Trust Labour? Yeah right!

The spark that has lit the fuse of Maori anger is Labour’s attempt to steal the seabed and foreshore. Labour tells us that their legislation to nationalise the seabed and foreshore will protect the customary rights of Maori and the public access of ordinary Pakeha. Yeah right! Helen Clark and her sidekick Michael Cullen were Ministers in the Labour government that privatised dozens of public assets in the 80s, including the railways and Telecom. Why should we trust them now? When the Clark government has nationalised assets, it has done so to save the bosses money. Remember the state buy-up of Air New Zealand a couple of years ago, which cost hundreds of millions of dollars? Clark told us that the airline was being bought in the interests of all Kiwis – then went ahead and sacked hundreds of Air New Zealand workers!

Labour is stealing the seabed and foreshore because Helen Clark wants to sell marine resources to multinational businesses. It’s no secret that Clark is chasing a ‘free’ trade deal with her ‘very, very, very good friend’ George Bush, and she’s keen to show George Dubya’s government that the whole of Aotearoa is up for sale. That’s why Labour recently announced changes to the Overseas Investment Act which made it easier for multinationals to buy up local assets, and why Michael Cullen replied to criticisms of this legislation with the question ‘Can there ever be too much foreign investment?’ He didn’t expect an answer, but Maori and their supporters have given him one, and it is ringing in his ears.

The revolt over the seabed and foreshore is ripping apart the coalition of supporters that has gotten Labour elected twice since 1999. The Maori seats are crucial to Clark’s grip on power, which is why the prospect of Tariana Turia and Nanaia Mahuta not voting for the theft of the seabed and foreshore has caused so much alarm inside Labour. Even more importantly, the vast majority of Maori are working class, and Labour’s most reliable support still comes from the working class. Labour’s safest electorates – places like Mangere, Papatoetoe, and Porirua – have big concentrations of working class Maori. Now anger over the seabed sell-out is spreading from Maori into the most militant part of the Pakeha working class, and finding expression in the unions and the other organisations of the left.

Two Peoples, One Movement

The revolt began with a series of mass hui which voted almost unanimously to reject Labour’s legislation. Maori workers from around the country took the spirit of these hui to the Council of Trade Unions conference in December, and came up with a declaration calling for trade union opposition to Labour’s legislation.

The Maori runanga of the National Distribution Union became a crucial link between the union movement and the Maori struggle, educating Pakeha workers and turning the left on to the most serious challenge to Labour since the teachers’ strikes of 2002. The Alliance adopted the seabed struggle as one of its main concerns for 2004. In Auckland, the International Woman’s Day Committee made the seabed and foreshore part of its platform, linking the Maori struggle to the struggle against sexism and to the war in Iraq. A few days before Waitangi a meeting in support of Maori was held in an overflowing Auckland Methodist Mission Hall. From the pulpit, unionists called for working class solidarity with Maori protesters, and criticised the CTU leadership for its failure to enter the battle against Labour.

The days of korero that surrounded the protests at Waitangi showed that many Maori understand who their real allies are. Speaking on Waitangi Day, Annette Sykes linked the theft of the seabed and foreshore to the war in Iraq, pointing out that Helen Clark was doing to Maori what George Bush was doing to Iraqis. Speaking at a hui in Ahipara the next day, many Northern Maori angrily criticised sell-out leaders like Graham Latimer who pretended that Maori could become rich by ‘playing the game’ of free market capitalism. Many at Waitangi and Ahipara hui talked openly of the need for revolution in Aotearoa, and called the whole ‘Treaty process’ a fraud.

Bashing Brash

Now the action at Waitangi has shown every Kiwi that Maori opposition to Labour is broad and deep. Don Brash’s Maori-bashing campaign has shown how worried the ruling class is about the re-emergence of militant Maori protest. Brash’s attack on the democratic rights of Maori is designed not only to win support from backward Pakeha workers, but also to dent the political power of Maori. Brash’s call for the abolition of the Maori seats, for instance, is a blatant attempt to kill off the ‘brown vote’ that is steadily growing, as the Maori percentage of the population increases and more and more Maori voters opt for the Maori roll. Brash knows that National’s viability as a party of government is being steadily eroded by the growth of the brown vote. By getting rid of Maori seats Brash hopes to push Maori to the margins of the political stage.

But Brash’s Maori-bashing has helped strengthen the links between the Maori struggle and the union movement. When Brash lied that the Holidays Act gave Maori workers bereavement leave rights that Pakeha workers do not enjoy, even the CTU leadership denounced his claims as anti-Maori and anti-worker.

Direct Action or Defeatism?

As debate continues over how to build on the actions at Waitangi, a division is emerging over tactics and strategy. Some iwi and union leaders are sceptical about the possibility of stopping the government, and hope to influence Labour to make its legislation more ‘friendly’ to Maori. Ngai Tahu leaders and Tariana Turia are calling for compensation to be paid for Maori for the theft of the foreshore. Trade unionleaders like the NDU’s Bill Andersen are backtracking from a head-on collision with Labour, and hoping instead to modify the government’s plans by lobbying. But these defeatist leaders are out of touch with the mood of many ordinary Maori. At Waitangi Turia was jeered and jostled by Maori outraged at her intention of abstaining when the seabed and foreshore comes up for a vote.

The differences over tactics reflect differences in strategy. Iwi and union leaders still have illusions in Labour as a progressive government – they think that with a few symbolic protests and a few legal arguments Labour can be made to act in the interests of Maori and workers. Iwi leaders think that the Treaty of Waitangi can be made into a sort of good behaviour contract for Labour; unions leaders want to sign a ‘social contract’ to bring back the good old days of the welfare state. For these dreamers, the protests at Waitangi were all about making Labour listen.

We say that Labour is deaf! On issue after issue, from teachers’ pay to the War of Terror to genetic engineering, Helen Clark has bowed to the influence of US imperialism and home-grown capitalists, and shafted her supporters. The Treaty’s promises of equality are not worth the paper they are written on. Nor are the election promises of a ‘worker-friendly’ government. Historically all of the gains of Maori and workers have come through direct action against bosses and the state, not through promises and contracts. It was occupation not lobbying that won Bastion Point and the Raglan Golf Course back. The only language the bosses understand is power, and the only power Maori and workers have is the power of direct action.

Maori and Pakeha workers should take over the seabed and foreshore so that its resources can be used in their own interests, not in the interests of multinational companies or iwicorp bosses. Mussel and oyster farms, for instance, should be collectively owned and run, so that the wealth they generate can stay in local Maori and working class Pakeha communities, rather than being sent overseas. We can take inspiration from the factories in Argentina and Venezuela which have been taken over by workers and are running for the benefit of working class communities, not foreign money.

Take the fight from Waitangi to Wellington!

But isolated occupations will not be enough. We need a campaign of direct action to throw this government into crisis and to make the theft of the seabed and foreshore impossible. We support the calls that many Maori have made for a new hikoi on Wellington in the great tradition of the 1975 Land March. The hikoi should end with a national day of action including a blockade of parliament to stop Labour’s legislation and nationwide occupations of the foreshore.

To win support for a hikoi Maori and their supporters must take their message deeper into the unions and the left. The rest of the left needs to follow the example of the Auckland International Women’s Day Committee and link the Maori struggle to every issue it protests. The anti-war protests scheduled for March the 20^th must link colonialism in Iraq and Afghanistan to colonialism at home.

Most workers and unionists still support Labour, but a minority is unhappy with the Clark government’s kowtowing to US imperialism and failure to lift wages and improve social services. Maori and their supporters must convince these pissed-off Pakeha that the struggle over the seabed and foreshore is their struggle, and that if the struggle is successful Labour’s whole Blairite agenda will begin to unravel. Small anti-Labour unions like UNITE and NUPE should be joining the National Distribution Union and setting an example for the larger, more conservative unions. The CTU must be made to oppose Maori-bashing from Labour as well as National.

For a hikoi on Wellington and a national day of action to seize the foreshore and shut parliament down!

Labour tries to claim that the F&S is not a Treaty issue yet many Maori see it as part of honouring the Treaty. The problem is that the Treaty cannot be honoured by capitalism. The Treaty was always a fraud used to legitimate the expropriation of Maori land and resources. It is still a fraud because international capitalism far from giving it back has to steal more land and resources to restore its profits. This drive by imperialism to solve its crisis at the expense of workers and peasants worldwide is what is behind both National and Labour’s ‘Maori policy’.

Brash and Bush

Brash claims Maori are privileged by special treatment when Maori and Pakeha are ‘one people’ by virtue of the signing of the Treaty. Of course this was never the reality during the history of expropriation and oppression in the 164 years that followed. But Brash says the settlements must stop because legitimate Maori grievances have been redressed and now Maori are becoming privileged This is a ‘Maori policy’ in the interests of the US imperialism that trampled on the native Amerindians, the Filipinos, the Mexicans, and many others, and now re-colonises the world, imprisoning ‘illegal combatants’ and killing ‘terrorists’ who stand up to it. Brash and Bush are blood brothers in the extinguishment of the rights of all peoples subject to US imperialism. Brash’s position is to return the F&S to the ‘status quo’ which means Crown property. This allows the Crown to sell rights to the exploitation of the F&S to all comers competing in the world market according to the ‘free market’ ideology of the neo-liberals.

Labour’s social-democratic Maori policy by contrast draws on the notions of ‘indigenous rights’ established in the 1970s to make citizenship universal. Social-democracy is premised on the view of the equal rights of citizens to be eligible to vote and form a majority and reform capitalism. It holds to the concept of partnership and the ‘honouring’ of the Treaty principles to include historically marginalised Maori. But this does not allow any real economic redress for the colonial past. The Treaty process is one of token settlements between a new Maori bourgeoisie taking responsibility for ‘iwi’ and the crown acting for capital in general which is prepared to pay to remove any legal claims on the Crown for past grievances. Instead of improving the class position of most Maori workers, it increases the gaps between pakeha and Maori and divides Maori so that a Maori bourgeoisie exploits Maori workers.

