Class Struggle No 106

July-September 2013

Class Struggle No 106

July-September 2013

BRIEF STUFF
Socialise Fonterra!
Almost all of the reaction to the latest round of contamination of dairy products was about how to prevent this happening and destroying NZs export markets. The only statement on this I have seen to put it the context of global capitalism was that of James Ritchie of the NZ Dairy Workers Union on The Daily Blog which points to the need for workers to take control of industry not only to promote food safety and prevent environmental collapse. Spelling out the logic of that argument we need to socialise production in Aotearoa under workers control with no compensation paid to private owners on unimproved market value. Rebuilding the unions however, will not be enough. The unions have to develop a working class programme to socialise the means of production, distribution and exchange. Capitalism is in free fall and all monopoly capitalist corporations will come crashing down with it. On top of this, private production destroys the environment and brings climate catastrophe and social collapse closer every day. The problem isnt only poisoning babies; its the destruction of the biosphere! We need to socialise production and the dairy industry can be a model for this. The state is the natural partner of the dairy cooperative so that bulk swaps can be done state to state rather than on the international market. We need a state bank like State Advances that provides cheap credit to farmers, and state marketing to guarantee prices. Eliminating the anarchy of the market will allow agriculture to be planned to meet basic social and environmental needs. The unions can play an effective role in this by promoting such a program in its policies and in lobbying the parties of the left. But there needs to be a rapid up-scaling of understanding of how wealth is produced in this country before any effective program can be drawn up. Our capitalist economics allows the owners of private property to expropriate not only the labour of workers but the monopoly rent that results from the private ownership of scarce resources. Land is the No1 scarce resource, but other resources such as water and energy are also critical. Before Aotearoa was colonised Maori used the land and paid for that use by defending it with their lives. The conversion of land into private property allows the private owners to monopolise all the value arising from its use in production. The grab to monopolise scarce resources continues to this day. Many farmers got land through state aid and banks loans. For small farmers that was the value of their own labour which on poorer land was often subsistence or less. Those on better land became rich because good land requires less labour so fewer farm labourers and reaps the unimproved value of good land driven up by its scarcity. The banks always took a large slice of this rent. While most small farmers have gone bust, richer farmers evolved into the capitalist farmers of today, producing value from both labour as profit and the increased Unimproved Value (UV) of land as monopoly rent. Many are still highly indebted to the banks but others are filthy rich and form the new gentry which along with the bankers are the backbone of NACT crony capitalism. The way to deal with this is to socialise the rent from the UV of the land. This is the same as a capital gains tax on UV. This returns to society its contribution to the value produced on the land. We say: expropriate the rent farmers and the banks! Cancel the debt to the banks and provide cheap credit for farmers from a State Bank! Nationalise Fonterra under farmer and state shareholding! Nationalise the land! Provide for rights of Iwi and Hapu for perpetual use of stolen land! Renationalise all state assets with NO COMPENSATION!

Red smears & class struggle

In the last week of the Labour leadership contest an attempt was made to smear the Cunliffe camp as exploiting Robertsons homosexuality. A huge debate erupted on the left blogs and twitter. Chris Trotter wrote that the smearing of Cunliffe had echoes of McCarthyism. The point of his article was that identity politics can be used to weaken or destroy the left. Thats because the left stands for working class politics while identity politics has no necessary class identity. Individuals, who identify as socially oppressed, in this case LGBT, are to be found in all social classes. Those who are employers or in the middle class will still experience oppression due to their sexual orientation, but typically they are not as exploited as those in the working class including those who perform unpaid domestic labour. Therefore employers or those who escape the working class into the middle class do not tend not to share the lefts project of social reform or revolution. The problem with the Labour Party is that it is a party of the labour bureaucracy which consists of the full time professional parliamentarians and union officials. They form part of the middle class. The bureaucracy is not interested in reforms that go beyond preserving their privileges apart from some token minority representation to appeal to sufficient voters to keep them in power. Cunliffes victory is widely held to signal a shift to the left and a break with neo-liberalism. He has come out in support of working class politics as inclusive of ethnic and gender identity politics and the MPs that support 2

Class Struggle No 106 him such as Nania Mahuta and Louisa Wall testify to this. This has given Cunliffe a clear lead among the members and ranks of the unions and led to a surge in party membership. It is this left politics that includes identity politics that threatens the privileges of the labour bureaucracy which until recently controlled the party apparatus. Robertson is the candidate of the bureaucracy and its politics are centre left, and signify no real break with neo-liberalism. Only in response to Cunliffes appeal has Robertson begun to talk left. But you will note that this left talk is very general. Those outside the beltway can see that and so can the ABC clique. In desperation Clare Curran raised the charge that the Cunliffe camp was attacking Robertsons sexuality. Here we have identity politics being abused by the centre-left camp against the left camp. In fact there was no homosexual smear coming from the Cunliffe camp, rather there was a red smear coming from the Robertson camp. It is the red smear that Trotter says has something in common with McCarthyism, though in that case identity politics was of nation versus class. A better analogy would be the Nazis attack on working class gays, while the gays in the Nazi leadership or command structure escaped persecution. Both of these historical movements are obviously fully blown attacks on the reds threatening the revolutionary left in a desperate attempt to divide the working class along identity lines by appealing to the politics of national identity as white, racist and patriarchal. New Zealand has some way to go to reach this level of reactionary politics since there is not even a strong left Social Democracy let alone a revolutionary left threatening the NACTs power bloc. The lesson is that using identity politics to smear the reds even on a small scale can in a climate of social crisis and working class mobilisation, lead to fascist attacks on the left by middle class elements facing economic ruin and workers confused over their class identity. Such attacks will always be directed first at oppressed groups that are part of the working class. We say: down with red smears; smash the fascists.

July-September 2013 rent (land, water, power, etc) and leave us in a burnt out wasteland. NZ is waking up to its recolonisation courtesy of Wikileaks, Kim Dotcom and Ed Snowden. Local capital is monopolised by international finance capital. e.g. Fletchers is a MNC. The NACTs are NZ compradors for international finance capital. Disaster capitalism restructures capital out of cities, regions and nations into the pockets of international banks. Christchurch is slotted into an international division of labour to service the Canterbury gentry, tourists and heritage freaks. Similarly workers become migrants and casualised as a floating reserve army. To fight this we say: working class alliances nationally and internationally are necessary to resist paying for the global crisis. Locally, the job is to contest the marginalisation of workers in this process of Disaster Capitalism and make national and international alliances.

