In this issue we confront head on the bankrupt politics of the ‘red-green’ left in NZ. We think that on the range of issues that matter today the left is retreating to a reactionary nationalism.

Last issue we welcomed Rabon Kan’s scathing reaction to the new immigration regulations shutting the door on Asians and the lefts complicity in this. We challenged the Seafarers cabotage policy that protects NZ jobs from foreign workers. This month we take this analysis further. We show not only is the Alliance backing cabotage, but also in a significant rightward move, so is the biggest ‘far-left’ party, the Socialist Workers.

We also tackled the critical issue of the Foreshore and put our class line on this question. This issue has released a gigantic wave of racism against Maori that sees Winston Peters –the Pauline Hanson of NZ –rapidly rising in the polls. Hanson’s jailing in Australia recently has shown that her once extreme brand of racism is now becoming respectable.

Journalist Paul Holmes gaff calling Kofi Annan a “cheeky darkie” and keeping his state funded job shows just how respectable racism has become in New Zealand.

Like immigration, the Foreshore issue is revving up racism in NZ. But what makes it respectable is the politics of the social democrat Alliance and their intellectuals allies like ARENA who sow illusions in kiwi workers joining with their bosses to return to economic protectionism.

Rallying to the national flag divides workers and puts us on the slippery slope to racial conflict and ‘national socialism’ that will make Rob Muldoon’s fortress NZ and racist Springbok Tour provocation of the early 1980s look like the Noddy Horror Show.

When kiwi workers look to their weak capitalist governments to protect their jobs, their country and their foreshore from the aliens inside and outside the country we know we are heading for dark days.

Workers who can’t see themselves as a class able to fight for their jobs by joining forces with foreign workers, are also incapable of giving support to the national rights of Maori to control over resources never formally stripped from them.

Rather they back a weak national bourgeois government that has no interest in protecting NZ capitalism and is the open agent of imperialism, making NZ workers pay for imperialist profits.

NZ is a client state of US imperialism and effectively a poor ‘7^th state’ of Australia. Groveling before this parasitic kiwi client state is a mark of a labour movement that is already defeated.

While kiwi workers are engaged in a diversionary fight to defend the beachhead from the alien invasion, global capitalism rips out jobs and resources in land, sea, forestry and industry and smashes the unions in the process.

It backs Bush’s war on terrorism to send kiwi soldiers to oppress Iraqis and Solomon Islanders and passes legislation to secretly charge and jail Ahmed Zaoui. It is unable to fight back against Labour’s Job Jolt attack on beneficiaries which is nothing more than an attempt to force them into the labour market to lower wage costs and boost imperialist super-profits. Or the ‘work-life balance’ plan to allow the bosses to tap into the fluid labour pool on their, not workers, terms.

By why do workers’ fall for this? In a series of articles we have run on the World Social Forum which we continue in this issue, we go to the root of the problem. The weakness of the working class is not because it is less exploited today or less capable of fighting back. It is the petty bourgeois reformist leadership in the unions, in politics, the media and the universities that conspire to keep them powerless.

Trying to escape the working class, this caste of bureaucrats gains financially from managing workers on behalf of the bosses. But the only way they can prevent militant workers from kicking them out is to pretend to be doing it in the name of ‘market socialism’.

They stake their credibility on identifying with populist governments like Lula’s in Brazil or Chavez’ in Venezuela, ‘socialist’ regimes like Cuba, or liberation movements like Colombia or Nepal, or their record as Trade Union organizers or as ‘anti-capitalists’. But their version of socialism is no more than a reformed capitalism.

As we argue in this issue, the world-wide reactionary role of the World Social Forum (and its NZ spin-off Socialist Forum Aotearoa) is rooted in the special interests of privileged bureaucrats who ultimately serve imperialism.

They make use of the radical posturing of celebrity intellectuals like Chomsky, Klein, Monbiot, Hardt and Negri etc. and their critique of ‘market’ capitalism (i.e. the uncontrolled market) to trap workers struggles everywhere in alliances with the bosses.

We hope to convince all those who have any illusions ‘green left’ politics or in the WSF that this project of transforming ‘market capitalism’ into ‘market socialism’ is futile and destructive.

We invite them to join us in fighting for a working class solution to jobs, welfare, the foreshore and trade. We invite them to become revolutionary communists.

Pauline Hanson jailed but racism still at large

Pauline Hanson the fish and chip shop owner from Oxley, Queensland who founded the racist One Nation political party back in the 1996 when she was kicked out of the Liberals, has been jailed for defrauding the Australian taxpayer of half a million bucks. The outspoken advocate of harsher prison sentences and fierce opponent of Blacks and Asian migrants now finds herself sentenced to prison for three years surrounded by the Blacks and Asians she detests so much.

Hanson was the pretty face of One Nation, but she was manipulated from behind the scenes by David Oldfield and David Ettridge, both proto fascist politicos who revived the old White Australia policies of the colonial days. Blacks should come off welfare, and Asians should keep out. Oldfield in an unguarded moment once described himself as a ‘national socialist’. He is now an Australian Senator.

One Nation’s appeal (over 30% in Queensland and still around 10% there and in Western Australia) was to the little Aussie ‘battlers’ - bankrupt small farmers, desperate self-employed, disgruntled jobless and poor workers, who saw Blacks and Asian migrants as the cause of their economic plight rather than the Australian ruling class and their US counterparts screwing up the rate of exploitation.

Howard tried to ignore One Nation. But when One Nation showed that there was a majority of rural poor willing to back its anti-Black and anti-Asian politics the mainstream Liberal politicians ripped off Hanson’s clothes. Howard who still refuses to ‘apologise’ to Blacks for their historic oppression at the hands of the settlers, tried to woo Hanson’s supporters while at the same time mounting a secret legal challenge to the party’s legality to destroy it. He swiped Hanson’s racist card. He ripped off her policy of turning away the boatpeople and even took here suggestion of granting refugees a 5 year temporary visa, and reduced it to 3 years!

Meanwhile the Labourite cosmopolitan middle class rubbished One Nation’s policies. For example, Hanson couldn’t decide if Asians born in Australia had time to become real Australians or not. Not surprising when Blacks who had been in Australia for 10,000 years did not qualify as Australians until 1967! She wanted family courts replaced with neighbourhood committees (more shades of national socialism?)

The media and liberal academics treated Hanson like ignorant ‘white trash’ and she became an easy target for the sophisticated racists. She was labelled the ‘Oxley moron’ and her party ‘One Notion’ i.e. racism. But scratch a raving multiculturalist and you find a polite racist. Hanson had dragged the skeleton of racist genocide out of the closet and she had to be shut up back in the closet.

But that skeleton has been truly outed with the legal victories of Mabo (1992) and Wik (1996) which gave Blacks the right to claim land that they had continuously occupied or had not been formally taken off them. In other words as far as the law was concerned, Australia was no longer terra nullius –‘land belonging to no-one’ when the settlers arrived. Blacks’ claim to title was equal to that of the settlers, and where that title had not been formally ‘extinguished’ (i.e. expropriated) by the crown they could try to reclaim it.

The mining industry, pastoralists and state governments all campaigned to get these decisions overridden by the Federal Government. Following Mabo Keating passed the Native Title Act of 1993 that formally and retrospectively ratified the expropriation of most Aboriginal land. Then, after Wik Howard brought out a plan to give leaseholders and miners’ protection from land claims. He amended Keating’s Native Title Act in 1996 to allow the big farmers and mining companies a free hand to continue exploiting the land to which Blacks could now claim native title. Howard had, in the name of enlightened, multicultural Australia, put limits on native title and shafted land rights back into the stone-age. Hanson’s out there brand of racism, and the radical land rights cause that fed it, had to be shoved back in the closet.

But Mabo and Wik were the victories of decades of Black protest and struggle for Black land rights. This included the Tent Embassy outside Parliament House in Canberra set up in 1975 and which is still there today. Black land rights would not go away. In 1998 four members of the Tent Embassy tried to get Howard, two other politicians, and Pauline Hanson arrested on the charge of conspiracy to commit genocide with Howard’s 10-point plan to roll back the Wik decision. The legal challenge failed but Howard was forced to make concessions to a Green Senator to limit his 10 point plan to abolish native title. So long as native title remained, the racist, chauvinist constituency opposed to land rights and Asian migration did not go away either.

Howard completely upstaged Hanson and revived his slumping popularity to get re-elected last year when he used the navy to blockade the refugee ship Tampa and re-direct the ‘boatpeople’ to Nauru and NZ. At the same time he kept asylum seekers locked up on concentration camps like the one at Woomera near the site of a former British atomic testing ground in the South Australian desert. Then he blocked off the backdoor entry of refugees into Australia from NZ. Now after the Bali bombing he is riding high on the US ‘war of terror’, mounting his deputy sheriff’s posse and swaggering into the Pacific frontier to lock up Blacks in their own homelands before they get the chance to invade Australia and upset Pauline’s people.

The result of all this was that much of the One Nation vote swung in behind the Liberals, leaving Hanson in the wilderness. Now her conviction leaves her political reputation in tatters. Or does it? We aint heard the last of One Nation and its radical populist politics. A rush of public sympathy for a pretty white woman to be released from jail will prove that mainstream Australia is still as racist and chauvinist at heart as Hanson. She is one of their own. She is an icon for White Australia. Even a tarnished icon should not be locked up with Blacks and Asian crims. No wonder John Howard is joining in the chorus to free Pauline Hanson. Maybe he has found a new recruit to a respectable racist groundswell that he can exploit for the next election.

In the end Black struggles have failed to win land rights because the white working class in Australia did not take up the cause for land rights and did not oppose this racist legislation with industrial action. Not until the white workers in the labour movement overcome their complicity in the racist foundations of Australian nationalism and come out on the side of Black land rights will the racist and chauvinist divisions in the working class be overcome. Until that happens, the bosses will continue to use the Black bogey as a way of uniting white Australia across the class lines and whipping up chauvinist hysteria to back their jackal imperialist policies in the Pacific and Asia.

Aboriginal fighter Charlie Perkins had a good line on White Australian racism – it is a defence against the bone chilling fear that every white Aussie has a Black bastard hidden in the closet. White Australians want to keep their nation pure scared of the ghost of miscegenation! But Perkins, now dead, was no Marxist. Australian workers must confront that skeleton and destroy the basis of the racist divisions in the working class once and for all so that Black and White workers can unite for a socialist Australia!

Jobs Jolt,

Profit’s Fault

Soft cop Maharey

Poor Steve Maharey. He is the one who has to put the spin on this little experiment in workfare to pretend it really, really, isn’t. But why feel sorry for him. Even though he is probably nearing the age of concern, he has a job, he doesn’t have to live in a caravan, and he was trained at state expense. But as a Blairite social democrat, Maharey is the ‘soft cop’ who comes along after the ‘hard cop’ has failed to get the beneficiary to confess to welfare scrounging. So his job is to introduce workfare under the guise of caring social work.