Labour’s ‘public domain’

Yet even this settlement is an intolerable interference in the market for neo-liberals. That is why they condemn Labour’s solution as an attack on the rights of all New Zealanders to get free access to the F&S in the hope of mobilising racist attitudes towards Maori against the Government’s settlement. This is a dispute between neo-liberals and social democrats on how best to manage capitalism. For Labour buying off the Maori corporate class who want to make commercial claims to the resources of the F&S is hardly going to bankrupt international capitalism. And the price may be worth it if it sidetracks the protests into interminable legal channels like the land protests of the 1980s. Labour’s proposal of ‘public domain’ is such a deal. It will probably give Maori iwi corporates customary title and some limited preference over commercial use. Any stronger title would be to give Maori capitalists a commercial advantage over others and represent a barrier to the free movement of capital investment so beloved of the US globalisers. So Labour’s solution is an attempt at compromise between on the one hand the legitimate claims of Maori to uninterrupted customary use of the F&S to keep them quiet, and on the other the claims of international capital to have access to exploiting the resources of the F&S to keep making big profits.

But Labour’s ‘public domain’ is just another name for Crown or nationalised property. Some on the left claim that nationalisating the F&S is better than risking the F&S falling in private hands. This is because they mistake state property for non-capitalist or post-capitalist property. Nationalization is state property, but the property of the capitalist state, which acts on behalf of all (collective) capitalists. Today this means the biggest MNCs and their World Bank and IMF bankers who dominate states policies in every country. It’s true that nationalisation would remove private property titles (so-called ‘fee simple’) to F&S. The F&S could not then be traded as shares and there would be no immediate transfer of ownership into private hands. But this would not prevent the state from making joint ventures with corporates for profit under ‘free trade’ rules such as GATS which allows the privatization of these profits. And as with all nationalised property there is no class barrier to its legal privatization except the working class. That is why workers have to go beyond capitalist nationalisation to demand socialisation under workers control of the F&S and all capitalist property.

From nationalization to socialisation

Socialisation means expropriating the property of capitalists, individual or collective, so that becomes the property of collective labour. This can only be achieved by means of workers’ occupations and control. These occupations result from workers uniting and organising in democratic committees or councils. In the case of the F&S this would enable Maori, overwhelmingly members of the working class, to impose a new customary right, the collective right to use the resources of the S&F for iwi and hapu, and in the process to open up the F&S to the use of all workers on the basis of their needs rather than that of capitalist profit. Socialisation means that the F&S would be effectively expropriated to become workers property and pose the question of expropriating other capitalist property. Why? Because while the socialisation of the F&S would serve some workers needs, other branches of industry are much more important to the survival and reproduction of the whole working class. Forestry is a good example.

When workers occupy strategic sites on the F&S and make it the property of collective labour they will see the need to occupy and expropriate other key branches of capitalist industry such as forestry and manufacturing. They will then have to defend this property against the capitalist state and its forces of law and order dedicated to protecting the bosses’ property. The only way to do this is to combine all workers committees or councils into a social base for a Workers’ and Farmers’ Government that can expropriate all capitalist property and defend socialised workers’ property. Aotearoa would then become a socialist republic as part of a socialist united states of the Pacific.

ERA weak

The Government is making some minor changes to the Employment Relations Act (ERA) to strengthen the role of unions. The ERA was designed to restore a balance to industrial relations after the ECA had almost destroyed the unions. Labour’s Blairite approach is to make the unions ‘partners’ with business so as to regulate the labour force and encourage increased labour productivity. But to do that unions have to first get coverage of workers. The ERA failed to give the unions sufficient strength to significantly increase their bargaining power with business. Bosses could refuse to agree to collective agreements and workers did not see the advantages of joining unions. After 3 years, union membership has recovered slightly from being around 18% of the workforce to about 20%. But today only 12% of workers in private industry are unionised compared with 50% in the public sector.

The CTU lobbied Government to improve conditions for unions. They wanted to make it harder for bosses to avoid participating in MECAS (multi-employer collective agreements), to promote collective bargaining, to make the good faith requirements stronger so bosses could not ignore them, to protect vulnerable workers when businesses are sold and to stop free-loading by non-members. The Government took these issues on board:

The Changes

Fines up to $10,000 if employers do not act in ‘good faith’
Vulnerable workers get more protections when businesses are sold
Employers could be fined if they pass union-negotiated wages and conditions to non-union workers
If MECAS are sought, employers must attend at least one meeting
A new system of non-binding 3^rd party facilitation when parties can't reach a settlement,
If the facilitation fails and a collective agreement can't be reached, a settlement could be imposed by the Employment Relations Authority
Labour Dept inspectors investigate complaints over equal pay

Bosses’ offensive

The employers are objecting to the changes in the Bill. While Labour Minister Margaret Wilson says that stronger unions will actually contribute to economic growth in the whole country, bosses want weaker unions and more control over their worksites. They strongly opposed the ERA when it was first promoted in 2000 and Labour made concessions to them. Even Roger Kerr of the Business Round Table admits that the original ERA was “watered down” and “remained enterprise focused”. Despite Kerr’s plain talking, most capitalists running businesses and employing workers, still hate the ERA and don’t want a bar of the new Bill. They miss the freedom of the ECA to hire and fire at will. So they are running a scare campaign to frighten Labour into submission.

The bosses’ offensive against the Bill has been coordinated by the New Zealand Herald. The ‘business section’ of NZH has run a campaign against the Bill. It reported 3 surveys they conducted of small, medium and large businesses on their negative reactions to the Bill. The alarmist reactions are captured in the headlines in the series of anti-worker stories called ‘Working to Rules’. One headline said ‘More rights, less work’, another ‘Recipe for Ruin’ and another ‘Businesses must rise in Protest”.

For bosses, the most unpopular aspect of the reforms is strengthening the provisions for MECAS. They say that large groups of organised workers across several enterprises is a move back towards national awards and a restriction to right of each employer to hire and fire. They also object to the provisions which protect workers when businesses are sold or transferred. Neither do bosses like the restrictions on freeloading. They claim mediation is not working for them. They object to being forced into an Agreement by the Employment Relations Authority.

Prominent critic Simon Carlaw of Business New Zealand says the Bill is anti-enterprise and anti-growth. The penalty for breaching good faith is too draconian and signals a return to compulsory arbitration and loss of freedom for bosses. Transfer of provisions is yet another compliance cost. Stopping bosses advising workers not to join unions restricts their freedom of speech! Kerr ups the anti, claiming the new Bill aims to return to compulsory unionism, to compulsory arbitration and that multi employer contracts will create class warfare, which will be news to that rabid socialist Margaret Wilson.

Trade unions respond

Trade union leaders predicted businesses would complain and generate panic like they did over the original ERA. So how are unionists reacting to the hysteria? Although the Bill refers to the “inherent inequality of power” in the workplace the unions are treading softly on this argument. Instead, unionists are appealing to the ‘good business sense’ of the bosses. Bill Andersen, president of the National Distribution Union, in an article headlined “Only bad bosses need fear law change”, claimed that if a business was run on a sound investment plan, was informed by market research and had good labour relations, then the new law would be great for them. This echoes former union leader Ken Douglas who stated some years back that the bosses need unions to get the most productivity from workers! That’s presumably why on retirement from the union job Douglas offered his services to business.

Margaret Wilson defended her Bill by restating her philosophy that workers and bosses have interests in common - suggesting that good profits and improved working conditions go together. She appeals to bosses by arguing that the Bill will benefit business. She sees that improved working conditions for workers will be good for business and anyway, good employers are already practicing good faith in their dealings with their workers. She points out that the Bill brings NZ in line with the working conditions in most OECD countries. One lone CEO responding to a NZH survey thought the negative reactions to the Bill were alarmist, and said the worker protections matched those in OECD countries.

Carol Beaumont, CTU secretary, echoes Wilson's arguments, claiming “good employers won’t worry”. According to CTU president Ross Wilson, the CTU position is that unions will work with businesses to manage the economy by helping plan and organise work, to increase productivity and develop economic strategies. The Douglas line lives!

Class Struggle perspective

Will these arguments change bosses minds? While Labour and the unions are taking a soft line stressing partnership and mutual benefits, business is facing an increasingly tough environment with a high dollar and uncertain world economy. The unions are weak, facing further damage in the year ahead unless we can rebuild them on the basis of a strong rank and file. On top of that National has revived its fortunes on the back of a racist anti-Maori campaign. But its new leader Don Brash has a rightwing neo-liberal economic package lined up to follow the racist campaign. We predict that the bosses’ offensive will force another backdown from Labour on the reforms in this Bill that are most helpful to workers.

We say that no labour law can protect workers, unless workers organize and defend these rights on the job. The weakness of the current ERA is that it gave unions more rights on paper – we called it a ‘charter for union bureaucrats’ when it was passed – but it could not strengthen t he rank and file base of the unions. On top of that the Bill has nasty anti-secondary strike provisions that have to be broken if any strike is going to succeed. It cannot stop employers from using scabs as the waterfront dispute in 2002 showed. We also object to union negotiators being able to sign off on deals without the members ratifying them. Workers are the union, not the union bureaucrats.

Despite its inherent failings we support rank and file union campaigns to get the Bill strengthened. So long as workers think that Labour is on their side we have to demand that they prove it. That way we show that Labour’s Blairite policies are really the old new right policies in drag. After the new right smashed the unions, the Blairites came along with a sedative. Today it’s the Labour Minister and her cronies in the union leadership that dose us with the ‘partnership’ class A drug. Let’s demand the things we know that neither Labour nor the union bureaucrats can deliver without pissing off the bosses. In doing so we prove to workers yet again that the only rights they can be sure of are the ones they fought to win and fight to defend!

For the right to strike! For secondary strikes! For national awards! For the closed shop!

