WELCOME TO THE RESISTANCE

Have you checked out the news on TV or in the papers lately? The two hot topics are the war in Iraq and the seabed and foreshore struggle here in Aotearoa. But have you noticed how similar the spin on the two subjects is? The way our politicians and news gurus tell it, a whole lot of trouble’s being stirred up by a minority of brown-skinned ‘extremists’.

But who can deny the similarities? In Iraq, George Bush’s troops are busy keeping Iraqis’ hands off their oil, in the name of freedom and democracy and the rule of law, while in Aotearoa Helen Clark is busy keeping Maori hands off the seabed and foreshore, in the name of the freedom and democracy and the rule of law. Is it any wonder that the White House has called this Labour government its ‘very, very, very good friend’, that Clark has troops in Iraq, and that the US has military facilities in Aotearoa?

Annette Sykes got it right when she said that the struggle in Iraq and the struggle in Aotearoa are one. When we march across Aotearoa against the theft of our seabed and foreshore we are facing down the same enemies as the defenders of Fallujah and Najaf. Our enemy is imperialism and the local capitalists who are the lackeys of the US and other imperialist states such as the EU and Japan.

THEIR FUTURE OR OURS?

Rich Americans and their local cronies want to rip Maori and other working class Kiwis off by defacing our coastline with their mansions, golf courses, and chopper pads. These thieves want to lease vast stretches of coast for sea farming businesses that will pay a pittance to their employees while sending huge profits offshore. Ultimately they want to trash the ‘Queen’s’ Chain by privatising entire beaches.

Our place within the ‘New, Improved Zealand’ being planned by the imperialists is clear – like the indigenous people of Hawaii, we will be asked to be grateful for low-paying jobs driving golf carts for American tourists across waterfront courses, or serving cocktails in five star hotels built for oil execs. The seabed and foreshore hikoi shows that Maori reject the US blueprint for the future just as surely as their Iraqi sisters and brothers do. We say that Aotearoa is wahi tapu, not an imperialists’ playground! But we need to learn some lessons from the Iraqis on how to fight back and defeat the imperialist invaders. The first lesson is that only the united working class can defeat imperialism!

MAORI AND PAKEHA UNITE TO FIGHT!

But Maori face a problem which the Iraqis have already overcome. Maori make up only 15% of the population of Aotearoa, and Brash and Clark have managed to convince most of the remaining 85% that the seabed and foreshore is not their issue. Polls show that a clear majority actually back Clark’s confiscation legislation.

In Iraq, the US has tried to divide the population along ethnic and religious lines, because it knows that a divided population is weak and easily conquered. But the Iraqis have defied the US by uniting across ethnic and religious lines to organize resistance to the occupiers. Look at the Shia giving blood for the wounded in Fallujah, and the Sunni and Shia marching side by side in unemployed workers’ demonstrations! We need the same sort of unity in Aotearoa!

It’s true that Maori are a minority of the population, but it’s also true that the vast majority of Maori are members of the working class, a group that also includes the vast majority of Pakeha. And, make no mistake, the seabed and foreshore is a workers’ issue!

Pakeha workers love the coastline just as much as Maori, and Pakeha workers hate being paid minimum wages for work in sea farms and hotels just as much as Maori workers. That’s why three trade unions with big Pakeha memberships have taken up a call by Maori trade unionists and announced their opposition to the theft of the seabed and foreshore.

UNIONS MUST TAKE A STAND ON THE FORESHORE

The Service and Food Workers Union, National Distribution Union and the Manufacturing and Construction Union have a combined membership of well over fifty thousand, and the Council of Trade Unions as a whole has a membership of over a quarter of a million. New Zealand unions have their own history of resistance to capitalism, symbolised by the years 1913 and 1951 and by working class leaders like Fred Evans and Jock Barnes. Or by Maori unionists like Zac Wallace who helped organize the trade union ‘green ban’ on Bastion Point in 1978 and led the workers during the Mangere Bridge lockout from 1987 to 1981. No government could ignore the strength of massive union strike action against the theft of the seabed and foreshore.

The Service and Food Workers Union has mobilised its members to protest Brash’s Maori bashing speeches – now the union should work to get members onto the hikoi, which is a much larger and more important protest against the same racism. The SFWU should also drop its political and financial support for Helen and her gang of thieves – after all, they are the ones who are actually implementing Brash’s agenda! We need to get trade union contingents on the hikoi, and committees to support the hikoi set up in worksites up and down the country. Talk to your pakeha workmates about this issue today!

Widespread Pakeha worker support can make the hikoi a huge show of working class strength against any government sell-out of Maori land to US, Japanese or Chinese bosses. On May the 5^th workers in Wellington should walk off the job and put their feet on the street! We need to build support for the physical occupations of the foreshore that will have to happen if before we can take control of this resource out of the hands of the bosses here and overseas and put it into the hands of the working people.

HAWKES BAY POINTS THE WAY

Action across racial lines to protect the seabed and foreshore isn’t an impossible dream – it’s happening already, in the Cape Kidnappers area at the bottom of Hawkes Bay. A US billionaire wants to build chalets for rich tourists all over the Cape, which is one of the most beautiful places on the North Island coast and an important breeding ground for birds. The people of the Bay have responded by staging a mini-hikoi which has united local hapu and Pakeha. Now the billionaire’s resource consent proposal is tied up in court and pressure is building on government. While the boss mobilises his millions to win in court, we can use the time to build on-the-ground support for an occupation of the site!

A LATIN AMERICAN LESSON

Sail east from Cape Kidnappers and the next piece of land you’ll hit is South America. You wouldn’t know from watching Holmes or reading the Herald, but it’s in South America that the solution to the seabed and foreshore crisis is on display every day. In the South American countries of Argentina and Venezuela, workers faced with economic crisis and job losses have taken over hundreds of factories, are running these factories themselves, and are defending their gains with their own militia. Like the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, today’s South American revolution has shown that workers can run their lives better than any boss.

Recently at Potaka, just to the west of Hick’s Bay, a hapu of Ngati Porou were planning to unilaterally set up a sea farming operation that would ignore anti-Maori planning and consent regulations. The Potaka crew wanted to run their farm collectively, sharing its income, and they emphasised that Pakeha were welcome on their foreshore. For now the Potaka hapu has withdrawn from confrontation with the state, but their operation had the potential to be a homegrown equivalent of the factory occupations in South America (we don’t have many big factories in Aotearoa, but we do have a very long coastline, and sea farming is a boom industry).

Maori and Pakeha workers should learn from Latin America, revive the spirit of Bastion Point and occupy key foreshore sites, especially those currently privately owned by rich corporates, and disprove the lie that this is a Maori land grab to keep pakeha Of the beach, but really a racially united workers’ occupations under collective ownership and control against all bosses, white, brown or gray.

BREAK WITH THE BROWN TABLE

The seabed and foreshore struggle is putting Labour’s Maori MPs to the test, and finding them wanting. All seven Maori electorate MPs had already lost a lot of mana by voting for the deployment of Kiwi troops, many of them Maori, to Afghanistan and Iraq. Now only Tariana Turia and Nanaia Mahuta are taking a stand against the seabed and foreshore confiscation legislation. The worst of this bad bunch is John ‘Uncle Tom’ Tamihere, who has been hanging round like a bad smell in Tariana’s Porirua patch, running down our movement with taxpayer-funded propaganda. With his excuses for racist policies Tamihere reminds us of Ben Couch, the token Maori minister in Muldoon’s cabinet who defended the Springbok tour and South Africa’s apartheid system. Get lost, John – you belong in the Orewa Rotary Club, not on the streets of Porirua!

It’s good that Labour has been put into power and exposed, because a lot of Maori workers had false hopes in Labour. But now that they’ve learned what Labour’s like, rank and file Maori members have to leave Tamihere and other Uncle Toms behind.

There is a lot of korero about a Maori party fronted by Tariana, but such a party will only be step forward if it reaches out to Pakeha allies by advancing policies that meet the needs of this country’s workers. The fiasco of Winston First has shown how useless it is for Maori to try to play National and Labour off against each other, when neither is any sort of ally for Maori workers.

Maori and pakeha workers need to get the CTU out of bed with Labour and elect a new leadership that can put up workers candidates for parliament. By building links now between the trade unions and the seabed and foreshore struggle we can help prepare the way for a real workers’ party that unites Pakeha and Maori on the basis of opposition to capitalism and imperialism.

               A real workers’ party would follow the South American example and build united strike action by the working class, not vote bums on seats in Wellington. Parliament diverts workers from the real struggle, because it can make them forget that real change happens on the street and in the workplace. The Uncle Toms can occupy Cabinet, but we’ll occupy the foreshore!

BEYOND MAY THE 5TH

Labour is desperate to pass the seabed and foreshore confiscation legislation on May the 5^th, and with Brash and the US breathing down its neck this government won’t stop attacking Maori. But Labour has woken the slumbering beast of Maori resistance, and for the rest of its life it will have to face a guerrilla war of protests, hikoi and occupations.

A new aukati has been crossed, and the flames of resistance lit at Rangiriri, Parihaka, and Maungapohatu and renewed at Raglan and Bastion Point have been kindled again. A new generation has taken the mantle of Te Kooti, Te Whiti, and Te Puea.

The new generation of Maori fighters can win this war if they can unite with their pakeha allies in a working class movement for socialism. Like their Iraqi sisters and brothers, the workers of Aotearoa have the power to stop US imperialism in its tracks.

Justin: The hikoi began today. A lot of people are talking about a repeat of the Great Land March of 1975. Some of the leaders of that hikoi are marching again. Some of the old flags are being used again. There’s a feeling of connection with that heroic past. The current situation represents a watershed in New Zealand politics like no other – it reflects the disillusionment of a whole generation with the institutionalised politics of the Treaty process. I think the thing could snowball. There’s a lot of interest, with iwi preparing big contingents. There have been a lot of enquiries from Aucklanders wanting to travel up north to take part in the early stages.

Jean, what are you as a Pakeha doing in a protest about what a lot of people still think of as a Maori issue?

Jean: The confiscation of the seabed and foreshore will be bad for all working class New Zealanders. The people who will benefit from Labour’s legislation will be capitalists who can afford to bid for leases on pieces of coast and buy blocks of coastal land and ultimately the foreshore itself. This legislation might look on the surface like nationalisation, but it’s actually about globalisation and the continuing privatisation of New Zealand. Don’t forget that it all started when a Maori legal challenge disrupted a plan to give a lease for sea farming to a business group. US imperialism is ultimately driving the whole thing, and Maori understand this. I’m finding that a lot of young Maori, in particular, identify with the Palestinians. They understand that what has happened to them in the past and what is happening now, is the same as the situation for the Palestinians.

Justin: Yeah, even the more backward kids who aren’t very political, who aren’t initially sympathetic...the other week I was at a demonstration protesting the murder of the Hamas leader Yassin, and it was on at the same time and place as the Mana Day concert in Aotea square...this young Maori guy comes over, looking pissed off, and asks me, ‘Hey bro, what the fuck is going on with all these bloody foreigners whingeing and moaning?’

I said ‘What do you mean bro? Didn’t you hear the news about some shit that went down in Palestine the other day? Those US backed Israeli terrorist mongrels, just blew away a Rangatira and respected Kaumatua of theirs. Just imagine if Te Atairangi Kaahu was wasted by those pricks, wouldn’t you be pissed off?’

The bro by understanding the plight of the Palestinians in simple terms in relation to a Maori example got the message. He left a more enlightened man with the simple expression, ‘Kia Kaha (Be Strong).’

Is there an empathy with Iraqis, too, as another colonised people now coming under the hammer again?

