Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
January-March 2014
January-March 2014
their rivals. Ultimately this struggle is downloaded onto the masses who suffer attacks on the living standards and their lives. The uprisings and revolutions in these flashpoints represent the mobilisation of the global working class entering the stage to break free from imperialist oppression and the national bourgeois regimes that are its lackeys. There can only be one of two outcomes. Either imperialism destroys the planet and humanity, or the working class overthrows imperialism and builds a socialist society. For humanity to live, capitalism must die! Read more
Briefs
For Revolution in Bosnia: For a Federation of Balkan Socialist Republics!
In Bosnia workers are rapidly coming to the conclusion that capitalism and imperialism have nothing to offer them but starvation and death. They desperately want to go back to workers ownership and control. But they can only go forward and a good first step is that they are building forums and assemblies on majority votes. We should call these embryonic workers councils, which however need to throw out the non-workers, i.e., bourgeois and oppositional petty bourgeois agents, who will try to sidetrack the workers back into a bourgeois parliament. Thus we have a problem with the call raised in many places for a government of technical experts. We have seen governments of technical experts manage the crisis of capitalism at the expense of the working class in Italy and Greece. The Balkan states need workers governments. Read more
January-March 2014
The CWI minority does not get to the roots of the leaderships empiricism
We welcome the recent attempts by CWI members around Bruce Wallace to challenge the CWIs rejection of Marxs Law of the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall (LTRPF), for an eclectic set of causes including neo-liberalism, financialization, and under-consumption. However, we dont think that the minority critique represents a complete break with the CWIs empiricist method which we trace back to the version of Pabloism that germinated in the tendency founded by Ted Grant in post-WW2 Britain. We think that Militant like the other main tendencies in post WW2 Trotskyism liquidated the revolutionary party into reformism and Stalinism Read more
Defend Venezuela from both US and Chinese imperialism; for a Workers and Peasants Government!
The US is backing the anti-government opposition in Venezuela and using is proxy states in the OAS to further destabilise the Bolivarian revolution. Revolutionaries must defend Venezuela against this US trade wars, internal disruption, and attempted coups, without given any political support to the Bolivarian bourgeois regime or its alliance with Chinese imperialism. Most of the Latin American Menshevik left supports the Bolivarian states and their popular front regimes as progressive against US imperialism. But as we have shown, these regimes are bourgeois Bonapartist regimes balancing between the masses and both US and Chinese imperialism. Our program is for the formation of independent workers and peasant organs to break with the Bolivarian regimes and their links to both imperialist blocs. It is necessary to fight for workers councils and militias capable of uniting the working class around a revolutionary program for workers power to overturn the bourgeois state and impose Workers and Peasants governments in a federation of Socialist Republics of South and Central America! Read more
January-March 2014
Aotearoa:
January-March 2014
to working with outright capitalists is reformist. If Mana is serious in fighting for the poor working class it needs to split the remaining workers from the Maori Party leadership. This is also true for Labour and the Greens? Now Matt McCarten is the Chief of Staff fo r Labour leader, David Cunliffe, will he attract the working poor back to Labour? Where does that leave Mana in relation to Labour? Many on the left including the small socialist ISO , SA and Fightback (see below) who are active in Mana support McCartens strategy which is a left-coalition government in which the leftish Greens and Mana will pull Labour to the left. But even at best this is an Australian Green Left/Boliviarian reformist strategy of reviving social democracy in the belief that capitalism can be reformed and socialism legislated into existence. As we have argued many times, a reborn social democracy today is looking to China as a populist if not socialist power capable of uniting all the oppressed nations of the world in a bloc against the dominant power of the US and its allies.
January-March 2014
currently vote for existing parties of the left who become convinced that they are betraying the interests of workers and who split to the left to build that new party. Our attitude towards the McCarten strategy of a left coalition is that it is necessary to give critical support to such a coalition to put it in government so that it can be shown up as pro-capitalist and anti-worker. But this can only work if a left coalition keeps left and doesnt include in it right wing or openly racist and chauvinist parties like NZ First. This is because the left becomes a hostage to the right to stay in government so that the right can be blamed for broken promises to the workers. So who would we give critical support to in such a left coalition? The Greens are an anomaly because while largely based on the petty bourgeois or middle class, they are in some areas more left than Labour especially on the environment and global warming which brings them up against monopoly capital. Labour itself is a divided party with a capitalist program but a working class base. It too includes a large middle class element. In short we would give critical support to a Labour/Green/Mana coalition government where beyond confidence and supply agreements the parties remain independent. Each party would then be judged on delivering on its own promises and not who else they can blame for its failure to deliver. This would allow workers to judge them on how they matched words and deeds, and prove that parliament is a bosses talk shop and that workers need to build a mass revolutionary party for socialism. In the event that Mana makes a deal with the Internet Party or any of the other parties for the purposes of getting a left coalition into government we would have no principled objection to such an agreement. We would also consider giving critical support to the Internet Party if its program advances the interests of the working class e.g., free internet and education, and an end to 5 eyes and the TPPA. A new revolutionary party will not fall from the sky but arise out of the struggle of workers in defence of basic democratic rights and social and economic security. That includes the majority working class being able to vote for a government of their choice so that they learn that real democracy is impossible unless they go all the way to the overthrow of the capitalist state and the creation of a Workers and Oppressed Government. (See article on the Spanish Marches for Dignity, March 22 in this issue).