Dear Comrade Fadhil,

I am writing to you in reply to your article about the hijab in France (see below). First let me say that I enjoy the works of the WCPI, and consider it to be the closest political organization to me in Iraq. I have some disagreements, and perhaps the future will allow us to talk about them on another day. For today I want to talk about one of these areas, which is the attitude towards Islam.

I believe that we are agreed on the basic areas. Islam is a reactionary phenomenon, which in the current epoch has absolutely no progressive aspects: it is completely and totally reactionary. It is a religion (like all others, if not more so) that is based on savagery, abuse of women, and the humiliation of all people. .

However, I disagree completely with the line that you have taken in your article.

We live in the age of Imperialism. Decadent capitalism in a state of decay that is so rotten the stench is overpowering. What role does France, as one of the leading imperialist states play on the world stage? The role of the oppressor! As Marxists our position must be based on the economic and socio-political analysis of a phenomenon, not on the rhetoric that a French nationalist might spout.

As Marxists we must stand for freedom of expression, freedom of religion as well as freedom from it. You are mixing up your priorities here. The right of the oppressed to opium is more important than the right of the state to imprison the addict. And what else is Islam but an addiction to an opiate?

Why are there so many North Africans in France anyway? Is it because North Africans are biologically predisposed to Southern Europe, or is it because Imperialism has destroyed these societies and economies? Who is the main enemy, comrade, Capitalism, or Islam? I believe that like so many other Iraqis you are so disgusted by Islam that you have a violent and almost overwhelming hatred of it, which leads you to prioritize Islam as the enemy. It is good to hate Islam. But you must not let that blind you to the realities here.

Arguing against the state’s right to imprison “drug abusers” is not the same as urging people to use cocaine Likewise defending the right of a person to wear anything, yes even a hijab, is not in contradiction to arguing against these reactionary items. It’s a basic issue of human rights, the rights to express oneself and one’s beliefs is a human right. –as long as these beliefs are not fascist in which case we call for physically exterminating the fascists. Even then we don’t rely on the state to “ban fascism”!

Capitalists and their governments are not interested in fighting Islam. Not in France and not in Washington nor in Tehran. Capitalism is interested in fighting workers. Today they choose racism and islamophobia to divide the workers of France. Tomorrow they will undoubtedly strike the next blow, then the next -always against the working class. It may be against the organizations of Marxists in France, it may be against the trade unions, but always- against the workers.

This attack comes with the pretext of defending secularism. Since when do Marxists side with the oppressor against the oppressed in defence of bourgeois secularism? This is the same bourgeois secularism that bombs Baghdad in order to liberate it. It is an icon that the French state hides behind. We do not worship Allah, but neither should we worship the secularism of the bourgeoisie!

You are against holding a wedding and a funeral at the same time in the same house. I agree. Don’t hold a wedding. Don’t hold a funeral. Just organize. Help defend the workers. Strengthen workers solidarity. Defend freedom of expression. The way out of the dreaded veil is not for a French gendarme to rip it off, it is for the working woman to rip it off and cast it away!

Fraternally,

The debate on the Hijab.

By Fadhil Nadhim January 15, 04

The heat of debate concerning the issue of hijab and religious symbols in France has already reached Canada as well. In response to the French government’s decision to introduce a law banning conspicuous religious symbols in state schools and state institutions, Islamic groups such as Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC) are seeking the support of social activists in Toronto to launch a demonstration against the move of the French government. In response to this attempt, Judy Rebick, one of Canada's most respected feminists and political commentators seems to be seated on the edge of two seats. Expressing her sympathy to CIC's anxiety, at the same time Judy raises other concerns regarding Saudi and Iranian laws which impose hijab on women. Judy goes on to say "I think if we are going to protest against a state forcing women not to wear the hijab we should also protest forcing women to wear the hijab." Unfortunately, in my mind, Judy’s opinion seems confused. It is like asking to hold a funeral and a wedding party at the same time in the same house. The root of this confusion is the misunderstanding of the philosophy behind the hijab.

Two critical misunderstandings have forced Judy to give up the right seat. First, she thinks that hijab is part of Islamic cultural values that should be respected. Second, she distinguishes political Islam in power and without power.

The Islamic veil is not culture. It has been a political construction. Not all members of a particular community want to wear the hijab. In many cases not all members of a family wear hijab, and this is because hijab represents a political stand, and not all members of a family share the same political view.

These days, hijab operates as a political uniform. It is a symbol of a political philosophy. Among adult members of communities and families those who are not concerned about politics also do not care about hijab although they might have fundamentalist religious relatives. But those who are concerned about politics and social developments and pursue their goal though an Islamic outlook do wear hijab. Cultural symbols are usually carried by ordinary people. However, in the case of the hijab, ordinary people do not bother with it. On the contrary, if one asks any veiled women they will most likely find that this woman has a strong viewpoint on political issues.

The Islamic Code dress for "political Muslim women" is a means to convey a message to the public. By this means they are stating: "I reject secular values of Western societies: the civil rights that Westerners are enjoying has not been achieved by progressive social movements - they have been given by states to corrupt their citizens. What John Stuart Mill, Jean Jacque Rousseau and other Western political thinkers have said are corrupting human society." Veiled women are reinforcing patriarchal views of Islam and saying "I believe women are the source of corruption. In order to reduce the degree of corruption in society, I have taken a responsible position and have tried to cover the feminine features of my body". Hijab has been chosen by many adult women to express these differences with secular women.

Many people do not see the mission of hijab, therefore they are not able to see the values and goals that Islamic states and Islamic groups share. All Islamic groups, in power and without power, should be examined based on their fundamental philosophy. They, for example, preach Islamic values and Koranic law. According to those values and laws, Muslims are superior to non-Muslims. Men are superior to women. Punishing those who disobey Koran laws, including murder, as espoused by some, is a fundamental duty of “true” Muslims.

In practice, all Islamic tendencies implement these Islamic laws and values to some degree, depending on their degree of access to social and political power. For example, in places like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, northern Nigeria, the Sudan, etc., where Islamists have all the political power, discrimination and violence against non-Muslims, women, children, and flogging, torture, execution, stoning, etc., of citizens are praised as services to God.

In Western and North American countries, however, the power of Islamists is mostly limited to the inner life of their families and private institutions. As a result, they are unable to play a determining role in our societal life. In such cases members of their families and their fellow Muslims are the target of their values. For example, abusing women, forcing their wives and daughters to cover themselves in the Islamic veil, depriving them of basic activities such as sports activities, imposing forced marriages on the young, and so on, are the values they proudly practice in Western societies. In Islamic schools of Toronto, sexual-apartheid is as systematically practiced as in Saudi Arabia and Iran. Have any doubts? Ask any Imam or Mullah how he would, for example, react if he found out his daughter loved a Jewish, Christian or Atheist man. Or simply visit an Islamic school in your neighborhood. I think Judy has not seen the communality between Islamic states and their organizations abroad therefore she is unable to take a clear position.

Regarding the issue of hijab, secularists must have a clear position. One cannot, as I said, organize a funeral and a wedding party at the same time in the same place. Either we are supporting Islamism or we are for secularism. Those who support hijab for women in western countries would boost oppression against women in two ways. First of all many young women living in Canada do not want to follow Islamic traditions; they reject forced marriage; they want to enjoy freedom of dress, to socialize with others freely and to explore their sexual desires. These are great sins according to the Islamic philosophy. In fact many females in western countries have been the victim of honor killings by their male relatives. Providing any support for Islamic groups or Islamic values will empower the anti-women, and patriarchal forces in our society.

Second, supporting Islamists will decelerate the effort of those women who are fighting against stoning and honor killing and forced Islamic dress code. When the media shows that a prominent feminist such as Judy Rebick is supporting Islamic Code dress in Western countries, it will give the upper-hand and boost the moral of Ayatollahs to unleash their virtual police forces on women.

The issue of hijab today is totally a political issue. It has divided the society into two sharp camps: secularist and Islamist. Unfortunately our secular forces in the western country are so confused that they cannot make up their mind. Instead the Right Wing French government has taken the lead on this issue. Although under the leadership of a Right Wing government, any degree of set back of political Islam will ease the struggle of women under Islamic states and groups around the world. Further, from a secular point of view banning hijab in public schools and state institutions is not enough. Hijab and Islamic schooling for children under 16 in society, even in private institutions, should be banned.

COB ends truce with plans for general strike

In a meeting that lasted all day, delegate after delegate of 42 of the 65 COB (Bolivian Workers’ Centre) affiliates, including miners, transport workers, teachers, shop assistants and civic committees, called for the unity of all the popular forces in Bolivia to be mobilised to launch an indefinite general strike in 20 days to bring down the Mesa government.

Jamie Solares a miners leader of the COB said that Bolivia was a colony of the US and that Mesa was continuing the same policies as Goni on behalf of US imperialism. He said that it was an emergency situation, and that the time for theory was past and time for action had arrived to build a great popular assembly to take power.

He had invited the peasant leaders Evo Morales and Felipe Quispe to meet with the COB to build a united front against the government. Morales was visiting the Chapare region where more than 200 died in the war against the selling of the gas in October. Morales replied condemning the COB plan to attack parliament were he is a member. He said that the COB plan was to make a coup that would only invite the US to make its own military coup. But when some of his supporters present spoke in favour of participating in parliament and the referendum on selling the gas they were booed. Quispe, for his part, did not come to the COB meeting but immediately came under pressure from the militant peasants of the Altiplano and quickly endorsed the call to bring down Mesa.

Most speakers called for the COB to build grass roots support for strike action to replace the government with dual power organs, repeal the gas agreement with the multinationals, nationalise industry and provide free health, education and pensions. Delegates from the media said that it was necessary for the people to replace the leadership. They questioned Morales claim to defend democracy. What democracy? We can expect no solutions from parliament! The workers union leader Roberto de la Cruz of El Alto (the working class town above La Paz) who was not at the COB congress challenged Morales to say which side he was on, the peoples or imperialism.