The Jobs Jolt will target 55-59 year old beneficiaries whose location and skills need to be matched with the available skilled jobs, DBPs, and long-term unemployed (over 8 years). The initiative will spend $100 million in a bid to get more people into work. It includes work testing for people between 55 and 59 and benefit suspensions for people who move to remote areas where there is no suitable work. Even if they have already moved to find work, or to find cheaper accommodation, they are expected to move again to fill these jobs vacancies (unless there are Maori in tribal areas –a concession to Blairite political correctness.)

They will get personal case management from contracted private sector managers to fit them up with jobs. Government wouldn’t do it, says Maharey, unless we knew the jobs were there, and were prepared to match the people to the jobs. He says he can find jobs for about 20,000 over three years. Hullo? What jobs is he thinking of?

Jobs Jolt won’t work

Jobs Jolt cannot live up to its spin because the only skilled jobs that are available are ones that demand an expensive and recent education in IT, marketing, management etc. These are the jobs that have replaced the jobs that many of the unemployed 55-59 year-olds, DPBs and long-term unemployed lost as a result of the restructuring of the economy over the last 20 years. The time to match people to jobs was then not now. The reason it didn’t happen then, and won’t happen now, is that it was too costly to up-skill middle aged workers when young skilled workers, paying for their own education, can do the work for less cost to the boss. That’s why many bosses gave older workers the boot.

This means that the only jobs that will be found for the jolted will be menial and low paid. These are the jobs that nobody wants and can’t even be filled by new migrants who are trained as doctors and physicists. It is these new low-paid, part-time, casualised, non-unionised jobs such as in the service and tourism sectors that have caused the recent slight rise in employment. But despite the official unemployment rate dipping below 5% the real rate of people who are out of work, or working very short hours, is probably closer to 10% of the work age population.

Maharey has bitten off more than he can spin this time. The 55-59 age group is no push over. Most of them have a long record in work and many will be former members of unions. Nor are the DPBs who have resisted all of National’s attempts to force them back to work so far going to lie down. They know their rights to the DPB, to unemployment benefits, and to other benefits, and can be organised to fightback against this experiment in workfare disguised as welfare. They can be politicised by the Jobs Jolt to resist moves to workfare. But first they have to reject any responsibility for unemployment and put the blame where it really lies – on the bosses and their government.

Labourite Workfare

Workfare is the nasty neo-liberal recasting of welfare as work so that people get off benefits back into the workforce where they can compete for jobs and drive wages down and profits up. Of course National and ACT hardliners don’t admit this and claim that it is to make ‘welfare dependents’ independent. To make them self-reliant National and ACT would force beneficiaries to be ‘free’. The full-on program of National’s Katherine Rich wants people forced to work by withdrawing their benefits.

The Blairite Labour government of Helen Clark has no option but to move towards workfare. NZ has a weak, dependent semi-colonial economy that competes for foreign investment by cutting its costs to investors. To offer low tax rates it has to cut welfare spending. To offer cheap wages it has to drive them down by forcing more people onto the labour market. This is the only way that Labour’s agenda of 4% growth a year and returning the country to the top half of the OECD countries and guarantee a profitable return on foreign investment. To stay in power, Labour has to bow to the dictates of imperialism which has to suck more profits out of the country.

But unlike National or ACT Labour postures as a caring government that wants to encourage people back into meaningful skilled work on living wages. It has adopted the Blairite or ‘third way’ approach to running capitalism – a so-called middle road between neo-liberalism and socialism. Instead of openly blaming or victimising people, Blairism is about making people ‘take responsibility’ for their lives. First we offer you a derisory job subsidy, a relocation allowance, some personal training so you can ‘help yourself’. But if you reject this offer we take away your benefit! Only problem is that under today’s clapped out kiwi capitalism the best on offer for those targeted by the Jobs Jolt is cheap and menial labour. Even where retraining and relocation is subsidised by the state, this is a welfare handout to the bosses that is deducted from workers health, education and housing spending. Forcing beneficiaries into work will only increase the bosses’ welfare at the expense of workers’ misery.

Work/Life Balance ?

While we say the shorter working week is the workers’ answer to the Jobs Jolt, the government says it wants to restore a ‘balance’ to work and life. What sort of utopian horseshit is this? To have a ‘life’ under capitalism you need a job and a ‘living wage’. While spindoctor no 2 is running the Jobs Jolt exercise, spindoctor no 1, Margaret Wilson, is launching the Work-Life Balance project. Sounds positively socialistic. Maybe Maharey is finding us the jobs, and Wilson, the living wage. Or maybe they missed out the word “for” as in “work for life”. Anyway someone is saying workers should get a life. We say workers should take their life back!

The WLB seems to be a response to union complaints about the end of the weekend and long hours without overtime pay. All work and no play puts Jack off Labour they say. So the idea is to get the CTU to make some proposals for shorter hours and more job sharing. Problem is that this initiative seems equally driven by bosses to increase flexible workhours. That is jargon for working on the bosses’ time and only getting paid for what you do. This fits in with globalisation, just-in-time production and delivery of goods and services. The prostitutes we spoke of in the last issue are no strangers to rotating and split shifts, but for most workers this is still something of a novelty. In other words the end of the weekend, and the 8 hour day, and now in the name of balancing the bottom line, the end of regular hours and regular pay.

Ever since past President of the CTU Ken Douglas said that the job of unions was to make workers more productive to attract foreign investment we know what to expect from the CTU/Government. Creating a flexible work force means that the Government gets together with the bosses to try to keep the supply of labour ‘liquid’ so that workers can move in and out of work and around the country (Jobs Jolt!) as demand for labour fluctuates in response to the market.

We say workers should get in first. As Pete Seeger sang: Take it Easy –but Take It! Demand a shorter working week on a living wage! A 30 hour week with no rotating or split shifts. That way we can all work and live. Of course the bosses’ will choke on this interference with their ‘property’ rights to hire and fire on their terms. Well, we didn’t want to work for them anyway. We can occupy the factories and workplaces and run them ourselves without paying compensation to the bosses. That way we make our necessary work serve our life needs, and not use up our life to serve the profit of the bosses

Jobs Fightback!

Enough is enough! The Jolted can lead a fightback against the Blairite spin on workfare. Don’t take responsibility for cheap labour! Demand that the bosses’ take responsibility to provide decent well paid work. Organise in your union to fight the Jobs Jolt. If you are non unionized, join a union! Low paid, unemployed and beneficiaries, join you local UNITE! [see below] fight the Jobs Jolt! No work without decent pay, re-location allowance and job training. Work for all! Share the work around! Create jobs by renationalising state assets under workers’ control. Free health, education and child care! For a 30 hour week on 40 hours pay! Rebuild the unions as democratic, militant unions! Fight for a workers’ government and for a socialist economy!.

PICKETERS OPPOSE THE JOBS JOLT

On Wednesday the 24th around 15 beneficiaries and supporters held a picket of the Queen St branch of WINZ to protest the Clark government's 'Jobs Jolt'.

A leaflet was distributed, signatures against the Jobs Jolt were collected, and speakers, including Greens MP Keith Locke, condemned the Clark government's attacks on workers. With new figures showing that the real average wage in New Zealand has declined by 6% over the last twenty years, the Jobs Jolt picket was a reminder that an attack on unemployed workers is an attack on all workers.

The picket organisers are working inside UNITE, a union of low-paid workers and beneficiaries, to help rebuild the union movement so that it can put some strong demands on Clark's government, and fight that government when it inevitably refuses to meet those demands.

The picketers' leaflet called for state funding to create real jobs which pay real wages and are aimed at socially useful ends. The picketers also called for a shorter working week without a reduction in pay to stimulate growth in employment and improve workers' lives.

The leaflet was headed “Revolt against the Jobs Jolt” It went on to say that Government attacks on beneficiaries are also attacks on our civil rights. “The jobs jolt removes the exemption for 55-59 year olds from having to seek work. It threatens to cut benefits of beneficiaries moving to the country to escape the appalling conditions created by high rents and low benefits. It requires job seekers to undergo drug tests and drug education. It pressurizes single parents and selected groups of sickness and invalid beneficiaries. All these groups will be intensively case managed, reducing people’s rights to manage their own affairs. In some cases this will be subcontracted to private enterprise” The jobs jolt will not cut unemployment or up-skill people, rather it is beneficiary bashing and subsidizing the employers. The picketers’ demands include:

Full Employment

A living wage for all workers and beneficiaries

Freedom to live where we choose

Retain the work-test exemption for 55-59 year olds

Free Education, Training and Retraining for all

Free Childcare

A 30 hour working week on full pay.

A disappointing aspect of the picket was the failure of some socialist groups to turn up. The Anti Capitalist Alliance supported anti-Jobs Jolt action in Wellington, but did not make it to either the planning meetings or the demo in Auckland. The picketers sent a representative to an Auckland branch meeting of Socialist Worker, hoping to get that group to send members to the picket. But Socialist Worker refused any cooperation, telling the picketers' rep that the protest was 'sectarian' and a 'diversion' from the 'rates revolt' protests. In fact, small actions like this are an essential part of the vital and difficult job of rebuilding the union movement in New Zealand.

WORKERS AND BENEFICIARIES UNITE AGAINST THE JOBS JOLT!
Join your union and demand that it opposes Jobs Jolt!
Join UNITE, the union for beneficiaries and low paid workers! [email protected]

To contact the UNITE beneficiaries ring Roger or Warren on (09) 6278655 or e mail Janet at [email protected]

ASYLUM FOR AHMED ZAOUI, ‘TERRORIST’ OR NOT!

Green Party Foreign Affairs spokesperson Keith Locke went on Auckland 1ZB radio station recently to talk about the Ahmed Zaoui case. Locke correctly called for Zaoui to be granted asylum in New Zealand, but the arguments he used on behalf of Zaoui can only be criticised.

Locke defended Zaoui by comparing him to Helen Clark, saying “Helen Clark is known around the world as a peacemaker, and so is Ahmed Zaoui - throwing Ahmed in jail is just as absurd as throwing Helen in jail would be.” Locke went on to differentiate Zaoui from members of groups which use armed struggle against oppression - he contrasted Zaoui the man of peace with the Algerian armed resistance and with the IRA, saying “there's no excuse for violence, whatever the circumstances.”

Yet the modern IRA was built originally as a self-defence force, and fought against Military occupation by an imperialist power, and the armed groups in Algeria are resisting a military dictatorship backed by French and British imperialism. Obviously there are many political criticisms that can be made of both the IRA and the Algerian Islamists, but equally obviously both are national liberation movements with wide support and many just demands. To support their suppression, as Locke implicitly does, is reactionary in the extreme.

