Imperialist crisis is the crisis of humanity

In the post September 11 2001 world US imperialism has gone on the offensive to use war against ‘terrorism’ to overcome its 30 year old economic crisis. To survive it is forced to impose its rule over the rest of the world so it can increase its extraction of value from the producing classes. It has to defeat its EU and Japanese rivals to grab oil and gas reserves and the resources of the former workers states. This has further polarised the class struggle internationally between the imperialist powers on the one hand (the EU countries uniting their forces and Japan reviving its military) and the workers and peasants fight back against growing poverty, military occupations and economic slavery.

This struggle is the result of a growing contradiction between the accumulation of wealth and the rivalry of the imperialists to control it, and the growing impoverishment of the masses whose labour and access to resources is being exploited and destroyed. Facing this crisis, the danger is that the masses do not directly confront imperialism but are drawn into one or other of the imperialist blocs behind the reformists. For while the objective basis of the crisis of capitalism remains the drive by capital to destroy nature and humanity, the consciousness of the working masses is yet to face its class enemy directly and recognise the need to overthrow it. Instead, workers and poor peasants everywhere are being led by political parties that refuse to overthrow capitalism, and promote instead some peaceful path to a ‘democratic socialist’ future.

Capitalist Peace and Democracy false hopes

Facing a global crisis where the imperialists are inevitably forced into greater conflicts and wars to survive, this reformist leadership draws workers and poor peasants into a strategy of social imperialism – trying to reform imperialism by means of ‘peace’ and ‘democracy’. So in Europe we have the workers parties, old and new, contesting the Euro elections over control of a ‘parliament’ that is a fig leaf for the Euro imperialists attempts to unify their power in a single state. In Iraq, workers are being asked to support a UN backed puppet government imposed on them by an imperialist invasion and occupation in the name of ‘peace’ and ‘democracy’. In Venezuela, workers are defending Chavez against imperialism but are being told by Stalinists and fake Trotskyists that Chavez can get rid of imperialism by ‘democratic’ and ‘peaceful’ means. In Aotearoa, Maori are being mustered into parliament by a new Maori Party in the belief that colonisation can be legally reversed and that the imperialists’ ongoing grab for land and fisheries can be stopped ‘peacefully’ and ‘democratically’.

Smashing social imperialism

All of these ‘social imperialist movements’ against imperialist globalisation are reactionary utopias. They are utopian because imperialism will not lie down and roll over to save nature and humanity. They are reactionary because they are death traps that will disarm and demobilise workers and small peasants in the face of mounting inter-imperialist aggression and war. They are promoted by bourgeois and petty bourgeois intellectuals to present a human face to capitalism in order to disorientate and disorganise the only class alliance that can put and end to imperialism and capitalism – the workers leading the poor peasant farmer masses.

The answer today is the same one that Trotsky gave in the 1930’s. The crisis of humanity facing the imperialist death drive is a crisis of revolutionary leadership. The workers and poor peasants are the vast majority of humanity, but they are yet to become politically conscious. Trotsky drew upon the tradition of revolutionary Marxism to show that a revolutionary international party was necessary to develop the spontaneous resistance of the masses into a class-conscious revolutionary movement. Without that party and its program workers would remain trapped in the ‘social imperialist’ movements posing as ‘socialist’.

Today, more than ever, as the most recent imperialist crisis now threatens again to destroy nature and humanity, it is vitally urgently build a world party of revolution. The current World Social Forum (and all of its regional and nationalist groupings) is the ‘movement of movements’ that traps workers behind so-called ‘socialist’ and nationalist leaders like Castro, Lula and Chavez. Revolutionaries must stand opposed to this utopian, reactionary, ‘socialist’ international and form a new revolutionary international.

International Conference in December 2004

The CWG is part of a Parity Committee of revolutionary groups that is convening a conference in December this year in Brazil of all those forces that understand that the crisis of capitalism can only be overcome by resolving the crisis of leadership. We are calling on every political tendency and workers organisation that agrees to a basic program of 5 points for world revolution and fights for them in the working class to come to this conference. These points are:

(1) Victory for Iraq, Defeat imperialism at home!

This position recognises that imperialism is the cause of war and that to stop war imperialism (as the highest stage of capitalism) must be defeated. It is based on Lenin’s position of 1915 – “the main enemy is at home”. It also means fighting in the trenches against imperialism.