The students also made the call to organise to fight for power, to prepare the general strike with blockades in February, to split the army and win the support of the military rank and file. In an separate meeting of youth organisations on the 25^th January in El Alto many resolutions were passed in support of the COB call for a general strike, including re-nationalising the gas, exprorpriating the multinationals, the US out of Iraq and for a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government.

The miners cooperatives representatives warned that if the workers and peasants were not united they would face a military coup d’etat. Other workers warned the leadership of the COB that they would be thrown out unless they provided militant leadership. The pensioners delegate spoke of the need to finish with the capitalist system and replace it with a socialist system.

Speaking for the artists and writers a delegate put the position of POB (Poder Obrero – Workers Power) calling for the renationalisation of the mines and the gas and oil, but under workers control which the program of the COB does not raise. He said that the unfinished revolution in Bolivia could not rely on the support of the anti-neoliberal governments who had just met at Monterrey, or the WSF, because Bolivia was not facing neo-liberalism. The enemy was the capitalist system and the drive of imperialism and its lackey Mesa government to rob Bolivia of its gas. The answer was to create a popular assembly of the workers, peasants and rank and file military to prepare for an insurrection and not a Constituent Assembly which was an example of parliamentary cretinism.

The POB comrades speech was in part echoed by the regional bodies of the COB – the CODs or local workers’ confederations of Cochabamba, La Paz, Oruro, Santa Cruz, Potosi, Beni, Huyuni and Montero. The government of Mesa was rejected. The gas law was rejected and the demand raised for gas to be under national control. War was declared against all the imperialist multinationals. The COB had to begin educating the masses for the national mobilisation. The CODs would provide the leadership along with the COB national executive to unite the forces to bring down the government and put in place a government of the COB representing the workers, peasants and rank and file military.

The resolutions passed ended with the demand that all the sectors declare an emergency, and organise within 20 days for an indefinite general strike to demand a 3% salary rise for all government workers, and a new monthly minimum wage of $820 up from $55.

From General Strike to Workers Power

It is clear to the people that Mesa is continuing to act like Goni as the open US agent in Bolivia. His class interest is to do a deal on behalf of Bolivian capitalists with imperialism that allows some share of the gas to be retained in Bolivia and trickled down to pacify the poor. But imperialism will not allow enough gas wealth to be kept to feed the children of the poor. US imperialism can only survive by taking the maximum super-profits from the Bolivian gas. The Bolivian children will continue to beg on the streets in their thousands.

The rank and file of COB have rejected the truce with Mesa and are calling for a ‘workers’ and peasants’ government.’ But this means different things to different camps. On the right, the MAS (Movement Towards Socialism) led by Evo Morales who represents the coca growers in the tropical east of Bolivia believes that it is possible to mobilise the people to force the Bolivian state to strike a deal with imperialism for a larger share in the gas wealth than Mesa can deliver. This will enable the coca growers to cultivate their land in peace and prosperity.

That is why Morales has used Chile’s demand to share in the proceeds of the gas being piped across its territory to activate Bolivian national resentment of the defeat in the war with Chile in the late 19^th century. Morales does not agree to the strike action on February 21 because he believes he can be elected president in Mesa’s place and win these concessions from imperialism. For him a ‘Workers’ and Peasants’ government’ is a left social democratic government led by the peasant bureaucracy rather than the national bourgeoisie. He fears that to go any further and allow workers and peasants to really take power would bring down an imperialist military coup on his head.

In the centre are the current leaders of COB such as Jaime Solares, and Filipe Quispe who represents the impoverished Quechua indian peasants of the altiplano. They are being pushed left by the mass rank and file militancy of COB and the grass roots revolutionaries who dominate the regional CODs. Since 1946 the COB has had in its program demands that originate in the Pulcayo Theses based on Trotsky’s transitional program for a workers’ and peasants’ state. Against this revolutionary program, Solares adopts the position of the labour bureaucracy that wants a return to the Popular Assembly of the 1970s, in the form of a Constituent Assembly that will write a new bourgeois constitution. Essentially the labour bureaucracy is petty bourgeois, and sees itself as a ‘middle class’ able to guide the Bolivian people to national independence. Its model is a petty bourgeois government that represents the national unity utopia of the popular or patriotic front, like that of 1952 and 1971 in Bolivia. They hope and pray that imperialism will come to terms with a radical popular front government and not smash it as has always happened in Latin America. Like all petty bourgeois politicians unless they are kicked aside by the revolutionary workers and peasants they will be used by the bosses to strangle and kill the revolution.

The camp followers of the labour bureaucrats are the centrist former Trotskyists of POR-Lora whose class compromises always betray the workers at the crucial hour. POR-Lora provides a left cover for the labour bureaucracy sowing illusions in workers that ‘democratic’ imperialism can make concessions to progressive anti-neo-liberal governments based on the unions in Latin America. The centrists are more dangerous than the open reformists as they speak about socialist revolution but act for the counter-revolution. For them a COB-led Popular Assembly would be a ‘Workers’ and Peasants’ Government’.

But their ‘Popular Assembly’ was and will always be a popular front joining workers and peasants to the petty bourgeois parties defending private property. Workers may call for a Constituent Assembly to defend bourgeois democracy against fascism or military dictatorships. But when workers are on the offensive, the Constituent Assembly is a trap which prevents them advancing to seize state power. The POR-Lora allowed the COB to join a popular front government in 1952 during a revolutionary upsurge, the first major post-war betrayal by Trotskyists of a workers’ revolution. Today they disarm workers who are mobilising to take power, by covering up these past betrayals and by refusing to call for a Workers’ and Peasants’ government based on workers and peasants councils and militias.

Revolutionary Party

On the revolutionary left the POB (Poder Obrero Bolivia) demands a return to the Pulcayo Theses, for the formation at the base of the COB and CODs of workers’ and peasants’ councils, for the splitting of the rank and file military from the officers, and for the formation of workers, peasants and soldiers militias to take power and form a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government. That is why the POB delegate at the COB meeting on the 22 January raised a number of transitional demands including the nationalisation of industry under workers control. This calls on workers to go beyond the COB demand for mere nationalisation of industry by the capitalist state. This is because even under a COB-led Constituent (Popular) Assembly the capitalist state can re-nationalise the oil and gas in the interests of imperialism to head off the revolution and prevent control over the profits from falling into the hands of workers. By raising the demand for workers control militant workers, peasants and youth are confronted with the necessity of going beyond capitalist nationalisation and of struggling to expropriate industry and land under workers and peasants control.

We see that an unlimited general strike beginning on February 21 can be the beginning of a victorious revolution. But for this to happen the rank and file workers have to take the Pulcayo theses and the POB program seriously. The program of the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie and the centrist betrayers to limit a ‘Workers and Peasants government’ to a Constituent (Popular) Assembly has to be defeated. The best militants have to join the revolutionary vanguard and carry its program into the base of all the workers, peasants and youth organisations. As the Solares leadership attempts to contain the strike short of these objectives it will have to be replaced by a revolutionary leadership.

The demand for workers’ control must mean that workers and youth occupy and manage industry, factories, gas and oil, health and education. It means that peasants must occupy the government departments that administer the land. It means that the rank and file of the military must mutiny against the officers and take control of the military apparatus. Such occupations will create a situation of ‘dual power’, in which the workers power can only be defended by armed workers and peasants smashing bourgeois state power. The seizure of power by the workers and peasants must be organised centrally as a Workers’s and Peasant’s Government based on workers’ and peasants’ councils and militias, and on the rank-and-file of the armed forces who come over to the revolution. A Workers’ and Peasants’ State in Bolivia will survive only if the workers of Latin America intervene to prevent the US from mobilising the state forces of its Latin American client states to smash the revolution.

For an indefinite general strike to bring down Mesa and to impose a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government!

Call on the coca growers of the tropical east of Bolivia around Cochabamba and Chapare break with Morale’s parliamentary cretinism and join the COB plan for a general strike!

Call on Bolivian workers and peasants to elect delegates to the Popular Assembly that are prepared to take power in the name of the workers and peasants organisations!

Build workers’ and peasants’ militias and for the rank and file of the military to take control of the state repressive apparatus!

Stop the chauvinist call for war with Chile over control of the gas pipeline!

Call on Chilean, Brazilian and Argentinean workers to blockade all gas stolen by the imperialists from Bolivia!

For a continental anti-imperialist workers bloc opposed to imperialism and to the anti-neoliberal WSF false international of Lula, Chavez and Castro!

For a new Bolshevik/Leninist International to lead the revolution in Latin America!

For a Socialist United States of Latin America!

In Aotearoa/NZ today the question of who controls the Foreshore and Seabed poses the need for workers occupations that impose workers’ control. In Canada recently workers’ occupied the world's largest producer of aluminum, Montréal-based Alcan. In Argentina, 100’s of occupations have taken place in the last 3 years, and the problems facing workers in winning and retaining control have become acute as in the case of SASETRU a pasta plant occupied by workers who were then evicted by the Workers’ Party in league with the Kirchner regime. The lesson of these occupations is that workers must build workers councils and armed workers defence committees prepared to physically defend the occupations from both the state and the anti-worker elements in the labour movement. Occupations will fail unless they are a step towards genuine workers control.

In Canada a recent occupation has begun this process but so far fallen far short of workers control. The Marxist reports (5 Feb www.marxist.com) : “Alcan announced on January 22, 2004 that it was closing its Jonquière Soderburg smelter in Arvida, Québec. In order to protect their jobs, the unionized workers of the smelter have seized it and demanded that it either remain open, or that Alcan replace the smelter with a new one…In the absence of this promise, the workers will not talk. There has as yet been no deadline announced by the company to work out a deal, although they claim that they will take back the plant and proceed with the closure.”

So far the occupation is not to control the plant but to pressure the bosses into keeping it open, or building a new plant. The unions have sought support from the public and called for protest actions and “talked of a general strike”. But as the Marxist points out the bosses are mobilising the ‘entire capitalist system” – the media and the state as well as other companies –to smash this occupation. The workers cannot win without taking this occupation to a new level and “nationalising the entire economy under workers’ control”. True, but how to do this?