Brazil rising?
The fake left responded to the mass protests in Brazil as dissatisfaction with the PTs (Workers Party) program. They were relieved when the PT appeared to meet the popular demands. The refrain was lets work thru the PT and CUT to push for more reforms. The point is that the PT is trapped in a popular front with the right and playing the bosses game cant deliver what the poor need. The poor are kept in place by the corrupt police, but the young educated, anarchistic elements that kicked off this protest are not so easily silenced. The program of the demonstrations is working class. The middle class, a term used so frequently to describe better off workers, are now leading the fight and drawing in organised labor. In Brazil organised labour is relatively privileged labour with jobs in the formal economy. The majority of workers are jobless or underemployed in the black economy. It is not surprising that some of them are fooled into supporting the fascist agenda of blaming the PT and organised labour for their plight. The objective of the political right is to mobilise a fascist movement to stage a coup against the PT and the left. Therefore there is no way to avoid the violence being meted out by the states, especially those run by the right with their corrupt police. The demand for no violence is futile. As the fascist mobs begin to appear on the streets backed by the police the left cannot run for cover and you can expect the left and the broad base of inactive workers to get active. We say the workers must form popular assemblies and defence committees, and create a power base to defend themselves from state violence and a fascist coup. Revolution must go all the way; compromise with the counter-revolution means that revolution will be defeated. Forward to victory of the Revolution! 3

Christchurch rebuild
The NACT regime used a false scare about buildings falling down to move commissioners into the CCC to take over building permits and town planning. So consents are speeded up, planning becomes a dead letter, the RMA is due to be gutted if NACT gets the numbers, and all the ensuing chaos and mayhem is paid for by the ratepayers that is, workers. This is Disaster Capitalism full frontal as predicted. The model to be applied to rest of NZ, local bodies buried by centrally controlled bureaucracy, Banks, insurance Co's and speculators rip out what is left of NZ non-renewable

Class Struggle No 106

July-September 2013

Abolish Spying! Abolish Capitalism!

There is a danger that the Spy debate itself will create a babble of liberal platitudes that hides the Key point. Spying? Too much, too little, tweak, amend, march, sit down, occupy, vote, pray. The ruling class acts secretly to spy on us so that it can prevent any democratic challenge to its power and wealth. It knows that owning the media and education, and dividing us into warring factions is not going to be enough. Sooner or later it will be facing a Tahrir or Tottenham. State surveillance treats each and every one of us as potentially an enemy of the state.
And they are right. Driven into poverty, occupied by an imperialist military, denied our basic rights, spied on, racially profiled and/or shot, each of us is potentially capable of conspiring to overthrow such a dictatorial regime. They know this and they are ready. We are not. All spying by a capitalist state has been proven as inherently NOT to protect democracy but to protect the property of the 1%. To think that the global spy system is somehow an aberration of capitalism is delusional. It is necessary for the survival of capitalism. Yet it is stupid to give up the fight for control of the internet because whistleblowers have revealed that there is no internet privacy unless you keep ahead of the spies. This devalues the personal sacrifice of the whistleblowers to inform us so we can keep ahead. We dont hear anyone saying we should stop demonstrating in public unless wearing Guy Fawkes masks. There are some rights to die for. So keep ahead of the spies, and spread disinformation when necessary. The Bolsheviks had Tsarist spies sitting on their central committee. Since they were there, they were put to work. When the Bolsheviks set the date for the insurrection, three members of the central committee published the date in Pravda. It didnt matter since the Bolsheviks had already won over the ranks of the army and the revolution was almost bloodless. Our response to the new spy laws should be to demand that spying by the capitalist state be abolished by abolishing the capitalist state and capitalist society itself. We are not interested in reviews if this Bill is passed. There could be no independent review of the spy laws in NZ while subject to the full spectrum press of PRISM. Without Dunne this Bill would not become Law, it would be defeated. The existing law would remain in place. But the GCSB having been exposed as breaking that law it could be strictly enforced by an incoming Labour led Government. Then a review of the whole spy operation would take place and Labour, Greens and Mana would debate whether we need spies or not. The point is that unless repealed this Act will allow NSA to spy on all New Zealanders while a review is taking place. We do not trust a Labour-led Coalition Government to hold any sort of independent review of spying in NZ when exposed to the full spectrum of US economic, political and ideological blackmail. Add to the NACTs open door to the GCSB is the TICS Bill that will force

Internet Providers to have back door portals for the GCSB to spy on us, and to lie to subscriber that they are being spied on. If NZ is to be rid of the pernicious surveillance regime imposed on the world by US imperialism, we have to reject its flagrant abuse of our basic rights on principle, and NOW!

Abolish the GCSB! Abolish the SIS! Out of the Five Eyes! Close down Waihopai! Smash the TICS

Class Struggle No 106

July-September 2013

For a Socialist Workers Labour Party

We are facing a global economic crisis where the future of capitalism is up for grabs. Either we accept the ruling class has the right to make us pay for their crisis, or we organise as an exploited and oppressed working class to overthrow capitalism. In NZ this choice means we suffer another term of the NACTs rip, shit and bust anti-worker politics, or we remove them and their class from power. This means putting a government in power that will overcome the problems of Aotearoa/NZs neo-colonial dependence on Australian, US and Chinese imperialism. The best hope to achieve a first step in that direction is to put a left coalition of Labour, Greens and Mana into office. This will prove that no capitalist government however left is capable of meeting the needs of the working majority and that capitalism has outlived its time and must be replaced by a Workers Government and a socialist plan. Origins of a Liberal-Labour Party
It is no accident that the internal fight inside the Labour Party has broken out since the so-called Global Financial Crisis of 2008. This represents a major structural crisis of capital that persists today and will lead to the destruction of capitalism unless it can make the workers pay for its crisis by forfeiting all the gains of past generations of struggles. NZ history is one of successive crises with intervening periods of growth. These were the normal periodic crises of capitalism that affect all countries. They are caused by falling profits overcome only by extracting more surplus-value from the working class. During the crises the working class organised and fought to defend their wages and conditions. The first major depression in NZ was the Long Depression of the 1880s. This was part of a global depression that hit NZ hard. The unemployed and landless rioted and demanded the vote and the right to form unions to improve their share of the national income. The Liberal Government was elected in 1891 on the votes of workers and small farmers following the massive Australasian Maritime Strike of 1890 which disrupted the NZ economy. The task of the Liberal government was to use the state to create the conditions for capitalist development. The state borrowed heavily to invest in infrastructure, grabbed millions of acres of Maori land and broke up the large estates to settle the landless. It sought to regulate labour relations between workers and employers and passed the IC&A Act in 1894 to set up the Arbitration Court to settle disputes over wages and conditions. Unions saw their wages and conditions improve until 1908 when the Court claimed an economic decline did not justify a wage increase. The result was that most of the large industrial unions (Miners, Railways, Watersiders, Seamen etc) viewed the Court as a 'leg iron' and left to form a new Federation of Labour the Red Fed. A period of rising labour unrest followed culminating in the Waihi Miners Strike of 1912 and the General Strike of 1913. Though these strikes were defeated and working class opposition to the Great War was repressed, the NZ ruling class feared revolution. War arms workers to fight one another but it also encourages opposition to war to turn into armed uprisings against their own ruling classes. Revolutions broke out in Russia and quickly spread to Europe. In NZ despite the climate of militarism there was opposition to the war in the unions and in the Waikato Iwi. The state came down heavily on objectors and deserters, shooting or jailing them. In the midst of this upheaval the patriotic non-socialist unions formed the Labour Party in 1916 in an attempt to stem the tide of revolution. The Labour Party would continue the work of the Liberal government in harnessing the working class to the task uniting workers, farmers and national capitalists in the task of building the national economy. The significance of such Labour Parties became clear when the Russian Revolution of 1917 sparked off other revolutions in particular the German Revolution of 1919. Social Democratic parties acted as barriers to revolution tying workers to bourgeois democracy. Workers had to be won from the reformist parties before revolutions were possible. In Russia the Bolsheviks 5

Class Struggle No 106 succeeded and won the majority of the Soviets to take power. In the European countries the revolutionaries failed. Despite carrying arms and capable of taking power, the social democratic parties isolated and smashed the workers armed revolution, steering them into bourgeois 'democratic' republics.

