and Pacifika
against the resistance of the bourgeoisie and
its hangers-on. Such a multi-ethnic class
alliance will be the first step towards self-
determination including succession, and this
democratic right remains active in post-
capitalist society.
So, what are the conditions arising from the
past and present that can facilitate the end of
capitalism and the creation of ‘peace, unity
and democracy’ in the future?
The most pressing condition is that global
capitalism is in terminal crisis, and out of that
crisis comes the potential for revolution.
Economic slump, pandemic and climate
catastrophe are destroying the material basis
for human survival. There is no way that the
capitalist ruling class fighting for its existence
can make workers and poor farmers pay for
their rotting system by conceding bourgeois
democratic rights and social equality.
The class struggle between the two main
classes will not be united or peaceful. It will
force those on both sides of the divide to
unite and fight each other. Only one side will
be democratic representing the will of the
revolutionary movement. This will see the big
majority of workers and their allies unite for
revolution, against the minority of land
owners and their middle-class allies, who turn
to fascism to defend their class interests by
means of counter-revolution.
The Māori/Pākehā Alliance
An alliance of Māori worker plus Pākehā and
Pacifica workers will be the big majority and
it will be capable of reviving new forms of
social relations of the original commune as the
way out of capitalism’s terminal crisis. That
Class Struggle 142 Spring
means building mass democratic organs to
debate, vote and act on the basis of workers’
democracy. The alliance can activate the
substance of the Treaty in de-colonising
Aotearoa alongside workers fighting globally
against the destruction of nature and
humanity as capitalism attempts to make the
poor masses pay for its terminal crisis with
ever-worsening pandemics, ecological
collapse, stagflation and wars.
The argument is often raised that the class
differences among Māori disqualify self-
determination since its ‘capitalist’ leaders
dictate the will of the people. Fear of an
‘ethno’ state is promoted where the Māori
minority oppresses the Pākehā majority. This
claim is based on a racist neo-colonial
mentality which condemns the majority of
Māori as dupes of their ‘leaders’. Moreover, it
accepts that leaders have sold out to the
colonial practice of forcing iwi to ‘corporatise’
and have turned their backs on tino
rangatiratanga of the Treaty. Such blatant
hypocrisy when the mainly Pākehā defenders
of the white settler colonial capitalist state
label of Māori self-governance as an ‘ethno’
state!
Tino rangatiratanga in pre-contact Māori
society was exercised in the interests of the
collective and not a separate ruling class.
Today this social relation is still alive on the
Marae and can be defended within the
surviving institutions where leaders are
elected and mandated by the people to work
for their collective interests. Such a
democracy is a survival of the original historic
commune and can become the practical model
for a new form of democracy able to unite all
races, and end all classes, in the future.
That leaves the minority white supremacist-
led fascist movement made up of sections of
the middle-class, small businesses, ‘kith and
kin’ and lumpen workers. These elements will
become the fascist fodder of finance capital
to defend their ruling class interests from the
perceived threats of Māori nationalism,
migrant workers and globalisation. Of course,
these threats become paranoia in the minds of
the petty bourgeois whose ‘world view’ stops
12
September-November 2022
at NZ national chauvinism and resents
anything alien to that patriotic mindset.
The state bureaucracy, and its repressive
forces, the police and military, will split over
de-colonisation in support of the rising
proletariat or the declining petty bourgeoisie.
It is important that the progressive majority
organise self-defence against the state and
paramilitary forces, appealing to the interests
of sympathetic rank and filers to join the fight
for Māori self-determination based on class
unity, racial equality and the democracy of
the future commune.
Lessons of the Commune
The Māori/Pākehā bloc based on majority
votes and election of recallable delegates will
draw on the history of the commune, and that
of pre-contact Māori society. It will also draw
on the history of socialist revolutions in the
20th century and learn their lessons.
The most important lesson is that of Marxism.
Revolutionary transition is not automatic, or
spontaneous, but planned and organised by
those who understand why capitalism has
exhausted its historical mission and reached
its dead end. Global capitalism is in the end
stage of its terminal crisis. The exploitation of
the working masses and of nature as a whole
now threatens to destroy the basis for human
existence making the return to the commune
both necessary and possible. We call those
who carry this knowledge in their hearts and
their heads communists!
When co-determination is already being
practiced routinely over rivers, over
settlements like Te Urewera, central govt and
local government, in many ways
foreshadowing the emergence of a new
workers’ democracy, it is not too hard to
envisage a united, relatively peaceful and
socially democratic revolution against
colonisation and for Māori self-determination,
ending the rule of dying capitalism and
creating the conditions for a return of society
living in harmony with nature.
Class Struggle 142 Spring September-November 2022

Can China Rescue Global Capitalism?