Justin: Yeah, although it’s only the more articulate protesters who are actually talking about the connection. Annette Sykes made the parallel in the aftermath of the Waitangi protests, saying that the Iraqi struggle and the Maori struggle were one. It’s early days yet, though, because most don’t understand imperialism, which is the real link. Explaining the link, that’s the job of unionists, communists...we know where most ordinary people are at politically – it’s a long way from where we want them to be. We have to be really articulate and link the local to the international, because the parallels are plain as. Brash is pushing Labour, local business leaders are pushing Brash, the US is pushing local bosses because it wants nuke ships visits; total co-operation in the War of Terror and open-slather investment. Labour wants to be rid of Maori claims to the seabed and foreshore for the simple reason that the international trade agreements, such as the GATS and all things prescribed by the WTO it has signed up to would prefer collectivised forms of ownership to be extinguished.

Some leftists who lack information about this movement imagine that it is made up of Maori capitalists – the ‘Brown table’, as they’re known. Who are the people you’re rubbing shoulders with on the hikoi?

Justin: I recently heard an interview with Tipene O’Regan of Ngai Tahu – he’s like the classic right-wing Browntable capitalist, and in recent times he’s been under a lot of fire from progressive Maori. O’Regan said that he didn’t like the people leading the hikoi – the ‘young radicals’, as they’re being called. I’d say that O’Regan’s view is representative of the Browntable’s.

The seabed and foreshore issue has woken up a lot of young people, and they have nothing to do with the Browntable. Apart from the war on Iraq and the whole war drive of US imperialism, I’d say that a key radicalising influence on these young people has been the underground youth culture that Maori have developed over the past ten years. Hip hop, for instance, has become very political, and rappers like Dean Hapeta are going to have a lot more influence over young Maori than Tipene O’Regan. I couldn’t give you a profile of the average protester – the movement is still very fluid. There’s just this big swell of interest...one new development, which again is a result of the struggles in Palestine and Iraq, is an awareness of the need to internationalise the struggle, to get solidarity from overseas. The speeches at Waitangi this year were full of this.

Jean: We were up at the big Hui at Ahipara, the day after the Waitangi protests, and among the most vocal people there were young working class women who felt they needed to do something about their situation. They and their young men are really coming out on this. They’re giving the movement a lot of its energy. They are being backed up by older women whose politics date back to the land marches of the seventies.

Do many of these new protesters identify in class terms? Do they see themselves as workers?

Jean: Maybe not as workers. Maybe more in terms of haves and have nots.

Justin: At the moment many identify more in a Third Worldist way – they quite rightly see themselves as oppressed people, like the Iraqis and Palestinians. That’s what Dean Hapeta’s politics are all about, really. Nanaia Mahuta, who is defying Labour over this issue, is a young woman. A lot of young Tainui identify with her. A lot of young Tainui would follow her out of the Labour Party.

It’s interesting that Mahuta was one of the few Labour MPs to express misgivings about the invasion of Afghanistan. Of course, as you know, there’s a long history of opposition to unjust wars amongst Tainui – Princess Te Puea led Tainui opposition to the First Imperialist World War, and a lot of young Tainui men were locked up for refusing to fight...

Justin: Nanaia Mahuta as an individual can’t carry this thing. She’s had a reputation as being a very quiet MP – it’s only this issue which seems to have sparked her up. Perhaps Tariana Turia is having an influence. But I think the big challenge for Mahuta’s supporters is to develop their own politics and break from Labour. It’s good that Labour has been put into power and exposed, because a lot of Maori workers had expectations in Labour, where they had none in National. But now that they’ve learned what Labour’s like, rank and file Maori members have to leave.

Justin, in recent years you’ve been pretty critical of the political intrigue within Tainui – the proposed prison near Te Kauwhata and the army recruitment drives which are aimed at Tainui youth and held on local marae. What’s the news on these fronts? Is the seabed and foreshore movement having a flow-on effect?

Justin: My marae was the first one used by the army to promote its ‘lets mop up the unemployed among Maori youth’ programme. ‘A bloody insult’ considering the timing in relation to the US led imperialist attack on Afghanistan. The day of that first meeting, was the day the US Congress passed the USA Patriot Act which is what our own so-called Anti Terrorism Act is modeled on. Our line in the Communist Workers Group and Anti Imperialist Coalition at the time was that the prison and the War on Terror were linked – that the government was aware it might need to lock up a lot of ‘terrorists’ in the future. Just look at the present situation with regards to the F&S. If things get out of hand for the government in terms of dealing with militant protests and an escalation in direct actions then the likelihood of imprisonment for those concerned will be the outcome. As a communist and trade union activist, this is of particular concern. History records that it was that layer who were the first to be dealt with by the state in the event of struggle.

So there’s a link between the prisons and the ‘anti-terror’ legislation and the seabed and foreshore struggle. If this movement gets really big and radical the government might well want to brand us as ‘terrorists’. And now we have outfits like the Maori Revolutionary Army talking about armed struggle.

Is there a feeling within parts of Maoridom that if the seabed and foreshore legislation goes through, and if Brash comes in and really guts basic democratic rights – the Maori seats, for instance – an armed struggle could begin?

Justin: Yeah, there’s a chance of that. But it’ll only happen if we as unionists, as socialists don’t do our job – if we lose the arguments with radicalised Maori. We have to get in there and say that being a REAL revolutionary means getting the support of the working class, Pakeha as well as Maori, and acting on a mass scale. Workers only have to fold their arms and they can bring the economy to a standstill. The support of unionists was crucial to the victory at Bastion Pt, and to the success of the Great Land March. Don’t get me wrong – I support and the CWG supports armed struggles. I support the struggles in Iraq and Palestine. But workers have to be in charge. Look at South America – in Argentina and Venezuela workers faced with economic crisis and job losses have taken over hundreds of factories and are running them themselves, and they’re defending themselves with their own militia. That’s the way to go.

Take the Maori Revolutionary Army for example. They talk about arms stashes and so on. Problem is they haven’t organised among the working class and their organisations, the UNIONS. The MRA is not accountable to any rank and file of any kind. They don’t know the first thing about strike committees, workers councils or even workers militia. I’m hoping to talk to this MRA crowd and say to them – if you’re a revolutionary, what have you done to organise the working class? Are you setting up committees in your workplace to support this hikoi? Are you pushing your union? If these guys talking about armed struggle can’t do the ABCs and organise workers then they’ll never get anywhere. If they are just hotheads then they need to be exposed, because they could do a lot of serious damage that will undermine the movement. The sooner we have the arguments with them the better.

At last December’s conference of the Council of Trade Unions a group of Maori unionists issued a declaration calling for trade union support for this struggle. What sort of progress has been made in getting the trade unions involved?

Justin: The Service and Food Workers Union, the Manufacturing and Construction Union, the Maori runanga of the National Distribution Union and the Maori runanga of ASTE have come out against Labour’s legislation. The NDU as a whole has not taken a position but more or less seems to support Maori. A CWG member reports that the Amalgamated Workers Union is holding debates this week on its position. The NDU was part of a big public meeting held in Auckland just before the Waitangi protests, where unionists like Syd Keepa who was part of the drive to put the foreshore and seabed on the union agenda. In Auckland, the International Women’s Day Committee included the seabed and foreshore in its platform and had SFWU activist Helen Te Hira as one of its official speakers. I’m hoping Mayday in Auckland will highlight the issue. A lot of Maori trade unionists are taking this issue into their worksites as individuals. There has been support from other organisations – the Green Party, the Peace Movement of Aotearoa – but the unions are the key, and we are a long way from making the links we need to make.

How will you express your communist politics inside the hikoi? Is it easy?

Justin: Not an easy job, given that among so called left tendencies and groups, views tactics and strategies are so disparate. With the amount of historical distortion, prejudice and association with despotism that has been inflicted on our movement and the ceaseless barrage of post Stalinist soviet era self satisfaction from the capitalist quarter, the battle is uphill, but not impossible. The workers everyday experiences have to be conveyed in such a way as to have direct relevance to the purpose of the hikoi. To the politically advanced Maori worker, an objective argument has to be made to express the contradictions of some of the ideas being proposed by a few advocating on behalf of Maori. To the not so advanced, a more subjective approach might be necessary. The outcome at least would be to establish links. As a Maori and a communist, the collectivised ideal common to both, would be a starting point.

What about concrete strategy and tactics? How can we win this one? What are you arguing for?

Justin: I think Labour is determined to push this legislation through, but I don’t think it’ll end there. For me the keys are union involvement and internationalism. We need international solidarity partly to protect ourselves. Look at working class hero and activist journalist Mumia Abu Jamal in the USA, framed for killing a cop and left to stew on death row for more than 20 years. The scumbag US justice system would have judicially murdered him long ago if he had not become the subject of international solidarity. Then of course there’s Mordechai Vanunu in Israel (occupied Palestine), the nuclear whistle blower–he would have been killed ages ago by the Israeli MOSSAD if he had not come to the attention of the international struggle. Look at the solidarity which is developing with Palestine and Iraq.

Recently at Potaka, just to the west of Hick’s Bay, a hapu of Ngati Porou were flouting regulations and setting up a sea farming operation without running it past the local government. They were planning to run the thing collectively, and share the income, and they emphasised, as Maori have done so often during the past year, that Pakeha were welcome on their foreshore. I thought of the Potaka operation as potentially a sort of homegrown equivalent of the factory occupations in South America – we don’t have many big factories, but we do have a very long coastline, and sea farming is going to be huge over the next few decades. Unfortunately the Potaka crew seem to have pulled back for now. Do you see occupations as a viable tactic for Maori?

Jean: Yes. I think there will be more of these actions but the danger is they’ll be coerced into line by the powers that be, and end up trying to work through existing regulations, which discriminate against Maori because Maori don’t have the economic resources...

Justin: We need occupations to put the government on the spot, to make them feel the heat. Like Bastion Pt did. We should seize and socialise the foreshore and also seabed-based activities – let’s run the mussel farms collectively!

Any final thoughts?

Justin: I think quite a few Pakeha are being educated about this issue. The forums Maori have held around the country may be having an effect. You don’t get as much of the raw racism you got a couple of months ago. I notice some political commentators are saying Brash is going to need a new issue, that Maori bashing won’t win him the next election and that it is unsustainable.

Jean: One thing I have noticed is the way that this issue has finally united urban and rural Maori. Now they have to take it a step further and unite with working class Pakeha...

Justin: A few months back there was much more separatism than there is now. In part that was a reaction to the strength of the racism being directed at Maori. Brash’s Maori bashing was a factor. This is a complex struggle and the CWG and those who agree with us are trying to do a number of things at once – counter Maori separatism, counter racism in the Pakeha left...

What do you say to the Alliance, which has now come out behind the government’s legislation, and to Pakeha unionists who still don’t think this is their issue?

Justin: I’d say don’t confuse the sort of nationalisation the left wants with the expropriation of indigenous people. We want workers’ control of resources, not nationalisation by the bosses’ state designed to protect the rights of private business (local or overseas) and US investors.

Workers commemorate past struggles and act in solidarity with present struggles. We remember the historic struggles of the Paris Commune of 1870, the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the heroic colonial revolutions such as the Chinese and Vietnamese. In NZ we celebrate the class battles of 1890, 1912-13 and 1951. These are the major milestones in the making of our class into that revolutionary force that has the power to overthrow capitalism and build socialism.

Workers resistance on the rise

Today the workers movement is weak and defensive. Years of defeat have pushed workers into retreat. But while capitalism can drive back workers struggles it cannot destroy the only class that creates its wealth. Around the world there are signs that workers are once again on the move. Imperialism is in deep crisis and can only survive that crisis by robbing workers and peasants of their resources, driving down their wages and making their lives miserable.