The Marxist says: “The only way these factories and shops under workers' control can be maintained is if socialism and a nationally planned economy replace the chaos and anarchy of capitalism… the bosses are unifying to sabotage the efforts of the workers in these factories, and without the assistance of a genuine workers' state, these efforts will not be defeated.”

Yes, but this is not something that will happen without a struggle to turn occupations into genuine workers’ control over all industry based on rank and file worker’s councils and militias. The case of SASETRU in Buenos Aries shows that without such organs of workers power, occupations are isolated and smashed by the state and its agents.

14 of November of 2003, SASETRU a pasta plant that had been occupied by workers under the leadership of Polo Obrero (a piquetero organisation aligned to PO, the Workers’ Party) was violently seized by thugs of Polo Obrero and the workers evicted at pistol point. Why, when PO had lead the occupation, did it turn around and evict the workers?

The answer is that in Argentina, Kirchner is using the left bureaucracy formed in the unemployed (piquetero) movement to contain genuine moves towards workers control.

As we have reported in previous issues of Class Struggle, the workers occupations of Brukman and Zanon have tried to go beyond the legal forms imposed by the state, such as workers’ cooperatives where the workers become shareholders in capitalist firms, to demand nationalisation under workers control without compensation. The state has tried to smash these occupations but found that a legal compromise with the workers was the best way of dealing with them. They used the left bureaucracy in the unions to impose these compromise deals. PO already showed in the case of Brukman that it favoured a legal process of workers cooperatives. Brukman is now a cooperative formed under Buenos Aires local government bylaws. The left bureaucracy as a result of these deals with the state gains influence with the state as managers of the jobs plans (state funded job schemes contracted out to the piquetero bureaucracies).

Polo Obrero occupied SASETRU to advance its bureaucratic power as an agency of the state apparatus. But it found that the workers were not prepared to play along with a union imposed hierarchy running the factory. They formed a democratic workers management committee to challenge PO bureaucratic control. The PO attacked this democratic committee as ‘agents of Kirchner’ etc. This led to their eviction and their struggle to organise support to reclaim the factory under workers’ control. Proving PO wrong, the workers did not go to the Kirchner begging him or the police or the courts to reinstate them. This of course is the usual method of PO itself. Instead the evicted workers have called other workers organisations to support the setting up of a ‘workers court’ to sit in judgment on Polo Obrero and its mother party, the Workers Party. At a meeting on January 22 the workers committee and the local neighbourhood assemblies voted to form an International Moral Tribunal to try the PO leaders for the eviction of SASETRU but also for the attack on one of the leaders of the revolutionary group Workers Democracy last year.

What the SASETRU struggles shows is that all occupations must be turned into real workers control under workers democratic management backed by strong support from workers organisations and militias. Otherwise they become trapped as forms of capitalist property, such as cooperatives where workers remain exploited by the bosses, or occupations controlled by the union bureaucrats in deals done with the state to hold back the development of the struggle for real workers control. The occupation of ALCAN has not yet gone beyond the bureaucracy’s agenda of putting demands on the boss against closure. The occupation of SASETRU has shown that when workers try to take control, the unions will use violence on behalf of the bosses to smash the occupation. The lessons are clear.

The recent decision by Microsoft to close down its chat rooms is the latest development in what is fast becoming a growth industry. It claims that it has done so to protect children from stranger danger on the net. A more likely explanation is that there was no money in the chat rooms for the giant corporation. In virtually the same sentence announcing the closure of chat rooms came the news that a new pay-for chat service was to be set up. Yet another way for Gates and co to make money out of the net. Closing down the free chat rooms was the perfect PR exercise for them. In one hit they get rid of an area that provided no profit and garner support and praise from the burgeoning number of Internet busy body groups such as The Internet safety group.

One has to wonder whether these groups are naive or dishonest. The closing down of chat rooms by Microsoft will not stem the flow of online chat. There are plenty of alternatives for people (including the young) to indulge in what must be one of the most time-wasting phenomena of the net. IRC (Internet relay chat) was around long before Microsoft stuck it’s nose in and I imagine will continue to be around for a lot longer. IRC is just one of a host of services offering real-time chat.

When listening to spokespeople from organizations such as The Internet Safety group we are reminded of people who talk up the war on drugs as if it was a war they were winning. Yet every year more and more people at younger and younger ages are trying drugs.

It almost seems like the Internet Safety group does not understand the anarchic nature of the net and cannot grasp that this is at the very core of what the net is about. Attempts to control and limit what goes on only play into the hands of giant corporations such as Microsoft and the state.

Writing for Spiked on Line Sandy Starr makes the following observations:

“Surely such rare incidents, while distressing, do not justify shutting down a service used by millions of people? And why should a communications medium bear responsibility for the activities of those who use it? Paedophilia was not created by the Internet, but existed beforehand. And underage girls have been running away with older men long before the Internet was invented.” (Spiked Online 26 September, 2003)

And further, referring to a discussion on The Jeremy Vine Show she comments:

“John Carr, associate director of the charity National Children's Homes, was also on the show. He argued: 'I'm sure for the great majority of children who used chat rooms; they were perfectly safe most of the time. But sadly, over the past two or three years, there have been at least 26, 27 cases, thereabouts, where children, typically 13- or 14-year-old girls, have gone in there, met somebody, been groomed by them, who's persuaded them to meet them in real life, where they've then been raped or otherwise seriously sexually assaulted. And we only know about those because the guys were caught, convicted and sent to jail. What we don't know about are all of the cases where the police couldn't get enough evidence together.”

This argument highlights a problem with today's reactions to the paedophile panic. It takes a small number of cases - '26, 27 cases, thereabouts' - and blows them out of proportion. It invokes the category of 'grooming' to confuse communication between a child and an adult, where the child comes to no tangible harm, with actual child abuse. And it makes unknown quantities out to be sinister, suggesting that there is a terrible multitude of cases of child abuse that 'we don't know about'.

Recently a law has been passed in England against what is being called “online grooming.” This is one of most vague concepts ever put into law. It moves away for the notion of punishing people for what they do to a world in which people are punished for what they think.

Like most laws of this kind it is also dealing with a perception rather than a reality. The number of cases of children being abducted over the net by strangers they have chatted with is so low as to be unmeasureable when you take into account the hundreds of thousands of children who chat without any problems day in day out.

Now when children are abducted by strangers (which, thank goodness, happens as infrequently as it did ten years ago) the immediate question seems to arise as to whether the children had been chatting with strangers on the net. The recent case of the two young girls from Soham in England is an example of this. As soon as it was found that the girls had been using a computer on the afternoon of the disappearance the media went into a frenzy. It seems as if the very act of a child turning on the pc has become a health hazard.

But this demonisation of the net is not something that has happened in the last six months. The capitalist world doesn’t like the net for a wide variety of reasons, the primary one being they don’t own and control it. Emily Bell, writing in The Guardian about the Microsoft decision to close it’ free chat rooms makes the following observation about the Internet is viewed by many:

“It is littered it seems not just with gurning paedophiles, but with spotty-faced science students "stealing music"; mad terrorists swapping bomb recipes; snake-oil salesmen desperate to increase the size of your penis; adverts for Viagra, Russian brides and cheap loans. A refuge for the socially dysfunctional and the sexually perverted. When Gary Hart was sentenced to five years in jail for causing death by dangerous driving after his car careered on to the rail tracks at Selby, newspaper reports pointed to the fact he had spent the previous evening talking to a woman he had met on the internet - as if this was the signifier of a moral turpitude which made his crime all the worse.” (The Guardian,September 25, 2003).

The Internet, it seems, has become an out-of-control monster which must be controlled before (like some invention of a mad scientist in a B-grade horror movie) it kills us all. And if you want to get people to fear something, what better way to do it than play the trump card of “your children are at risk.” The natural instinct of all animals to protect their offspring kicks in.

The reality (as outlined above) is that children are far more at risk of being run over by a car than from anything adverse happening to them while they are chatting online.

The sort of Internet groups like “The Internet Safety group” would like to see is effectively not the Internet at all, but some bland, boring, state and corporation controlled medium. Once again quoting from Spiked online.

“John Carr provided listeners of the Jeremy Vine Show with a chilling vision of what he would like to see the internet become: 'People behave badly on the internet because they think they can get away with it. If we can convince them that there's a 99.99 per cent probability that if they commit a crime, they can be quickly identified and apprehended, they'll stop doing it. And then we can have the chat rooms back again, and they'll be a lot safer than they are today.”

This vision of the Internet may be comforting to Carr. But for the rest of us, an Internet where 'there's a 99.99 per cent probability' of being 'identified and apprehended' for what you say and with whom you fraternise, isn't an Internet worth having.

The fact that the net contains content which we might find offensive is at the very heart of what the net is about. Noam Chomsky said that being in favour of free speech means you are in favour of it for views you disagree with. Many on the left talk a lot about being opposed to censorship but don’t put there money where there mouth is when it comes to the acid test. Attempts to ban and shutdown racist and bomb-building websites (among others) are met with silence or worse still support from some so-called socialist and Marxists. They miss the point that these websites can only exist because of the very nature of the net. It is a free for all which allows space for every point of view, no matter how extreme.

Just about every major Trotskyist tendency has a site on the net. In 30 minutes you can catch up on what different groups views are on world and local events and much of this information is updated regularly which means you don’t have to wait a month or two as did when all their thoughts were contained in a written publication. We must not be fooled into ceding control of the net to the state or to the capitalists.

During the recent Bush Blair invasion of Iraq net surfers could quickly find sites that gave them information to counter the capitalist lies about Iraq. Sites like Indymedia only exit because of the Internet. As recently as ten years ago you would have to hunt round for an alternative point of view, often waiting weeks for left-wing publications which, in the case of New Zealand, were mostly imported.