The Terminal Crisis Unfolds from Sri Lanka to South
Africa and Beyond

Sri Lankans protesting in front of the Presidential Secretariat in Colombo on 13 April

Bourgeois celebration of the arrogantly proclaimed “End of History” has been

waning. The second “American century” has hit unplanned for and
unexpected headwinds. The period of clear sailing, for unchallengeable and
unassailable US/NATO military power and economic control of the semi-
colonial world and the Global South has hit a wall. That wall was the slow and
steady rise of the Russia/China imperialist bloc led by China’s mass of capital
sent by “Belt and Road” looking outward for return on investment that the
‘turn to the interior’ could not provide. China’s economic engine (exploiting 6-
700 million proletarians in China alone) is buttressed by Russia’s vast expanse,
natural resources, nuclear arsenal and military prowess as integrated into the
CSTO, BRICS and SCO projects.

Warned and informed by cold warriors like Kennan, Brzezinski and Kissinger, the western
imperialists have only themselves to blame for their surprise. But what of the working masses,
the proletarians upon whom the future of humanity depends? How has the international working
class been prepared for the crossing of the Rubicon from a mono-polar world to one of what
promises to be decades long inter-imperialist conflict? The bi-polar world conflict presented, for
13
Class Struggle 142 Spring September-November 2022

the bourgeois strategists, as a series of geo-strategic standoffs, including but not limited to Syria,
Yemen and the Ukrainian steppes.

Hidden beneath the surface we see imperialism’s terminal death march to keep the masses in
line. Countering the geo-pol strategists, Marxism warns the workers that these hotspots are
counter-revolutionary wars against resurgent permanent revolution, objectively necessitated by
the unfinished tasks of the national democratic revolutions in all the dependent nations. The
workers movement suffers decades of a crisis of leadership. The counter-revolution and
restoration of capitalism in Russia and China created an ideological tailspin giving rise to social
imperialism, social chauvinism, right populism, fascism and social patriotism. It is the task of
vanguard workers and revolutionary socialists to examine and expose this crisis of leadership to
the masses who are daily being driven to the barricades and the front lines of the imperialist wars
and class wars theoretically and organizationally unarmed while led by class traitors.

The degeneration of Trotsky’s Fourth International left the workers as unprepared victims of cross
class popular fronts from Bolivia in 1952 to Sri-Lanka in 1964. The Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP)
entered the Bandaranaike government only for the party and vanguard workers to be slaughtered
by the thousands. The Stalinists, Mensheviks, tankies, M-Ls and other revisionists never had a
pretense to any kind of working-class independence and have dragged the workers in and out of
one failed popular front project after another. This deadened class consciousness to the point
where half the international worker’s movement supports (backhandedly and with gobs of
qualifiers) either Putin and Xi or Zelensky and NATO. Red flags have been folded up and put back
in the closet, the international proletariat is mobilized under either the Blue and Yellow or the
White Blue and Red.

This leaves the masses rising up against consequences of the exploding debt trap without class
conscious leadership. We have trade union leaders enforcing their blocs with the bosses by means
of bureaucratic centralism from South Africa (NUMSA-COSATU) to the AFL-CIO with its social
patriotic agenda integrated with the CIA. Where is the democratic centralism of the revolutionary
proletariat needed to break the logjam-where is the New International needed now more than
ever?

Imperialist Debt Traps

Who laid the debt trap for the Sri Lankan masses? The west points at China while China’s apologists
point back. One BBC reporter helps China make their case blaming the victim, in this case Sri
Lanka. Is Sri-Lanka just the tip of the melting ice-berg? Are its particularities really that unique?
Aren’t most loans (from both the east and west) knowingly extended and entrusted to mini-
despots committed to ensuring repayment, exploitation of commodified labor power and resource
extraction by means of repressive labor laws, austerities and militarization? Of course, they knew.
Didn’t all the creditors know sovereign bond markets could not sustain the hyped-up interest
burden once the coupons came due? Of course they knew the default risk!

14
Class Struggle 142 Spring September-November 2022

The big creditors know how deeply they put semi-colonies in debt–yet they extend their exposure
because the dynamics of capitalism leaves its administrators no other choice than to put the
overproduced capitals back ‘to work’ exploiting opportunities internationally.