In the last issue of Class Struggle we spelled out our position on the Labour Party as a capitalist party and the need to build a Revolutionary Socialist Labour Party capable of leading a socialist revolution in NZ that will smash the state and replace the capitalist parliament with a Workers Government. We will not go over all the arguments again. What is important here is that such a new RSLP will not arise out of thin air but out of those who
January-March 2014
Australia:
Manus Island: Brutal and Murderous Attack on Asylum Seekers by Guards and Cops!
The concentration camps, where refugees are forced to live for the crime of seeking asylum, are barbaric and horrendous. This applies to camps both on the Australian mainland and those offshore. It is indeed very understandable that refugees sow their lips, attempt suicide and riot. On Manus Island things are even worse because they may catch malaria and dengue fever. The refugees there were agitated because they believed that Papua New Guinea would not allow them to stay. This has been denied but it is what they were led to believe. What happened on February 15 was not so much a riot but a brutal attack by security guards assisted by the locals including members of the police force. At least seventy seven were injured, many seriously the guards and allies were armed with machetes, sticks and stones. The refugees were unarmed. One refugee, Reza Barati. An Iranian Kurd was murdered within the detention centre not trying to escape. One witness according to the Sydney Morning Herald saw one refugee with his throat cut. And another whose face was swollen beyond recognition. The injuries were horrendous. It has been suggested that the guards were taking revenge on refugees who abused them. These guards were inadequately trained. Their employer G$S has been sacked but the company which has taken its place, Transfield, has employed the very same guards. Eight refugees have been charged. The PNG Government claims it is investigating. We wonder how many security guards will be charged. All that has been changed is the employer. Of course revolutionaries are unconditionally on the refugees fighting the system, including physically. Scott Morrison has been caught out lying. He, of course chose to believe only that information which suited his agenda the criminalisation of the refugees. He has been forced to retract. The Pacific solution first introduced by How ard and reintroduced by Gillard is barbaric and reactionary. This atrocity is an understandable bi-product of this policy Both the Abbott Government and the previous Rudd Government are responsible. They have blood on their hands. So too does Peter ONeil PNG Prime minister who made an agreement for PNG detention centres with Kevin Rudd
The refugees are victims of politics. The Liberal Party has effectively used this issue to expose Labor, showing that they are the better defenders of Australias borders. The Liberals have indeed exposed Labor winning over chauvinist working class people The point is to enlist working class support for their reactionary agenda. Tony Abbott now boasts that he has stopped the boats. Bill Shorten [Labor Party leader] has been critical of Scott Morrison for lack of information. But his criticism only goes so far. He knows that Labor shares responsibility for the barbaric situation. He wants the PNG solution to stay and he will not let this incident get in his way. The refugees are an important issue within Australian politics. Basically the workers movement must take a stand. Refugees must be free and allowed to come to Australia, unconditionally! There must be working class action to free the refugees. Revolutionaries reject the borders imposed upon us by capitalism. We must reject all immigration controls. We must smash all immigration controls! The capitalist propaganda machine is working overtime spreading lies. Many working class people are sucked in by these lies such as refugees living in luxury hotels. We must counter this lie machine. Workers must be with the refugees against the system. Reprinted from REDLETTER Publication of the Communist Left of Australia Number 105, March 2014
January-March 2014
poorly capitalised, under equipped and suffering from a small local market. It has been massively subsidised by the Australian government. The Global Financial Crisis has hit Australian manufacturing hard. It has meant a highly valued Australian dollar. This has meant that Australian manufactures have been uncompetitive to export. So jobs have been lost and this will continue. In no way has this been the fault of the Australian worker. In the car industry the union movement has co-operated accepting low wages. They have accepted lay-off and there is no sign of any fight back against this major threat to the industry. The union strategy appears to be crawl to the government to Save Australian industry. Tony Abbott will not be coming to the party. Of course these closures are a serious threat to the livelihood of workers and must be fought. Not one worker out the gate! Workers must organise on the job to prepare to fight every lay-off. Organise! Occupy! Expropriate the car industry under workers control! Our struggle must be international. To put Australian jobs before jobs elsewhere, such as Asia, plays the bosses game. It ties us to the class enemy. We must fight for jobs everywhere to stop the bosses playing us off against each other. It is clear that the Labor Party has no answers to the crisis. To fight internationally we need a revolutionary communist party committed to a new communist international. Build a revolutionary communist party! Break with the chauvinist Labor Party! Reprinted from REDLETTER Publication of the Communist Left of Australia Number 105, March 2014