What Locke's 'defence' of Zaoui actually does is (a) whitewash Helen Clark's and Labour's role in the ongoing War of Terror, and (b) reinforce the efforts of the White House to run together terrorism and national liberation struggles (think of Colombia, where Bush is calling the leftist guerrillas 'narcoterrorists', or the Philippines, where the Communist Party's New People's Army and the large Muslim insurgent groups are tarred with the brush of Abu Sayaff and Al Qaeda). We should support Locke when he calls for asylum to be given to Zaoui, but we need to accompany our support with criticism of the continuing rightward drift of the Greens and some other parts of the peace movement.

We have to take aim not only at the surface absurdities of Green and liberal arguments, but also at that their underlying view that the state and armed forces of Western countries can be 'turned' by the left and made to act for progressive ends in the Third World.

It is this underlying belief which has many Green supporters happily going along with their party's support for the invasion of the Solomons, and unconcerned about the way their party jumped into bed with the emerging Euro-imperialist bloc by backing a Franco-German occupation of Iraq under the banner of the UN back in March.

Trapped in their reformist illusions, the Greens and organisations like Peace Movement Aotearoa tend to hold back the anti-war movement by advocating forms of protest designed to 'pressure' Labour to act progressively on international issues. PMA, for instance, is now calling for letters to be sent to Helen Clark demanding the release of Zaoui.

The truth is that Labour will never be pressured into changing direction and dropping its support for US and European imperialism. Labour is dedicated to administering capitalism, and at the dawn of the twenty first century wars of recolonisation and rollbacks of civil liberties are the survival mechanism of capitalism. The War of Terror is a necessity, not some mistake a few well-worded letters can persuade honourable politicians to put right. We need organized workers' action, not symbolic pressure protests, to counter the War of Terror and help its victims like Ahmed Zaoui.

The absurdity of the Green-liberal position on the capitalist state and army was shown up by another part of Locke's performance on 1ZB. Locke condemned the SIS as an untrustworthy player in the Zaoui case, pointing out the closeness of the organisation's ties to the CIA and MI5. Where, though, does Locke think the information being used to justify the invasion of the Solomons comes from? If the SIS is not to be trusted over the facts concerning one man, how can it be trusted over the fate of a nation?

Locke also pointed to the role of French security services in helping the Algerian regime demonise opponents like Zaoui. Of course, France has a long history of acting against the interests of Algerians - in the 1950s and early 60s it killed tens of thousands of Algerians in a futile effort to defeat an independence movement in its biggest colony.

Closer to home, the French state has an appalling record in Pacific colonies like New Caledonia, where it killed a quarter of the Kanak population in the nineteenth century, and French Polynesia, where it tested nuclear bombs as recently as 1994. And then, of course, there's the role of French security services in the Rainbow Warrior bombing in 1985.

Why, given this record, does Locke think that France offered a progressive alternative solution to the crisis in Iraq last March? Why did he trust the French army and security services over the Pentagon and the CIA? Why does he continue to advocate Franco-German occupation as preferable to US occupation? It is questions like these that rank and file Greens should be asking.

Chasing after global shadows

The protests at Cancun called for the abolition of the WTO because the WTO is dominated by the US and EU and imposes ‘unfair’ trading conditions on the ‘developing’ countries. For example EU farmers spend $2 a day on every cow when half the world’s people live on less. Guardian journalist George Monbiot writing on Cancun rejects the call to abolish the WTO. He says countries cannot retreat from trade to self-sufficiency without increased poverty and harm to the environment. No, say the Greens, local production can be sustainable. Replies Monbiot, only global trade can be sustainable. Yet both Monbiot and the Greens promote equally unworkable and ultimately identical utopias of fair trade.

On the one hand Monbiot’s would-be multilateral world government has been wiped out by S 11. The US ignored the UN to invade Iraq and still rejects its demands to take over the rebuilding of that country. The US rejects trade liberalisation by giving its rich beef, grain and cotton farmers yet more protection. The US and EU are fighting to see who can be the most protectionist. So where is the prospect of the poor countries ganging up and forcing the rich countries to open up their markets? Trade wars in which the powerful nations dominate the weak nations are just one symptom of imperialism. The WTO is a weapon of imperialism, just as is the UN. When is suits them they use it, when it doesn’t they don’t. Right now the imperialists are embarking on trade wars with their rivals and poor countries don’t figure in this war except as victims of super-exploitation and oppression.

Monbiot’s dream requires that poor countries stand up to the rich and reform the WTO. But the poor countries are also pressured to sell off all their resources to the big multinationals to repay debt. ‘Neo-liberal globalisation’ is all about forcing poor countries to open up so that their assets can be owned and controlled by big business. So how can they resist further trade deals to earn foreign exchange to pay off debt unless they go all the way and reject the debt?

Maybe they can take a lead from Venezuela and refuse to make any further concessions on the sale of national assets until the rich countries open up to trade. But despite Chevez’ tough talk, and surviving two attempted coups, he is making deals to pay off Venezuela’s debt. None of his populist buddies, like Lula in Argentina, or Kirchner in Argentina, dare cut their ties with imperialism. Even his idol, Fidel Castro, is busy selling off Cuba’s resources to capitalist corporations.

Chasing local movements

Aziz Choudry (a founder member of the NZ anti-globalist group ARENA) writing in “Neoliberal Globalisation” (Green Paper #4 http://www.asej.org/) puts the case for the WTO rejectionists against the Monbiot-type WTO reformists.

“Can we seriously talk about humanizing or adding a “social dimension” to the exploitation and misery inflicted by market capitalism?” He says the attempts by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and Greens to insert “social” and “green” clauses in the WTO are merely smokescreens to hide its real purpose. He quotes Canadian union activist Dave Bleakney who says that a ‘social clause’ is like “fighting for guarantees that you have the right to be present at your execution”. Good point.

But what does Choudry put forward as a solution?

“We need to align our struggles for alternatives to neo-liberalism with the older struggles for self-determination, against all forms of imperialism and colonialism. We must de-legitimise transnational corporations and international institutions like the WTO, World Bank, the IMF and International Development Bank, and the other institutions and processes which advance neoliberal globalisation globally, regionally and nationally.”

So to reject the WTO we must also reject the IMF, WB and all the multilateral institutions that are the weapons of imperialism in the ‘developing world’. This leaves no option but for the poor countries to go it alone. Choudry answers Monbiot charge that this would lead to stagnation and ecocide by pointing to two examples of the strategy from below that can survive the collapse of the WTO.

The first is the Solidarity Economy championed by the Zapatistas of Chiapas in southern Mexico. The rebellion of the Zapatistas in 1994 was against NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement between US, Mexico and Canada) and the robbing of the traditional lands of the indigenous peoples of Mexico. While this was a brave attempt to resist privatisation and to promote self-reliance the Zapatistas remain marginalised and their example has failed to take root elsewhere.

The second example is that of the actions of the Argentine piqueteros (unemployed) who in December 2001 formed popular assemblies with employed and self-employed workers to occupy factories and fight the collapse of the economy.

Again, this popular and progressive social movement has yet to become a successful model to replace neo-liberal globalisation when the current Kirchner government is doing a deal with the IMF to repay $20 Billion in debt and at the same time repressing the workers movement.

Fair trade means ending capitalism

While these examples are the beginnings of social movements against neo-liberalism, in themselves they are incapable of defeating imperialism and replacing capitalism with a just society. They are limited by the type of analysis that sees ‘neo-liberal globalisation’ as something that can be resisted and reversed without challenging capitalist society (see article on Social Re-Forum Aotearoa). But there can be no ‘fair’ trade in commodities that already contain the expropriated labour of producers. There can be no ‘peace and justice’ in communities that remain dominated by global capitalism.

The rural-based movements such as the Zapatistas in Mexico or the FARC in Colombia, can be contained by imperialism because they do not link up with the mass workers movements of the employed and unemployed such as in Argentina.

But, even as in Argentina, mass workers movements that are not armed and mobilised to take power cannot defeat imperialism in their own countries. They remain hostages to the WTO, WB, IMF, UN peacekeeping forces, and open military repression. Only a united, armed working class and its class allies can win the war against imperialism (see article on Chile).

As S 11 proved to us all, ‘neo-liberal globalisation’ is nothing more than imperialism in crisis, forced to enter into trade wars and to re-colonise poor countries to privatise assets and super-exploit their labour. And when this is resisted as in Iraq, imperialism escalates trade wars into hot wars with military invasions. The WTO, like the UN, is nothing but a weapon to impose imperialism’s crisis on the poor. If it collapses imperialism will use more direct methods.

Trade wars can only be stopped by workers’ revolutions which overthrow imperialism and its client comprador capitalist agents, and replace the market with socialist plans.

The alternative to trade wars under the domination of global capitalism is the building of socialist economies based on workers production and exchange, that spread from national bases to regional bases in Latin America, Asia and Africa, and then to a global socialist economy that includes Europe and North America.

It is not enough to back the revolt of the poor countries leaders against the rich countries in the imperialist WTO. It is necessary to overthrow these leaders too, along with the whole system of capitalist production and exchange, to expropriate the means of production and exchange and to put in place a World Socialist Trade Organisation.

It will take more than Zapatistas and Piqueteros to make revolution. For that we need an organised and armed working class in every country that can lead all the oppressed and exploited in the struggle for socialism and defend it from every imperialist act of war, repression and counter-revolution.

Long Live the Global Revolution!

The UN debacle was all about the failure of the Franco-German leaders to win a deal with the US that would give them a share of Iraq’s oil and of strategic influence in the Middle East and Central Asia. For a crisis-ridden US economy, Franco-German cooperation was simply too expensive . At Cancun, the US and the Europeans were on the same side, united in their opposition to cutting agricultural subsidies and united in seeking greater access for their multinational companies to Third World economies. But the refusal of either the US or the Europeans to cut a deal with the Third World nations represented by the ‘G 22’ group reflected the decreased commitment of imperialism to multilateralism. The US seemed almost to relish the collapse of talks, with Bush boasting that he would ‘aggressively pursue bilateral deals’ in the aftermath of the talks. Both the US and the Europeans are also moving to consolidate regional trade blocs.

Anti-globalisation gurus like Britain’s George Monbiot and New Zealand’s Jane Kelsey have hailed Cancun as ‘empowering’ and a ‘victory’ for the poor countries. In fact, bi-lateral deals and regional trade blocs will speed up globalisation by cutting through the red tape and the compromises of the WTO. Globalisation will become more political and military as well as economic, as both the US and the Europeans tie ‘security issues’ to trade. It is likely that the US, Europe and the East Asian economies will form fully-fledged rival economic blocs that will confront each other in ‘contested’ zones like the Middle East and Central Asia. Cancun coincided with the beginning of an aggressive campaign by the US to force Japan and China to raise their ‘undervalued’ currencies and thereby make US products more attractive in their domestic markets and help to cut the US’s massive trade deficit.