International resistance to imperialist rule is mounting. But the organisation of that resistance is still at a rudimentary level. Because of the weakness of the organised workers movement worldwide, resistance to oppression is taking forms that cut across working class solidarity and hold back the rise of international labour solidarity.

In Palestine and Iraq, the invaders have smashed working class organisations and are forcing workers into the arms of the bosses and Islamic clerics. Young workers are being driven to futile suicidal attacks against high-tech invading armies. Isolated and outgunned these ‘intifada’ can be smashed as in Palestine and Afghanistan.

Al Qaeda, the terrorist organisation funded by wealthy Saudis, is bombing and maiming Western workers to drive imperialism out of the Middle East, not to liberate Muslims but to make rich Arabs bosses even richer.

What we have to learn from all these struggles of oppressed peoples against imperialism is two things: first, the working class is the only class that can unite all the oppressed and defeat imperialism, and second, that the working class must be united internationally and led by a revolutionary party.

Why the working class?

The leadership of the national struggles against imperialism must come from the working class. Only the organised armed workers can turn resistance on the part of peasant and tribal fighters into a victorious defeat of imperialism. All other classes have an interest in doing deals with imperialism for a share of the wealth created by workers and peasants.

Workers, in opposing the system that exploits and oppresses them, have a class interest not only to defeat imperialism. They also have an interest to overthrow the national capitalist class and its hired politicians - including those who pose as friends of the workers like Arafat, Chavez or Lula. And workers have the means to do this as they can strike to close down the economy, arm themselves, win over sections of the military and take state power.

But even where workers are highly organised as they are in Bolivia, they have been cheated of power by class traitors in their own ranks. Armed peasants and miners led by militant trade unions have several times in the last decades been capable of taking power, only to be betrayed by leaders who do deals with imperialism to share the expropriated labour of workers and peasants.

To avoid repeating these defeats, we have to keep alive the lessons of the past as guides to action today. In Russia in 1917, the armed workers were led by a revolutionary party that defeated the treacherous sellout elements in their ranks and helped the struggle for national liberation to become a victorious socialist revolution. The difference between Russia in 1917, and the failed or incomplete revolutions in Germany 1919, Bolivia 1952, Cuba 1959, and Chile 1973, was the existence of a revolutionary party.

The second lesson is, that a victorious national liberation movements against imperialism cannot survive as independent workers’ state without the class solidarity of the workers in the imperialist countries, including their rich client states like New Zealand.

This is because these ‘Western’ workers are the only class that has the strength to shut down the imperialist economies and bring the war machine to a halt.

For example, it was the German workers who went on strike and the soldiers and sailors who mutinied in 1918 stopping the European imperialist powers from overwhelming and smashing the Russian Revolution at its birth. The workers in the imperialist countries are the only force with the power to stop their own bosses from invading, occupying and destroying other countries, by defeating the 'main enemy' at home.

The labour ‘aristocracy’

But there is a problem in building support for liberation struggles in the Western working class. Many workers are ‘bought off’ with high wages and back their bosses in imperialist wars. They are members of the labour ‘aristocracy’ whose wages are partly paid by the cheap labour of the ‘developing’ countries. Their unions are led by bureaucrats that manage labour relations within the law of the bosses’ state. They vote for reformist parties that claim to manage capitalism in the interests of ‘all classes’.

For example in the US, the main union organisation, the AFL-CIO, is proud of its ‘patriotism’ in supporting the ‘war on terror’, including the use of the Patriot Act to attack labor rights at home. Why? Because this war defends the interests of US workers whose jobs and wages depend on the strength of US imperialism. The AFL-CIO calls for votes for the Democratic Party, as the more union-friendly party of the US bosses, to deliver these jobs and wages.

This is why the vast majority of those millions of workers who opposed the invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003, did little more than demonstrate in the streets or pray for peace. They thought that war was the wrong policy. And their pacifism is catching. When Bush abolished the labour rights of public employees after 9-11, there was no strike in response. Even the West Coast Longshoremen, traditionally one of the most militant US unions, loudly proclaimed their unrivalled patriotism and backed off an industrial dispute last year when Bush threatened to lock them up under the Patriot Act.

NZ workers sign up for imperialism

In NZ the CTU official stand on the ‘war on terror’ was to endorse the UN resolutions. While the Auckland CTU leadership took a more principled stand against a UN invasion of Iraq, the union movement in NZ has not taken any industrial action against the SAS being sent to Afghanistan or the Engineers to Iraq. NZ workers too are dominated by a union bureaucracy that banks its career paths on 'lesser evil' Labour governments or an alternative future Alliance/Green coalition managing a 'peaceful and just' capitalism.

Why? Because in NZ the most privileged workers in unions affiliated to the Labour Party and the 'left' parties, benefit from NZ’s military alliance with Australian and US imperialism. For example the Maritime Union 'cabotage' campaign appeals to NZ bosses to join forces with Australian imperialist bosses to keep ‘foreign’ workers on lower wages off local ships. And the EPMU is begging the Aussie military to contract out maintenance on its frigates to the Whangarei shipyard that helped to build these ANZAC frigates to police the Pacific on behalf of US and Australian imperialism’s interests.

Pacifism means sucking up to bosses

Thus the most privileged layers of Western workers depend for their jobs and incomes on direct or indirect benefits from imperialist military expenditure. Or on wars for oil, gas, copper, diamonds, fish etc whose proceeds trickle down into their jobs and pay packets. These unions are bureaucratic, pacifist, dependent on the state and form racist national fronts with their bosses to protect their jobs from migrants or foreigners.

The most these workers will do against war is to argue that imperialism does not need to fight wars to defend their jobs and high wages, and that the UN should manage invasions like in Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq. This is why the official labour movement in the imperialist countries will never go beyond pacifist posturing and never take organised strike action to stop war. For example, even when train drivers went on strike against Britain’s role in the Iraq war, they acted as individuals and not as members of their union.

Build unions of the most oppressed!

But all is not lost. While the union bureaucrats in the imperialist countries serve the interests of the bosses and the labour aristocracies, they do not represent the vast layers of other workers who are highly exploited and oppressed.

These are the migrant workers and/or low paid service workers who are mainly women, ethnic minorities and youth. They are typically casualised workers, not unionised and on the worst pay and conditions. They do not benefit from imperialism and form an oppressed layer of cheap labour in the imperialist heartlands. They have the class interest to form strong links with other workers across borders in the oppressed world and take direct action against their own military machine.

It is to these workers that we must look to form new class struggle unions based on rank and file democracy. They can be organised independently of the state, reformist parties and the bosses. Like the Latino janitors unionised in Los Angeles, they can take militant strike action to fight for better wages and conditions in the heart of the imperialist machine. They can act in international solidarity with the anti-imperialist resistance around the world.

Organise the casualised worker!

In NZ, the large majority of workers in the casualised mainly private service sector are not unionised. They are predominantly young, female, migrant workers. They work for multinational hotels like Sheraton, fast food outlets like Burger King, petrol stations like Mobil, and supermarkets, multinational call centres and commercial cleaners.

They need to be unionised so they can join forces with the workers who are employed by these same global corporates in other countries to fight together to win rights and better pay and conditions.

They can also link up globally with unionised workers in oil companies like Shell, banks like Citigroup, and military contractors like Halliburton, and other war profiteers, to blockade these companies and demand that they get off 'corporate welfare' and free up billions for health, education and housing for the poor.

The can unite with unionised workers in the export industries such as fishing and forestry to oppose anti-worker practices and the destruction of fish and timber stocks. They can fight to keep the foreshore and seabed from being sold-off to the expanding multinational aquaculture corporations. They can demand the nationalisation of all these companies under workers’ control with no compensation to the bosses!

For Rank-and-file control of unions

To be effective these unions must be run by their rank and file members. They must struggle to be independent of any political bureaucracy, of the reformist parties who suck them into parliament and the bosses’ state, and able to unite with other unions in militant strike action.

With this organisational strength, these unions can be what Leon Trotsky called ‘schools for revolution’. They can take up the fight for the most immediate bread and butter demands, and when the bosses refuse to meet them, they can take the fight all the way to win workers’ control of industry and state power.

They can take action on wages which become stands on war. They can defend their jobs yet refuse to build or repair frigates. They can demand that the CTU takes strike action against NZ’s military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. When the CTU refuses they can replace it with their own rank and file leadership.

They can impose boycotts and bans on Israel. They can mount solidarity campaigns in defence of migrant workers, so-called illegal workers, refugees like the jailed Algerian Ahmed Zaoui. They can fight for the rights of foreign workers in NZ ships, and build support for the independent trades unions and women’s’ organisations of Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan.

These unions must be democratic, independent, militant and internationalist! They can train and empower the working class fighters who will unite with workers globally and create a new political leadership that can bring an end to capitalism and build a world socialist society!

Workers have no country!

No to cabotage, frigates and theft of the foreshore!

Strike to stop imperialist war at home!

Support the resistance in Iraq and Palestine!

Support the workers and peasants revolution in Bolivia!

No to the treacherous leaders of the WSF - Lula, Chavez and Castro!

For a new World Party of Revolution!

MARCH 20 LEAFLET

Defeat the US Empire in Iraq & NZ!

One year on from Bush’s invasion of Iraq, the war goes on. But now it’s a serious armed resistance to imperialism. Because workers in the West failed to go on strike to prevent the military invasion, Iraqis, like the Palestinians, are pushed into using terror as their weapon. Will terror defeat the invader? No! It may produce more pacifism in the West, but it will not arm western workers to smash their military machines at home. Only a consistently anti-imperialist labour movement can do that. We must support workers armed resistance in Iraq and organize direct action in the labour movement in Aotearoa/New Zealand to stop 'our' nation’s military involvement in the 'war on terror'.

Bombing workers

               The people of Spain have spoken to the crusader Bush. Go to hell with your army of genocidal mercenaries! Of course al Qaeda are terrorists and must be condemned, but they are the misbegotten offspring of US imperialism. They are fighting back against the evil empire in the name of Islam only because their secular national leaders are US lackeys and will not fight back. In the absence of action by workers in the West al Qaeda uses terror to jolt popular opposition to the US.

Why did al Qaeda chose to kill Spanish workers and youth in full view of CNN, Fox and the BBC on the eve of the election? To prove that the price of killing Iraqis for imperialist oil is not worth it! 90% of Spanish people already knew that, now they have been bombed into kicking out the Bush’s puppet Aznar. Next they need to kick out the Socialists who, like kiwi Clark, will keep the troops in Iraq under a UN mandate.

               So the Spanish people are getting the message. Who's next? Not the Brits or the Yanks. Not the Aussies or the Kiwis. They are all still tolerating warmongers posing as the defenders of democracy fighting terror. Blair has survived his scandalous lying to invade Iraq. "Bring em on" Bush is being challenged by Kerry, another warmonger, hero of Vietnam and supporter of the US invasion of Iraq. Aussie Howard is Bush’s deputy ‘downunder’ and kiwi Clark is the deputy’s dog.

Will it take bombs in London and New York to jolt British and US workers into action to get rid of Blair and Bush? In Sydney and Wellington the security services are already crying ‘terrorists’.

               Or will it take the rising body count in Iraq to push people into action? As the heroic Iraqi resistance fighters continue to kill the invaders, and as al Qaeda bombs the heartlands of the UK and US cities, maybe opposition to the military occupation of Iraq will grow, like it did during the war against Vietnam.

Pacifist populism

               But this is a dismal prospect. It means that Western workers will only move into action when they are directly threatened. When they are killed, or when they have to pay more taxes for the military. Most of the Western peace movement is appealing to just such individual interests to build an anti-war movement. They say “bring the troops home” because it is they, rather than Iraqis, who are being killed.