To counter the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the over accumulation of capital must find
an outlet. The sovereign bond funds and loans for technology and military equipment that turn
around and buy back from the lender. The zombie projects that wither and to lesser degrees the
corruption which infuriates the masses all build up debt with compounded interest that must be
paid regardless! The comprador capitalists and their corrupt politicians cut the deals, skim their

15
Class Struggle 142 Spring September-November 2022

cut and pass along the cost of debt in labor conditions, oppression and austerities the masses are
made to bear–but only as long as the working masses willingly tolerate the arrangement.

The decade of ‘easy money’ flowing from quantitative easing in the west and the ‘Win-Win’ and
Belt and Road projects emanating from Beijing peaked around 2016.

https://voxeu.org/article/china-s-overseas-lending-and-war-ukraine

China’s entry into the Great Game for an imperialist’s portion of the Global South came out of
the same necessity of all imperialists: the need to keep the overaccumulation capital flowing.
For the last to the game all the cycles of the world market of boom and bust are amplified. The
Chinese central bank looks at its books today full of distressed debt.

16
Class Struggle 142 Spring September-November 2022

The IMF is pressuring China to sit down at the table and take its lumps alongside the rest of the
big boys again in Sri Lanka as it was forced to do in Zambia. What are the choices for the creditors?
The indebted want moratoriums and cancellations but “nominal write-downs are rare”. China like
the rest of the parasites prefers restructuring, interest and term readjustments, debt for equity
swaps, long term leases –anything to assuage the bankers’ desire to keep the loan on the books
as active receivables.

The big dogs at the IMF, World Bank, Asia Development Bank are caught in a monumental
international ‘debt trap’ of their own making, and China is neck deep in it both abroad and at
home. Clearly China did not plan for this eventuality, although they should have, having at their
service the largest brain trust of experts formally trained in Marx’s crisis theory. To manage the
debt impositions in the private sector Michael Roberts takes on the job of advisor to Xi and
explains the CPC (Communist Party of China) only choice is to rein in the private capitalist sector
using the state to float the boat. Ultimately that means the pain of the few will be shared by the
many as the cost of the crisis lands on the masses, something socialism is supposed to prevent.

But Roberts’ reference to ‘state capitalism’ based on Lenin is wrong. Unlike Lenin’s time in Russia,
there is no workers’ state in China capable of reining in the private sector. The state rules on
behalf of the capitalist ruling class but has ‘special characteristics’ due to China’s history and
recent restoration of capitalism after 1992. The central state ruled by the Maoist bureaucracy
deliberately reintroduced the law of value to make the old state-owned sector competitive on
the global capitalist market. The former CPC bureaucracy was transformed into a capitalist
bureaucracy to manage capitalism, allowing it to rule on behalf of collective capital in the global
economy characterized by monopoly capital.

While Western imperialist states were moving towards a state form that managed monopoly
capitalism dominated by private monopoly banks and industries, China was able to use its central
capitalist state to defend and extend its monopoly control of its own banks and industries against
foreign capital. China’s rapid growth rate since 2000 therefore has to be credited to its state
management of the law of value which it dresses up as ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’.
Of course, this neo-Maoist ideology is magnified by its imperialist rivals as the new wave of “reds
under the bed’’, and simultaneously lauded by the treacherous Stalinophile Menshevik left as
‘actually existing’ socialism and fed down the transmission ‘belt and road’ to the working masses
for their consumption.

With mass upsurges in Sri-Lanka, the spread from Myanmar and Sudan across Panama and
Argentina, all the imperialist creditors tremble at the specter of resurgent communism. They now
know that declarations of the “End of History” were nothing but bluster! Today they balance the
cost of largess, in terms of incremental caloric concessions to defuse the powder keg against the
cost of losing it all to successful revolutionary upsurges. Alongside these class enemies, the
comprador authoritarian enforcers, the reformists, social democrats, trade union leaders, much
of the self-identified socialist and communist left work overtime to stop the workers from
establishing leadership of the masses with a class independent party and program of action. Thus,
workers are now on their own to expropriate foreign and national capitals and thereby complete
the tasks of national self-determination by permanent revolution that breaks down national
borders to crush imperialism.

17
Class Struggle 142 Spring September-November 2022

Without a revolutionary leadership, each upsurge is first met with the popular front to snow the
workers with ‘democracy in action’ which without class political independence only prepares the
workers for the inevitability of fascism. Promises of democracy to assuage world opinion are made
and under new elections that at most deliver a ‘socialism’ of “bolsa de familia” to lift the enraged
masses from misery to poverty but not beyond. Yet capital has no room and no means to offer the
workers anything of value. In this crisis they can offer neither bread nor peace. If workers break
with the popular front, then capital abandons all vestiges of democracy and crushes the masses.
Each downturn produces a ‘red tide’. In the west the red tide is more like a pink wave where
social democrats, radical sociologists and other social-patriots rise to the task, but in the Global
South as the red flags come out they must be tightly controlled.