January-March 2014
South Africa:
January-March 2014
independence was a sham that ensured continued economic slavery. So in South Africa the SACP dutifully wrote the Freedom Charter as the Stalinist road to socialism. The ANC in power since 1994 has proved beyond question the validity of the Leninist-Trotskyist conception of national liberation via permanent revolution. In the colonies and semi-colonies where the national liberation movement went on to overthrow the national bourgeoisie and defeat imperialism this proved that it was possible to win a partial national liberation and independence from imperialism. But these were not workers revolutions. These were petty bourgeois revolutions that resulted in transitional deformed workers states such as China, Vietnam and Cuba that were ruled by bureaucratic elites, living off the backs of the workers and peasants. Such states would be overthrown by workers political revolutions and become healthy workers states, or they would revert to become restored capitalist states. Political revolutions could only arise out of an international working class movement led by an international party and program committed to permanent revolution. What does all this mean for South Africa today?
Revolutionary leadership
We can see that when NUMSA breaks with the ANC, the national bourgeois lackey of imperialism, but does not take the road of permanent revolution, it cannot succeed in creating the conditions for socialism. That is why revolutionaries in South Africa must be clear about their program. When NUMSA breaks from the ANC and SACP, fights for COSATU to break also, and calls for a new mass political party, it must be supported, but very critically by raising the transitional program for permanent revolution. When NUMSA argues for implementing the Freedom Charter we must say: The distributional politics of the Freedom Charter, for completing the nationalisation the South African and imperialist corporations, is nothing more than the SACP Stalinism of the ANC now dressed up as the win-win partnership with China on the road to market socialism. The road to China, Vietnam or Cuba, of merely nationalising capitalist property and calling it socialist, leads inevitably to a new capitalist tyranny over the workers. Moreover when the road advocated by the EFF and the WASP as well as other left currents, to form a mass party with a program to join the Bolivarian bloc of nations with China against US and EU imperialism, we must say: China is not the model for South African socialism. It is a restored capitalist state that has become a new imperialist power that super-exploits workers and peasants in all of Africa and the world. Its rivalry with the US threatens to engulf us in a new world war.
Permanent Revolution
When Trotsky called for a Black Republic in SA in the 1930s he did not see this as a national democratic stage to prepare for a future socialist stage. Once the black majority was in power it would face a hostile intervention from British imperialism which would necessarily force it to follow the course of the 1917 revolution in Russia to the seizure of power by the working class, and to defend itself in a revolutionary war against imperialism. That is the permanent revolution. The Leninist-Trotskyist position on the right of nations to self-determination was not a matter for isolated nations. The imperialist epoch was one in which oppressor nations oppressed the colonies directly and the semi-colonies via the national bourgeoisies. The struggle for national independence would require a struggle to defeat both the national bourgeoisie and its imperialist masters. Trotsky was assassinated by a Stalinist agent in 1940, but the period of decolonisation that followed WW2 vindicated the Leninist-Trotskyist position. By contrast the Stalinist conception of socialism in one country was translated into national roads to socialism where the national bourgeoisie would take power to prepare the conditions for socialism. This was an opportunist adaptation of the Stalinists to the democratic bourgeoisie as allies of the Soviet Union against world revolution. The new bourgeoisies would prevent the workers from rising up and be rewarded as the junior partners of imperialism. In every case such political
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Build a mass workers party based on the reclaimed unions! Form local workplace and community councils and self defence militias! Mobilise for a general strike to bring down the government and replace it with a Workers and Peasants Government!
This government will then impose a plan to create a socialist economy based on the expropriation of all capitalist property, national and MNC, the mines, the banks, the farms, etc., under workers democratic control. Such as program will unite workers of all Africa and enable a Federation of Socialist Republics to be established on the continent.