July-September 2013 Keynesian policy pioneered by Bill Sutch to insulate the economy and establish a state-managed capitalism in NZ. Rather than socialism Savage characterised Labour's program as "applied Christianity". So when Labours stabilisation policies were challenged by workers themselves fighting for equality, Labour put bosses' profits before the equality of workers. The "Christianity" was selective in is application. Labour used its wartime powers to jail striking workers, proving that during the war its first priority was to ensure that NZ played its role in protecting the interests of capitalism globally, and nationally, it's priority was to break the hold of the British bankers, to support the emergence of a class of domestic manufacturers, and to discipline the working class. Labour was thrown out of office in 1949 when the more radical unions got tired of its strike-breaking regulations. At the same time the National Party rallied the farmers and bankers against Labour as part of the communist red menace spreading down-under. Labour's contribution to the post-war stabilisation was then to try to referee the class war and refuse to take sides during the 1951 Lockout. The Nordmeyer (57-60) and Kirk (72-75) Labour Governments lasted one term each and failed to defend the nation Liberal-Labour had created. Nor did a growing working class rise up out of the boom to demand a socialist Labour Party out of the ashes of old Labour. The Liberal-Labour task was over but the socialist task was dead on arrival. The Stalinist socialists in the union bureaucracy were embedded in the state and doing deals with both Labour and National (and hence both main fractions of the ruling class). So Nordmeyer put an end to the Sutch-Keynesian intervention with his black budget attacking the wages of the workers. The Kirk Government was also a one term government. Kirk attempted to use the state to aid industry and stabilise wages and conditions. But the end of the post-war boom meant that these policies had little effect. Far from a weak attempt at reviving state 'socialism', the Kirk government was an early warning that economic nationalist polices had reached their limit; a reality that was finally driven home by Muldoon's futile attempt to insulate the economy from the growing storm of the worsening global depression in the years from 1975 to 1984. By 1984 the NZ economy was beset with an acute crisis. Desperately Muldoon had tried to hold off the restructuring of the NZ economy by trying to insulate the economy with more protectionist measures. He could only have done that by enlisting the support of the unions. Instead he imposed wage and price control that drove down living standards yet failed to stop stagflation. The irony of a National Party leader representing farmers and bankers, stealing old Labours protectionist policies to deal with a debt crisis, was not lost on the Rogernomes. The international banks threatened to bankrupt the economy and the Muldoon government collapsed. It was left to the incoming Labour Government to complete its historic mission, reversing its role as a Party that united workers and manufacturers in an insulated national economy, into a party that acted in the interests of Australian, US and increasingly, 6

Bourgeois-Workers Parties
In Britain, Australia and New Zealand social democratic parties took the form of Labour Parties. Lenin writing in 1920 characterised these British-type Labour parties as bourgeois-workers parties because while they had working class members they had bourgeois programs. Recognising that such parties were deluding workers into supporting capitalism, the Communist International devised tactics to win workers from them to the communist parties. The main tactic was that of critical support. This required voting for Labour Parties to get them elected so as to expose their true role as capitalist parties that must betray the interests of the working class. Lenin likened this support to the 'rope that supports a hanged man'. The usefulness of this tactic depends on its success and this has been debated ever since. Whether or not it would succeed would depend on the conditions. In NZ in a semi-colonial setting this posed a problem. Lenin had commented in 1913 that the Labour Parties of Australia (and NZ) were of a special type of bourgeoisworkers party. They were actually liberal-labour parties reflecting the underdeveloped economies where the migrant workers formed an alliance with the emigre capitalists to create a new nation out of a colony. The would-be national capitalist class wanted tariffs to protect the economy from cheap imports so that domestic manufacturing could survive and develop. Their interests clashed with the land-owning and banking capitalists who ran the economy and were only interested in making profits from exporting farm products and importing manufactured goods from Britain. In Australia and NZ the Liberal-Labour Parties arose to complete the process of developing settler colonies into independent nations. So the NZ Labour Party served to unite workers and local manufacturers to break NZs colonial dependence on Britain and set up domestic manufacturing. Typically the working class migrants wanted to escape wage labour into selfemployment, and then by means of tariff protection from cheaper imports, set up as small capitalists with the ambition of becoming a big capitalist.

The Savage and Kirk Myths

The first Labour Government elected in 1935 was a depression Government. It took its cue from the failure of the Reform Government to get the economy out of the depression because of the resistance of farmers and the Bank of England to state intervention. Labours task was to continue the role of the Liberal Party; to use the state to regulate and protect the economy from the competitive forces of global capitalism. The myth of the Savage Labour Party was that it reformed the economy to realise the goal of social equality. In reality it intervened to stabilise the colonial capitalist economy. It applied a local version of

Class Struggle No 106 Chinese imperialism to open up and deregulate the national economy.

July-September 2013 status is to activate the class contradiction in the Labour party to split the workers from the bourgeois program and go forward to a Socialist Workers Labour Party!