               Can Nader make a difference? If he stands as an anti-war presidential candidate and campaigns to pull ALL (including UN) troops out of Iraq this will boost the anti-war movement in the US but not necessarily challenge its pacifist politics. If he is supported by the grass roots of the unions who also organize to strike against the war at home this will make a difference.

In Aotearoa, the response of the Greens, PMA and PAW to Labour sending Engineers to Iraq and more SAS troops to Afghanistan, has been to appeal to New Zealanders concerns that kiwi military personnel might be killed, or that the taxes spent on war would be better spent on domestic welfare. Is war OK if it’s cheap or by remote control, and if our kids can get heart operations?

               Then there is their futile appeal to moral arguments about 'peace' or defending NZ's reputation as a 'peacemaking' lover of the UN. While the international 'peace' movement mobilized up to 10 millions on the streets before the invasion in March 2003, this movement collapsed once Bush went to war. And anyway, the UN created the state of Israel in 1948 and bombed Iraq for 10 years in the 1990s. It’s 'fig leaf' cover for the naked interests of western imperialism is gone for good.

Right to Resist

               Western workers have much learning to do. First they have to put the interests of the Iraqi people first, and not merely their pockets or body counts at home or in Iraq. The anti-war movement has to shift from personal, moral and financial appeals to workers to oppose war, to declare the right of all colonized peoples to resist BY WHATEVER MEANS NECESSARY the evil empire and its backers.

               To bring about this shift in political attitudes towards war we have to understand that the wars are IMPERIALIST wars, for the purpose of re-colonizing countries to grab their resources, and nothing to do with promoting democracy. And that the fundamental democratic right in this situation is for the Iraq resistance fighters to kill the invading troops, including our ‘own’.

               But its no use defending that right of resistance as inalienable (it was enshrined in the US Constitution!) if we don’t fight to defeat imperialism. Islamic terrorism and personal acts of sacrifice are the methods of desperation, due to the lack of an organized, working class based resistance movement. At best such terror can increase pacifism in the West. At worst it can fuel a more extreme anti-Islamic reaction. These methods are losers. They kill workers rather than rally their support and cannot defeat imperialist wars.

Armed workers

               We must help to build that anti-imperialist resistance in Iraq and Palestine on the solid basis of the organized working class. This means providing material aid to popular resistance in Iraq and Palestine!

BUILD THE INDEPENDENT UNIONS AND WOMENS MOVEMENT!

               At home we must build an anti-war movement in the unions that can strike to close down the country and stop the movement of troops, and  take direct action against all the reactionary anti-terrorist legislation being used to lock up 'suspects' and shut down anti-war protest.

STRIKE TO GET THE TROOPS OUT OF IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN!

               One year after Bush's invasion of Iraq the lessons are clear. Only the organized movement of the working class can stop the imperialist war of terror. Individual terror against state terror will always lose. Working class armed resistance is the only force that can defeat imperialism, smash capitalism, and make socialism a reality.

SUPPORT THE ARMED WORKERS RESISTANCE IN IRAQ!

BUILD STRIKE ACTION AGAINST NZ’S MILITARY OCCUPATION OF IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN!

FOR A REVOLUTIONARY COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL AND WORLD SOCIALIST REVOLUTION!

Imperialism: policy option or death drive?

When anti-war activists blame US imperialism or ‘globalisation’ as the cause of wars they usually mean the ‘power elite’ – the ‘neo-cons’ etc who are backed by the oil and arms industry. Imperialism and its wars are ‘bad’ policy options on the part of the US as a ‘world power’ which can be countered by world public opinion – the ‘second world power’’, or the ‘movement of movements’ as the World Social Forum has been called. For Marxists this conception of imperialism as ‘bad policy’ open to reform by an electoral alliance of workers, peasants and ‘good’ capitalists is a reactionary utopia. It is a utopia because imperialism needs wars to survive. It’s on a death drive and cannot be pacified. It is reactionary because it disarms the masses in the face of inevitable destruction and dooms the struggle for socialism. Real anti-imperialism for us does not mean making ‘good’ ‘bad policy’, but terminating the terminator.

There are a number of theories that have arisen in recent years claiming that the Marxist/Leninist concept of imperialism as the highest and final stage of capitalism is wrong.

They argue that the main forces that Lenin saw as driving imperialism to inevitable wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions, do not exist. The rise of finance capital, capital export, the growth of monopolies etc that doomed capitalism to destruction, have been surpassed by new developments such as the new economy that have rescued capitalism and made unlimited growth and the sharing of wealth possible. If this were true, then Marxism would cease to be relevant. Lenin’s theory that class politics is the extension of class economics would be empty phrases. Social classes would not longer exist and socialism as a post-capitalist dream would be made redundant by a just and benign capitalism.

These theorists say that globalisation has replaced imperialist contest between rival capitalist powers. Multilateral agreements between imperialist powers subordinate national interests to the global market and make national conflicts a thing of the past. It was easier to argue this during the 1980’s when the major powers were all allied to the US led ‘cold-war’, and the 1990’s when the UN and NATO officially fronted the wars against Iraq and Serbia. Whatever word is used to describe this ‘consensus’, national differences are now all accommodated under a US global hegemony where all states, including the US as the world’s biggest debtor, are dependent upon one another. Indeed some radicals, like Hardt and Negri in their book Empire published in 2000, say that the US is now so economically weak that it is no longer ‘hegemonic’.[1]

But what if the underlying strength of the US economy is in terminal decline?

What if to survive the US needs to turn its back on international agreements and attack its former allies? What if the US economy is in such a deep crisis that it is forced to revert to naked imperialist aggression on any state that threatens its ‘national interests’. A reversion to unilateral aggression is exactly what has happened since 9-11 under the Bush regime when the ‘world changed’. So the question must be asked: is this reversion an aberration? An aggressive militarist policy option driven by the narrow interests of one section of the US ruling class, the oil barons and arms industries? Or is this return to military occupations and recolonisations driven by a more deep-seated desperation on the part of US capital to survive at all costs? The answer to this question is critical because the solutions offered to this post 9-11 crisis depends on the perceived causes.

The globalisation theorists explain post-9-11 as an aberration. Already they say, the world has passed on. The new knowledge economy has created more wealth across national borders that can be redistributed in rising living standards in the developing world. The new capitalism in the US, Japan and EU does not need wars to make profits, but rather new technology and increasing labour productivity. The dynamic growth areas of the world economy are driven by multinational firms that invest, produce and sell in an integrated world market.

This ‘aberration’ must therefore be caused by a rogue element of the US ruling class that has taken power and used the military to grab scarce resources such as oil and natural gas to make big profits. For example, Chalmers Johnson’s recent book the Sorrows of Empire argues that the military have taken over the US state for this purpose. Chomsky’s analysis of US power is similar; the power elite uses its control of the media to manipulate public opinion to accept an aggressive foreign policy. If these arguments about the US as a ‘rogue state’ are correct, then mass mobilisations that reclaim control of the media and democratic institutions can theoretically regain control of the state for the people. But what if these arguments are not correct and imperialism is not a policy option but a death drive.

The reality is that imperialism is in a life or death crisis.

In the 1970s the world economy experienced a classic crisis of overproduction due to falling profits. Profits fell not because they were squeezed by rising wages but because the corporates could not increase the rate of exploitation fast enough to return a profit on the massive investments that went into plant, machinery and raw materials.[2] To restore profits it was necessary to drastically cut the price of wages (variable capital) and raw materials and machines (constant capital) by whatever means. In the 1890s and 1930s the world economy revived only because depressions and wars drastically cut the costs of plant and machinery and of labour.[3]

In the years since the 1970s ‘crash’, the US economy has failed to revive its economy to outcompete its rivals. The new economy has seen some increases in output and profits, but not sufficient to outperform Japan in cars and China in consumer goods. The recent ‘jobless’ upturn is less to do with new technology replacing jobs than with fewer workers working harder and longer (i.e. increased hours and intensity of work). There has been no massive reduction in the costs of wages or raw materials and the economy has been kept afloat by state borrowing and spending. The money borrowed from its rivals, particularly Japan, means that the US is now heavily in debt. Therefore the US economy is experiencing a deepening crisis of insufficient profits from which it can only survive by embarking on open imperialist wars to recolonise other nations, plundering their raw materials and attacking workers wages and rights at home and abroad to reduce labour costs. As Marxists say, the bosses’ crisis is being solved on the backs of the world’s workers.

It is not the policy of a militarist fraction of the US ruling class that causes war, but that of the whole US ruling class. Imperialism is not an aberration but a necessary result of capitalist crisis today.

So how does the whole ruling class benefit from war? Some corporates benefit directly, while others benefit from the flow-on effects. Of course the military and war industries do gain directly from imperialist wars, but production of arms and munitions is consumed unproductively (apart from R&D spin-offs in other sectors e.g. satellites, jeeps etc) and cannot revive the US economy as a whole. The Bush family and prominent members of the cabinet like Dick Cheney and Condoleeza Rice profit as shareholders of corporations that supply the military, and the workers in the arms industry earn wages that enter into the GDP – a sort of ‘military Keynesianism’.[4] But military expenditure does not otherwise add value to the economy. A good analogy would be to say that war benefits some bosses like the production of luxury items such as fast cars and jewelry. Theories such as the Permanent Arms Economy promoted by the Cliffites to account for the post-war long boom are fundamentally flawed in failing to recognise this fact.[5]

However unlike luxury cars, planes and tanks can be used to invade and occupy other countries and expropriate their resources and labour supply. The US has seized Iraq’s oil wealth and created hundreds of military bases in the Middle East and central Asia to oversee the plunder of natural resources. In its own poodle-like fashion, the UK has rechristened Gaddafi the former ‘terrorist fiend’ as the west’s ‘loyal friend’ in order to get access to Libya’s oil and gas fields.[6] While the military and oil magnates get the biggest share of this colonial bounty, the flow on effect of the war to the whole US and UK economies will be a vital supply of oil and gas at cheap prices that will lower the price of constant capital (fuel for industry) as well as variable capital (gas for workers cars) not available to their EU and Japanese rivals.[7] At the same time the US can create client states like Bolivia, or protectorates like Bosnia, Kosovo[8] and Iraq, impose the US dollar as the main currency, and threaten to bomb any state that wants to switch from the dollar to the Euro or yen as a rival to the ‘petrodollar’.[9]

We see that the imperialist states’ militarist policies are dictated by the interests of all capitalists.

The big banks and corporations all benefit from imperialist wars and plunder. What Lenin identified as finance capital was the big banks fusing their interests with the big corporations, and becoming monopolies, that is, combines or cartels that dominated whole industries. The monopolies were vertical (like Rockefellers Standard Oil or Carnegie’s Steel Corporation in the US) or horizontal (like the big German cartels) conglomerates that bought up their rivals and set the prices of production in that industry. Because they were national monopolies they had to compete with their rivals in other nations backed by their states. It was this rivalry that led to the export of capital to colonies to gain cheap raw materials and labour and the inevitable wars to divide and rule the whole world market. In what sense do today’s multinational corporations remain monopolies dominated by finance capital which look to their nation states to go to war in their interests as the ‘national interest’?

Monopoly finance capital is now centralised mainly in the hegemonic imperialist power, the USA.

First to the question of finance capital, then that of monopoly, then the question of national interest to show that state monopoly capitalism is alive, but not well.