(2) Against the Popular front and against governments of the bourgeois workers parties in power.

This is Trotsky’s position against all alliances between workers’ organisations and the bourgeoisie, except temporary military blocs, such as being in the trenches alongside the Iraqi resistance.

(3) Against all counter-revolutionary tendencies in the workers movement like Stalinism, and false Trotskyists that provide ‘revolutionary’ credentials for these elements. Practically this means opposition to the role of the World Social Forum which is a popular front kept alive by the role of Stalinists and fake Trotskyists.

(4) For Workers’ Councils and soviets everywhere as the basis of workers and poor farmers’ governments!

The Russian revolution would not have happened without soviets. Elsewhere revolutions without soviets have failed.

(5) For Leninist-Trotskyist democratic-centralist political parties!

This is the party of class conscious workers that leads all workers and their class allies to socialist revolution.

JOIN THE PARITY COMMITTEE AND FIGHT FOR A NEW WORLD PARTY OF REVOLUTION

BEACH ACCESS UNDER ATTACK

Despite almost unanimous Maori opposition and the largest street protests for a quarter of a century, Labour’s foreshore and seabed legislation went through parliament in May.

Labour defended its land-grabbing law by claiming that Maori wanted to privatise the seabed and foreshore, and that only quick legislation would protect the customary Kiwi right of free beach access. Maori and a significant minority of Pakeha didn’t buy that line – they remembered that it was the last Labour government which held a fire sale of nationalised assets like Air New Zealand, the Bank of New Zealand, and Telecom. Helen Clark and Michael Cullen were ministers in that government, yet now they pose as guardians against privatisation!

When the current government has renationalised assets, it has done so in the interests of big business, not ordinary Kiwis. Remember Air New Zealand, which Clark spent hundreds of millions buying back to prop up local business, but which had to lose hundreds of staff to become a ‘more efficient’?

And the there’s the awkward little fact that Labour’s seabed and legislation excludes from its provisions over 70 private landowners, the overwhelming majority of whom are non-Maori! Labour is happy to ban Maori from asserting their customary rights in the courts, but happy to enshrine the private ownership of the foreshore by wealthy Pakeha in the law!

It hasn’t taken long for events to expose the hollowness of Labour’s claim to be the defender of public access to beaches. The government’s ‘Tourism New Zealand’ bureaucrats are teaming up with the Thames Coromandel District Council and the Department of Conservation to plan the introduction of charges for access to popular New Zealand beaches. Coromandel’s Hot Water and Cathedral Cove beaches have been picked out as prime targets for commercialisation.

DOC Waikato region boss Greg Martin has told the media he wants a ‘pay and display’ car park at Cathedral Cove beach. Martin admitted that his plans would cause a ‘furore’ amongst Kiwis, but promised to pursue them anyway! Tourism New Zealand chief executive Greg Archibald has slammed critics of beach access charges, calling them ‘naive’. Archibald didn’t mention that only weeks ago Helen Clark and her Ministers were assuring Kiwis they would have free access to all their foreshore forever, thanks to their government’s wonderful new legislation!

But charges for access to Cathedral Cove and Hot Water Beaches would be just the beginning. Keen for a ‘free’ trade deal with Washington, Labour is determined to liberalise foreign investment rules and encourage the buy-up of New Zealand by US capital.

Blairite ‘Third Way’ governments like Labour advance programmes of ‘creeping privatisation’, where governments contract out services to business, or indulge in ‘partnerships’ that give private capital control over key assets and services. In Britain, Helen Clark’s role model Tony Blair is outraging trade unions by forcing through ‘public-private partnerships’ that see schools and hospitals being run on ‘market principles’ and ‘topped up’ with money from the private sector.

Our own Labour government has hailed ‘as the way of the future’ the new business school at Auckland University, which is funded jointly by the state and by private business. Labour’s seabed and foreshore legislation leaves local councils and DOC the space to effectively part-privatise the seabed and foreshore through ‘partnerships’ with local business and ‘business model’ practices like charging for beach access. ‘Long term leases’ of the foreshore to US businesses are only another step down the same path.