The Fourth Labour Government

Labour took power and the Lange Government restructured and deregulated the economy relying on the union bureaucracy to suppress working class opposition. This worked as the unions led by the Socialist Unity Party members closed down strikes to avoid Labour being smeared as Moscow agents. The Party that had used the state to promote economic nationalism now became its executioner. It is the character of the NZ Labour Party as a bourgeois-workers party that explains its switch from defending national capital to defending international capital. The bourgeois program is dictated by the strongest fraction of capital, national or international. The switch resulted from the need for capital to expand beyond the nation. To profit means to grow beyond the national borders and compete internationally. Labour now backed the dominant international capital so its program reflected the interests of that fraction. But that required the slashing of state subsidies and an attack on wages and conditions to achieve international competitiveness. Inevitably the contradiction between the working class and the now 'neo-liberal' bourgeois program began to explode/break the historic LiberalLabour class alliance. This caused a split in the Labour Party which grew from 1984 and culminated in the formation of New Labour in 1989. The split was premature since no mass support for a socialist Labour Party (in Lenin's sense) existed outside Labour, let alone a mass Communist Party. Instead of staying in the party to fight for a socialist program, New Labour went into the wilderness blocking with tiny petty bourgeois groups including the Greens. The result was a defeat for the working class as the National Government (1990-1999) resumed its lead role as the party of farmers, international bankers and free traders, and the Clark Labour Government (19992008) oversaw the progressive re-colonisation of NZ by international capital over the next 18 years without any major working class resistance. The world is now 5 years into a long recession that is more like a long depression. Since 2008 the Key National Government has resorted to a rip, shit and bust strategy of asset stripping and its regime has become increasingly authoritarian. The Labour Party is being pressured by its members to break with neoliberalism and return to its reform origins as a Savage Labour Party. We have argued that the Savage Government should be understood as a special form of social democracy characterised as 'Liberal-Labour'. Today, a socialist Labour Government would have to return to the liberal task of fighting for NZs economic independence. Yet unlike the 1930s, there can be no domestically protected manufacturing fraction of national capitalism. NZ manufacturing has to compete internationally and is largely owned by international monopoly capital. A bourgeois-workers party can only function by defending the interests of international finance capital. And this defence of international capital cannot be reconciled with the interests of the working class. The only way for the NZ to escape its neo-colonial

A Labour/Green/Mana Government?
If Labour is elected under its new leader David Cunliffe in 2014 and forms a coalition with Greens and/or Mana it will attempt to return to a more interventionist Keynesian policy to revive the class alliance using the state to stand in for the virtually nonexistent national capital. But this will prove impossible as the NZ state has little sovereignty over Australian, US and Chinese imperialists control of the economy. The Labour Party will not be able to perform its historic task of a bourgeois-workers party, locking the working class into a class alliance with capitalism. So the question then, is: how can revolutionaries activate the contradiction inside the Labour Party to break workers from its bourgeois program and form a revolutionary working class party? That task concerns not only Labour but also the parties it is in coalition with. On the right will be the Greens and on the left will be Mana. Depending on their electoral support, both parties will add weight to each side of the contradiction. The Greens are avowedly not socialists, as they are committed to a Green capitalism. Greens are a radical petty bourgeois party so they are on the bourgeois side of the divide. Mana is a small newly emerging left social democratic party with its roots in the Maori working class but which has yet to go beyond Maori nationalism and unite with a significant section of the non-Maori working class apart from the Unite union. But it is on the Labour side of the divide. Each would enter a Coalition with Labour with its own program, but it is Labour which has the historic links to the unions and it will be the organised labour movement that will drive the wedge between a bourgeois program and working class supporters. How to do this? The answer is to prove to workers that even a 'far left' social democracy cannot solve the crisis of capitalism by reforming capitalism with some form of parliamentary socialism. What we have to prove is that capitalist inequality cannot be overcome by state redistribution such as the current proposal of the predistribution of wealth. The debate about predistribution will prove in practice that the capitalist state exists to defend capitalist property. It is a part of the capitalist state which means it will not predistribute the wealth that already exists as the result of the predistribution of the ownership of the means of production as explained by Karl Marx in Grundrisse. David Cunliffe wants to break with neoliberalism and crony capitalism. Yet he says he is not a socialist, defined as the (capitalist) state owning (i.e. nationalising) all the means of production. This is the fundamental limitation of social democracy. It will not seriously embark on nationalisation of the means of production because that would threaten the private ownership of the means of production and therefore the cause of capitalist inequality. So now we have this question out in the open again after half a century. The contradiction is laid bare: either the bourgeois program of defending capitalist social relations, or the socialist 7

Class Struggle No 106 program of the social ownership of the means of production! This no accident since the global capitalist crisis has forced much rethinking, even if much of this is recycling the old Fabian socialist debates of the 1800s and 1900s, and Keynes vs Marx as the way out of the crisis. But the crisis this time, the worst since the 1930s because it fuses economic decline with global warming, and the revival of socialist ideas that now confront it, will not only pose all the right questions about going beyond capitalism, it will prove that we have no alternative by capitalist barbarism or socialism. The Labour party is now firmly the camp of international finance capital. It can do nothing to stop

July-September 2013 the ongoing pre-distribution i.e. the accumulation of capital created by workers flowing into the hands of the ruling class. It can do nothing to stop the global meltdown of climate change. The only thing it can do to workers is try to block the road to revolution. We need to break workers from historic Labourism and build a Socialist Workers Labour Party committed to fight for a Marxist program that can mobilise workers internationally to overthrow capitalism and join the fight to build a new socialist world society. http://redrave.blogspot.co.nz/2013/09/aotearoa-forsocialist-workers-labour.html

Kill NACTs new anti-worker bill!

The NACTs has unleashed a new battery of anti-worker laws to give employers more power to smash the unions and drive down wages and conditions to raise their profits. The CTU campaign will wait for a Labour government to repeal this legislation. We say that workers cannot wait, that they must organise to build democratic, fighting unions that are not tied to the leg iron of the bosses labour law.
A National Party sponsored capitalist attack on workers rights is underway. The Employment Relations Amendment Bill is legalising the ability for capitalist class to drive down wages and conditions and to break workers organisations (unions) by bringing in non-union workers (scabs) and locking out unionised workers. It is an offensive re-write of the rules that smashes the good faith out of the current bargaining law by giving the option for employers to apply to end negotiations. This would create the end to legal strikes. It would undermine good faith and the role of unions in negotiations over contracts. In the ports of Auckland / MUNZ (Maritime Union of New Zealand) dispute, the ports (employer) would have another weapon to smash the MUNZ union by legally ending negotiations and employing someone else to do the work. Exactly what the ports wanted to do by illegally sacking all the workers during bargaining. Clearly this law provides legal license to employers to further undermine workers ability to organise and take collective action to try and get our needs met. The Employment Relations Act (ERA) never offered great protection for workers in the first place. "Good faith" has been the fluffy covering on the old leg irons chaining the working class to capitalism, by way of legalised labour laws -or- truce agreements. But this rewrite of the rules for capitalist exploitation of the working class to absolutely favour the bosses. The capitalist class is in such crisis that they continue to need to push down wages to try to save their profit margins. As the Pike River disaster showed, the health and safety of the working class is already ridden over in capitalist drive to restore their profits. Unions are behaving like paper tigers fighting talk only, words on paper. The union officials have held meetings and written articles in the union newsletters to inform the organised workers about the rule changes. However non-union workers have little information about it all. The union officials have lead the union members into the parliamentary waste of time. They encouraged members to send in submissions on the law changes (thousands of form submissions from the PSA alone). But governments can easily ignore paper just as the 1991 National government ignored 10,000 working class marchers and a one day general strike protesting against the Employment Contracts Act, there is nothing to stop them ignoring thousands of union members submissions on the latest capitalist rewrite of employment law. The union leaders instead are promoting the parliamentary road of voting for Labour who promise to throw out this anti-union negotiation law. This would undermine the role of the leaders that negotiate the collective employment agreements or the return to work truce in the class struggle. Realistically to meet workers' needs, we need to smash the bosses. We will need illegal strikes i.e. to ignore the bosss laws and to organise all of society's work to meet the needs of working people: socialism.