So internationally the imperialist bosses are playing whack-a-mole. The west depends on
authoritarians like Rajapaksa, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Duterte/Marcos and Bolsonaro hiding as best
they can behind failing veneers of democracy. On the other side the Chinese apply the art of
turning “useful idiots” to their ends. For China the task is to have a ‘radical left’ coterie of
academics and activists ‘hold high’ the legacy of 1917 and 1949. This is morphed and wholesaled
by the leadership from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping into ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’,
delivered as Marxism-Leninism’s Gospel truth to the enraged and awakening masses in the Global
South who are told the debt collectors from China are their friends and leaders of an anti-
imperialist bloc!

Capitalist Con Men of the ‘Left’: The petty bourgeois politics of the NGOs and the Stalinist
Bureaucracy:

One such useful idiot rose from working class radicalism as a member of a Maoist caucus of
radicalized black autoworkers in 1970’s Detroit to become something of a tech mogul.
Thoughtworks’ profile page for founder Roy Neville Singham shows he has made bank directing
multi-million dollar projects for the likes of Caterpillar Financial Services with no regard for their
armored bulldozers’ role in the death of Rachel Corrie and the IDF’s demolition of Palestinian
homes in 2003. His company and activities became something of a pass-through to left outfits like
Peoples Forum, Tri-Continental and CODE Pink in the US and to the 330,000 members strong
NUMSA (National Union of Miners of South Africa) and its creation, the Socialist Revolutionary
Workers Party (SRWP).

In legal existence since 1987, NUMSA has organized the most militant sector of the South African
Working class, standing up against the rightward trajectory of the Tripartite popular front of the
ANC-SACP and COSATU which trapped the workers in perpetual subservience to imperialism,
allowing a layer of Black capitalists to rise to the top climbing over the graves of the Marikana
miners. The Marikana massacre exposed the ANC and now president Cyril Ramaphosa’s anti-
working-class commitments. At the time of the massacre, Ramaphosa, a former trade unionist
and strike leader had become a board member of the Lonmin mine. When Ramaphosa showed up
at the miners’ memorial vigil he was driven off by the workers who held him responsible. He
would go on to serve on the executive board of the ANC. Since then, he has acquired stakes in
many industries; his personal wealth is reported as $450 million-quite a trajectory for a former
trade unionist and strike leader!

18
Class Struggle 142 Spring September-November 2022

Today he cynically preaches class peace as he vows to fight corruption as he campaigns for the
“Framework for a Social Compact”, uniting COSATU and business owners to drive down wages and
boost investment. With a third of the working class unemployed the ruling class opposes a ‘basic
income grant’ and fears a new “Arab Spring”.

The fallout from the Marikana massacre split the working class internationally between supporters
of the multi-class Tripartite popular front and the Justice for Marikana Miners movement. This
split was apparent in Oakland, CA when we initiated street action in defense of the Marikana
Miners, which led to forums and workshops. NUMSA sent its representatives to a Berkeley venue
where the Transportation Workers Solidarity Committee, run by retired ILWU Local 10 militant
Jack Heyman, hosted and toasted NUMSA as the emerging vanguard. Noticeably absent from this
movement, in particular because they have been in lockstep with the Tripartite regime, were all
the local Stalinist and M-L outfits like the Communist Party, Angela Davis’s Committees of
Correspondence, the Becker brothers’ PSL and Workers World Party leader Clarence Thomas (ex-
president of ILWU local 10 and leader in the Million Man March.)

After the 2012 Marikana massacre COSATU expelled NUMSA in 2013. The vanguard of the working
class was looking for a new leadership to challenge the capitalist Tripartite regime, which despite
its participation in BRICS, was clearly uninterested in shaking free from the imperialist world
order, neither from the entrenched Anglo American nor from the new kids on the block, China.
Gert Grobler reported in July 2021, “China has been South Africa’s largest trading partner for 12
years in a row. From January to May this year, bilateral trade between China and South Africa
reached $20.52 bn, growing 65.6% year-on-year…”

NUMSA, it was hoped, by vanguard workers internationally, could fill the role providing a
revolutionary socialist alternative. Its leader Irvin Jim led the 2019 formation of the SRWP which
despite its proclaimed Marxism-Leninism was not able to win more than a small fraction of the
NUMSA members to vote for it against the ANC. Only 24,439 voted for the SRWP in 2019 and in
the municipal elections of 2021 it floundered again, garnering only 5,444 votes. Could it be the
bureaucratic centralism of the leadership and its trajectory away from ‘Leninism toward Maoism’
and embrace of Xi’s China is no more inspiring to the working masses than the official SACP-ANC-
COSATU?