Program:
Why we call for a New World Party of Socialism based on the Transitional Program of 1938
Readers may have noticed that we usually finish our articles with such a call. Here we explain what we think it means based on what Trotsky said about a new international party, with a Transitional Program, and the Transitional Method that is incorporated in it. In Defence of Marxism/Dialectics
For Trotsky the Transitional Program and the method underlying this cannot be separated from a bigger debate that took place between Trotsky and the petty bourgeois opposition who did not see the need for dialectics . What they mistook for a superfluous philosophy was, however, the Marxist conception of capitalism that produced the knowledge necessary to overthrow capitalism and replace it with socialism. Dialectics was no abstruse theory, but the method that produced the theory making possible the practice of revolution. For Trotsky, rejecting dialectics was rejecting Marxism and the socialist revolution. Trotsky explained how even if revolutionaries did not get the dialectic, the dialectic got them because the laws of capitalism worked behind their back. That is to say the method of dialectics enables revolutionaries to understand the contradictory totality of capitalist society and how to use this knowledge to act to transform the social relations in favour of the workers revolution. This is why Trotsky was at pains to explain to the members of the SWP that the program must not tail the existing mood/consciousness of workers but intervene to change their mood/consciousness. This could only happen if those demands reflected the objective reality so that in the struggle to achieve them, workers subjective consciousness would make the transition (Trotsky used the analogy of crossing a bridge) from immediate bread and butter demands to the workers insurrection and to a workers state. In short, Trotsky demonstrated how dialectics was necessary to keep a Marxist program alive. The Transitional Program and the party that fought for it, was dialectics in action. Unfortunately, such were the conditions at the time, the US SWP, as the main national party in the Fourth International, was heavily influenced by the default ideology of capitalism, empiricism or in Trotskys terms the US version of this, pragmatism. The problem with empiricism is that it takes only the observable features of capitalist society and tries to act to change these in the interests of one or other class. In other words, it is an ideology that takes for granted the inversion of relations of production as relations of exchange. Empiricism is therefore the default ideology of the working class without the intervention of Marxism or dialectics. It limits the consciousness of workers to that of economism, struggling to improve wages and conditions, rather than to overthrow the wage system. The labor aristocracy and the bureaucracy that emerges out of it, has no interest in challenging empiricism because it is consistent with their interests to peacefully coexist with the capitalist class in bargaining to improve living standards rather than organise to overthrow the social relations of capitalism. Empiricism understood at this level of generality however takes on special features depending on the historical context. In the US empiricism became pragmatism capitalism works to create the American Dream of Horatio Alger. Pragmatism was the ideology of the expanding colonial frontier where the new settlers did what worked in their interests conquering indigenous peoples and Mexicans
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a good party. And a great tradition will remain in the working class.
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January-March 2014
USA:
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January-March 2014
-THIRTY HOURS WORK FOR FORTY HOURS PAY! FREE QUALITY UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE, EDUCATION AND PENSIONS ARE A RIGHT! These demands can be won by forming rank and file class struggle caucuses in our unions that bring back the class struggle methods that built the unions in the first place, like job site occupations, general strikes and political strikes. Thus our fight today is not to reform a decaying mode of production ready for the dung heap of history. Our fight must be for what we need to lift all of us out of poverty! Only a workers government can guarantee a living income for all because only a workers government will relieve the capitalists of the hoarded capital and put it to work. Only a workers government can or will tell big capital that if you cannot provide for all, we (the assembled working class) will nationalize the commanding heights of industry without compensation and run them under the workers own self-management and plan. But a workers government will not come about without a struggle, a struggle in the unions, the factories and job sites led by a workers party with a revolutionary program, which by its very nature must confront the multinational corporations and thus be internationalist and build the fight for workers power in solidarity with a revolutionary workers international party! This is what it takes to end poverty in our time! Build mass workers assemblies! Form the workers party that fights for a workers government and the historic program of the working class. ABOLISH WAGE SLAVERY! Communist Workers Group USA 3/27/14
Spain:
MANIFESTO
Were starting 2014 with no improvement for the workers, sunk in an unprecedented capitalist crisis and without any measures on the part of this illegitimate government other than misery, precariousness and repression, rulers who act as reall representatives of big banks, employers and big business, of capitalism, under the order of the Troika (the European Commission, the Central European Bank and the International Monetary Fund). Were living in a situation in which every minute were being pushed to brink, a situation against which we must