For a living wage based on workers committees to set living standards 30 hours for 40 hours pay. Share the work until everyone who wants to work, can work. For rank and file control of the unions For democratic, fighting unions An injury to one is an injury to all!
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Class Struggle No 106

July-September 2013

Australia: Rudd Labor Smashed!

We reprint the Australian Communist Left post-mortem of the Labour Governments defeat in the recent elections. We differ on the tactical question of critical support for Labour. Our reason is that Labour is the party of the Labour bureaucracy that still has influence over organised labour. So long as the Labor Party exists as a barrier to the development of working class revolutionary politics it is necessary to intervene and expose it to prove that workers need a mass revolutionary party to overthrow capitalism and replace it with socialism.
Many Labor supporters feel some consolation. Their party was only smashed and not annihilated. There is at least enough senior experienced members elected in order to establish the basis for an alternative government. Labor didnt do as badly as expected in Western Sydney nor Queensland. However things are indeed very grim. This was the lowest Labor vote in the past hundred years. Kevin Rudd no doubt thinks he has been hard done by. The economy is in good order with a triple a credit rating. There is low inflation and interest rates. Unemployment though rising is still under control by normal capitalist standards. He put forward a responsible capitalist programme for the future. But he was smashed! To find the answers we look at the Rudd record over the past six years. Rudd was elected as an economic conservative. On the whole he kept his word. When he was elected in 2007, he offered modern twenty first century image for Australian capitalism. John Howard seemed a bit old fashioned, dowdy and lacked direction. Australians wanted something different. Rudd came unstuck due to the Global Financial Crisis. He was forced to do something to head off recession. He chose to spend government money to put money back into the economy and provide jobs. This is, of course, a more honourable was of dealing with the crisis than the Liberals programme of doing nothing and tightening the belts. But in reality, there is no painless way out of the capitalist crisis. What Rudd was doing was delaying the effects of the crisis. We are still suffering. Yes, Rudd can point to the fact that Australia did not fall into recession. But there were serious mistakes such as the pink batts affair. This was a scheme where the government gave free pink batts to insulate those who owned their home. The aim was stimulate the economy and to save energy. But due to inadequate supervision, fires occurred, accidents happened and a few workers even lost their lives. His leadership lost direction. He became eccentric and chaotic. The bureaucrats replaced him with Julia Gillard to bring the government down to earth. She failed. Part of the problem was a very vicious campaign against her conducted not just by the Liberals but by the media. She was also a victim of obnoxious treatment and sexism. Eventually people stopped listening. There were also many scandals such as Peter Slipper and Craig Thompson. The finger was pointed at Labor for being incompetent and corrupt. There was a vicious and nasty personal campaign. Federal Labor was also a victim of the crises of state Labor governments. In NSW State Labor has indeed been exposed as incompetent and corrupt. The Liberals and the media made sure that Federal Labor would also be implicated. The bureaucrats crawled back to Rudd to save their electoral bacon. Whether or not he did better than a Gillard leadership would have done is up for debate. It is clear now that Labor was facing a smashing either way. Rudds problem has been the economy. Rudd and Gillard claim to have planned for the budget to go back into surplus. Their initial target was 2013. But it didnt get back to surplus as there was a cash shortfall partly due to the mining tax not raising as much money as expected. Once again the finger has been pointed at incompetent Labor. People do not think OECD. It is ok for Rudd to point to economists complementing the Australian economy but the fact is that people are suffering. They blame Labor who after all administers the capitalist system and must take responsibility. Recently there has been a rise in the rate of unemployment. Australia has had a high valued Australian Dollar even compared to the US dollar. This has advantages but the drawback is that it discourages exports. Many manufacturing plants depend on exports. Having lost their overseas competitiveness, they lay off workers. This includes workers in the car industry. Rudd and Gillard had no answers. It has offered the multinationals many millions to stave off sackings. But Ford is about to close operations and Holden still threatens more sackings. Rudd/Gillard like any other conservative government makes the working class pay. There was very 9

Class Struggle No 106 little reason for ordinary working class people to support their version of conservative policies. Rudds problem has been the perception that the Liberals are sounder at economic management. Small and big business people, some labour aristocrats, look back to the Howard years with nostalgia. It is very easy for them to point the finger at Rudds spending as the problem especially when the Liberals have this massive propaganda machine reinforcing this. The other key issue was refugees. Rudd when elected, promised a more humane approach. For example no children were to be placed in detention. Then the Sri Lankan war ended, the Tamils were persecuted and the boats came. Rudd is a man who believes in borders. Like all believers in the capitalist state he believes in defending them. He began peddling backwards. This looked bad. So there has been a race to the bottom. Part of the reason Gillard was elected was for a harder refugee line. Her Malaysia policy failed. Rudd has continued the race with the PNG solution. All this is barbaric and reactionary. Once again it was the Liberals who have the reputation for stopping the boats. Labor has appeared to be incompetent. Revolutionaries, of course have no intention of stopping the boats. We want to welcome all those who come by boat to Australia, whether real refugees or otherwise. Smash all immigration controls! The Liberals have used the refugee issue to wedge Labors chauvinist base, especially in western Sydney. Labor has been exposed as the less effective chauvinists. Both parties are barbaric. The Liberals have run an efficient well orchestrated campaign basically asserting their right to govern. Tony Abbott once portrayed as a fighter has been transformed into Abbott the statesman. Basically the message was trust me and they promised stability as opposed to chaos. In doing this he has managed to avoid embarrassing questions about where the budget cuts are going to go and who will suffer. In this election there were a massive number of disillusioned people. They have been alienated by Labors right wing policies. They dont like the Liberals but they have little reason to vote Rudd Labor either. Abbott had the assistance of Murdoch newspapers notably the Sydney Telegraph. They made a totally obnoxious campaign to bring down Labor. Get rid of this mob went one of their headlines as any fig leaf of impartiality was thrown out the window. Are we sympathetic to Rudd Labor? No! If you enter the capitalist state you do so on its terms and you face the consequences. Rudd is a man who wants