Yet despite all the revolutionary bluster neither NUMSA and SRWP nor SAFTU and their respective
leaders Irvin Jim and Zwelinzima Vavi have made a qualitative political break with the ANC,
COSATU and SACP. For years they promised to return to the Freedom Charter and the national
revolution and to get the revolution back on track. However, neither grouping was able to break
from Stalinism’s Menshevik theory and stageist method that tasks the working masses with
establishing a nationalist popular front and a rebuilt workers party as envisaged by Joe Slovo to
revive the Freedom Charter. There is no fighting leadership that shows the masses the necessity
of the permanent revolution, that only under the leadership of a politically independent black
working class can the fight for workers power and socialism achieve the lofty yet limited national
democratic tasks of the Freedom Charter. Tasks that can only be won by expropriation of foreign
capitals and the native white big capitalists and emergent black capitalist class.

The Cape Town SRWP Shaun Magmoed Branch released a statement that argues that the
bureaucratic centralism and adaptation of the Maoist method of allying with the entire petty

19
Class Struggle 142 Spring September-November 2022

bourgeoisie as opposed to the Leninist method of splitting the poorer/oppressed petty bourgeois
from the upper well off petty bourgeois are being enforced, now in real time with the shuttering
of New Frame magazine and the refusal to seat delegates critical of the leadership at the NUMSA
convention. This is the culmination, they surmise, of the work of the Chinese Communist Party
and its operative Roy Singham and the network of NGOs tying Chinese imperialism to NUMSA, Code
Pink, Vijay Prassad at Tricontinental,the People’s Forum and Code Pink As?

Workers around the world have to rally against this sell-out of NUMSA to remove its
Stalinist/Maoist bureaucratic leadership and put a fighting democratic leadership in place. Under
the bureaucratic rule of Irvin Jim’s Stalinist/Maoist leadership of NUMSA treats the SRWP as its
political wing. Here we have the treacherous labor bureaucracy threatening to take control of the
whole labor movement, collaborating with the China led BRICS – (Brazil, Russia, India, China,
South Africa soon to include Iran). The war in Ukraine has caused the West to close ranks
temporarily, but far from weakening the Eurasian Block, sanctions have pushed the BRICS into a
huddle – just take the fact that they now all buy Russian oil or gas. China and Russia are in a
different league from the semi-colonial BRICS as rising imperialist powers.

Most of China’s economic growth flows from its ability to use its state capitalist regime to
accumulate capital by outcompeting its imperialist rivals. It tries this on with the soft-power of
‘win-win’ deals that promise FDI on terms that pretend to be a peaceful extension of ‘socialism
with Chinese characteristics’ rather than the grubby Western abuse of the semi-colonial world.

But soft power is not credible without recruiting the labor bureaucracy in the semi-colonies to
con workers into playing along with this lie. Workers do not buy the lie and know what super-
exploitation is (take the case of the Rössing miners in Namibia whose union was busted by China.)
But when they fight back against the popular front they meet a reactionary union leadership that
drops its fake Marxism- Leninism and apes the Bonapartist bourgeois regimes of Xi, Putin, Modi,
Bolsonaro, and Ramaphosa. They become mini-Bonapartists spouting the Maoist Xi line of ‘win-
win’ socialism to justify expulsions, thuggery, and fascism as the order of the day.

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Class Struggle 142 Spring September-November 2022

Terminal crisis offers no way out for capital. Forward on the road to socialism!

As the terminal crisis unfolds it can only lead to a dead end for capital. The counter-tendencies
to the LTRPF come up against the reality that capital cannot create enough new value out of our
labor to make a profit on the vast pile of accumulated dead capital. Ultimately all the counter-
tendencies depend on increasing the rate of exploitation of labor to plunder nature to restore the
rate of profit. But this depends upon the willingness of the workers and poor farmers to pay for
the crisis with their lives and livelihoods. Neither the Western imperialists that drag workers into
war against the “red menace”’, nor the Russian and Chinese imperialists who enlist the support
of the petty bourgeois enemies of the workers to trap them in Stalinist/Maoist patriotic fronts to
fight their wars, can restore falling profits. The mounting pile of debt in both the imperialist and
semi-colonial world and the repression of the working masses worldwide will explode and bring
capitalism face to face with the fearful ‘specter’ of communism. We face the rapidly approaching
crossroads leading to socialist revolution or human extinction.