At the heart of monopoly is finance capital. After Lenin’s death 20^th imperialism created state capitalism to survive. Private banks became regulated by the central banks which took over the management of money capital to rescue the corporate sector. Without massive state intervention and ‘military Keynesianism’ after WW1, the big US corporations would have collapsed. The ‘new deal’ like the Keynesian welfare state’ was mainly about benefits to business.[10] Therefore we can say that far from being outdated, finance capital is even more concentrated and centralised today than it was in Lenin’s day.

Today the giant US Federal Bank along with World Bank and International Monetary Fund monopolises global finance capital through the bond market and international credit. The ‘Fed’ creates dollars which are pumped into US business which it then borrows from its rival EU and Japanese money markets in the form of US bonds. But the cost of its debt is offset by the advantages of the dollar as the main international currency. Private monopoly banks, such as Morgan/Chase, BOA and Citibank, are the biggest shareholders in the World Bank and IMF and dominate the loans made to the '‘third world’. But such is the crisis of overproduction, most ‘capital’ today is not invested in production but in speculation as ‘fictitious capital. Not only is finance capital concentrated into giant monopolies in the form of central banks and a few giant corporate banks they are all centralised in heart of the US imperialist state. Therefore what became known as ‘state monopoly capitalism’ in Lenin’s day is still the dominant reality in the global economy.

The crisis of overproduction manifests itself as the ‘risks’ associated with anarchic capitalism destroying the forces of production. Capitalism’s quest to plunder the third world is now in its final phase of world domination –exhausting the resources of the former soviet bloc. The end of the Soviet Union has opened up central Asia. There and elsewhere, the race for scarce resources is hotting up the competition between the imperialist powers.

Today capitalist production is highly dependent on non-renewable resources, notably oil, whose supply is rapidly running out. The big corporations are oil pushers, enforcers, or oil junkies.[11] Those who control these scarce resources benefit from ‘rent’ i.e. that is the premium that can be extracted from those who do not own this resource. Capitalism today is an asset-stripping death machine. The risks associated with this drive to survive explains the behavior of all the players.

The US finances its military machine and arms industry to win control in the rent-seeking war game. This is the case in Iraq, Central Asia and Latin America. These are all military fronts in the war for oil, gas or other vital resources. But even such looting of vital resources and the massive military subsidies of the imperialist states, does not make them cheap enough to restore rising rates of surplus value and return acceptable profits on the vast capital stockpile awaiting investment in production. As capitalism drives down its path of destruction it cannot save itself.

There are inherent limits to the gains from capitalist production which is simultaneously destroying the forces of production.

The recent controversy about the US ‘jobless recovery’ illustrates this point. While thousands of migrants flood into the US to fill menial service jobs, productive industry shifts over to ‘lean production’ by exporting jobs to cheap labour countries. In Mexico or China, wage goods (clothes, white goods, electronic goods, cars etc) are produced more cheaply because of low wage costs combined with global lean production methods (cast-off production lines e.g. Korean or Indian cars). This is the same export of capital recognised by Lenin. But now it is up against more fundamental limits set by rock bottom wages as well as productivity caps.

The crisis of the period from 1914 to 1945 was hugely destructive in terms of the devaluation of variable and constant capital. Only out of such a destructive firestorm could the post-war boom emerge. But that boom was limited to the imperialist world and did not extend to the third world and the gap between ‘north and south’ widened dramatically. The accumulation of capital at the centre is now so huge that only a massive destruction of capital on a world scale will restore a return to profitable production. Windfalls like the collapse of the Soviet world extended the capitalist market to its full global reach. But while it created huge chunks of ‘new capital’ to add the world supply, it did not create sufficient means of making sufficient profits on that capital.

Thus early 21^st century imperialism is unable to generate enough super-profits to keep pace with its rising capital stock. All the ‘t-shirts in China’ cannot sustain sufficient profits in the US let alone rising living standards of labour in the US. With the decline in new surplus-value from production, potential money capital becomes merely footloose money that devalues unless new sources of ‘value’ can be found. Increasingly finance capital ceases to be the productive investment that drives the development of industry and instead becomes ‘fictitious’ capital which is valueless because it cannot exchanged for commodities and must be gambled away on the prices of commodities. Take the derivatives market of ‘casino capitalism’.

Morgan/Chase the biggest international bank now has 84 times its real capital assets (stockholders funds) gambled on ‘derivatives’.

‘Derivatives’ are bets on future prices. Derivatives are a form of insurance to cover risks of production in a high-risk, unstable, crisis-prone anarchic market. That’s why 80% of such bets are on future interest rates (the price of money). For example futures brokers ‘borrow’ company shares for a fee, sell them to create cash and agree to sell the shares back at a given price. They use the money to speculate on currencies etc, and hope that the shares will be worth less when they buy them back so they can make a profit. This creates huge amounts of debt with no share asset backing. The instability in the market is itself greatly increased by the billions of hot money gambled on future prices every day.

Moreover it is workers that stand to lose most in the casino economy. For every George Soros who may lose billions of fictitious capital there are millions who lose their life savings. The finance mafia bets the savings of the ‘new middle class’ held in pension funds and bank shares. Marx talked about joint stock companies borrowing from small savers as a form of ‘socialising the costs’ of capital. Small savers would always be wiped out in any credit crash. Soros lost millions in 1998 when Russia defaulted on its debt. Morgan/Chase was similarly exposed to the Argentina collapse in 2001 even though the government froze the accounts of small savers (ahoristas) while at the same time allowed the big banks to take their money out of the country.

Such financial crashes destroy the jobs and savings of those workers who have savings. 19^th and 20^th century imperialist powers justified their smash and grab expansionism by selling it to their working class as a defence of the national interest. Britain had its ‘civilising mission’ and the US had its defence of the ‘free world’. All used ‘international relations’ to pacify and buy off the rising working class challenge to the power of capital. Marx, Engels and Lenin recognised the importance of colonial super-profits, which when trickled down to the ‘new middle class’ bribed it to support imperialism and to turn organised labour into cheerleaders for imperialist wars. Now 21^st century imperialism cannot afford to buy off its workers and runs the ultimate risk of eliminating its support base in the ‘labour aristocracy’.

21^st century imperialism cannot afford political buyouts so funds patriotic panics.

While it can’t afford to buy patriotism anymore imperialist states appeal to ‘national values’. Foreigners are blamed for taking jobs and cutting wages so that the labour movement becomes geared up to support wars against enemy aliens at home and abroad. As imperialist rivalry hots up trade protection becomes national protectionism in which workers are enlisted to fight the ‘enemy’. But as the costs of imperialist crises and wars become thrust onto the backs of workers (workers welfare axed while corporate welfare – especially oil and war industries – climbs, jobs and wages lost, workers in uniform lose their lives in the war for oil etc) the political class consensus that drove the post-war boom and which has been kept intact from the victory of capitalism over ‘communism, now becomes fractured at home and abroad. Workers and peasants see themselves as pawns in a US corporate war game for world domination. The level of anti-US sentiment outside the US is rising to massive proportions. And the class conflicts in the outside world are now being reproduced inside the US and the other imperialist powers.

This means that resistance in many forms is beginning to emerge. The WSF is a sort of ‘good cop’ imperialism that promotes the illusion that imperialism as a bad policy option that can be globally challenged and reformed. Hardt and Negri’s concept of Empire provides a popular version of this ideological position. There is a reformist labour international around Castro, including Chavez and Lula that promotes social democratic regimes coming together as an international counter-weight to US rogue imperialism. But the severity of the crisis imposed on the masses is rapidly surpassing the capacity of the reformists and their leftwing cheerleaders in the WSF to strangle the exploding resistance movements. Castro, Lula and Chavez attempts to negotiate with imperialism can only be at the expense of their worker and peasant supporters. Once we can see that 21^st century imperialism is on the road to destruction, then we understand that only a world working class mobilisation for a global socialist society can offer an alternative. The cost of anarchic date-expired capitalism in the 21^st century will be more wars and destruction unless it is replaced by socialism!

(4) ‘Capitalism’ – the Stalinist ‘export’.

In Polynesia the history of the formation of the working class has not been written in the same way that Marx wrote about the formation of the European working class. The whole struggle has been ignored by generations of Pakeha ‘labour’ historians, who camouflaged the truth to allow the labour bureaucrats and Stalinists to sell out Polynesian workers. While the labour bureaucrats suppress class struggle in general, the Stalinist history of the workers in Polynesia suppresses the documentation of the proletarianisation of the Polynesian people. This is a betrayal of both Marxism and the Polynesian people. The legacy of this Stalinist ‘fake’ communism in New Zealand, is a ‘Marxism’ that refuses to call for the expropriators to be expropriated!

Stalinist ‘Marxism’ combines with imperialist ideology to argue that the entire Capitalist mode of production –capitalists, workers and all – was exported to Polynesia lock, stock and barrel, from Britain, and is purely Anglo-Saxon. This racist ‘Marxism’ denies the Polynesian people a place in capitalism as members of the working class which is reserved for whites only. Just like the fate of the national peoples in the USSR under Stalin, Stalinists in the South Pacific put their white racist chauvinism before the rights of the Polynesian people and tell them to wait until the white revolution before they can be liberated.

The Stalinist Workers’ Communist League claims (WCL) it has a ‘class’ analysis of racist and colonial oppression in New Zealand. But their programme itself is clearly racist. For them, the history of New Zealand’s movement towards independence is a Pakeha history, to which the Maori people are an appendage. The racist suppression of the brutal and atrocious record of the expropriation of the Polynesian people is aided and abetted by these ‘friends’ of the working class (whose real ‘friends’ are white union bureaucrats) – in the name, naturally, of breaking with the ‘Trotskyist’ theory of permanent revolution. For them, the achievement of white settler power based on denial of Maori suffrage in New Zealand is an “advance”. The failure to see that white ‘independence’, achieved at the expense of Maori independence, assumed a reactionary and imperialist character leads logically to a recognition of Polynesian workers as a class with no revolutionary potential, but which must limit itself to a ‘minimum program’ of democratic rights, forgetting ‘independence’ and ‘socialism’.

The WCL does not see the split between Maori workers and the white labour aristocracy it seeks to represent, has its basis in the reproduction of a reserve army of labour. It says racist ideas are “learned” by white workers, ignoring capitalism’s use of racism to justify the super-exploitation of Polynesians in the reserve army to the privileged white labour aristocracy. It is not enough for the WCL to say that 90% of Maori are workers and that they are a “powerful component of the working class”. Rather it has to be said that it is because Maori are oppressed as members of the reserve army that they have been and must be in the vanguard of the proletariat. In ‘allowing’ Maori to lead the ‘anti-racist struggle’, but in limiting their demands to “full equality” and “minority rights”, the WCL actively suppresses the revolutionary potential of the Maori proletariat in order to maintain its ‘leadership’ of the white working class.

When Polynesian workers overstep the ‘minimum programme’ of the WCL the white chauvinist ‘Marxist’ Graeme Clark will do exactly the same as the white chauvinist ‘Marxist’ Bill Andersen – call the cops on Polynesian militants to get them thrown out of the labour movement. The WCL have refused to attack cop lover Andersen in public and that for a very good reason: they must repeat his performance (Andersen after all had a ‘minimum programme’ which Black Unity overstepped). WCL student bureaucrats are still ready to refuse to let Auckland University Student premises to Te Moana. However, in this period of mounting capitalist attacks on Polynesian workers they will not be held back by reactionary white labour bureaucrats from understanding that their history of imperialist oppression is a revolutionary history and that their future is that of proletarian revolution.[12]

Yet such is the legacy of Stalinism in Polynesia – that of dressing-up petty-bourgeois chauvinism as ‘Marxism’ – that it infects the thinking of national peoples and diverts them from revolutionary class struggle. In Aotearoa, the most influential Polynesian group, Black Unity, has so far been unable to overcome the legacy of white racist ‘Marxism’. Black Unity tries to talk about the overthrow of the Maori mode of production by the Capitalist mode, and least one group, referring to themselves as “Black Marxists” identify the Maori people as “an oppressed layer of the proletariat”.[13] But Black Unity is unable to draw out any revolutionary significance from this analysis. Rather than arriving at a revolutionary Marxist position on racism and imperialism, it arrives at a petty-bourgeois psychological one.