Economic nationalists like Kelsey hope that the end of the WTO might lead to globalisation bypassing pockets of the semi-colonial world. Kelsey argues that semi-colonial countries and regions like South America should attempt to ‘delink’ themselves from imperialism and build up their own indigenous capitalisms.

The economic nationalists dream of a return to the 1950s and 60s, when nations like Brazil, Argentina, and to an extent New Zealand used high tariffs and state subsidies to create a sheltered domestic economy, and to fund indigenous industrial development. But the ‘independence’ of the 50s and 60s was illusory. Sheltered semi-colonial economies were underwritten by the post-war economic boom in the imperialist countries.

Kelsey forgets that New Zealand’s 1960s ‘national capitalism’ was funded by massive agricultural exports to Britain. When the long boom unraveled in the 70s and Britain joined the European Community, New Zealand’s economy went into a tailspin. Today New Zealand could only experience a new era of national capitalist development if one of the main imperialist powers simultaneously opened its doors to New Zealand agricultural exports and accepted the re-imposition of 60s-style tariffs on goods coming into New Zealand. In the era of globalization, when the economy is largely owned by global corporates, such an arrangement is unimaginable, unless you are Israel.

As a media pundit, Kelsey can afford to square the circle and ignore the absurdities of economic nationalism. Would-be economic nationalists in power do not have the same option. One of Kelsey’s idols is Brazilian President Lula de Silva, whose Trade Minister led the ‘G 22’ at Cancun. After the talks failed, Lula was cast by many on the left as a hero who stood up to the bullying West. In fact, Lula was desperate to strike a deal with the big boys, but found that they would not budge an inch from their demand for the further opening of poor economies to Western multinationals.

Why was Lula so keen for a deal at Cancun? Lula is an advocate of the sort of ‘national capitalism’ Kelsey advocates, a leader who constantly urges his restive working class and peasant followers to cooperate with ‘progressive’ Brazilian capitalists by avoiding strikes and land occupations. Lula wants workers and bosses to cooperate to build Brazilian capitalism, but he also wants access to imperialist economies for the exports Brazilian capitalists produce. At Cancun Lula found that the circle could not be squared. The imperialists were not interested in opening their markets to him, or even reigning in their own subsidy regimes. And the imperialists were not prepared to tolerate the meagre protections poor economies still enjoy, let alone consider the expansive new protections needed by economic nationalists! Jane Kelsey doesn’t know a victory from a defeat.

In an editorial banged out a few hours after the talks were abandoned, the New Zealand Herald urged the Labour government to ‘do all it can’ to ‘improve ties’ with the United States.

A day later parliament debated Cancun, and opposition MPs rounded on Labour, accusing it of lacking a ‘Plan B’ to cover for the failure of its multilateralist strategy. ACT leader Richard Prebble took over where the Herald left off, demanding that the government immediately invite US nuke ships back to New Zealand ports. National leader Bill English played the same tune, accusing Helen Clark of ‘disloyalty’ over the war in Iraq.

When her turn came to speak Clark made a very vigorous defence of her government, pointing to Labour’s close cooperation with the US in the War of Terror. Clark recited her party’s record of collaboration with Bush’s wars, citing ‘the SAS in Afghanistan, frigates, Orions and Hercules in the Gulf, engineers in Iraq, and stabilisation teams in Bahrain’.

Clark’s speech was notable for several reasons. In the past she has often insisted that issues of trade and issues of ‘security’ are unrelated, and that Kiwi contributions to the War of Terror are unrelated to any quest for better trade terms with the US. After Cancun that rhetoric has gone out the window.

Clark also used her speech to link explicitly the New Zealand contribution to the occupation force in Iraq and the war against the Taleban and Al Qaeda. In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Clark followed the French and Germans by making a distinction between the invasion of Afghanistan, which she strongly supported, and a unilateral US invasion of Iraq, to which she preferred a Franco-German occupation under the banner of the United Nations.

Clark has tried to appease local anger at Bush’s war by making a distinction between a legitimate ‘War on Terror’ and a ‘regrettable’ invasion of Iraq. Clark has tried to walk a tightrope: on the one hand she has wanted to hose down anti-Bush anger felt by the Kiwi workers who voted for her, and on the other she has tried not to offend Bush and the US money barons on whose favour Kiwi capitalism ultimately depends. Cancun has pushed Clark off the tightrope, forcing her to side unequivocally with Bush and push the Pentagon’s discredited line that post-Saddam Iraq is the latest front in some sort of global war against the ‘enemies of freedom’.

Clark also followed Bush’s lead by denouncing the ‘G 22’ nations as the villains behind the Cancun collapse. In the leadup to the talks Clark and her Trade Minister Jim Sutton thought that they could piggyback on the G22’s criticism of the agriculture subsidies and protected markets of the US and the EU. But the G 22 emerged as a breakaway from the pro-free trade ‘Cairns Group’ because poor Cairns Group countries felt that they were being dominated by wealthier members like Australia and New Zealand.

Now, sensing blood, National and ACT MPs are pointing out that New Zealand is the only Cairns Group country not to either have joined G 22 or else to have a realistic chance of a bilateral trade deal with the US. New Zealand’s place ‘out in the cold’ reflects its peculiar economic status as a small advanced semi-colony of the US. New Zealand capitalism is too wealthy to share the immediate perspectives of G 22 countries like Brazil, but too small and too moribund to have a realistic chance of playing with big boys like Australia.

Clark’s commitment to multilateralism, in the UN as well as the WTO, made sense for a ruling class which is too weak to hold its own in the hurly burly of international unilateralism. But it is Clark’s multilateralism which now threatens New Zealand’s business and political elites with international isolation in the brave new twenty- first century world of unilateral wars and feuding trade blocs.

In her speech to parliament Clark defended the ban on nuke ships, and insisted that the WTO represented the best route to a free trade deal with the US. Anything else less would have been a humiliating climbdown. It is likely that behind the scenes Labour is reformulating its trade strategy. New moves will be made to try to win entry to trade negotiations between Australia and the US. Expect new military, diplomatic, and domestic policy gifts to the US, if not a lifting of the ban on nuke ships or an opening of the gates to GE food. Clark will also likely try to use the upcoming Apec meeting to push for a US-backed Asia Pacific trade bloc as a sort of cheap alternative to the global new trade order Clark saw in the WTO.

But why is Labour so obsessed with a free trade deal with the US? A section of New Zealand’s capitalist class would benefit from a deal, but these people are mostly hostile to Labour. A free trade deal would not benefit the Kiwi working class, which still represents Labour’s electoral base. Writing in the New Zealand Herald in the aftermath of Cancun, political analyst Guyon Espiner noted that open-slather GE imports, a deregulated drug market, the weakening of existing labour and environmental legislation, and nuke ship visits would all have to be part and parcel of a deal with the US. So how can Labour keep the workers onside?

The truth is that Labour has no option but to go for free trade deals. And its survival depends on selling it to its supporters. When Labour was forced to abandon its economic nationalism and dismantle the protected economy in the 1980s, it lost the historic base in NZ manufacturing that sustained the post-war compromise of capital and labour. Today Labour is unable to fund even the very modest set of reforms it promised its core supporters who put it into office in the 1999 and 2002 elections.

Student fees are rising, hospital queues are long, and Maori wait impatiently for the closing of the gaps. Like the ‘knowledge economy’ hulabaloo, the free trade deal with the US is a mirage conjured by Labour to try to disguise the fact that there is no economic base for even the minimal reform programme laid out in 1999 and 2002.

This leaves Clark in the same position as Tony Blair and all the other right wing social democrats of trying to justify their economic retreat to neo-liberalism by the benefits of globalization. Clark and co need a free trade deal as the economic miracle that will dramatically boost the government’s tax base and make social democracy possible again. At the beginning of the twenty first century, social democratic ideology looks a lot like cargo cultism.

PEASANT SUICIDE

In a piece headed ‘Field of Tears’ in the British Guardian, Jonathon Watts wrote:

“He took a patch of harsh mountain land and turned it into a thriving farm. But when Korea was flooded with foreign imports he was ruined – and last week, during the world trade talks, Lee Kyung-hae plunged a knife into his heart.”

There is a danger that the tragic suicide of Lee Kyung-hae at Cancun, while drawing attention to the suicides of many small farmers driven off the land by the policies of international capitalism, will also fuel a wave of sympathy and nostalgia for Lee’s model farm as evidence of the viability of rural peasant life. This is bad enough in itself because the peasant way of life is doomed, but it also celebrates individual protest action that cannot bring an end to the same forces that destroyed Lee Kyung-hae.

Small farming it is a very labour intensive and patriarchal form of production. The necessary labour required to sustain a farm family is usually more than a 12 hour working day and under conditions that are more like slave labour. In fact small farmers are usually debt slaves. Most of their labour goes to landlords or banks to pay back debt. Much of the labour on farms is unpaid domestic labour performed by female family members.

Of course peasants should be defended from exploitation at the hands of landowners and banks. But we shouldn’t fight to preserve peasant labour as some non-capitalist utopia. Nostalgia for family farming exists only because capitalism starves peasants off the land and does not offer well paying jobs. The survival of small farming It is not just a policy question of the protection of rich US and EU farmers, but more fundamentally the relative inefficiency of small scale farming compared with commercial farming that makes peasant farming unprofitable.

In fact, most of the world’s workers are no more than one generation from the land. They had no alternative to move off the land and shift to the cities in search of work. That is how capitalism works. No matter how bad their conditions at first this is a step forward. Many have gained jobs, minimum wages and more social and political freedom than was ever possible tied to the land.

Peasant movements and revolts have happened for centuries. Yet the most freedom that peasants can win is to get ownership of the land they work. And to win that they have to overthrow the capitalist farmers and banks who are now the landlords.

Peasant revolts that have failed to join up with workers’ movements have been doomed to isolation and defeat or collaboration with capitalism. A good example of this today is the FARC in Colombia who deliberately cut itself off from workers in the cities and tries in vain to do deals with the Colombian ruling class who are the agents of US imperialism in exploiting Colombian mineral and land resources.

When faced with the choice of stay on the land and starve or become wage slaves most peasants vote with their feet. They abandon peasant exploitation for wage exploitation. In China today this is happening at a rapid rate.

Their best interests are not to return to the land but to organise themselves as wage workers into powerful unions and working class political parties. Rather than accept capitalism’s power to exploit and oppress them as wage workers they need to organise collectively as a class to take over the means of production.

Capitalism is not challenged by suicides of individuals. It is challenged when individual workers unite as a class to take power and expropriate its property.