Socialist revolution will not happen without a mass working class conscious of the necessity for
socialism. As we see in Sudan, Sri Lanka and elsewhere, when workers rise up against the
oppression of inflation, debt, hunger, war etc., the counter-revolution prevails unless the workers
are organized and mobilized by an internationalist revolutionary party. Most urgently, workers
around the world must rise up against the fifth-column labor collaborators that sell out the
workers and poor farmers to endless wars and inevitable human extinction. They must be thrown
out, and fighting, democratic unions built, backed by workers councils and self defense militias,
capable of defeating the Bonapartist and fascist regimes, smashing the bourgeois states and
imposing workers governments capable of ending capitalism and opening the road to socialism!

International Leninist Trotskyist Tendency (ILTT), 08/02/22

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Class Struggle 142 Spring
Brazil: Elections and the bankruptcy of the left
Rescuing the Revolutionary Program and Method
The election for president next October shows
a polarized scenario between Bolsonaro and
Lula, repeating the polarization of the last
election in 2018, and of the country since
2016 after Dilma's impeachment.
We believe
that this
polarization is
a consequence
of the crisis of
capitalism,
and of the
inter-bourgeois
dispute in the
country, which
strongly shakes
the democratic
regime and its
reactionary
1988
constitution. There is no room for the center.
After a Popular Front (FP) government, the
extreme right and fascism began to rise,
establishing the marks of polarization.
We warn workers: elections do not fight or
end the extreme right and fascism. The
elections will not end the economic, social
and political crisis in the country!
Faced with the terminal crisis of capitalism,
the rise of the extreme right and fascism is a
threat not only in Brazil or Ukraine, it is a
threat in all countries and for the workers of
the world. Fascism is a weapon of the
bourgeoisie against the workers.
The democratic regimes are in crisis in the
world and the method of fascism and civil war
against the workers remains as a necessary
resource for the bourgeoisie and imperialism
to crush the exploited class and the poor
people who have no other way out than the
struggle against austerity and attacks lest they
pay the price of the crisis. While imperialism
promotes war abroad, it feeds fascism at
home. In the semi-colonies, fascism translates
into military coups, such as authoritarian and
repressive governments.
22
September-November 2022
In the Ukraine war, we have seen the
bankruptcy of the left divided between
support for one of the disputed imperialist
blocs (US/EU and Russia/China) without giving
a class
alternative to
the workers, a
clearly social
imperialist
deviation.
Likewise in
Brazil, the left
that claims to
be Trotskyist
falls into a
national-
Trotskyist
deviation
supporting the
Popular Front
(FP) against fascism and imperialism. It is the
abandonment of the struggle for socialist
revolution. (1)
"It's the economy, stupid!"
The discontent with the effects of the
capitalist crisis was demonstrated in the
demonstrations of June 2013 and in the
numerous strikes in 2014. The PT government
did not resist, culminating in the bourgeoisie
manoeuvre removing Dilma from power in
2016. Since then, political and social
instability and economic has worsened. The
Temer government was on a tightrope and
Bolsonaro did not represent stability, on the
contrary.
In the struggle against the Bolsonaro
government, the class question was erased by
the opportunist leaderships of the workers.
Defeating the “extreme right” was the
objective and method, the bourgeois
elections. For the opportunists, the attacks on
workers and the worsening of living conditions
were never related to the global crisis of
capitalism and the fascist rise in Brazil has
nothing to do with the world trend. According
Class Struggle 142 Spring
to the reformist leaderships, it is enough for
Lula and the PT to win the election to end
fascism and the economy to grow again.
Both Lula and Bolsonaro know that they will
not solve the crisis without having to harshly
attack the rights of workers. Lula is aware
that he will not govern with the favorable
economic situation with which he governed in
the past. One of his priorities in the alliances
for the 2022 election has been to secure the
greatest possible support in Congress, looking
for a wider range of parties, anticipating the
attacks he will make against workers in a
scenario of high inflation, unemployment and
misery. His speech is based on past
achievements and has avoided talking about
what his eventual next government would look
like. He knows that the illusion of the masses,
which leads him to be the first place in the
elections, is in the hope of an economic boom
that will never return.
Illusions of the masses
Supporting Lula and the FP with the excuse of
being with the masses is a betrayal on the
part of the left that claims to be
revolutionary. To nurture this illusion is to
stop alerting workers to what is to come, to
arm workers for the struggle and advance
class consciousness. No matter how big the