July-September 2013 capitalism with a bit of a fair go. What he doesnt understand is that the ruling class are not interested in fair play. They want to rule and their mouthpiece, the Liberal party, to govern. Right wing Labor has only been tolerated by the ruling class because it played an important role in heading off class struggle. But what class struggle today? The ruling class want a Tony Abbott to save money on unnecessary taxation and to put the working class in its place. From their point of view he will do the job admirably. So which way for Labor? Well there are strategic problems. The lesson of Rudd is that being a second rate more caring conservative government doesnt work. Basically we think the Labor party will muddle on, hoping for a Tory mistake. They may get one but on the whole the Abbott machine is competent in serving the class it believes in, the ruling class. Make no mistake! Abbott is a man on a mission. That mission is to smash the left and the workers movement. He will bide his time. There is no urgent need to implement work choices immediately. But make no mistake he will introduce it. When Abbott does put the boot in there will no doubt be many who will looking back to Rudd and Gillard with rose coloured glass. We wont! We will remember attacks such as maintaining the Northern Territory Intervention. extending quarantining incomes, forcing sole parents onto Newstart, maintaining work for the dole. Yes their legislation is better than workchoices but it is still antiunion legislation He has served US imperialism adequately with troop facilities in Darwin. They also continued Australias participation in the imperialist war in Afghanistan. Gillard when under attack appealed to sisterhood. But she emphatically opposed any attempt to impose equal pay for women. Rudd has hardly been union friendly. The Liberals say there is not the urgency for industrial reform as they are satisfied with Labors changes to unfair dismissal legislation, in favour of the bosses of course. Labor has demobilised the unions. The Liberals will smash them. Working people in this country deserve a leadership who is prepared to fight both the Liberals and the system they represent. They need to break from the reactionary social-imperialist Labor Party. Revolutionary leadership is urgently needed! This requires breaking from Labor and forging a revolutionary communist party. The only real alternative is a revolutionary one. We must put revolution on the agenda for Australian politics. Reprinted from RED 103, Communist Left of Australia. See also here and here.

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Class Struggle No 106

July-September 2013

US/NATO imperialists: Hands off Syria!

Mobilize to defeat Obamas war against the Syrian People and their Revolution!
The US/NATO threatens to launch missiles against regime targets in Syria. The revolutionaries on the ground have never asked for US/NATO to intervene militarily. They have asked for weapons to defeat Assad and received no heavy weapons. The US now admits that this is because it has no confidence it can prevent the Islamist elements from taking control of the war against Assad. Assads use of chemical weapons has forced the US to acknowledge that he will never make peace and is giving impetus to the Islamist opposition. The prospects of a negotiated deal have vanished. So now US/NATO and Russia will to do a deal to remove Assad and replace him with a friendly regime that will attempt to put a halt to the Syrian Revolution and the wider Arab Revolution. We must oppose US/NATO attacks on any targets in Syria, just as we oppose Zionist attacks. We must also oppose the Russian and Chinese imperialists backing of the Assad regime, as well as their proxy Iran.
Obama plays the same old humanitarian game the US has played over and over again as an excuse to invade or bomb a country which is escaping outside the bounds of the imperialist control. The vanguard workers internationally know, from previous experience with Obamas humanitarian aid in Haiti and with US aid in Somalia, Bosnia, Serbia, Chile, Vietnam and Palestine that it is the very population the US leaders hypocritically claim to want to protect that ultimately pay the bloody price with thousands of dead civilians. The aid takes the form of bombed out communities shot up by trigger happy cowboys running up the Pentagons expenditures for their sponsors on the corporate side of the military industrial complex. Lets blow some shit up is always a good option when the economy is in the tank. At least the big munitions producers get their cut of the blood money, their stocks soar, backs are slapped and careers are made. Conscious workers know that the US imperialism has more blood on its hands than Basher Al-Assad could bathe himself with in three lifetimes. Hiroshima/Nagasaki, Central and South America, the Korean War, Vietnam, Panama, Haiti, Iraq and Afghanistan and many more; for over a century US imperialism has left a trail of bloody war crimes. This is not the result of bad or misguided policies by this or that administration, but is part and parcel of the highest stage of monopoly capitalism and its world-wide quest for elusive super-profits.

Workers dont need the peace of the capitalists and the pacifistsa peace only found in the grave yardThe end of imperialist war and the causes for war require that the working class consciously acknowledges the existing class war and organizes to defeat the class enemy, the 0.01% and their lackeys. For workers to live capitalism must die! There can be no peace so long as capitalism exists. To end imperialist war once and for all requires more than morally outraged peace demonstrations. Peace requires the organization of the working class at the head of all the oppressed for all-out class struggle against the main enemy, which is our own ruling class, and their system of exploitation. To win, an anti-war movement needs to be based on independent working class actions. In the US, this requires an absolute political break from the Democrats, who have proven over and over again they are the willing 11

Class Struggle No 106 butchers for American imperialism. The Democratic Party has moved far to the right over recent decades; has historically served as the graveyard of class and social struggles, and they will continue to serve that role. Workers should organize labor political strikes against any military intervention. Not only does this mean the hot-cargoing of military goods, particularly by longshoremen, railroad workers, merchant seamen among others but workers should organize material military aid to Syrian working class revolutionary fighters. United labor actions should be organized internationally from the semi-colonial nations to the imperialist centers. A general strike movement needs to be organized to bring these war moves to an end and a fighting workers/labor party built to organize such actions in opposition to the Democrat/Republican parties of war. US enlisted ranks need to be broken from the officer corps and organize soldier and enlisted ranks councils to oppose US imperialist actions. Opposition to the war could be turned into a fight for social justice, for jobs, healthcare, education and housing for all. Carrying such a fight through to a victorious conclusion requires the formation of a workers government.

July-September 2013 Workers should come to the defense of the Arab Revolution. Labor in transport should help ensure that military goods are commandeered and delivered to the Syrian working class revolutionaries of the Local Coordinating Committees (LCC) and militias, who are fighting the brutal Assad regime. Organize workers international brigades to fight in Syria alongside our class sisters and brothers! The Syrian Revolution must not be broken by the imperialists! For international labor solidarity! Workers of the world unite!

All imperialist powers hands off Syria! For a workers victory against the regime! For workers material aid to the revolution! From Tunisia to Kuwait, victory to the Arab Revolution! For workers revolution and a socialist federation of the Middle East and North Africa! Communist Workers Group USA

BART Workers! Reject the Concessionary Contract being negotiated now!

No give backs! No take aways! Make the 1% pay!
BART, AC Transit, Wal-Mart, Fast Food workers and all out-of-contract unions: we had the power to stop the bosses attacks with a Bay Area wide Indefinite General Strike!
The Labor Tops (the Pie cards from the international, the State Fed and the Labor Councils) are joining management and the Democrats in twisting the arm of the rank and file and their most militant negotiators demanding a no gains/give back contract. Labor negotiator Josie Mooney has made concessions this week we must reject as DOA! BART and AC transit workers are taking the heat for all labor and can either turn the tide and defeat the bosses attacks, or a defeat will be compounded on hundreds of thousands of other workers looking for a decent contract. Today all labor must be mobilized to stand shoulder to shoulder with AC Transit and BART workers fighting for their contract. If BART workers lose the losses will be the new bottom sought in all our contracts! So labor must direct its immense resources toward winning this contract. To do that we must create a grand united front of all Bay Area Labor and the community. To reach out to the community labor must show it is serious about organizing the low wage workers so they can win dignity and a living wage that mass workers assemblies define. Labor must reach out to the most oppressed and exploited and win them to supporting and mobilizing all unions now out of contract, public, transit workers & low wage workers for the indefinite strike to win! To accomplish this the rank and file needs to reassert union democracy and sweep away the dead wood, be they from the international or the labor tops of the local councils who join with the bosses to stop strike actions and scare us with the threat of the anti-labor laws they will never fight! WE SAY $15.00 IS NOT ENOUGH! FREE QUALITY HEALTH CARE FOR ALL! PENSIONS ARE A RIGHT NOT A PRIVILEGE! 12