Ripeka Evans in a recent Suva speech for which she has been inexcusably ‘punished’ by eviction from the Trade Union Centre, argued that the Capitalist mode of production was an “export”.[14] She said “it is the responsibility of the white working class” to remove the “super-oppression” of the Maori people. In blaming white racist workers for the super-oppression of Maori workers, Ms Evans accepts the divisions introduced into the working class by imperialism. Ms Evans rejects the racist ‘Marxism’ which says that Polynesians should not act separately, but wait for the ‘real’ white working class to hand them their liberation bit by bit. Naturally, Black Unity is not prepared to wait for ever – especially since the eviction of Te Moana from the Trade Union Centre has shown tat the Stalinists mean what they say! But the lessons Black Unity have drawn from the white racist paternalism of the labour bureaucrats have fallen short of Marxism which makes it the responsibility of the Polynesian proletariat to remove their oppression by leading all workers to smash the white ruling class.[15]

In Chapter 25 of Volume 1 of Capital, ‘The Modern Theory of Colonisation’, the only chapter of Capital with direct bearing on early New Zealand economic development, Marx argues strongly that the Capitalist Mode of Production cannot be simply ‘exported’. Wakefield, wrote Marx, “discovered that in the colonies, property in money, the means of subsistence, machinery, and other means of production, do not suffice to stamp the owner as a capitalist if the essential complement to these things is missing: the wage-labourer, the other man, who is compelled to sell himself of his own free will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons which is mediated through things”.[16] Wakefield, according to Marx, found that “in the colonies the divorce of the workers from the requisites of their labour, and from their root, the land, has not yet been effected, or has been affected only here and there”, an so developed the theory of ‘systematic colonisation’ for this purpose.

In spite of what bourgeois historians write, Marx argued that Wakefield’s scheme had to fail in New Zealand. It was not that easy to create a proletariat, because this meant that the capitalist had to use force to “clear out of his way the modes of production and appropriation that are based upon the independent labour of producers”. For Marx, that whole point of his discussion of Wakefield was to demonstrate that “political economy has discovered in the new world…that capitalist private property demands…the expropriation of the worker”. The succession of stages Marx had noted in English capitalism, first petty production (based in England on Henry VIII’s massive expropriations) followed by developed industrial capitalism (also requiring large-scale land expropriations) must necessarily recur in New Zealand. In both stages of development, the expropriation of a Maori proletariat was necessary for capitalism, first to establish itself and then to develop. This expropriation was largely completed by 1945.

Therefore, capitalism according to Marx, cannot exist in the colonies, either as a petty commodity production or industrial capitalism, until such expropriation has taken place! So without the expropriation of the Maori people it would have been impossible for capitalism, even in the form of the sub-mode of peasant production, to develop. It is not surprising that Pakeha historians refuse to admit that New Zealand capitalism is built upon the ‘compulsion’ to sell black labour-power “voluntarily”. They do not want to think about the possibility of capitalism being “voluntarily” expropriated in its turn.

But Black Unity too, deliberately misunderstands Marx. It is not possible for the Polynesian mode of production to survive “outside” the capitalist mode of production, one the latter is dominant. The remnants of Maori society, its land and labour, served during the nineteenth century as partial means of subsistence for a rural reserve army of wage-labour. Maori social relations of production were increasingly converted into wage-labour/capital relations using the remnants of traditional cooperative labour on the land to hold down wages. Whilst the Maori people retained elements of their culture, these could only survive in a form reproduced by capitalism, either being turned into fetishised folk relics, or kept alive in the struggle of the Maori reserve army against imperialist super-exploitation. It is the fusion of the traditional culture of the Polynesian mode of production with the developing proletarian culture which explains the vital role of the Maori people in the vanguard of the proletariat, and not as Black Unity claims, its role in defending a traditional “culture” separate from, and “outside”, the proletarian culture. This is ‘cultural nationalism’ not Marxism.

The Polynesian people are victims of capitalism in Polynesia; they have been proletarianised; they are workers on whose surplus-value Pakeha capitalists have made their multimillions; they can act to achieve their demands. Far from waiting for the ‘white working class’ to ‘liberate’ the Maori people from their super-oppression, it is the white workers not bribed by the privileges of the labour aristocracy who will wait for the Polynesian proletariat to take a revolutionary lead, even on such bread and butter issues as jobs, wages and conditions. But this revolutionary lead will not come from Black Unity which repudiates Marxism. The Polynesian proletariat deserves a revolutionary Marxism which can develop its potential in the leadership of the struggle for a Socialist Polynesia.

(5) Permanent Revolution in Polynesia

Polynesia (except Tonga) was annexed by various European powers in

the nineteenth century, and the history of struggle against annexation is long and bloody. Throughout Polynesia, King Movements developed as forms of Polynesian self-government, following European monarchical traditions, initially under the influence of missionaries. These movements generally lacked the strength to control European land purchases, and their surrender to the market made inevitable their surrender to European governors. In Aotearoa, however, a King Movement developed after annexation rather than before it, against European opposition and using its monopoly of physical force in certain areas to control the activities of Pakeha farmers.

This movement, because of its totally Polynesian character and its effective control of agricultural production was seen by the white settler ruling class – who had achieved ‘responsible government’ in 1852, excluding Maori from the vote – as part of an insurrection. Forms of Maori sovereignty directly confronted Pakeha sovereignty, in opposed forms of government based upon conflicting modes of production. The King Movement once under attack from the white settler government, lost effective power because it did not gain military support from all sections of the Maori population in the land wars. The white government, protesting its ‘loyalty’ to Britain – so as to use the British army’s guns to facilitate land expropriation – conceded to the Maori people the struggle for national independence.

A minority of the King Movement saw itself as opposed to British rule – Te Hokioi, the King Movement paper, pointed to Haiti’s success in maintaining its independence – but the majority could not rise to the conception of a national movement cutting across tribal divisions. Yet the King Movement, before its suppression, exercised more economic and political power over both Maori and Pakeha within its jurisdiction than any similar movement elsewhere in Polynesia, learning as it did from similar movements in other islands.

The defeat of the King Movement had several effects. It confirmed the white settler government in its role as a dependent satellite of British imperialism. It led to the rise of Christian churches independent of the Pakeha missionaries, most notably Ringatu, whose view of the lessons to be learnt from defeat was not only that the Pakeha missionaries were servants of imperialism, but also that the Maori people were being proletarianised.

“Each tohunga therefore must earn his living with his own hands and anything that in any way resembles tithing is not tolerated”. “ The love-feast whish is held in the morning of the second day of a monthly Ringatu festival, is a feast in the literal sense of the term. When a large crowd is gathered…the feast is held in the open, the ‘tables’ being laid on the ground in true Maori fashion…The tohunga offers grace, and the meal is eaten with relish. Truly only the best is provided, the motive being that it is a love-feast to God. A collection is taken toward the close of the meal, the money being used for church purposes only. The collection must not be used for defraying the expenses of the meal, or making other provision for the entertainment of the gathering. It is also a rule of the church that the money given must be earned by the sweat of the brow – interest on investments, proceeds of sale of land or leases not being acceptable.”[17]

The withdrawal of many North Island Maori from the only white institutions they had previous links with – the Pakeha churches – was their verdict on the ruling class’s land war. Now, in a period of Maori political decline new white missionaries have emerged to tie Polynesian workers to white capitalism.

The formation in 1892 of a Kotahitanga, or union, deriving from the 1835 Declaration of Independence by a confederation of united tribes, was another effort by Maori in Aotearoa to achieve their own form of government. While it was claimed that Kotahitanga did not aim to limit the authority of the British Crown, both the New Zealand and British ruling classes refused to recognise it. Had its leaders seriously based themselves on the 1835 Declaration, they could have claimed the Kotahitanga had more right to existence than the Pakeha parliament. They did not do so. Although the movement later subsided (as was inevitable because its success relied on Pakeha parliamentary approval) it was nonetheless an expression of Maori lack of faith in capitalist parliamentarism, and an attempt to develop their own institutions instead.

By contrast, the so-called ‘Young Maori Movement’ (praised by Donna Awatere and the Socialist Action League), was an abandonment of the Polynesian revolutionary tradition, and a surrender to European parliamentarism, leading to such racist attacks on Maori culture as the Suppression of Tohungaism Act. With Apirana Ngata’s impeachment in 1934, it was shown that even the better elements in the Movement, given opportunities at the highest level, could not work through colonial parliamentary institutions. The Ratana Movement, in reaction, linked itself to the Labour Party, in endorsing Tawhiao’s view of the unity of the working class.

“…in London, Ratana was snubbed by his own High Commissioner, Sir James Allen, who was happy for the party to perform haka and poi dances at the Wembley exhibition but laughed when Ratana asked that arrangements be made for him to meet representatives of the British Government. This rejection deeply wounded Ratana and, standing on Westminster Bridge, he prophesied in the words used by Tawhiao: “When all your stone houses are destroyed in time to come, then will the carpenters, the blacksmiths and the shoemakers be in power and I will be the government.”[18]

Although their links with the labour movement have enabled the Ratana Church to play a continuing political role in Maori affairs, again it has failed to achieve its objectives through parliamentary means.

The history of the Maori people in Aotearoa has been a history of struggle for its own form of government. So long as the Polynesian mode of production continued to have vitality, traditional leaders basing themselves on the survival of Maori social relations tried, always unsuccessfully, to persuade white settler governments to tolerate forms of Maori self-government. When traditional leadership failed, now leaders emerged – often as apparently ‘religious’ leaders in a society where distinctions between religion and politics are not clear cut – giving expression to the proletarianisation of the Maori people and their links with other workers outside the framework of parliamentary politics. The refusal of Maori to fight imperialist wars have been the direct result of the emergence of this formally religious, but proletarian in reality, tradition – mass actions with little echo and no support from the ‘official’ Pakeha labour movement.[19]

As the old social relations of the Polynesian mode of production fused with the social relations of the Capitalist mode, as the Maori people became fully proletarianised, the early forms of proletarian ideology lost their religious shell and took on the form of self-government in opposition to imperialism and colonial racist parliamentary rule. The New Zealand colonial ruling class has and will refuse to concede the demand for self-government, but this demand will be achieved in spite of the ruling class, by smashing it. The King Movement and the Kotahitanga were imitations of European class institutions, their monarchies, their parliaments. It is necessary to go beyond European class society and its imitation.

The Polynesian people, their land having been expropriated, now constitute a section – potentially the most revolutionary section because of their tradition as an oppressed nationality – of the working class. The struggle for self-government has now become the workers’ struggle for power: instead of Kings and parliament, workers’ councils are on the agenda. The tradition of the Maori people, a tradition of armed struggle and revolutionary aspiration, now fuses with the international working class culture, developed by Marxism and its tradition of revolution to form the science and culture of the Polynesian socialist revolution.

This struggle has always had an international dimension. The King Movement of the Waikato drew on the lessons of Tahiti, Hawaii and Haiti in the nineteenth century. Today, as the Spartacist League predicted fifteen years ago, the Polynesian islands which have been conceded formal independence by imperialism, experience as a result the crisis of the nation-state in holding back the development of the forces of production, in its most acute form.