all start to give a real, collective, mass answer, by fighting from the grassroots, from our different territories but with one voice. Because with every day that goes by the situation is getting more agonizing, more difficult. In the Spanish State there are hundreds of thousands of us who have lost our homes or who dont receive benefits for dependents. There are more than 6 million of us without paid work and unemployed. Weve got tens of thousands of working people without any unemployment benefits at all. There are more than a million of us who are living below the poverty line and all thats going down while the Popular Party continues with its cuts, destroying and robbing the health system, education, culture, pensions,
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bare minimum employers social security contributions, to create work, they cynically say, and they turn a blind eye to massive fraud, corruption and capital flight. And without money were left with no house, no job and no wherewithal to survive. Both the so-called Popular Party (PP) and the so-called Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) are the culprits. To reduce us to this situation they made the constitutional reform in 2011, a Treaty with the European Union and an Organic Law to guarantee payment of the debt and, if need be, to suppress any public institution (like the Statute of Autonomy of the Valencian Country), if it doesnt reduce its debt (and so its provision of public services) whenever and however they want. We fought with great sacrifice to gain our social rights and were just not prepared to lose them. We demand from politics the transformation of our economy to make it an economy at the service of humanity and to guarantee that these rights can be universally exercised. Thats why we demand: The abrogation of all the counter-reforms that have been forced down our throats (labor laws, laws affecting pensions, education the right to safe legal abortion, the 15/97 act which commoditizes health care, the law of civil repression etc)! A realistic plan against unemployment and a law establishing a basic income! Stoppage of all evictions, the guarantee of the fundamental right to housing and to the basic utilities of water and energy. Universal, free and high-quality public services! Realistic and effective policies to ensure equal opportunities, regardless of a persons origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, diversities or age! A guarantee of the reimbursement of the loans made to banks and their nationalization along with the nationalization of all strategic companies and sectors. A fiscal policy whereby those that have more, pay more and public social expenditure is guaranteed above everything else! A guarantee of the right to decide, in all spheres, as persons, workers, peoples. Because we demand real democracy! In order to advance in the construction of unity and peoples power we must advance in the Marches for Dignity so we can arrive in Madrid on March 22 from all cardinal points of the Spanish State! We want to live and work with dignity in our land with our people! To defend all that is and should be ours, struggle is the only way! Bread, a roof, rights and dignity for all workers!
Massive crowds gather during a protest against the Government in Madrid, Spain, Saturday, March 22, 2014. Hundreds of thousands from different parts of Spain marched towards the Capital to join a large antiausterity demonstration, demanding the resignation of the Government and to express their anger at government financial cuts, its housing rights policies, and the high unemployment rates. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki) There are more than 500,000 of us, young and not so young, people that have been forced to emigrate in order to try to eke out our living in one way or another. And despite this, they go on shutting down small and medium businesses with impunity, destroying most the real productive fabric, both industrial and agricultural, which could give work to the majority of the population. In this context women have long had fewer rights: the right to live without male violence or to decide over our own bodies the right to family planning. In our country if you were born somewhere else in the world, if your skins a different color or you have another religion, they take away your fundamental rights (healthcare, education et.) and can even shut you up in an Internment Center, even though youve committed no crime. Simply for speaking our own minority language, simply for wanting to live in accordance with the culture of our land, we can be fined or even thrown into prison like during Francos fascist dictatorship, but now they call it democracy. Fines and criminal penalties, imposed just for exercising the right of freedom of speech or the right to disobey unjust laws, are heavy, but the corrupt lite never go to prison and never have to pay for the damage they cause. While the Government continues to hand out cash to big building firms, to the energy companies, to bankers and to corrupt businessmen etc. Theyre leaving us with no work, no house, no health care, no pensions, no university grants, no schools, no education, no future: in a word no life. Theyre raising taxes, the price of energy and basic products for the poorest of use, while theyre reducing to a
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Defend Marxism
While the economic conditions for socialism exist today, standing between the working class and socialism are political, social and cultural barriers. They are the capitalist state and bourgeois ideology and its agents. These agents claim that Marxism is dead and capitalism need not be exploitative. We say that Marxism is a living science that explains both capitalisms continued exploitation and its attempts to hide class exploitation behind the appearance of individual "freedom" and "equality". It reveals how and why the reformist, Stalinist and centrist misleaders of the working class tie workers to bourgeois ideas of nationalism, racism, sexism and equality. Such false beliefs will be exploded when the struggle against the inequality, injustice, anarchy and barbarism of capitalism in crisis, led by a revolutionary Marxist party, produces a revolutionary classconsciousness.
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 2006 http://communistworker.blogspot.com/
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