Class Struggle No 106 ESTABLISH LABOR/COMMUNITY WAGE AND PRICE COMMITTEES THAT DEFINE A LIVING WAGE AND FIGHT FOR AND ENFORCE A SLIDING SCALE OF PRICES AND PREVAILING WAGES TO ELIMINATE POVERTY & WANT! JOBS FOR ALL NOW! SHARE THE WORK! 30 HOURS WORK FOR 40 HOURS PAY! Today, while low wage workers are making their demands heard in strikes and actions across the fast food industry, at Wal-Mart stores and warehouses, public workers and unions are put on the defensive. The bosses shrug off the 50 million who live in poverty, a misery enforced by minimum wage-slavery. The bosses even sustain labor friendly economists like U.C. Berkeley Professor Robert Reich (secretary of labor for Clinton) who benevolently promote the poverty wage of $15.00 an hour as a sufficient minimum, while in Sacramento they phase in a new $10.00 minimum over 2.4 years. This they hope will prevent workers from building a general strike movement to turn on the offense. This holding down of minimum wages by liberal politicians and economists is the hidden side of the 0.1%s take away of the workers share. The $10.00 minimum is intended to defuse the Fight for Fifteen movement (FF$15) and movements for a living wage, especially when they eye the prevailing wage as their goal. The bosses project is to drive down the prevailing wage relative to inflation by denying COLAS, in stark contrast to increases in productivity, CEO pay and stock profits. To build a united strong movement that can win, labor must put resources to organizing the unorganized, fighting for jobs for all at a living wage, a wage which labor defines, to strengthen the alliance with the most oppressed. We will need action committees in all job sites to build a class-wide General Strike movement based in the unions and the oppressed and worker communities, exemplary political strikes like that initiated by the ILWU Local 10 on Oct 23, 2010 to Jail Killer Cops must be held to win the communities just demands. LABOR MUST FIGHT FOR JUSTICE FOR OSCAR GRANT, ALAN BLUEFORD, KENNETH HARDING JR., RAHEIM BROWN JR., MARIO ROMERO, JAMES RIVERA, END

July-September 2013 RACIAL PROFILING AND STOP AND FRISK! An Injury to one is an Injury to all! The alliance, formed by the Democratic Party, including the liberal economists (Reich, Paul Krugman) and the entrenched leadership of the two major labor federations, acts as an efficient tool of enforcement designed to stop workers self-organization, class struggle actions and political independence. Workers democratic action committees and assemblies need to be convened to organize and beat back the attacks of the 0.1%. The Democrats only support worker mobilizations to the extent they can be turned into party electoral projects. As witnessed in Wisconsin, the mass movement toward a General Strike was stuffed into an ill-fated recall campaign, disarming labor and leading to defeats for public workers. Labors alliance to the Democratic Party ties labors hands. Labor has refused to fight the anti-labor antistrike laws like TaftHartley which outlaw solidarity and general/political strikes. In contrast, a fighting workers Labor party will build mass democratic workers assemblies that empower strikers and mobilize the working class and oppressed communities for their victory! In order for labor to win, we must reclaim class struggle tactics and stake out political independence! Management scoffs at labors demands! So today the Communist Workers Group (CWG) advocates united strike action of the AC Transit, the BART and the other unions (public and private) currently out of contract. The CWG calls on all labor to join in and make the transit contract a class-wide fight! In order to win, to organize the unorganized and protect the most oppressed and exploited, labor must reclaim the right to strike which can only be won by victorious strike action. SAVE OUR UNIONS! REJECT CONCESSIONAY CONTRACTS! ORGANIZE THE UNORGANIZED! LAUNCH THE UNITED AND INDEFINITE GENERAL STRIKE NOW! TO WIN LABOR MUST BREAK WITH THE DEMOCRATS! FORM A FIGHTING WORKERS \ LABOR PARTY!

http://cwgusa.wordpress.com/2013/09/21/bartworkers-reject-the-concessionary-contract-beingnegotiated-now/ 13

Class Struggle No 106

July-September 2013

Argentina:

Statement on Las Heras from Democracia Obrera (Fraccion Leninista Trotskista)

TO ALL THE ORGANIZATIONS Caleta Olivia, September 6th, 2013 To the teachers and truck drivers of Tierra del Fuego, to the workers of Borda Hospital, to the teachers and workers of Neuqun who confronted the government and Chevron, to all worker and student militant organizations in the country: We are witnessing how the government mercilessly attacks workers. The government does it against you by prosecuting you in Tierra del Fuego, or against Borda Hospital for defending health and demanding what belongs to them. We have also seen how the government defended the agreement with the oil company Chevron by repressing the youth and teachers. We are in the last period of this trial fabricated by the oil companies to impose a vengeance against our comrades, these thirteen Las Heras comrades who were the first ones fighting against the tax on wages and against the labor flexibility under the war cry for equal work, for equal payment. The town of Las Heras achieved his voice to be heard in the court denouncing how workers were tortured, chased, repressed, and our town has been occupied by the Gendarmerie and the Intelligence Services. But unfortunately, we are very few here. We need that all the forces of workers can be side by side the comrades who under risk of ending up in jail with life sentence. We are against the clock, these are defining moments. We need of all the forces. The complaint under the orders of the oil companies wants revenge; we need the freedom of all the workers. We have news that in Tierra del Fuego, the teachers under prosecution summoned to the inquiry, voted a strike and demonstration towards the court whenever they have to go to the court to the inquiry. What a example it is for workers! Thats what we need here in Caleta Olivia! Here these days are defining. We need all the forces for our Las Heras comrades to be freed. In this way, we will be in better conditions to go on fighting for the release of the comrades of Corral de Bustos, of Bariloche and for the non-prosecution of you and all the fighters. We need urgently that all the worker and student militant organizations of the country come to Caleta Olivia and enclose the court in solidarity to conquer the freedom for the comrades! Signers: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. Catrihuala Franco Andrs Catrihual Francisco Family of Hugo Gonzalez Silvana: family of Cortes Wife of Catrihuala Mother of Catrihuala Wife of Omar Mansilla Relative of Quique and Daniel Aguilar and Pablo Mansilla Family of Daniel Aguilar, Enrique Aguilar, Omar Mansilla, Danil Mansilla Villacorta Union delegate of Paty Mother of Padilla Franco Maximiliano Wife of Juan P Bilbao Brother of Alexis Bilbao Paula Medrano, daughter of disappeared. UNCONDITIONAL FREEDOM TO ALL THE COMRADES! IMMEDIATE NON-PROSECUTION TO ALL THE PERSECUTED WORKERS! STOP FIGHTING ALL DIVIDED!