illusion with Lula, revolutionaries have an
obligation to tell the truth, and not leave
them disarmed and alienated.
There is no other force to fight fascism and
the effects of the capitalist crisis than the
force of organized and conscious workers. FP
does not fight fascism. The FP does away with
the independence and organization of
workers, it makes their consciousness as an
exploited class go back, it diverts the methods
of direct struggle to the bourgeois paths of
choice. The FP dismantles the only force
capable of fighting fascism, the working class.
Bolsonaro and his allies in the military are on
an offensive against the Brazilian electoral
system. In the media today, the discussion is
about an attempted coup. The relationship
between the powers is increasingly
deteriorated. This discussion has never been
so present! The bourgeoisie knows that it
23
September-November 2022
cannot solve the crisis and if repression and
dictatorship are the necessary way out, so be
it. The judiciary tries to stop Bolsonaro by
arresting his supporters for attacks on
“democracy” and the president uses his
powers to have them released, as was the
case with the arrested deputy in which
Bolsonaro used a constitutional instrument
never before used by a president, in a clear
defiance of the judiciary.
Today, sectors that supported the current
president against the PT in 2018 are his main
opponents, such as Globo, the judiciary and
other sectors of the bourgeoisie that probably
thought they could control him. The actions of
the “democratic” bourgeoisie against
Bolsonarism have enthusiastic support from
the left. Instead of mobilizing and raising
awareness among workers for self-defense and
direct action, the left allied itself with the
degenerate Brazilian bourgeoisie to defend its
institutions and “democracy”. Institutions and
democracy that kill poor people in the slums,
attack indigenous people and rural workers in
the countryside and do not allow strikes,
picketing, street demonstrations and factory
takeovers by workers. What will become of
workers and left-wing organizations that
advance in the class struggle and challenge
“democracy” with their actions against the
bourgeois class and capitalism? Thus, the FP is
disarming the workers and opening the way
for fascism.
The first PT governments were dependent on
their alliances with the bourgeoisie and
applied the neoliberal policy of imperialism
(2). In an eventual next government, it will be
the deepening of this dependence. Lula will
be totally subordinated to the bourgeoisie to
govern and the attacks on the working class
will be enormous. For this electoral campaign,
Lula has Geraldo Alkmin, a historic member of
the PSDB (main opponent of the PT until
2014), who is currently in the PSB, as his vice-
president on his ticket. The PSDB since the
democratization of the country was the party
that polarized with the PT in the elections and
is now experiencing a deep crisis.
PSOL: bankruptcy and crisis
Class Struggle 142 Spring
The PSOL emerged shortly after Lula took
office in his first government in 2003, as a
rupture with the PT after the pension reform
in its first months of government. The party
presented itself as an alternative to the
bankrupt PT as a workers' party. The PSOL was
born reformist, made up of various tendencies
and organizations,
without a
program to unite
them and without
democratic
centralism. In
these elections,
the majority of
the national
leadership
positioned itself
in support of Lula
and, for the first
time, will not
launch its own
candidacy. Furthermore, with the new law
that allows federations of parties, it built a
federation with a bourgeois party, REDE. The
federations will bring together several parties
that will act together in parliament for the
next 4 years, until a new election. The PT also
joined the federations, with the PCdoB and
several bourgeois parties.
We already warned that the PSOL would not
leave the 2022 electoral process in one piece,
and currents in the party have already begun
to announce its rupture. The pressure of the
class struggle put the PSOL to the test, and it
did not resist. The entry of Boulos and the
current Resistance strengthened the
opportunist tendencies within the party and
the course of class conciliation is a
consolidated reality. Revolutionary currents,
especially those that claim to be Trotskyist,
must break with the party or they will be
declaring their bankruptcy to fight for the
socialist revolution.
PSTU and centrism
The PSTU launched the Socialist and
Revolutionary Pole as a left-wing alternative
in the elections. This initiative is
important. We defend that the PSTU cedes its
title to the working class to present classist
candidacies in these elections. Left workers
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September-November 2022
and organizations that did not capitulate to
support the FP must build committees in their
workplaces and homes to discuss a program of
struggle and democratically elect their
candidates. This is a true revolutionary policy
that, while uniting and organizing the struggle
of the working class by launching
revolutionary to
the pulpit,
denounces the
bourgeois
elections and the
opportunist
leaderships in
opposition to a
program discussed
and built in the