AFTER THE SOLOMONS, PAPUA NEW GUINEA

In the last issue of Class Struggle we discussed the US-backed ANZAC invasion of the Solomons. Many on the left, including the Green Party, backed the invasion, claiming that it was motivated by ‘humanitarian concern’. We thought that John Howard and Phil Goff made unlikely humanitarians, and that the invasion was really motivated by a need to enforce at the point of a gun a brutal IMF ‘reform’ programme of job losses and cuts in government spending.

The Howard government itself wasn’t shy in linking the Solomons action to the invasion of Iraq and the whole so-called ‘War on Terror’. At the recent Pacific Islands Forum in Auckland, Howard and his PR team argued that intervention in the Solomons was a blueprint for a ‘new order’ in the Pacific. Two months after troops hit the streets of Honiara, Howard is turning his attentions to the Solomons’ neighbour Papua New Guinea. The following edited report, taken from the World Socialist Website, gives a chilling picture of the consequences of the Solomons invasion. We challenge the Green Party and other ‘red-green’ leftists who backed the invasion of the Solomons to learn their lessons before ANZAC troops as well as Aussie cops takeover Port Moresby in the name of humanitarianism.

The purpose of this article is to explain why this understanding of capitalism is wrong and why it leads to such disastrous consequences. Some anti-globalists like Monbiot argue that globalisation can only be resisted by an international civil society developing out of the institutions like the UN. This tendency is theorised in the book Empire by Hardt and Negri. Others seek to reclaim national sovereignty from these globalising forces. In NZ, ARENA, the Alliance, some Greens, and academics like Jane Kelsey, take this position (see article on Trade Wars). These two positions overlap considerably, but can become somewhat antagonistic at the extremes.

We shall show that logically both of these approaches are two sides of a false coin which wrongly mistakes globalisation for a ‘transnationalisation’ of the location of power and wealth. That is, international capitalism has centralised its power by undermining and then transcending the power of nation states. The question then becomes how to match this global power on an international level, and/or how to fight to reclaim national sovereignty at the local level?

Both strategies result from a common conception that the capitalists use their power to enforce unequal exchange between capital and labour. This inequality can be corrected at either global or local level by mobilising the counter-power of the masses to take over the capitalist state. For example, the ‘anti-globalisation’ movement adopts the strategy of attacking the global headquarters of multinational capital, while others favour the strategy of organising and linking local resistances to globalisation.

Market fetishism

The key to understanding the different currents of the WSF is to see where they go wrong in their theory of capitalism. They misunderstand the nature of capitalist political power. They see capital as exploitative because capitalists use their power to extract surplus from producers by underpaying them for their labour during the process of exchange. For them what is wrong with capitalism is the unequal exchange in the market that robs the producers and enriches the bosses. Therefore exploitation can be resisted by workers mobilising their power and struggling until wages become equal to their value, and by nationalising the wealth accumulated from their past unpaid wages. This is political logic of the exchange theory of David Ricardo the foremost classical political economist critiqued by Marx in Capital.

The problem with Ricardo’s theory of capitalism was that he took the exchange relations of capitalism to be the basis of exploitation. He equated capitalism with the market rather than with a set of historically unique social relations.

For Marx, what distinguished the capitalist market from the earlier development of the market was the way it turned everything into commodities which exchanged more or less at their values (the socially-necessary-labour-time –SNLT, or the normal hours of workers using typical machines –required to produce them).

However, Ricardo could not explain why the value of one ‘commodity’, labour, which he agreed created the value in commodities, was paid less than this value. As Marx pointed out, Ricardo failed to understand that capitalism had created a new form of exploitation by making labour-power into a commodity. The capitalist bought the worker’s labour-power in order to create value. Labour-power was the only commodity capable of producing more value than its own value. Its own value was the socially necessary labour-time (SNLT) required to produce the commodities workers needed to consume to replenish their labour-power (i.e. the workers consumption). Because Labour was equal to the value of the product of labour-power the two could not be equated.

By forcing workers off the land and into industry capitalists could buy this labour-power at its value, produced by workers during part of the working day –necessary labour time –but also force workers to work for a longer period –surplus labour time –to extract surplus value and hence profits. (Marx said if capitalists actually paid workers the full value produced by their labour they were idiots and would soon go out of business.)

Marx discovered this because he used a method of analysis that looked beneath the level of market exchange to the underlying social relations of production. For Marx then, it was necessary to explain how capitalism falsely presents production relations as exchange relations so that workers could become conscious of the need to revolutionise the relations of production.

Marx’s theory therefore reveals to workers how production relations come to be fetishised (re-appear falsely in another guise) as exchange relations. This happens because workers do not see the underlying mechanism of surplus-value production and assume that profits are deducted from wages. This fetishised ideology of the marketplace where individuals appear as actors exchanging their commodities is the material base of the bourgeois ideology of the state representing individual citizens who can mobilise electoral majorities and reform exchange relations.

From this ideology flows the concept of class exploitation at the level of exchange, of workers participation in parliamentary politics in popular fronts (all those who are in some way exploited by unequal exchange including small capitalists and even national capitalists) and reformist policies of wealth ‘re-appropriation’ or ‘redistribution’ back to the producers as the property or income of all those ‘exploited’ by capital – e.g. the rationale for Hardt and Negri to replace class with ‘multitude’ i.e. all those exploited by unequal exchange.

But more than this, neo-Ricardian theory becomes a practical application of bourgeois ideology when it is actively used by the petty bourgeois agents of capital as social democracy or reformism. This political doctrine tries to eliminate the risk of revolution by putting ‘socialism’ on the ‘installment plan’. Socialism becomes achievable in easy, progressive stages of equalising exchange, first by means of exhausting the potential of the bourgeois state for reforms such as land reform, nationalisation, social welfare etc. so that at some indeterminate point in the future these reforms will compound into full-blown socialism. But in effect all that is being ‘revolutionised’ here is the fetishised form of capitalist production relations – exchange relations. Thus even this reformist agenda pre-supposes getting and using state power step by step to defeat the capitalists.

The problem is that capitalist state power is only incidentally a means of determining the value of wages. That is overwhelmingly the role of the labour market. The state’s real purpose is to organise the interests of the ruling class as a state force to guard against any threat to capitalist productive relations. The ruling class will not concede any state power if it results in their expropriation.

Therefore capitalist state power has to be taken by force and replaced by workers state power to transform capitalist social relations into socialist relations. But as long as reformists and their exchange theory socialism continue to dominate the labour movement capitalist state power and capitalist social relations will not be challenged and overthrown. Or worse, any challenge will be defeated because workers are not prepared to take power.

Global anti-capitalism

This is why those who adopt the strategy of global reforms to take power and equalise exchange are wrong. Hardt and Negri are a good example. They say that the enemy is no longer organised into national capitalist classes, but is united into one global Empire. The bosses’ power is now concentrated in global institutions like the IMF, WB, WTO and the big multinational firms. Since these are no longer located within any one nation state, then the anti-global and anti-capitalist forces must also be organised ‘transnationally’. The struggle that results will allow the ‘multitude’ (or the ‘new proletariat’) to become global citizens, win a ‘social wage’ (i.e. a guaranteed income) and assert its right to ‘re-appropriate’ of capital.

S11 and the war on terrorism proves this theory wrong. The enemy is still imperialism organised on a national basis. US imperialism is based on US national territory and its government and military are violently advancing its interests with the war on terrorism and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Hardt and Negri have been forced to explain the post-S11 imperialist war and growing rivalry between US and EU as a regression of US imperialism back to nationalistic politics. But instead of seeing that this is neither a regression nor something confined to the US alone, they pronounced EU multilateralism as a more progressive stage of transnational capitalism, or Empire, and the UN as the body that represents the reformist potential of transnational government that can made to deliver on the masses’ demand for global citizenship, social wage and re-appropriation.

S11 has therefore knocked down, along with the twin towers, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, the reformist illusion that transnational capital is no longer located in rival imperialist powers. On the contrary, the conflict between the US and EU was not about the US breaking from its multinational obligations, but rather the naked re-emergence of rivalry between US and EU imperialism for control of territory, resources and markets. Far from reflecting a victory of the ‘new proletariat’ in Europe to pressure Empire to concede its demands, EU imperialism is busy driving down workers living standards, cutting their social wage and ‘re-appropriating’ the gains of past workers struggles.

Therefore if there is no transnational location of power which determines production of surplus, there can be no transnational location of resistance to take power and reclaim the surplus. This leaves the global anti-capitalists in their millions, reading Monbiot, marching without direction on the streets, incapable of organising anti-imperialist movements to defeat the military power of the imperialist states, and incapable of forming military blocs with oppressed states under attack from imperialism. Worse, they are diverted from the elementary task of rebuilding independent organisations capable of mobilising workers to combat the deadly popular fronts of the reformist left with the bourgeoisie, religious extremists etc in the name of ‘civil society’. So maybe those who say that the better strategy to fight globalisation is that of reclaiming national sovereignty have a point?

National anti-capitalism

The nationalists at least recognise that power is not globally located outside national borders. Therefore they are usually on the side of oppressed countries against imperialism. But they make the same mistake of fetishising the power of nation states (as opposed to transnational states) to overcome unequal exchange. They think that reclaiming political sovereignty at the national level will allow them to regain control over their economies and the distribution of wealth.

To refute the nationalist position all we need to do is point to the history of social democracy. Whenever mass social democratic parties have become the government and attempted to use state power to radically redistribute wealth or equalise exchange by nationalisation etc, they have been overthrown by imperialist-backed coups or imperialist invasions. The high point of post WW2 social democracy was the 1970s when Chile, Portugal and Nicaragua all attempted to introduce radical social democratic reforms and were all overthrown by right wing coups.

After such defeats, including the fall of the Soviet Bloc, social democracy retreated a long way to the right and adopted neo-liberal policies imposing the costs of imperialism’s crises on the backs of workers and peasants. Where social democrats have won elections, as today in Latin America, not only can they not roll back neo-liberalism and win any substantial reforms, they are forced to attack their working class supporters. For example, Lula’s Workers Party in Brazil, the most left wing party in power in Latin America, is forced to govern in a popular front with the big boss party of Alencar and implement the World Bank’s policies. Lula is now busy suppressing rising opposition within his ranks.

This means that the same state power that the reformists claim can be taken over to win back sovereignty and protect the economy, is inevitably used against them by international capital. The state is the agency of imperialisms’ crisis policies and the means of repressing all challenges to its rule. The reformists dream turns into the workers’ nightmare.

The only power that can win control over the economy is the workers’ power used to overthrow the state and to impose a workers government and socialist plan. And that will not happen unless the domination of the labour movement by reformists in the WSF is exposed as grounded in a petty-bourgeois neo-Ricardian theory of unequal exchange. Not until revolutionary Marxists in the workers movement can build a class conscious vanguard party with a genuinely revolutionary theory and program to leader the masses will the prospect of workers power become real.