Political independence only deepens the economic dependence of the Polynesian island states, accentuating the dependence of the national economies themselves on the remittance of wages of Polynesian migrant workers in New Zealand. Therefore, the achievement in the less developed island states of what has proved impossible in the most developed island with its white culture – the objectives of the King Movement and Kotahitanga –shows that these forms of independence do not halt the pauperisation, immiseration and proletarianisation of the Polynesians by the Capitalist mode of production.

In Polynesia, the less developed island states are to Aotearoa what Transkei and Ciskei are to South Africa – reserves of cheap labour-power which can be forced back into poverty during any economic downturn in the sacred name of respect for ‘national sovereignty’. But the Polynesian proletariat has outgrown ‘nationalism’, which is another name for starvation behind national frontiers, and which intensifies imperialist exploitation instead of abolishing it. Samoa, the Cook Islands, Niue and to a certain extent Tonga, are New Zealand semi-colonies whose colonial dependence can be ended only by socialism. Tahiti, Eastern Samoa and Hawaii, are victims of the final ruse of imperialism – incorporation of the colony into the metropolitan imperialist state. We demand for them the right of secession!

What is needed is a Socialist Union of Polynesia! The revolutionary tradition of Samoa, Hawaii, and Tahiti – the history of uprisings against imperialism – must now directed beyond independence to socialism. Now that large numbers of Polynesian workers have been concentrated in Auckland and other parts of Aotearoa, it is there that they will exchange experiences and prepare for united revolutionary action. This pamphlet has concentrated on Polynesia since (with the exception of Tahiti and Hawaii) it is largely within the sphere of interest of New Zealand as a small imperialist power. A Socialist Polynesia would, however be only a step toward a Socialist Union of the Pacific.

(6) Racism and Imperialism

Capitalism in the South Pacific entered its imperialist stage, the stage of decay, virtually at its birth. The rise of capitalist social relations in Polynesia, the last act of the capitalist division of the world, was an expression of the uneven development of world capitalism, being incorporated by imperialism at the onset of its epoch of decay. This means also that the Polynesian economies combine within them per-capitalist social relations and advanced international capitalist social relations, principally in the form of the super-exploitation of cheap labour-power and resources by giant multi-national forms.

The imperialist ruling class is typically white and male, reflecting Europe the birth-place of capitalism and the patriarchal family. Those who try to rise in imperialist society ape the secondary characteristics of the ruling class. Being white and male is seen to be an admission ticket to the profits of corporate capitalism. The ruling class, a very small privileged minority, encourages these racist and sexist illusions – which form part of the ideology of equality of opportunity – in capitalist society. During the period of capitalist youthful expansion – the late nineteenth century – a privileged white male labour aristocracy was formed, bribed by colonial super-profits. But in its imperialist epoch of decline, this privileged stratum in the working class is not only bought-off with bribes, but also corrupted into political collaboration with imperialism.

The form of imperialist state which travelled furthest on the road to total decay, fascism, showed the underlying logic of such petty bourgeois ideologies based on privilege. The ruling class surrounded itself with a privileged social stratum based on race and sex, a ‘master race’, which proletarianised and even enslaved new oppressed nationalities as ‘Untermensch’. As the defeat of fascism proved, however, the logic of capitalism is not based on sex or race but on the rate of profit and victory in global bloodletting for control of labour-power and resources. The imperialists who dope themselves with their own ideological opiates commit suicide in catastrophic military defeat.

Imperialism has, does and will continue to try to split the working class on race and sex lines, between the white male labour aristocracy and the predominantly non-European and female reserve army. But as the fate of fascism proved, it is impossible to organise a capitalist economy on this basis without catastrophe. In day-to-day struggle, the working class exposes the limits of imperialism’s ability to exclude Polynesian workers from white wages, to keep women in the reserve army, and to provide decent wages for the bulk of white workers. The guerilla struggle for wage increases cannot destroy the basis of the system – only revolution can do that – but it can force the capitalist system to adhere to the historic value of labour-power and act as a brake on tendencies to divide the working class permanently. The conversion of advanced capitalist states into ‘paradises’ for the master race only accelerates their economic and military decline. The accelerated tempo of economic development in political independent states, once relieved of a white ruling class living at the expense of the bulk of the people, goes far to prove the same socially and economically decadent character of racism and colonialism.

The laws of social development of the capitalist economy are social, economic and political, not racial or sexual. Racism and sexism represent reactionary political and social strategies: strategies for dividing the working class and co-opting sections of it in collaboration with the ruling class. When large social strata accept such incentives and privileges as imperialism offers, imperialism must ensure that the working class pays for them. There are limits, however, to imperialism’s ability to increase exploitation to pay for these privileges. These limits are set by the most advanced sections of the proletariat who reject ruling class ideology an the intensified oppression that increased exploitation brings; that is, the black workers against whom the racist ideology of the mainly white labour bureaucracy is directed. What is decisive in this attempt to use racism to perpetuate the splits in the working class, is the extent to which the most oppressed sections of the working class, despite race and sex, reject imperialist ideology, and develop a class conscious struggle against imperialism. As the rate of profit falls, exacerbating the tendency to crisis in the more developed capitalist societies, imperialist super-profits can no longer be utilised to prop up the special privileges of labour aristocracies based on race and sex, even though labour aristocracies will attempt to defend their privileges at the expense of other sectors of the working class.

As our fraternal Australian party, the Communist Left states in its programme, “the revisionist theory of ‘double oppression’ (sometimes treble or quadruple oppression) on racial, national or sex lines, is designed to divert the most oppressed workers from their oppression as wage workers to some other kind of exploitation, usually one denounced by petty bourgeois ideologists. It should be said that for the petty bourgeoisie, this ‘special oppression’ is usually psychological. “It is not the most exploited workers who are only partially exploited as wage slaves,” the programme goes on, “in fact, under capitalism, racism and chauvinism are only made possible by wage slavery.” Under capitalism there is no independent source of exploitation and oppression outside of wage-slavery. [20]

But while there is only one possible source of exploitation and oppression under capitalism, as we have shown, it is the reserve army of ‘cheap labour’ who are the most exploited and oppressed. We have defined super-exploitation as the payment of wages below the costs of reproducing labour-power. In New Zealand both Polynesian and Pakeha workers, in different ways, find that the land issues are used to divide them, and to force down wages, directly and indirectly. The existence of ‘nation states’ in the islands is used to casualise and therefore reduce the wages of island workers. Maori populism is used to divert Maori workers away from struggles on the job back to the land. These divisions are used to blind Pakeha workers to the need for class unity. At the same time a limited privileged stratum of white workers is bribed (quite openly as in the 1981 Budget) to maintain racist attitudes and split the working class. In all cases, forms of populism, whether Maori or Pakeha, introduce a false radicalism into existing class consciousness to prevent the development of a revolutionary class consciousness across race lines.

As we have shown in this pamphlet, Polynesians in the South Pacific were the first proletarians in the area, whose conversion into wage-slaves was a result of the destruction of the Polynesian mode of production and the expropriation of the land. At every point, and in every way, capitalists use and still use competition and racism within the working class to worsen the conditions of Polynesian workers. All competition between different groups of workers, forces wages for all workers down to the advantage of the capitalists. Without wage labour, the division of the working class on race and sex lines would not have the same effect. This historically entrenched division takes the form of special privileges for that section of the white working class ready to abandon class struggle and collaborate with the ruling class, that is, the white labour aristocracy and their representatives, the labour bureaucrats of the trade union leadership.

(7) Maori Nationalism – Real and Fake

To throw off the colonial yoke, all national oppression and all privileges enjoyed by any particular nation or language, is the imperative duty of the proletariat because it brings the socialist revolution closer. But to go beyond these strictly limited and definite historical limits is helping bourgeois nationalism means betraying the proletariat and siding with the bourgeoisie.

“Combat all national oppression? Yes, of course! Fight for any kind of national development, for national culture in general? Of course not… The proletariat, far from undertaking to uphold the national development of every nation, on the contrary warns the masses against such illusions, stand for the fullest freedom of capitalist intercourse and welcomes every kind of assimilation of nations, except tat which is founded on force and privilege.” [21]

So Lenin wrote in his Critical Remarks on the National Question, opposing the reactionary conception of ‘national culture’ with the conception of an international working class and democratic culture.

In her recent Broadsheet articles, Donna Awatere also contrasts ‘national oppression’ with ‘national culture’. She tells us that the basic contradiction in New Zealand is not the “alienation of wage labour” (which we suppose to mean the alienation of wage-labour from the means of production), but “white alienation of our land and white destruction of hat is more important than money, or wage-labour – our culture, Maoritanga.” [22] Here Ms Awatere substitutes for the ‘basic contradiction’ between the forces and relations of production, which we have shown brought about the destruction of the Polynesian mode of production and the proletarianisation of the Maori people, a ‘contradiction’ between white racism and Maoritanga.

This means that so long as Ms Awatere imagines that the basic contradictions of capitalism have nothing to do with the alienation of Maori land, she is abandoning any fight for the Polynesian proletariat. Naturally, in abandoning Marxism for Maoritanga, Ms Awatere also has to repudiate ‘the left’; not just the so-called ‘white left’, but the left in general. Yet although the ‘white left’ she repudiates has suppressed the historic struggle of the Maori proletariat as we have shown, Ms Awatere, too, is diverting the Polynesian proletariat from the class struggle. The Spartacist League, therefore, repudiates both ‘white’ and ‘black’ lefts who abandon Marxism and the working class.

But how far does Ms Awatere support the reactionary concept of ‘cultural nationalism’, a criticism made of her by the Polynesian Panthers which she has yet to answer. In fact, while vociferous about ‘culture’ she is very vague about what ‘nationalism’ she stand for: “Maori sovereignty”, “autonomy” or “reclaiming the land”.

The Maori tradition is a tradition of demanding forms of self-government: the Maori King and his rununga, Kotahitanga, and today, the appropriate form is the Workers’ Council. This tradition is rejected, though the majority of Maori are workers as Ms Awatere knows. Independence, without a definite form of government is unreal – Ms Awatere does not even call for a ‘black government’. Her conception of “Maori Sovereignty” is instead to persuade them that the present endless series of land struggles unwon, and in continued isolation, unwinnable, have some kind of ‘nationalist’ goal and should be intensified. Ms Awatere, far from introducing a new ‘political’ element into Maori struggles, is following a reactionary traditionalism.

It is clear that Ms Awatere uses the term ‘sovereignty’ in an economic sense, referring to reclaiming the land. We ask: how does Ms Awatere wish to reclaim the land? In a recent speech at a Public Service Conference, she said that Maori have to fight for traditional objectives in “Pakeha ways”. Among these “Pakeha ways” she listed union activity (apparently unaware that unions are a product of capitalism, and while often led by Pakeha have large numbers of Maori members). But these “Pakeha ways” do not apparently include ‘green bans’, nor struggles such as that at Bastion Point – even as a step by Polynesian workers to regain possession of part of their land. How then will she regain the land? There is no answer. We have a proposal: expropriate the expropriators! But this proposal, it seems, is rejected along with any other ‘left’ solution.

The ‘cultural nationalists’ Lenin attacked fought in their bourgeois way for independence and for protection of their land. Ms Awatere does not. Instead of linking herself to the Maori tradition – those traditions of resistance and struggle which are today being incorporated in an international working class culture wherever workers meet in Aotearoa – she borrows a set of phrases from Pacific peoples’ national liberation movements and from Azania’s Pan African Congress. Not surprisingly, she cannot translate these phrases into a consistent Maori nationalism with its roots in traditional Maori struggle, but instead popularises a petty bourgeois cultural chauvinism. Why is this?