If we really do want to change the world then we must use every means at our disposal to do so. One of these means is the Internet. This is why we must oppose control of the net by capitalists. The sort of Internet they want is not an Internet worth having.

Cuba’s government recently passed a law which limits internet access to those, such as officially recognised businesses and government offices, with special telephone accounts payable in US dollars. The law is an attempt to stop ordinary Cubans surfing the web. Amnesty International has attacked Castro’s anti-internet law, calling it "Yet another attempt to cut off Cubans' access to alternative views and a space for discussing them."

But Amnesty International’s complaints about Castro's refusal of net access to Cubans are not matched by condemnations of the United States-organised trade embargo and military harassment which force Cuba to operate as a siege state. It's actually the US government and the Cuban capitalist class in exile who bear ultimate responsibility for Castro's repression. The US has been waging economic and occasionally military war on Cuba for over forty years.
The US siege of Cuba has involved the use of stations like Radio Marti (named, outrageously, after a Cuban anti-imperialist fighter) to broadcast a lot of false and inflammatory information designed to create panic in the country and ultimately to facilitate a second US invasion. George Bush the younger has stepped up the anti-Cuba campaign. Recently Otto Reich, Bush’s right-hand man on Latin American affairs, planted threats against the Cuba and its ally Venezuelan in a series of right-wing US publications including the Wall Street Journal and the Miami Herald.

Hate for Bush’s plans for South America should not imply love for the way Castro runs Cuba. Castro is a Stalinist bureaucrat who is strangling Cuba’s revolution. Cuba’s socialised property and planned economy make it a post-capitalist state, and allow its people to enjoy health and education systems which are an inspiration to millions of workers around the world. But Castro only overturned capitalism from above because he wanted his rule to be bankrolled by the Soviet Union’s bureaucracy, which in turn owed its position to its hijacking of the original workers’ revolution of 1917. Castro was never and will never be interested in workers' democracy and the rule of the soviets (workers' councils). Since the fall of the Soviet Union Castro has been moving to follow the ‘Chinese road’ and restore capitalism. Cuba now has the US greenback as an unofficial currency, and foreign investment is being welcomed.

Like all Stalinists Castro uses the strength of the workers he controls to cut deals with the bosses, deals which see the workers cooperating with capital. Castro wants to see strong ‘national capitalisms’ throughout South America, as a counterweight to US imperialism. Hence Castro's closeness to Brazil’s President Lula, Argentina’s President Kirchner, and Ecuador’s President Guitterez. Castro favours a strategic alliance between South American national capitalism and the European Union, and sees the multilateral imperialism of institutions like the United Nations as the alternative to US unilateral imperialism. Hence Cuba's record of support for the genocidal sanctions against Iraq.

In revolutionary situations Castro always plays a counter-revolutionary role. When the ‘Argentinazo’ smashed the de la Rua government at the end of 2001 and revolution seemed on the cards, Castro made a speech endorsing the Peronist (social democratic) President Saa and telling protesters to get off the streets. Luckily Castro was ignored, and another three governments fell. Undaunted, Castro flew into Buenos Aires to attend the inauguration of the Peronist Kirchner. On the same day the CWG’s comrades in the Democracia Obrero (Workers Democracy) group were attacked by Kirchner’s armed cops, who were trying to recapture the occupied factory of Brukman. While Castro and Chavez lauded Kirchner and sipped cocktails, Kirchner’s cops clubbed revolutionary workers. The best of the South American left now recognises that defending and spreading Cuba's revolution means overthrowing Castro.

But no true critic of Castro should fail to condemn the US war on Cuba. Cuba's right to repress Radio Marti and similar internet operations must also be acknowledged. To use a comparison: corruption amongst trade union bureaucrats should be criticised when it occurs, but the criticism has to come from within the labour movement and the left, not from the bosses, or from a point of view uncritical of the bosses.
Activists who run open-access left-wing ‘indymedia’ websites have discussed subverting Castro’s ban on internet access by setting up a Cuban indymedia-in-exile. According to the Cuban government’s own estimates, 40,000 Cubans already illegally access the net. But how could a Cuba indymedia avoid being co-opted by the Cuba-bashers on the right? Amnesty International’s criticism of Cuba has been seized upon by right-wingers eager to discredit the Cuban revolution and the new revolutionary movements sweeping other Latin American countries today.

There are a number of campaigns centred in the US against the siege of Cuba by the US. If indymedia activists in the US and round the world got involved in these campaigns, then they'd be in a good position to constructively criticise the Cuban Communist Party's policies. The Party has tens of thousands of sincere rank and file activist members, and a pro-revolution but anti-Stalinist message could find an echo amongst them.

Part One

(1) Racism, Marxism and Internationalism

New Zealand’s massive demonstrations against the Springbok Tour in 1981 became, especially in Auckland, demonstrations of Polynesian protest against racism. In spite of every effort by HART leaders and the Workers’ Communist League (WCL) and the loyal opposition of ‘labour left’, it proved impossible to limit the struggle against racism to South African apartheid. The slogans directed against South Africa were also directed against the New Zealand government’s racist policies at home. ‘Protesting’ every inch of the way, the HART leaders were forced to accept that the struggles against racism in South Africa and New Zealand were both part of the same international struggle against racism.

So long as South African racism alone was attacked, postures of moral outrage could be adopted and political issues avoided. The New Zealand movement refused to even discuss the political differences between the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan African Congress (PAC). Once it could no longer be denied that racism was at home and alive and well in Queen St., the need to bring the South African struggle home forced the movement to rub its nose in grubby politics. Turning moral outrage against Bantustans into moral outrage at the oppression of Maori people, black radicals adopted the positions of the PAC, hiding behind Protestant morality and issuing ultimatums that the ‘black movement’ should be given the same uncritical support as that HART gave to the ANC/PAC.

This is not only a means of avoiding political debate about the relationship between race and class, but of keeping democracy out of the anti-racist movement. Without political debate on the character of racism in Aotearoa, its relation to capitalism, and the working class, white militants turning toward anti-racist working class internationalism, away from single-issue moralism, will not move forward.

Just as the entire South African left has chosen, is choosing, and will chose between the opposed political lines of ANC and PAC (and also the Non-European Unity Movement) so, at a time when a mass movement in Aotearoa is forced to take a stand on New Zealand racism, it must face political choices between different political lines. The same choices present themselves, essentially as on the pakeha left, between populism and Marxism, but it is always populism which tries to avoid debate and political struggle.

The anti-racist movement will grow powerful and break the alliance Muldoon tried to forge with the backward sections of the working class during the Tour only by making New Zealand racism towards its own Bantustans in the Pacific and at home an issue with workers. That involves raising, debating and resolving the relationship between race and class – the issue which ‘Black Unity’ evades in every way at every point. The task is to bring the South African war back home by showing that racism is an international creation of imperialism, and that it can only be brought to an end by the international working class.

“Communists” wrote Marx, “are distinguished from other working class parties by this alone: in the national struggles of the proletarians of all the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality, in the various stages of development which the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interest of the movement as a whole.” (Communist Manifesto)

The working class of this area of the Pacific, Polynesia, is made up of both Pakehas and Polynesians. They work in the same factories, queue for the same unemployment benefits, and live in the same boarding houses. Their interests are common interests; their fight against imperialism, capitalism in its epoch of parasitism and decay, is a common fight. In the South Pacific, the working class cannot develop a clear consciousness of its interests and goals outside the framework of working class internationalism. Against imperialism and its class collaborators, the Spartacist League opposes the revolutionary tradition, the tradition of the Communist Manifesto, the tradition of working class internationalism.

In this pamphlet, the Spartacist League puts forward its position on the question of racism and capitalism. We oppose those white ‘left’ chauvinist groups like the Socialist Unity Party and the Workers’ Communist League, who suppress the history of the Polynesian working classes and subordinate the national rights of Polynesians to a white-racist, reformist, programme to “fight racism”. We oppose just as firmly the petty-bourgeois black populists who too turn their backs on the proletarian history of their peoples, in order to establish “sovereignty” on capitalism’s terms. We also oppose those radical groups like HART, the Socialist Action League and the Republican Movement, who in giving their uncritical support to black populism, also give their support to imperialism’s attempts to deepen divisions in the working class in order to smash working class internationalism. The Spartacist League is uncompromising in exposing those forms of petty-bourgeois chauvinism, and we expect to be called all sorts of names for doing so. But let them be called in public debate, and the real issues argued.

(2) Super-Exploitation, Super-oppression and the reserve army of ‘cheap labour’

The weakness of the New Zealand ‘Marxist’ left finds its clearest expression in the fact that the debates about the special characteristics of Australasian capitalist development take place among Northern Hemisphere Marxists, with no participation from nor even echo among New Zealand Marxists. Sutch and Roth, whose incomprehension of Marx’s analysis of the Wakefield system leads to the acceptance of a racist theory of the export of English capitalism to New Zealand still dominate the little debate there is on the development of Australasian capitalism. [1]

Meanwhile in European debates over the crucial issue of the character of the contemporary world imperialist system, much discussion has taken place on the position of relatively high-wage agricultural exporting capitalist countries such as Australia and New Zealand. The purpose of the debate, in particular between Emmanuel on the one hand, and Mandel and Bettelheim on the other, has been to explain the differences separating such countries from poorer third-world countries whose exports are predominantly agricultural also.[2]In contrast, to Marxists groups whose ‘New Zealand-centredness’ impoverishes Marxism, such as the Workers’ Communist League, we intervene in the debates of the internationalist Marxist movement.

The importance of this debate is that of clarifying the explanation of why there emerged in New Zealand a high-wage largely white working class and a relatively low-wage Polynesian ‘reserve army of labour’, combining in the one country the divisions introduced into the world proletariat by imperialism. Without such an explanation, there can be no Marxist, materialist, explanation of the evolution of the Maori proletariat, and its history as the most advanced section of the New Zealand working class.