Conclusions

As we have seen, the problem with the global and local strategies being debated in the WSF movement is not that one fights at a global level and the other at a national level, but that both are incapable of winning state power and taking control of, and planning, the international economy. This is because they fail to understand to real nature of capitalist production and the capitalist state.

By taking the fetishised forms of capital as real, the anti-globalisation strategy of the internationalists becomes a diversion from the real struggles that must initially be located within nation states. S11 has shown that faith in building an international social democracy on the basis of the UN or even the EU is utopian and dangerous. It deludes those layers of workers and youth who are idealistically opposed to the effects of imperialism into the dead end of de-territorialised and directionless struggle against a non-existent transnational state. Instead these kids get beaten or shot by US, Italian or German cops and military.

On the other hand, while the nationalists are at least fighting on the ground where the worst effects of globalising imperialism are felt, their strategy is to sow illusions in social democrats winning state power from the capitalists without an armed struggle. As the history of Latin America demonstrates and today again shows, state power will not be conceded to the workers. It has to be taken by force and used by the masses to create workers governments that can take control of the national economies and begin to build federations of socialist republics and economic cooperation between countries.

The task of revolutionaries is to explain to those who are attracted to the WSF solution to capitalist imperialism that it is an adaptation to imperialism not a solution. We say that the WSF is a forum for the promotion of a reformist politics grounded in a fetishised ideology of capitalism. We say the leadership of the WSF hides their reformist politics behind a façade of ‘democracy’ that in effect denies workers’ democracy. The WSF leadership refuses to allow political parties to affiliate because it knows that this would invite serious debates leading to exposure and challenge of their reformist agenda.

As revolutionaries we want to break the rank and file participants in the WSF from its reformist agenda. The way to do this is to demand freedom of speech and organisation within the WSF. In this way those who see the necessity to expose and defeat the reformist agenda can challenge the WSF to take positions on the important questions of our time – the defence of Iraq against imperialism; against Lula’s popular front in Brazil; for workers occupation and control –without compensation –of factories like in Argentina etc.

CWG will do so on the basis of the 21 principles contained in the document calling for a conference of principled Trotskyists and revolutionary workers. As we say in that document, our urgent task is to refound a new world party of socialism that can unite the theory and practice of revolutionary Marxism in a program to overthrow capitalism and build socialism

Film Review

Sweet Sixteen

Directed by Ken Loach

106 Minutes

Bloody Sunday

Directed by Paul Greengrass

107 Minutes

The Education of Gore Vidal

Directed by Deborah Dickson

84 Minutes

Sweet Sixteen

The Auckland Film festival In recent years has seen a trend to including films which are of a more commercial nature and end up coming back on general release. An example from the most recent film festival was the American film American Splendour.

One wonders if the festival is used as a barometer, gauging the public interest in such films. Last year several films which were clearly of a commercial nature made it into the festival and then were later released commercially to relative success (Apocalypse now – redux and Mullholland Drive are two examples.) Some films even go on to make a huge impact on commercial release. Donny Darko from the 2002 festival was a huge hit at Auckland’s Rialto which had to keep extending its season.

While, like most of New Zealand culture, the trend is towards greater commercialisation and an eye to the buck being made, it is fair to say that the vast majority of films in the Auckland festival are largely non-commercial and will probably not return to the big screen in this city.

This is particularly true of documentaries which have a much more limited audience that say a drama. Of the three films above The Education of Gore Vidal is the only documentary and would probably have never been be released on video and dvd in this country, let alone been seen in any cinema.

Films of a broadly left-wing nature also feature as a regular part of film festivals.

Ken Loach is no stranger to the Auckland film festivals. His films have been a part of the festival for many years. Loach sees himself as a Trotskyist and has been making films, documentaries and TV Programmes for many years.

Among his works are such films as Kes, Land and Freedom The Navigators and Bread and Roses. His TV work includes the well-known drama from the 60s Cathy come home and Days of Hope.

Many of his earlier films had a political edge to them, even when dealing with what seems at first glance a non-political subject. In Kes (1969) he presents the story of a boy who works with a wild kestrel but it is set against the backdrop of a grim mining community in the North of England.

Another of his trademarks is the use of non-professional actors in his films. This, along with the use of hand held cameras, gives his films a gritty, realistic documentary feel.

Sadly, in the ‘80s and ‘90s his works have become more depressing and most seem to focus on people in hopeless situations who can’t seem to find their way out. (A recent exception is Bread and Roses -2000).

Sweet Sixteen is about a boy (Liam) who is nearly 16 but seems trapped in a world not of his making. His mother is in jail for drugs and he lives with his stepfather and Grandfather in a working class community in Scotland.

His guardians care nothing for him and he drifts away from them apparently rejecting the life they lead. But he quickly gets involved in selling drugs himself and begins working for a drug dealer in order to try and raise money to look after himself and his mother when she is released from prison.

The acting is of a high quality, despite the non-professional nature of the cast and Martin Compston does a particularly good job in the lead role as Liam.

The film is bleak and depressing and you leave thinking that there is no hope for a young working class person like Liam. Loach seems to present the working class as downtrodden and hopelessly unable to change anything within there own lives and the world about them. This wouldn’t be so bad if it was just this one film but as mentioned earlier, this seems to be an on-going theme in Loach’s work.

There is a need for Marxists to present the world as it is, but there is also a need to show what could be and to reflect on and present the victories as well as the defeats. (See review of Bread and Roses in the next issue).

Bloody Sunday

The subject of defeats leads to a discussion of the second film, Bloody Sunday. This film deals with the events the occurred in the Bogside in Londonderry on Sunday January 30 1972. Followers of the Irish Republican movement will be well acquainted with the events of that day during which 14 unarmed Catholic civil rights protesters were dead, murdered by British soldiers in an act of unprovoked violence. James Nesbitt (from the television series Cold Feet) plays Ivan Cooper, a Protestant MP and leader of the Northern Irish Civil rights movement. The villain of the piece is the British commander General Robert Ford (well played by Tim Piggott-Smith) who seems to be out to teach the Irish a lesson.

Like Sweet Sixteen the film is shot with the use of hand held cameras to give it the feel of a documentary. It is also grainy and interlaced with some footage from the actual march.

It is an outstanding film well worth seeing on either the big screen or on video and dvd. It is fast paced and fascinating to watch as the terrible events of the day unfold and the Irish civil rights movement is confronted by the forces of British Imperialism.

The accents are hard to penetrate at first but you quickly develop a knack for understanding what is being said.

All the performances are excellent and the fly on the wall documentary style approach (which is very vogue these days) works well here.

The events of that day probably helped fuel the rise of the modern IRA and the widespread hatred of the English occupation. However, given the despicable role of British imperialism in Ireland for hundreds of years it is hardly surprising that they could murder unarmed people and get away with it. Sad as it is, Bloody Sunday was just another chapter in English imperialism.

It is also unlikely that the peaceful civil rights movement would ever be able to achieve freedom and democracy for the people of the Northern part of Ireland. It is no accident that any limited gains achieved by the Irish over the last century have come about by means of armed struggle.

Nevertheless, the film still makes for compelling viewing and presents an accurate account of what happened that day.

The Education of Gore Vidal

The final film is the only documentary of the three. The Education of Gore Vidal is a shortish film at only 84 minutes and one unlikely to be seen again at movie theatres in New Zealand because of its limited appeal.

Gore Vidal is a fascinating character. Born into a wealthy family, his Grandfather was a Senator and he seemed destined for a leading role in the American ruling class. He even ran for Congress as a Democrat.

However from the 1960s he began to change tack and developed into one of the great critics of American Imperialism

He is also probably one of the great American writers of the 20^th century and it is around his various novels that the documentary takes it shape. This will probably disappoint those like myself who would have liked to hear and see more about his role as an American dissident.

The documentary uses interviews with Vidal, readings from his books by friends (including Paul Newman and Tim Robbins) to give us a feel for his life and work. There are some excerpts from debates with right-wingers and examples of his acidic wit used against right wing Presidents such as Ronald Reagan, but these seem like “fillers.”

Also passed over is any discussion about the fact Vidal is gay. This is not to say that the documentary is dishonest. It shows Vidal with his “companion” several times but the nature of this relationship is never developed. It is true that one of the books (The City and the Pillar, 1948) discussed had a gay theme and was extremely controversial for it’s time. However, there is no attempt to relate this in any way to Vidal’s life.

Not making mention of Vidal’s sexuality is not in itself wrong. Perhaps the point was to not make a big issue of it. But the overall impression one ends up with is one of confusion. Is the sexuality hidden or simply not an issue?

The Education of Gore Vidal is a well-crafted, interesting and lively documentary. It holds the attention of the viewer throughout. But if it is an insight into the left wing thinking of one of the great American dissidents you are looking for you would be better placed reading one of his more recent works such as Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace or Dreaming war: Blood for oil and the Cheney-Bush junta.

The victory of US and UK imperialism in the Middle East has brought about an unstable balance between revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces worldwide. This precarious situation means that for the moment, US imperialism has a relatively free hand to attack its enemies and its own workers. But this situation cannot last. Bush and Blair are under challenge in Iraq as the people resist the occupation and at home as their justifications for war are increasingly rejected. The European workers are on the move; in Latin America the masses have opened the road to revolution; the DPRK (North Korea) refuses to dismantle its nuclear program. Under these conditions, more explosive contradictions beneath the surface are preparing new crises, new wars, and new class battles.

Latin America in the Balance

In Latin America, imperialism uses its victory in the Middle East to mount a new attack on the masses in the form of the populist governments of Lula in Brazil, Kirchner in Argentina, Toledo in Peru, Gutiérrez in Equator, Chávez in Venezuela, all aligned politically to Fidel Castro and supported by pacts and truces and the class collaborationist politics of the union bureaucracies, Stalinism and the reformist leaders grouped in the World Social Forum.

This balance of forces favouring US imperialism allows the state to impose a Bonapartist regime in Chile to enforce imperialism’s super-exploitation and oppression. Chile has signed the TLC (Tratado de libre Comercio or Free Trade Treaty) with the US and become the ‘model’ for the next round of attacks being prepared by US imperialism.

The TLC was first mooted ten years ago. These were the 10 years of transition to “democracy”, during which the ferocious structural changes in Chile, initiated by the Pinochet dictatorship were continued. These changes followed the dictates of the US to create the conditions necessary for TLC.

They included a wave of privatizations of state businesses, of public sector services; attacks on workers rights and living standards, vicious cuts in wages; small cosmetic changes to the Pinochet Constitution of 1980, in preparation for the genocidal FTAA (Free Trade Agreement of the Americas). Also new government laws were passed to increase the pensions of relatives of those killed by the dictatorship to avoid a wave of court cases against the killers, and to avoid explosions of the masses against the plans of imperialism, and its lackey Chilean government.