Pacific islands outside Aotearoa have retained their language and most of the land and traditional cultures. Yet they form a group of states almost bankrupt in the world economy. Vanuatu, frequently held to be a good example of a successful ‘national liberation’ has expelled the imperialist master only to invite him in the back door with offers of tax-free investment and other incentives at the expense of the labour-power of the people of Vanuatu. The immiseration of the ‘liberated’ Pacific peoples reaches levels that would be intolerable in Aotearoa, but in Ms Awatere’s terms they have their culture, so what does the alienation (read starvation) of labour-power matter? This is where cultural nationalism leads.

Donna Awatere and Ripeka Evans are familiar with these islands and their leaders. They frequently attend international conferences of nationalist leaders in the Pacific. In her Broadsheet articles, Ms Awatere seems to identify with bureaucrats when she says that the conference on the Public Service in a multicultural society “produced an impressive collection of people who would be acknowledged as leaders by the Maori people themselves”. Here affinity with the Pacific leaders also reflects her social position as a Maori professional earning far more than the unemployed or part-employed Maori proletarian, a position of social privilege which she shares with Pacific island leaders outside Aotearoa. The social position which tends to produce a rejection of the working class also provides Ms Awatere’s “tools of analysis”: the psychological techniques used in measuring “white hatred” and “white paranoia”.

For example, Ms Awatere’s account of workers in a capitalist city – Auckland – a phenomenon written about by Engels in his Conditions of the Working Class in England in 1844, is psychologising in its most extreme ideological form. In early capitalist England, the proletarian sections of the city were always the worst, the middle class refused to live in those areas. The most class conscious proletarians, who lived in these areas, were Irish migrant workers who experienced both national and class oppression. Yet Ms Awatere invents her psychological ‘explanations’ for a class phenomenon documented as such for more than a century. What is her reason for such deception? Even with her bourgeois professional credentials as a psychologist, she will not convince Maori workers, who are all too conscious that their situation is directly caused by lack of money and not white racism. (It is a curious “white hatred” that can determine property values with such precision).

Such populist psychologising does however, influence those white liberals whose economic interests are served by a psychological rather than class analysis of racism. Liberals who can be ‘blamed’ for racism, whose guilt feelings are manipulated by Ms Awatere, and who accept their ‘responsibility’ to fight their personal racism. As Ms Awatere abandons the other Polynesian peoples, abandons the feminists, and abandons the ‘left’, who has she got as allies but the white liberals and their guilt complexes? Side by side with Ms Awatere at meetings and conferences sit clerical advocates of ‘racial harmony’ – National Council of Churches education officers on racism. Churches remain throughout Polynesia, a major white racist influence on the Polynesian proletariat. In her articles, Ms Awatere does not attack these phonies and the “opiate of the people”. Her seminars on ‘confronting racism’ are full of rich white liberals made to fell ‘uncomfortable’ but without challenging their support of a white ruling class which exploits Polynesian labour-power. The Polynesian proletariat will wait forever for emancipation if they have to wait for whites to ‘confront racism’. Racism will be smashed when the white ruling class is smashed. In this a Polynesian vanguard of the working class can take a lead.

Concluded next issue

[1] Empire was a hit until 9-11 when its conception of ‘Empire’ transcending imperialism fell down like the World Trade Centre.

[2] Anwah Sheikh http://homepage.newschool.edu~AShaikh

[3] In Marxist terms ‘variable’ capital is wages because it is the investment that creates new value hence ‘variable’. ‘Constant’ capital is investment in plant and machinery which does not create value during the process of production, hence ‘constant’.

[4] See James O’Connor Fiscal Crisis of the State, and Paul Mattick Marx and Keynes.

[5] Yaffe’s critique of the Permanent Arms Economy. http://www.rcgfrfi.easynet.co.uk/marxism/articles/crisis.htm

[6] See Michael Meacher ‘The path to friendship goes via the oil and gas fields. Colonel Gadafi is just the latest beneficiary of a cynical strategy’ Guardian Saturday March 27, 2003: “So "brave" Muammar Gadafi has agreed on the importance of combating terrorism. A handshake with Tony Blair has sealed his re-entry into the international community, with contracts worth several hundred million pounds for Shell and BAE to follow. His compliance in opening up Libya to nuclear weapons inspectors has been spun as a major triumph in the "war on terror". The motives, however, are rather more cynical…Libya produces high-quality, low-sulphur crude oil at very low cost (as low as $1 per barrel in some fields), and holds 3% of world oil reserves. It also has vast proven natural gas reserves of 46 trillion cubic feet, but actual gas reserves are largely unexplored and estimated to total up to 70 trillion cubic feet.”

[7] The ‘war for gas’ in Bolivia in 2003 was sparked by the proposal to sell natural gas to a US/UK/Spanish consortium – three of the powers that were members of the ‘coalition of the willing’ in Iraq.

[8] On Kosovo, Meacher (see note 1) claims that: “ As the official Dutch inquiry into the 1995 Srebrenica massacre has now revealed, a secret alliance was formed between the Pentagon and radical Islamist groups to assist the Bosnian Muslims in violation of the UN arms embargo. A vast secret conduit of weapons smuggling through Croatia was organised by US, Turkish and Iranian clandestine agencies, together with Afghan mujahedin and pro-Iranian Hizbullah. Aircraft from Iran Air were used, joined by a US-sponsored fleet of C-130 Hercules. The 78-day bombing of Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999, directed by the US general Wesley Clark, was said to be stopping an alleged "genocide" by the Serbs in Kosovo (some 2,000 bodies were later exhumed, a horrifying number but far short of the 100,000 the US predicted). The US goal was to assist the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). Yet the year before, the US state department had branded the KLA a terrorist organisation, financing its operations from the heroin trade and funds from Islamic countries and individuals, including Osama bin Laden. As James Bissett, the former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia, has subsequently reported: "This did not stop the US from arming and training KLA members in Albania and sending them back into Kosovo to assassinate Serbian mayors, ambush Serbian policemen and intimidate hesitant Kosovo Albanians ... Despite a UN arms embargo, and with the support of the US, arms, ammunition and thousands of fighters were smuggled into Bosnia to help the Muslims ... Bin Laden and his network were also active in Kosovo, and KLA members trained in his camps in Afghanistan and Albania." According to reports in April 1999, assistance was also provided by Britain's SAS. Through much of the 1990s, US support for Islamic militants in former Yugoslavia was backed up by covert US airdrops of arms, especially at Tuzla in northern Bosnia. These took place in the face of Operation Deny Flight, the UN-imposed and Nato-policed no-fly zone over Bosnia. The US House of Representatives also failed to authorise the war under the War Powers Act, making it illegal (shades of Iraq). But the airdrops were only the tip of the iceberg. Retired US officers heading Military Professional Resources Inc, a private paramilitary firm based in Virginia, planned the bloody Croatian "liberation" of the Serb-held Krajina enclave, which resulted in the ethnic cleansing of 200,000 Serbs. US goals in the use of the KLA as a proxy force, similar to the funding of the Contras against the leftwing Sandinista government in Nicaragua in the 1980s, were partly to remove Milosevic and break up Yugoslavia as one of the remaining Communist regimes. But related motives were to break Russia's monopoly over oil and gas transport routes and secure pro-western governments in the strategic Black Sea-Caspian Sea oil-rich basin. A crucial oil corridor, called the Trans-Balkan pipeline, designed to become the main route to the west for oil and gas extracted in central Asia, was to run from the Black Sea to the Adriatic via Bulgaria, Macedonia near the border with Kosovo, and Albania. Another was to run across Serbia to Adriatic ports in Croatia and Italy, fed by a pipeline running from a Black Sea port in Romania.”

[9] Some have argued it was Saddam’s switch to the Euro from the dollar that proved he was no longer a ‘reliable’ ally of the US.

[10] Corporate welfare is much more dependent on the ‘welfare state’ than working class ‘welfare scroungers’. In 1991 Corporate Welfare in the US was around $150 billion around the same size as the amount of federal transfers to working class welfare beneficiaries. As workers welfare is contingent on keeping workers ready for wage-labour and exploitation, its clear that all ‘welfare’ expenditure is a subsidy to profits by the capitalists state, and beyond that, a redistribution of surplus-value!

[11] According to Meacher (cited above): “For both the UK and US, an energy crisis is looming. The latest BP statistical review of world energy predicted that UK proven oil and gas reserves will last, respectively, only 5.4 and 6.8 years at present rates of use. It has been estimated that by 2020 the UK could be dependent on imported energy for 80% of its needs. The US energy department has calculated that net imports of oil, already at 54%, will rise to 70% by 2025 because of growing demand and declining domestic supply.”

[12] See Workers Communist League Manifesto, November 1980. Also Unity, July 1982,

[13] Witches, Bitches and Dykes. Vol 1 (4), November, 1981 0 20-21.

[14] “A statement on the attempt by white leftists to divide Pacific peoples”. Reprinted along with other material on the eviction of the Polynesian Resource Centre in The Republican, No 41, July 1982.

[15] That one of their number at least now recognises she is not a Marxist, is admitted by Donna Awatere in the Auckland Star, 7-9-82

[16] page 932 in Chapter 33 in the penguin edition of Capital. Marx use the example of Mr Peel who took his money and machines to the Swan River region of Western Australia where he bought land but could not obtain ‘free’ labourers. “Unhappy Mr. Peel, who provided for everything except the export of English social relations of production to Swan River!” p. 933

[17] Greenwood, The Upraised Hand, or, The Spiritual Significance of the Rise of the Ringatu Faith. P. 54

[18] Tony Simpson, Te Riri Pakeha. P 227-8

[19] Peter Gibbons, in the Oxford History of New Zealand. P. 313

[20] Programme of the Communist Left of Australia. 1975 p 2-4

[21] Collected Works, Volume 20, page 35

[22] Broadsheet, June, and October. No 101 and 103, 1982.

Class Struggle #55 April-May 2004‘

Contents

Beksd up morality

From Iraq to Aotearoa

Marching for Victory in Iraq

Class For Sure

MAYDAY

Madrid bombing

Defeat US Empire

Imperialism” bad policy or dead end?

Towards a Socialist Polynesia Pt 2

All Beksd-up’: Market Morality Bends OK

FROM IRAQ TO AOTEAROA, WE CAN WIN THIS WAR

WELCOME TO THE RESISTANCE

THEIR FUTURE OR OURS?

MAORI AND PAKEHA UNITE TO FIGHT!

HAWKES BAY POINTS THE WAY

A LATIN AMERICAN LESSON

BREAK WITH THE BROWN TABLE

BEYOND MAY THE 5TH

VICTORY TO IRAQ!

Auckland's Arab Community Shows the Way

On Sunday April 18 about 140 members of Auckland's Arab community and a handful of their supporters marched to the US consulate. Organised at short notice and almost totally ignored by the media, the march was a powerful show of support for the armed insurrection shaking Iraq.

A disappointing feature of the demonstration was the absence of almost all of Auckland's left-wing

It is certainly true that Sunday's march could have been better advertised, and that the Arab community could make stronger links with the many Aucklanders who hate Bush and his imperialist war.

As rank and file trade unionists, we are disgusted and embarrassed by the failure of our movement to distance itself from the imperialist war machine and to show solidarity with the people fighting to stop that machine in its tracks.

Instead of acting as cogs in the War of Terror, our unions should begin a campaign of aid to the Iraqi workers’ organisations opposing the occupation of their country.

In the 1930s, New Zealand unions sent money to the Spanish republicans fighting Franco and the Nazis, and some left-wing Kiwis travelled to Spain to join the International Brigade that took on the fascists on the battlefield.

Victory to Iraq!

Defeat US/NZ Troops!

Build the Iraqi workers' movement!

MayDay! Workers of the World Unite!