Mandel, in his book Late Capitalism, argues that:

“In the ‘empty’ countries of Australia and New Zealand the whole population was incorporated from the outset into the capitalist production of commodities. This population consisted principally of independent commodity producers who were themselves owners of their means of production (proprietors of extremely cheap or free land which was available in abundance) and who were therefore guaranteed a high minimum level of existence from the very start, with which the prices of commodity labour power had to compete in order to allow wage labour to come into being at all. In Portugal or Algeria, by contrast, the mass of the population existed outside the realm of capitalist commodity production. The slow displacement of pre-capitalist relations of production led to the increasing immiseration of the indigenous population, which became willing to sell its labour power at ever lower prices in order to be able to bear at least part of the ever more oppressive burden of ground-rent, usury and taxes. The destruction of the native (sic) handicrafts and the separation of indigenous peasants from their land and soil was therefore accompanied in the long run by the secular growth of an industrial reserve army, which explains the blocking of wages and needs instead of simply proceeding from it axiomatically.” (p.364)

Mandel’s acceptance of the ‘empty country’ hypothesis in the case of New Zealand carries a stage further a racist myth: capitalism was not simply ‘exported’ from Britain, its establishment required the prior expropriation of the Polynesian population, who far from ‘disappearing’, continued in existence as a section of the proletariat. Mandel’s argument, however, does have the merit of recognising (unlike his Socialist Action League ‘co-thinkers’) the significance of independent producers in 19^th century New Zealand.

This being so, Mandel’s distinction between New Zealand on the one hand and Portugal and Algeria on the other breaks down. The dominance of white independent commodity producers followed from the land wars fought to expropriate by force large areas of the best and most strongly coveted Maori land; increased during the long period of ‘slow displacement’ – through the operation of the capitalist land market – of the remnants of the Polynesian mode of production, which maintained a tenuous existence on increasingly marginal land, that least attractive to capitalist farmers. On this marginal land, Mandel’s statement about Portugal and Algeria applies: “the mass of the population existed outside the realm of capitalist commodity production. The slow displacement of pre-capitalist modes of production led to the increasing immiseration of the indigenous population, which became willing to sell its labour power at ever lower prices…”. Side by side with the rise of white independent commodity producers, in Mandel’s words, “guaranteed a high minimum level of existence from the very start”, the expropriated Maori population was denied by the facts of continuing expropriation, and land alienation, access to this “high minimum level”.

But while expropriation and continued land sales made possible the rise of commodity production, it was the survival of remnants of the Polynesian mode of production which made the super-exploitation of the Maori rural reserve army of cheap labour possible.[3] Pre-capitalist forms of property in land and traditions of mutual economic support within tribes provided means of subsistence outside that which could be bought with wages in the market. This meant that Maori workers could be paid low wages (below the cost of reproduction of labour power in the market) and employed as casual or seasonal labour. As land values dropped further and more land was alienated, the dependence of the Maori rural reserve army on its own means of subsistence lessened but without any equalisation of the low wage and the ‘high minimum level” set by commodity production.

The history of the super-exploitation of the Polynesian workers is the history of the continued existence of the Polynesian mode of production within the framework of the dominant capitalist relations of production. So long as the Polynesian mode of production survives within the hostile capitalist environment, the wages of Maori workers are forced below the value of labour power. While the continued possession of some Maori land may slow down the proletarianisation of the Maori people, it cannot prevent and has not prevented it. It ensures, on the contrary, that when Maori workers enter the proletariat, they do so on the worst terms, as the lowest stratum of the class. This is not the result of racism, though this process has produced and will continue to produce racism. It arises rather from the logic of a slow and protracted expropriation of a pre-capitalist mode of production by the capitalist mode, at every point representing continuous immiseration of the indigenous population as the value of Maori land declines and the amount of land owned is reduced in area and fertility. Similar processes take place in other Polynesian islands but even more slowly.

So long as capitalism had a revolutionary character, it smashed the remnants of feudalism in its European centres, expropriating thousands of proletarians and throwing them onto the labour market as a reserve army. Before this first stage of ‘primitive accumulation’ had been completed in Europe, imperialism had penetrated into the colonial periphery to organise large-scale capitalist production of raw materials and to generate super-profits based upon the super-exploitation of cheap colonial labour power. This primitive accumulation in the colonies set limits to the expropriation of pre-capitalist modes of production, creating dependent national economies each with specific combinations of pre-capitalist, semi-capitalist and capitalist relations of production. The dominance of imperial capital from the outset limited the power of local capital to escape its dependence on imperialism and to develop its industrial base and its proletariat, allowing pre- and semi-capitalist modes of production to survive.

In New Zealand the specific combination of modes of production involved the Polynesian mode of production, petty commodity production as well as capitalist farming. The result was that wages offered to white workers had to be higher than the subsistence level of small-scale farming, while those paid to the Maori reserve army of cheap labour enabled the development of capitalist agriculture in New Zealand.[4] The establishment of the arbitration system after 1894 represented state acceptance of the dual labour market – relatively high wages and good conditions for urban white workers subject to arbitration, and low wages to rural Maori workers whose wages and conditions were not protected by state-enforced labour laws.

In Mandel’s terms, New Zealand combined some of the features of the United States and Australia as high-wage countries along with characteristics of low-wage countries like Algeria and Portugal. With changes in Maori land laws, ‘Maori land’ became less a site of a Polynesian mode and more a site of a peasant mode of production based upon subsistence agriculture. As the petty commodity mode of production among white farmers is transformed into intensive capitalist agriculture, the peasant mode of production is consolidated in ‘Maori land’. It is this form of economic organisation which today is defended in struggles for ‘Maori land rights’. This transition from a Polynesian to Peasant mode of production was not accomplished peacefully –Te Whiti’s struggle at Parihaka, and to some extent Rua’s as Maugapohatu, mark definitive defeats of attempts to defend the Polynesian mode of production in unfavourable historical circumstances.

New Zealand’s combination of high and low-wage workers is best understood by comparison with South Africa. There the land wars to expropriate the indigenous modes of production were carried through by the Boers, who replaced them with small-scale petty commodity production similar to New Zealand sheep farming. Then, in the Boer war, the states set up by the Afrikaner petty producers were militarily defeated by British imperialism. The British represented the interests of large mining capital, and used the ideology and practice of Boer apartheid to divide the working class on colour lines, and so force down wages. It was the existence of white peasant farming which set relatively high wages for white workers, while the African population, like the Maori, was pushed out of the capitalist economy to form a reserve army of labour. When the African re-entered the capitalist economy, it was under conditions that one writer describes as follows:[5]

“When the migrant labourer has access to means of subsistence outside the capitalist sector, as he does in South Africa, the relationship between wages and the cost of the production and reproduction of labour-power means the capitalist is able to pay the worker below the cost of his reproduction”.

This, as we have argued, is similar to the position in New Zealand. In both cases part of the costs of reproduction of indigenous labour-power is being met by the traditional labour of those (particularly women) outside the capitalist mode of production. South Africa’s development diverged from New Zealand’s in that the CMP displaced the petty commodity MOP in agriculture by force, a result of British imperialism’s drive to protect large-scale mining capital. The absence of any large-scale mineral or other raw material resources in New Zealand meant that massive capital investment such as in South Africa did not take place. This held back the development of industry and the rate of conversion of petty commodity production into capitalist agriculture, and allowed the survival of comprador small capital dominated by British finance, shipping and meat exporting capital. These differences however, are differences of pace and scale, not of substance. An accelerated concentration of capital in New Zealand and the South Pacific would utilise existing wage differentials between white and Polynesian workers to entrench an apartheid-like system. Under capitalism, South Africa represents the future of Polynesia.

It is because Marxists understand and have a programme to end the super-exploitation and super-oppression of non-white racial groups under capitalism that they reject all subjective conceptions of oppression. Super-oppression exists because of super-exploitation of ‘cheap labour’, that is, the payment of wages below the socially necessary average for the reproduction of labour-power. Super-oppression exists because of the exploitation of Polynesian workers in the factories and freezing works of New Zealand and the South Pacific. A ‘return to the land’ under capitalism will only increase existing super-exploitation, by enabling white capitalists to pay wages more and more below subsistence level. Only under socialism – that is through the conquest by black and white proletarians of both industry and the land –can a nationalised land be restored to the Polynesian people, together with the abolition of wage slavery. ‘Land rights’ under capitalism means Bantustans – the Pacific Islands are becoming more like Bantustans year by year – or ‘native reserves’ like those in Queensland, and intensified exploitation of black labour-power.

(3) The Workers of Polynesia: Their Role and History

The real history of the working class in Aotearoa and the Pacific has still to be written. It begins with the strikes against the first agents of imperialism, the missionaries, for the most basic and elementary requirement of the worker – the payment of wages. The struggle against capitalist missionaries, shipowners and ‘traders’ for the conversion of unpaid labour into wage labour was a long and bitter struggle. In many cases Polynesian people resorted to the use of arms to coerce the agents of European imperialism into giving themselves and pakeha workers alike the same wages and conditions. Throughout the history of capitalism in Polynesia, the existence of a Polynesian mode of production in any form has always been used by the white capitalist ruling class to ‘justify’ a ‘special’ wage rate for Polynesians – initially a ‘special’ rate which was no wages at all!

In 1841 in Nelson, the first strike of pakeha workers in Polynesia for piece work at higher rates took place. The ruling class feared that the labourers would rise and take possession of the fort at Nelson. The Maori population, dispossessed of their land, and turned into wage workers, also threatened this fort. The two groups opposed to the ruling class failed to make common cause, the colonial authorities maintained their power, and the pakeha workers were bought off by leases or sales of small pieces of land. The land became the wedge driven by British imperialism between pakeha workers and Polynesians who were expropriated and turned into a reserve army. This division between pakeha and Polynesian workers remained through most of the nineteenth century: the pakeha worker, when militant, was offered land, so that he ceased to depend for his livelihood solely on wages. Maori land in the Polynesian island most suited to farming, Aotearoa, was purchased, and the Maori forced more and more to work for wages for a living, as the Polynesian mode of production was increasingly subordinated to the Capitalist mode.