But the main reasons for the TLC, was first the defeat inflicted on the Chilean working class by Yankee imperialism and the Chilean bourgeoisie in the counter-revolution of 1973, and second the defeat of the workers struggle that revived in 96-97. This latter upsurge of workers and the people onto the streets was based on the copper miners of El Teniente, the coal workers of Lota, health, state, municipal, AFPs, harbor workers, and the small fishermen.

The fight of the El Teniente workers leads the way

It is under these conditions, with governments that continue the “work” of Pinochet, delivering Chile to the monopolies and transnationals, in a country oppressed by 30 years of imperialist plunder though the external debt, etc, and a new round of attacks on the Chilean working class on the part of the US client regime of Lagos –a rise in job losses, cuts in wages, rising prices of basic goods and services, flexibilization and casualisation of work –have generated the beginning of organized resistance.

This resistance was foreshadowed by the two rebellions of secondary school students of 2001 and 2002, then gathered pace by the end of 2002, with the actions of the health workers, of civil employees, the demonstrations of the teachers, etc. and then continued at the start of 2003 with the national strike of the ANEF, and the struggles of unemployed workers against the state.

The reformist leaders contained these militant fights by isolating them sector by sector. But despite this the struggle has not been defeated and the most militant tendency is now beginning to question its leaders, blaming them for the defeats and the reactionary situation in which they are today.

In the last months without any doubt the vanguard of the militant tendency of workers has been the heroic copper miners of El Teniente, the symbol of the most super-exploited workers in Chile. They mark the road forward for the working class and all exploited Chileans in the battle against the starvation of workers and attacks on social security, aggravated by the successive rounds of the world economic crisis and the burden of the costs of imperialism’s crisis being borne by the exploited and oppressed of Chile.

These miners at the end of April began to organize in response to the low salaries and bad conditions of negotiation imposed on them by the management. The miners decided in a democratic assembly to go on strike, picketing the mine and paralyzing production for 10 hours.

Because this action they confronted the military/civilian Bonapartist state [a ‘Bonapartist’ state stands above any one fraction or class but in the last analysis represents capital] based on the Pinochet Constitution of 1980, they faced the open repression of the murderous police, and formed committees of self-defense (workers militia).

This is why we say in our “Programmatic manifesto”: “every fight for immediate demands, for wages, for land, for work, for education, for health, for the punishment of the killers of the workers, forces the working class to confront directly the Bonapartist state of Pinochet and the Coordination” [present government].

The betrayals of the bureaucrats

We demand that the Communist Party (PC) and the National Union of Workers (CUT) call on the heroic miners of El Teniente to convene, with a delegate for each 100 workers, a National Committee to prepare and to defend the strike of August 13, building defence committees in all workplaces; to prepare the conditions for the strike begun by the miners 3 months ago, proving to all Chilean workers that the only way forward is to unite all the divided sectors against the attacks of the state and imperialism, by creating organs of workers democracy coordinated nationally. The PC and CUT called on the unions they control such as health, state, teachers etc to support the strike, but they failed to generalise the call for unity and hold up the banner of the whole Chilean proletariat.

The leaders of the PC, the PS, the FSD, the PPD and the DC that leads the CUT, have all failed to build national support for the miners strike on August 13. Their demands include a Chile in which there is ‘justice’, real jobs, no privatizations, against the external debt, against health and education cuts etc. We say that the strike is a first step to unify the workers, but how have the PC and the PS in the CUT prepared for it? Sadly neither the PC neither the CUT have placed its forces behind the strike. For example, some leaders call for a strike, others call for a day of protest, or for days of ‘reflection’. The PPD and the DC are opposed to the strike. The PS has just withdrawn its support for the strike. Others like the MIR and the GAP call for protest in the streets. This explains why there has been a call for at least 7 different marches where none of them will join in a single march. They have refused to call for workers assemblies or voted to send delegates to the meetings of the miners of El Teniente so that they can prepare for the strike and unify workers in all sectors in struggle to break the isolation of the miners and build the strength and national coordination of the strike.

Instead of building workers solidarity for the strike, G. Marín, president of the Chilean PC and a leader of all the PCs in Latin America, wants militant workers of Chile think that unity with bourgeois sectors will make their strike more successful. In the weekly The Century ( 8-14 of August) he says: “... the parties that unite with the CUT have a great sense of national responsibility. We want a national plan of development that includes the businessmen who defend the national interest”.

We cannot have any confidence in any boss, big or small, as history has proven this to be fatal to the interests of workers. G. Marín does not say anything new. His own boss, Fidel Castro had already said this in his last visit to Argentina, and it is the same politics that is found in the FSM. The businessmen who act in the ‘national interest’, are no less the allies of imperialism, because their ‘national interest’ is to act as the agents of imperialism against the workers.

For a workers state and a federation of socialist republics of Latin America!

Workers can trust only our own forces, not any alliance with the management. Where these exist it is at the expense of the workers. Such is the case with the agricultural bosses who are in dispute with the government. On the one hand they sent their agricultural workers to block roads and to fight the murderous police, while at the same time they were still negotiating a deal with the government that defers price controls for two years, during which time a their agricultural workers will live under the same conditions of exploitation. That it is the ‘just’ Chile of the PC? This class collaborationist policy is the sure road to the defeat of the workers.

Our objective is a Chile with a workers, popular, peasants government, a Chile independent of Yankee and EU imperialism, a Chile without TLC, RAZORBILL, or Mercosur. To win this objective it is necessary to take the road that the miners of El Teniente show us, that stake out very clear battle lines between the bosses and the workers. We say that: “...the workers alone produce the wealth, that is our true power, while the bosses are no more than parasites” (“The Miner” Workers Bulletin) and call on the Chilean working class to trust only in its own power.

The principled Trotskyists of the GOI- CI of Chile (International Workers Group – Fourth International) think that the calls of the miners of El Teniente are supportable since it is the way to lead the Chilean working class out of division and atomization and unite their ranks. The PC, the PS and the CUT and all the leaders that speak in name of the working class and claim to defend its interests, should immediately break every alliance with the bourgeoisie and use all their forces to unify and strengthen the rank and file workers in struggle, call for a National Strike Committee to support the heroic miners of El Teniente, the vanguard of Chilean workers; for a Committee that can unite all the sectors in struggle, raising an common program of demands and a united Plan of Action that generalizes the call of the workers of El Teniente for Committees of Self-defense to face the repression.

It is necessary that workers in health, the state, unemployed, professors, rubbish collectors, migrant workers, secondary and university students and of course the agricultural workers, all send delegates to El Teniente; that all the sectors in struggle create assemblies of the rank and file that vote delegates to the National Strike Committee, and that popular protest organizations also sent their delegates to El Teniente,. This is necessary to overcome the miners isolation, to make the strike and protest of August 13 a means of mobilizing all workers as the first step towards a National Congress of delegates of the rank and file of the whole Chilean workers movement, of both employed and unemployed, poor rural masses, militant students, etc that has the task of organizing an indefinite general strike that can defeat the Bonapartist regime and government in Chile.

Plan of Action

Enough of divisions in our ranks!

One Class One Fight!

For a National Strike Committee for August 13, that unites all the workers behind the miners!

For Self-Defence Committees in all workplaces, workers organizations and protest groups to prepare the days of struggle and the strike!

No alliance with the national bourgeois, for a workers’, popular and rural alliance!

We raise a single list of demands

Work for all! For the distribution of the hours of work among employed and unemployed, with a salary equal to the family basket indexed monthly according to the cost living!

End work without contract, seasonal or by fixed contract with no union rights!

All on permanent contract!

Equal pay for equal work!

No more super-exploitation of migrant workers!

Equal salaries, equal political and union rights!

Free education and public health!

For the refund of funds in the hands of the imperialist of the AFPs!

Nationalise the banks!

Re-nationalise copper production and all privatized assets, without compensation and under workers control!

For the expropriation of the large rural and urban landowners!

Down with imperialism!

For an immediate break of all the military, political, and economic pacts that tie Chile to imperialism!

Down with the IMF!

For the non-payment of the external debt!

Down with the TLC, the RAZORBILL and the Mercosur!

For a popular, peasants, and workers government based on the agencies of self-determination and direct democracy of the Chilean working class!

Bush’s sales pitch

               Bush is helping the Maritime Union and New Zealand shipping companies campaign for cabotage, which is the confusing name for a system which would see the restriction of shipping services between New Zealand ports to New Zealand-operated and crewed ships. The Maritime Union and New Zealand shipping bosses want the government to intervene to get rid of the foreign-owned ships and foreign workers currently operating in New Zealand waters.

               In its leaflet promoting cabotage the Maritime Union proudly proclaims that ‘Cabotage is the system used today by the most powerful economy on earth, the United States of America.’ Heck, who can argue with logic like that? If the US has it then it must be good, right? No wonder the union’s pro-cabotage poster features a smiling US commander-in-chief telling an attentive Helen Clark that “The US still insists on American crews on American owned ships trading on the American coast”.” That sounds like a grand idea George – why don’t we do that here in New Zealand?” Helen replies.

               Maritime Union leader Dave Morgan must reckon he’s on a good wicket. After all, George Bush has put many demands on Helen Clark – troops for Afghanistan and Iraq, repressive ‘anti-terrorist’ legislation modeled on the US’s Patriot Act, support for GE – and the commander-in-chief has tended to get what he wants. Dave must reckon that the George Dubya magic will work again, and that Helen will soon be signing on the dotted line to kick those cheeky darkies out of Kiwi waters.

               We can’t help noticing, though, that all of the stuff the US has pushed on Clark until now has been bad for workers in New Zealand and around the world. The Maritime Union is an organization that is supposed to represent workers, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have seen workers in uniform killing workers in uniform, for the sake of Bush’s oil interests. The ‘anti-terrorism’ legislation is designed to stop workers’ strikes, not terrorist strikes, and GE threatens to poison workers and profit bosses.

               We don’t know if Dave Morgan has noticed, but Maritime Union rank and file members actually voted to oppose Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The union also voted last year to support the wharfies on the West Coast of the US after Bush had banned them from striking using legislation ‘designed to protect national security’. Now, though, we find the Maritime Union’s PR geniuses not only using Bush’s noble visage but stealing his words too. (Honestly comrades, hasn’t the English language suffered enough?) The union’s leaflet claims that ‘Cabotage will mean less chance of terrorist activity’ and ‘less exposure to biosecurity hazards’. Isn’t that how Bush sold the Patriot Act?

Sacking Third World workers

               Some on the left are embarrassed by Dave Morgan’s new friend. They say that cabotage is a good idea, but Bush is a bad salesman. We disagree. We think that Bush is the perfect PR man for a system that

discriminates on the basis of nationality, sets worker against worker, and lines the bosses’ pockets.