http://redrave.blogspot.co.nz/2013/09/argentin a-statement-on-las-heras-from.html 14

Class Struggle No 106

July-September 2013

Americas Cup is half empty

The Americas Cup contest is over. The Billionaire Oracle Team leader Larry Ellison won. The Emirates Airline/Team NZ lost. Here we have a marvellous expression of what is good and bad about capitalism. Capitalism wins. The new technology and design skills which produce big cats that stand out of the water on tiny foils, fuses developments in high tech materials and advanced computer design. It is a leading edge, or more appropriately, foil edge, of what drives technical advances in labour productivity and thus profits. There will be massive spinoffs into industries of all sorts in the same way as technical advances in the military and space travel have given us cyber-technology and drones. While we can admire the new technology and the skill or those using it, we cannot separate the fact that this technology is branded intellectual property of the US ruling class. Yet capitalism also loses. US imperialism is on a downward spiral as its global hegemony is challenged by the rise of China. Its struggle for survival means a massive sucking of resources including intellectual property from the underdeveloped and emerging nations like NZ creating a widening gap between the huge wealth in the hands of a few hundred billionaires at one pole, and the poverty and misery of a growing mass of workers at the other pole. This is because each advance in technology means the expulsion of living labour from the productive economy. High tech increases the productivity of labour so fewer workers can produce more commodities in less time. However, because technology is only employed if it makes a profit capitalism faces an insoluble limit. Increasing labour productivity that does produce value cannot compensate for the rising cost of capital invested in plant and technology that does not produce value. Instead of us all sharing in the growing wealth and working less labour time, falling profits leads to stagnation and the destruction of wealth, and the collapse of the Earths ecology and extinction of the human species. The fallout from this contradiction is the inevitable decline of capitalism as it expels workers from production, squeezes the middle class down into poverty, and sucks all the wealth into the pockets of the 0.1%. The ruling class can attempt to mask this widening inequality by creating spectacular contests such as the Americas cup, when national pride is at stake. Yet such contests are simulations of trade wars and military standoffs and training grounds to prepare workers in the US camp to prepare for economic and military wars. So NZ and the US may be rivals in the Americas Cup but they are actually financed by US billionaires and oil sheiks whose main objective is to enlist the poor and oppressed masses in the US imperialist camp in its economic and military struggle against the China/Russia imperialist camp. As revolutionaries we say we need to expropriate the obscene wealth of the capitalist ruling class and plan the economy to produce what the masses need and not to increase the profits of the few. We can do that easily as the accumulated technology produced by the collective labour of workers under capitalism can be appropriated to allow us to share in this wealth - from each according to their ability, to each according to their need. We can do it by reducing the labour time that is necessary to reproduce our species and all other species and restore the ecological balance to the Earth. The Americas Cup that stands for the rise of capitalism from the conquest of the new world in the 15th century to its terminal decline in the 21st century, will be replaced by the cup that overfloweth held collectively in the hands of humanity. http://redrave.blogspot.co.nz/2013/09/americas-cup-ishalf-empty.html

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Class Struggle No 106

July-September 2013

What We Fight For

Overthrow Capitalism
Historically, capitalism expanded world-wide to free much of humanity from the bonds of feudal or tribal society, and developed the economy, society and culture to a new higher level. But it could only do this by exploiting the labour of the productive classes to make its profits. To survive, capitalism became increasingly destructive of "nature" and humanity. In the early 20th century it entered the epoch of imperialism in which successive crises unleashed wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions. Today we fight to end capitalisms wars, famine, oppression and injustice, by mobilising workers to overthrow their own ruling classes and bring to an end the rotten, exploitative and oppressive society that has exceeded its use-by date. barbarism of capitalism in crisis, led by a revolutionary Marxist party, produces a revolutionary classconsciousness.

For a Revolutionary Party

The bourgeois and its agents condemn the Marxist party as totalitarian. We say that without a democratic and a centrally organised party there can be no revolution. We base our beliefs on the revolutionary tradition of Bolshevism and Trotskyism. Such a party, armed with a transitional program, forms a bridge that joins the daily fight to defend all the past and present gains won from capitalism, to the victorious socialist revolution. Defensive struggles for bourgeois rights and freedoms, for decent wages and conditions, will link up the struggles of workers of all nationalities, genders, ethnicities and sexual orientations, bringing about movements for workers control, political strikes and the arming of the working class, as necessary steps to workers' power and the smashing of the bourgeois state. Along the way, workers will learn that each new step is one of many in a long march to revolutionise every barrier put in the path to the victorious revolution.

Fight for Socialism

By the 20th century, capitalism had created the preconditions for socialism a world-wide working class and modern industry capable of meeting all our basic needs. The potential to eliminate poverty, starvation, disease and war has long existed. The October Revolution proved this to be true, bringing peace, bread and land to millions. But it became the victim of the combined assault of imperialism and Stalinism. After 1924 the USSR, along with its deformed offspring in Europe, degenerated back towards capitalism. In the absence of a workers political revolution, capitalism was restored between 1990 and 1992. Vietnam and China then followed. In the 21sst century only Cuba and North Korea survive as degenerate workers states. We unconditionally defend these states against capitalism and fight for political revolution to overthrow the bureaucracy as part of world socialism.

Fight for Communism

Communism stands for the creation of a classless, stateless society beyond socialism that is capable of meeting all human needs. Against the ruling class lies that capitalism can be made "fair" for all; that nature can be "conserved"; that socialism and communism are "dead"; we raise the red flag of communism to keep alive the revolutionary tradition of the' Communist Manifesto of 1848, the Bolshevik-led October Revolution; the Third Communist International until 1924, the revolutionary Fourth International up to 1940 before its collapse into centrism. We fight to build a new, Fifth, Communist International, as a world party of socialism capable of leading workers to a victorious struggle for socialism.

Defend Marxism
While the economic conditions for socialism exist today, standing between the working class and socialism are political, social and cultural barriers. They are the capitalist state and bourgeois ideology and its agents. These agents claim that Marxism is dead and capitalism need not be exploitative. We say that Marxism is a living science that explains both capitalisms continued exploitation and its attempts to hide class exploitation behind the appearance of individual "freedom" and "equality". It reveals how and why the reformist, Stalinist and centrist misleaders of the working class tie workers to bourgeois ideas of nationalism, racism, sexism and equality. Such false beliefs will be exploded when the struggle against the inequality, injustice, anarchy and

Class Struggle is the bi-Monthly paper of the

Communist Workers Group of New Zealand/Aotearoa, in a Liaison Committee of Communists with Communist Workers Group (USA) and Revolutionary Workers Group (Zimbabwe)
Online at http://redrave.blogspot.com Phone +64 0272800080 Email cwg006@yahoo.com Archive of publications before http://communistworker.blogspot.com/

2006

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