Together the pakeha and the Capitalist mode of production arrived in Polynesia, displacing the formerly existing Polynesian mode of production in Aotearoa, the centre of white settlement, by force of arms in the land wars, and ‘peacefully’ by land sales and duplicity before and after those wars. Imperialism in the South Pacific meant the imposition of capitalism, ultimately by force or arms (Tahiti, Hawaii, and Samoa as well as Aotearoa) on the Polynesian peoples. In the centre of Polynesian capitalism, Aotearoa, the destruction of the Polynesian mode of production began the process of proletarianisation of the Maori people with the expropriation of the Waikato people. There was bitter class conflict even before the New Zealand ruling class aided by British imperialism turned their armies against the Taranaki and Waikato people. Maori workers’ strikes for higher wages, for mail carriage and transportation services, and the building of colonial government institutions, increased. Maori producers boycotted European markets until reasonable prices were paid. So not only did the ruling class use force to grab the land for future petty capitalist agriculture, they picked up the gun to put an end to these bitter class struggles and to maintain Maori ‘cheap labour’.

New Zealand is the exception rather than the rule among Polynesian islands where only Hawaii and Tahiti besides New Zealand have large white settler populations. Elsewhere, the older Polynesian mode has been transformed into a predominantly peasant mode of production (with many survivals of the older mode however) with the same result of enabling overseas companies, usually from the dominant colonial power, to pay Polynesian labour-power below its cost of reproduction while exploiting Polynesian resources. As communal labour and land ownership under the Polynesian mode has been eroded, productivity and food exports have fallen, and with them living standards. The island governments have themselves required support of aid and wages earned in New Zealand to help meet the costs of government and its services.

The incorporation of the island states into the world capitalist economy increases the pressure on peasant economies, and proletarianises thousands of islanders. Their land becomes inadequate even for subsistence agriculture as individualisation of land titles is linked to population increase – an example of the capitalist law of surplus population. At the same time, colonial practices of indirect rule through chiefs and others has assimilated the traditional role of chief in the Polynesian mode to a role approaching that of landlord, claiming a large part of the workers’ surplus-labour. As well as this, the world capitalist economy forces the small island economies more and more towards bankruptcy, limiting drastically what they can buy, lowering living standards and pauperising the people. The possession of land no longer guarantees adequate income. The depreciation of Polynesian-owned land values outside Aotearoa serves the same purpose as the expropriation of land in Aotearoa – forced proletarianisation.

The more advanced country, Aotearoa, shows the future of the less developed. As the world crisis deepens, and national barriers to the expansion of the productive forces reflect capitalist social relations which threaten the very existence of Polynesian island economies, the illusions of harmonious co-existence between the Polynesian/peasant modes and the world capitalist mode in crisis will be ruthlessly destroyed, as the Polynesian mode collapses, completing catastrophically the proletarianisation of Polynesia. Island independence will become an even more transparent fiction, masking the dictatorship of the Polynesian islands’ imperialist creditors whose power will be more absolute than that of the former colonial rulers, completing land alienation, increasing white petty bourgeois settlement, and subordinating the islands to imperialism’s war plans. Today these islands are on the edge of their own land wars, which they can win if they combine and fight against imperialism with the class struggle for international socialism they can learn about in the New Zealand working class.

The history of working peoples in the world is a history of the rise and development of the Capitalist mode of production, of its colonisation of pre-capitalist societies, of the sometimes violent, and sometimes economically forced ‘peaceful’ separation of the wage-workers from the land, and their herding into the big cities as an industrial reserve army of labour. Marx wrote in Capital about the history of the proletarianisation of European workers. Their migration to Polynesia, and their integration into the Capitalist mode, meant that they formed the bulk of the workers as capitalism shifted from agriculture towards manufacture, and began to form a labour aristocracy based on the privilege of high wages. As in England, there was a gap in time between the taking of the land and the dispossession of the Maori people – more or less complete by the end of the nineteenth century – and their employment as wage-workers in urban industry, which became a steady trend from the 1940’s onward. In this interval, trade unions had grown up whose members were predominantly pakeha and which were controlled by a white labour bureaucracy more and more under the domination of the racist apparatus of the capitalist state. Polynesian workers had to struggle to have their voice heard and their interests defended by these bureaucratic organisations.

European annexation of Polynesia meant and still means the imposition of a white ruling class on the Polynesian people, and their forced conversion from owners of common land, into increasingly landless, dependent wage workers. ‘European civilisation’ means the expropriation and immiseration of pre-capitalist people. But in creating a Polynesian proletariat, capitalism creates its own gravediggers. Capitalism expropriated Polynesians in armed struggle; in turn, capitalism will similarly be destroyed. The Polynesian people will regain their land as proletarians, by expropriating their expropriators.

Part Two in next issue of Class Struggle.

Few Americans have contributed as much to American literature in the 20^th Century as Gore Vidal. Vidal has been the writer of many great American novels and plays including some which were extremely controversial at the time they were written for dealing such taboo subjects as homosexuality in a positive light.

Vidal is himself gay and perhaps his experiences of discrimination have contributed to his political views. He came from an upper-class establishment background and was groomed for public office following in family footsteps (his grandfather was a senator). From his time as a young adult he began to turn from the path that seemed to be laid out before him and as he has got older his politics seemed to have consolidated into a sort of broad left wing approach to life.

His most recent books reflect his politics in that they have mainly been collections of essays criticizing the United States Government on a broad range of subjects. However, his latest two books “Dreaming War” and “Perpetual war for perpetual peace” are collections of essays on what seems to be his favourite subject, American foreign policy.

He is a trenchant critic of American foreign policy and it is here that he is at his strongest. Few Americans can compete with the depth of his understanding and analysis of what the US has been doing for the last 50 years. As well as having a razor sharp analysis he is also very witty in many of his books and essays. Unfortunately, his wit isn’t a large feature of the essays in “Dreaming War,” but given the subject matter perhaps there’s not a lot to joke about.

The book is a collection of essays mainly on American foreign policy. Some of the essays were written for publications such as “The Nation,” “Vanity Fair” and “The Times Literary supplement” but many simply have a date at the end indicating when they were written. The essays were written between the 1990’s and the present day giving a vista of the Clinton and Bush years and the policies they have inflicted on the world.

The subject matter is not, however, limited to modern day foreign policy. One of the most interesting essays, “Japanese intentions in the Second World War” concerns the subject of the origins of American entry into that conflict. I was surprised to find that the middle of the book goes into a fair amount of detail on American foreign policy from the Second World War. In fact, at first I found it mildly irritating as I was looking forward to seeing Vidal bend his intellect and wit to sticking the knife into the current regime.

However, I persisted through essays that I found slightly dry and carrying a subject matter that was not as much interest to me. I’m glad I did because by the end of the book I realized Vidal had reminded me that modern-day American foreign policy didn’t materialize out of thin air. I learnt a lot from these essays and realized through reading them that as well as writing about modern US history, Vidal also lived through it.

One of the other joys of his works is not only his ability to put forward controversial points of view but bring to life subjects that often seem to get lost and forgotten. An example of this is his excellent essay “In the lair of the Octopus” which analyses American intervention in Guatemala in 1954.

Near the end of the collection of writings he writes on a more philosophical level about where the United States of America finds itself today. “The union of the state” deals with issues confronting the United States as a federal entity and comes up with some interesting suggestions, including splitting the republic up into “sections” with far greater autonomy than is currently enjoyed.

Finally the book ends with an enjoyable interview (“The last defender of the American Republic”). The subject is largely on American imperialism and looks at issues such as why September 11 happened. The only criticism I have is that the interview is far to short. In fact it seems to have been edited as it ends rather abruptly.

On the whole, “Dreaming War” is excellent and comes highly recommended. Vidal writes in a way which is both interesting and informative. I found out much that I didn’t know about US policies abroad over the last 50 years and can imagine that even the most knowledgeable person on US history will find the essays of value.

The only real criticism of the book is that like so many who have a broad left-wing liberal or social democratic view of the world Vidal seems to be better at criticizing than suggest concrete alternatives.

The fact that Gore Vidal is not a Marxist means his view of the world is not as much a class analysis as an analysis of imperialism. In my view you can’t separate the two. This is not to say that Vidal doesn’t recognize the term “class” and address it elsewhere. But like a lot of non-Marxist leftists he seems to almost fear looking at the world from a perspective of class conflict. This criticism aside I highly recommend this book as a worthwhile contribution to our understanding of imperialism.

[1] See in particular, Sutch’s Quest for Security in New Zealand. Sinclair, in his A History of New Zealand, accepts Sutch’s account of Marx’s view of the Wakefield system in order to attack Marxism.

[2] A. Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange (which includes comments by Charles Bettelheim, and E. Mandel, Late Capitalism.

[3] For a description of the characteristics of the Polynesian Modeof Production see M. Godelier, Perspectives in Marxist Anthropology, Cambridge, year, p 112 etc.

[4] See the discussion of the peasant mode of production in D.Bedggood, Rich and Poor in New Zealand. And on the ‘combination’ of modes of production, see J.McRae and D.Bedggood, ‘The Evolution of Capitalism in New Zealand’, Red Papers, No.3.

[5] H. Wolpe, ‘Capitalism and Cheap labour-power in South Africa: from segregation to Apartheid’, in Economy and Society, 1 (4),1972, p 434. See also R.Davies, ‘MiningCapital, the State and Unskilled White Workers in South Africa’, in Journal of South African Studies, 3 (2), April, 1977, p50-51.

Class Struggle is the bi-monthly of the Communist Workers’ Group.

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Socialise the Foreshore and all of Aotearoa

Employment Relations Law Reform Bill

ERA weak

Trade unions respond

Banning the Hijab (Islamic headscarf)

Report from Bolivia

Making the Revolution

COB ends truce with plans for general strike

Towards a Socialist Polynesia

Part One

Resolution