committees of
workers, youth
and poor people.
However, we
already denounced on the occasion of the
launch of the Polo, that the intentions and
program of the PSTU were not that of
independent struggle. Our review of Polo can
be read here. The PSTU is a centrist party that
replaces direct class struggle with trade union
bureaucracy. The PT and PSOL in the elections
unite with the bourgeoisie and their programs
pass through the alliance with the ruling class,
because, for reformism, the struggle takes
place through parliament and bourgeois
institutions, and not through the organizations
and independent struggle of workers.
In the bourgeois elections, the PSTU shows
itself as a Marxist and a revolutionary, but
only as a way of maintaining its credibility. In
these periods, it presents itself with a
sectarian and “radical” policy that hides the
reformist program where it replaces the
revolutionary struggle of the workers with the
union bureaucracy with which the party has a
long history of alliances and bureaucratic
organizations. For the PSTU, class
independence is maintained in elections, in
struggles and in unions, “unity of action” is
possible with bourgeois sectors within the
unions and their bureaucracy.
The Socialist and Revolutionary Pole Manifesto
clearly states that, in the fight against
Bolsonaro, it supports “unity of action” with
Class Struggle 142 Spring
everyone. That is, it supports the Popular
Front. In unions and strikes, “in concrete
struggle” as it says, the PSTU prioritizes its
agreements with the bureaucracy of the union
centrals, giving up class independence, with
an opportunist policy. In bourgeois elections,
it prioritizes “Marxism” and “revolution”, with
sectarianism. With its zig-zags, it lays bare its
centrist character.
However, despite launching its own candidacy
and showing all its radicalism, in the second
round the PSTU capitulates supporting the FP,
as it did in 2018 and several previous
elections. In addition to failing to present a
revolutionary program and electoral tactics
and to capitulate to bourgeois democracy and
the FP, in these elections the PSTU claims
that the police, the armed wing of the
bourgeoisie that in Brazil controls the
paramilitary militias in the big cities, are
workers. In the state of Espírito Santo, your
candidate for governor is a military
policeman!
Winning the masses and the consciousness
of the workers
Part of the dispute over the PT's base is the
demand that they break with the bourgeoisie.
We defend the United Front with all leftist
organizations, not only from their leadership,
but from their bases. We advocate a leftist
candidacy with representatives of the working
class organized into committees in the
workplace that democratically decide who
should represent them. Left unity must
denounce the PT's class conciliation, which
breaks unity and divides workers. The United
Front must unmask the opportunist
leaderships and show itself as an alternative
to the Lula/PT FP candidacy.
Lenin and Trotsky fought tirelessly against the
PF because they knew that in the imperialist
epoch there is no such thing as a
“progressive” bourgeoisie. The Popular Front
disarms the working class of its conscience
and direct actions, trapping them with
illusions in reformism, paving the way for
fascism. Supporting the FP is not a
requirement of the PT, it is capitulation and
betrayal. We must intervene in the bourgeois
25
September-November 2022
electoral process defending class
independence and never support FP!
Faced with the bankruptcy of the world left,
put to the test by the global crisis of
capitalism (terminal combined with climate
change), the inter-imperialist war of the
US/EU and China/Russia blocs and the
renunciation of class independence, we call
for a New Zimmerwald. (3)
The tasks of the working class are
enormous. Imperialist capitalism promotes
destruction, misery and wars. All over the
world, the working class resists not to pay the
price of the crisis. The only possible way out is
for the World Revolutionary Party to lead
them to victory with the destruction of
capitalism and the Socialist Revolution. Class
independence, its methods of struggle of
strikes, pickets, the seizure of factories, class
solidarity and proletarian internationalism
must be rescued.
For this, the workers need to overcome
the reformist leader so that their
struggles advance and are not diverted
and betrayed by the reformists.
Currents that claim to be revolutionary,
the currents that today break with the
PSOL and conscious workers, we call to
build a New Left Zimmerwald. A call to
organizations and militants who do not
capitulate to the inter-imperialist war
and are for revolutionary defeatism in
Ukraine, who do not capitulate to the
FP and class conciliation.
With the conciliation of class
consolidated in the PSOL and the
historic betrayal of the PT and PCdoB, a
regrouping of the revolutionary left in
Brazil is necessary that leads the
workers to the fight for the destruction
of the bourgeois state, the seizure of
power by the working class and the
construction of a workers’ state.
GTR Brazil
Class Struggle 142 Spring September-November 2022

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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