               We’re sad to say that Laila Harre doesn’t agree with us: in a recent Alliance Party press release she claims that "Cabotage would ensure that foreign crews working in New Zealand coastal waters received New Zealand wages and conditions".  Touching concern for Third World workers, coming from someone who voted to take New Zealand into a war that has so far killed 20,000 Afghanis, give or take a few pieces of ‘collateral damage’.

               But Laila’s view of cabotage must make perfect sense to Laila. She helped the foreign workers of Afghanistan by helping Bush to blow them up. Now she wants to help foreign workers again – by taking their jobs away. We reckon Laila learned compassion from the US general who justified another massacre in Vietnam with the immortal line ‘We had to destroy the village in order to save it’.

               Under cabotage non-New Zealand workers will only be allowed to take up jobs in New Zealand coastal waters if no New Zealand seafarers are available for those jobs. In practice, this would mean that the vast majority of foreign seafarers currently employed working ships in New Zealand waters would lose their jobs to New Zealand workers. The Maritime Union’s pro-cabotage leaflet rips into the ‘cheap Third World labour’ supposedly ‘swamping’ New Zealand with all the fervour of a well-lubricated Winston Peters. Laila and Dave Morgan admit that many of the foreign seafarers they want to sack are poorly paid and have large families to support in countries without the sort of social welfare safety net that exists in New Zealand. How can we say they are less deserving of jobs than local workers?

Meet the ‘Progressive’ Bosses

               Bush is only a silent partner in the cabotage campaign. The Maritime Union can use his picture and his mangled English in its promotional material, but the man himself won’t be guesting at the Alliance’s pro-cabotage public meetings. George can only focus on one thing at once, and he’s much too busy right now applying the logic of racism and nationalism in the Middle East, in a place he can’t pronounce. And nobody could call George a hypocrite: he’s put the wharfies of Basra to work, unloading precious cargoes of US guns and bombs for the princely sum of 25 cents an hour. The Iraqis’ new employees are the same companies that got Bush to deal to the West Coast wharfies last year.

               For an active partner in the cabotage campaign, the Maritime Union has had to turn from Bush to the New Zealand section of the capitalist class. Dave Morgan has signed up the New Zealand-owned shipping companies, and he’s trying to win other bosses to the cause. Victor Billot, the Maritime Union’s leading PR genius, has explained to sceptical workers that the union leadership aims to win the support of ‘progressive business’.

               The ‘progressive’ nature of the Kiwi shipping tycoons is well known, of course. In 1951, for instance, they demonstrated their progressive qualities by demanding that the National government lock Jock Barnes’ bolshie wharfies out of the waterfront, and by cheering when Barnes and his comrades were beaten up and imprisoned in New Zealand’s most famous industrial struggle. In 1991, the shipping companies reaffirmed their progressive credentials by supporting Jim Bolger’s notorious union-busting Employment Contracts Act. We guess that if Alliance activist Victor Billot can call Laila Harre’s parliamentary record progressive, he can probably fit the word around anything.

               But it seems that some bosses really are less ‘progressive’ than others. The Employers and Manufacturers Association has rebuffed the Maritime Union’s invitation for it to join the cabotage campaign. The Association says that cabotage would be ‘inefficient’. The Maritime Union leaders don’t agree: in an open letter to the manufacturers, Dave Morgan and his mates insist that cabotage works in George Bush’s America with “no detrimental effect” on business.

               ‘Efficiency’, of course, is a codeword the bosses use for profitability. The main determinant of a manufacturer’s profit margin is ultimately the costs of labour it takes to make and move their products. The Manufacturers and Employers Association has always been a keen supporter of attempts to lower the costs of the labour of the wharfies and seafarers the Maritime Union is supposed to represent. The leading members of the Association helped the National Party to write the Employment Contracts Act, and the Association has backed multinational Carter Holt Harvey’s use of scab ‘Mainland Stevedoring’ labour to load its ships in the South Island and weaken the Maritime Union there.

               The Maritime Union’s members opposed the Employment Contracts Act, and they’re still holding protests in Bluff against Mainland Stevedoring. Yet now the Maritime Union’s leadership is using the bosses’ language to beg the friends of the ECA and Mainland Stevedoring to join the cabotage campaign! Perhaps Dave Morgan should take another leaf from the bosses’ book and ask his members to cut their wage claims to the 25 cents an hour earned by the Basra wharfies. That’s the sort of ‘efficiency’ Bush and the bosses are after.

Economic Nationalism – another US import

               Believe it or not, Bush has some trade union fans besides Dave Morgan and Victor Billot. In the United States many union leaders have backed Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and tried to cash their support in for cabotage-style legislation. John Sweeney, the leader of the umbrella union group the AFL-CIO, has argued that the War of Terror is advancing workers’ interests – American workers’ interests, that is.

               Sweeney is an economic nationalist who wants to see Bush protect the US economy from foreign competition and keep wetbacks and gooks out of the US labour market. In the leadup to the recent World Trade Organisation talks at Cancun, Sweeney and his mates went on US TV to urge Bush not make any concessions to poor countries wanting to open up the US market for their goods. The Sweeney sound bite was “My message to President Bush and to US employers is ‘it’s not us against you, it’s you and us against the world’”.

               The Maritime Union leadership has imported Sweeney’s economic nationalism as well as with his crush on Bush. Along with the Alliance, the Green Party and trendy intellectuals like Jane Kelsey, the union is urging New Zealand workers and bosses to unite and build a fortress economy against the ill winds of the world.

               But the logic of economic nationalism hurts workers, especially workers in small dependent nations like New Zealand.  One of John Sweeney’s greatest triumphs was the tariff Bush introduced last year on imported steel. But Sweeney’s triumph was the misfortune of workers outside the US, including the workers at the Glenbrook Steel Mill south of Auckland. Bush’s import tax threatened Glenbrook’s business with the US, and has left an axe hanging over jobs and conditions at the mill.

               If Dave Morgan ever succeeded in getting cabotage legislation through parliament he would create a few jobs for New Zealanders, at the expense of course of the equivalent number of jobs of Third World seafarers. But this ‘triumph’ of economic nationalism would be offset massively if workers in other countries successfully demanded cabotage-style measures from their governments. After all, hundreds of thousands of Kiwis work abroad. Imagine if Aussie shearers organised to kick foreigners out of their industry, or if British service workers demanded a national contract excluding non-British hospitality workers, or if Japanese English teachers lobbied their government to send foreign teachers home. Even from a purely selfish, short-term perspective, Kiwi workers have much more to lose than to gain from economic nationalism.

Socialist Worker Salvage Job?

               Some ‘socialists’ have given qualified support to cabotage. Writing in the August issue of Socialist Worker Monthly, Socialist Worker member Grant Brookes admitted that the campaign has had a racist tinge, and condemned overtures to Winston Peters by Maritime Union members. But Brookes went on to argue that workers can ‘win’ cabotage without making an alliance with their local bosses.

               Brookes would like to see workers fighting for cabotage with marches and strikes. But anyone with even a basic knowledge of the history of class struggle in New Zealand should know that the struggles of wharfies and seafarers are always international struggles. The very nature of the work wharfies and seafarers do means that they inevitably require the solidarity of brothers and sisters overseas to wage strong struggles. New Zealand wharfies and seafarers have often been supported against New Zealand bosses by their brothers and sisters overseas. During the great strikes of 1913 and 1951, for instance, it was 'foreign' workers who sent aid and in some cases took industrial action in support of New Zealand workers fighting New Zealand bosses.

               Grant Brookes would surely agree that any campaign for cabotage would have to be international to succeed, drawing on the active support of the wharfies and seafarers in important Pacific economies like the Philippines, South Korea, and Indonesia. But what motivation would workers in countries like these have to support cabotage? Why would they risk their livelihoods by striking in support of a piece of legislation that would inevitably put some of their compatriots out of work? The struggles of 1913 and 1951 were universal, because they were about workers’ rights and resisting imperialism, themes common to unionists around the world. The ‘struggle’ for cabotage, on the other hand, is about putting the interests of New Zealand workers before the interests of workers in other parts of the world.

               Grant Brookes may be naive, but the leaders of the Maritime Union are not: - they know that cabotage has no chance of winning the support of workers outside New Zealand. That’s why they’re looking for support to the only people who have an interest in Kiwi economic nationalism – the least profitable and effective sections of the New Zealand capitalist class. Winston Peters, Kiwi shipping bosses and cabotage are made for each other. The Socialist Worker should pick its campaigns more carefully.

A Cause Worth Supporting

               Instead of wasting their time and insulting non-Kiwi workers, the left supporters of cabotage should look to the international working class to advance the interests of Kiwi workers. It is the international working class, and not Kiwi capitalists, which has a track record of real action to defend jobs and living standards from globalisation over the last few years.

               In Argentina, for instance, hundreds of factories closed or threatened with closure by globalisation have been occupied by workers who have taken control of production for themselves, making new products and finding new markets for these products. Around the world, and especially in South America, workers have been inspired by the Argentinean occupations - in Brazil, for instance, copycat actions have broken out.

               In Argentina it is the new social democratic government of Kirchner - a government hailed by some for its economic nationalist policies - which has attacked the occupied factories. Like the Alliance, Kirchner seeks to counter globalisation by making an alliance with local bosses - and bosses, by definition, don't like workers' control of factories. Kirchner has sent in the cops to try to break up the pickets which protect many occupied factories. In some cases he has succeeded in restoring bosses' control, but in others he has been defeated, and has even had to accept the nationalisation of factories under workers' control. With the support of the international working class the Argentinean workers can defeat Kirchner and occupy the whole of their country in a new socialist revolution.

               What are the lessons of all this for us? The Kiwi left must learn that in the era of globalisation the economic nationalism symbolised by cabotage has no chance of helping workers. Economic nationalism only divides and confuses the class that can defeat capitalism.

Masochistic readers can find most of the Maritime Unions pro-cabotage material on its website at http://www.munz.org.nz/ Click on ‘Campaigns’ on the homepage and follow your nose.

Editorial:

Burn the National Flag

Notes and Comments:

Pauline Hanson jailed but racism still at large

Jobs Jolt,

Profit’s Fault

Soft cop Maharey

Jobs Jolt won’t work

Labourite Workfare

Work/Life Balance ?

Jobs Fightback!

$$=Trade Wars+$$

AFTER THE SOLOMONS, PAPUA NEW GUINEA

The Social Re-Forum of Aotearoa

Market fetishism

Global anti-capitalism

National anti-capitalism

Conclusions

Film Review

Sweet Sixteen

106 Minutes

Bloody Sunday

The Education of Gore Vidal

Directed by Deborah Dickson

Sweet Sixteen

Bloody Sunday

The Education of Gore Vidal

Plan of Action

We raise a single list of demands