The Coromandel is one of the fastest-growing parts of New Zealand, and its council reflects its mixture of wealthy ‘lifestyle capitalists’ and conservative farmers. Councillors from ‘exclusive’ beach resorts like Pauanui are demanding revenue to ‘upgrade the infrastructure’ of the peninsula, and in doing so increase the value of their own properties. It’s the same story up and down the country. In the south, Clutha District Council is considering putting a toll on the road through the beautiful Caitlins coastal area.

The lesson is clear: Labour’s nationalisation means property rights for bosses, not right of access to the beach for ordinary Kiwis. Labour’s legislation has eliminated any possibility of Maori using the court system or the Treaty of Waitangi to throw up annoying challenges to the rule of capital and the US buy-up of New Zealand. A stroke of the Governor General’s pen has made a mockery of the Land Court, the Treaty of Waitangi and the ‘loyal opposition’ of Nanaia Mahuta.

But there are other types of opposition that Labour can’t legislate away. The occupation of stolen land has always been a part of the Maori struggle against colonialism and imperialism, and it must become a tactic of ordinary Pakeha as well. A majority of working class Pakeha supported Labour’s racist legislation, but now that the consequences of that support have become clear they should change their tune and unite with Maori. We need to revive the spirit of Bastion Pt and Pataikore, and occupy threatened sections of the foreshore up and down Aotearoa.

SKY CITY WORKERS WIN

Workers at Auckland’s Sky City casino have won a pay increase and a number of other demands after a campaign which culminated in a short strike and a mass picket. Organised by the Service and Food Workers Union, workers at the central city’s biggest worksite forced management to grant them an average $1 an hour pay increase.

The demand for a pay increase reflected workers’ frustration at the contrast between their dismal wages and the pay packets of Sky City management. Sky City CEO Evan Davies makes $26,000 a week, which is more than the yearly net income of many of the people he employs.

The pay increase will be union-only, which means that non-union workers will not be able to ‘freeload’ on their mates. Other successful demands include an on-site office, changes to anti-family shift work arrangements, and action against a flea infection which has left a number of workers in hospital.

The Sky City story offers many lessons to those trying to rebuild New Zealand’s union movement. Five years ago the SFWU had only a handful of members at Sky City, and these members had to operate ‘underground’ for fear of discovery and dismissal. Management was openly contemptuous of workers’ rights and of unions. Today, the SFWU has over 800 members, and its new on-site office symbolises the concessions it has forced from Sky City bosses.

Crucial to the SFWU’s success has been its use of the ‘organising model’ of unionism, which gives more emphasis to rank and file activism and strikes than the discredited ‘partnership model’ pushed by Council of Trade Union leaders Ken Douglas and Angela Foulkes in the 90s.

The SFWU has used mass pickets of newly-unionised workers to attract public support and more members and expose Sky City management’s anti-union policies. SFWU organisers have used Labour’s minor liberalisation of employment law to get legal access to the site and recruit more workers. Because it has been built through struggle, the SFWU’s Sky City branch has a comparatively high level of rank and file activism. The 350-strong picket supporting the latest strike was organised at very short notice.

But the SFWU’s success at Sky City can’t hide some important political weaknesses. The leadership of the union is very close to the Labour government, despite that government’s record of attacking workers at home and supporting US imperialism’s wars against workers overseas. The last issue of Our Voice, the union’s paper, reported the struggle at Sky City, but also found space to praise Michael Cullen’s ‘budget for working families’. Our Voice didn’t mention Labour’s ‘Job Jolt’ attack on unemployed workers and its boost on spending for War of Terror-related ‘security’.

The SFWU is preparing a new recruitment drive at Sky City, and the union-only pay rise it has won gives it a good chance of getting a big haul of new members. In the longer term, there’s the prospect of building up the unions at other casinos around New Zealand, and fighting for a MECA (multi-employer collective agreement) covering all casino workers. MECAs provide extra protection for workers’ pay and conditions, and offer workers a broader front when they fight to defend their pay and conditions. The SFWU has already won a MECA for rest home workers in Auckland.

But bosses hate MECAs, because they reduce ‘flexibility’, i.e. the ability of management to cut costs with redundancies and pay cuts. Casino workers will only win a MECA with a militant fight involving extended strikes, effective pickets and solidarity from other unions. None of these things will be welcomed by the Labour government. The wharfies’ fight against Mainland Stevedoring scabs in 2000 and the struggle of secondary teachers in 2002 showed that Labour sides with the bosses in any important industrial scrap.

Labour will not hesitate to turn on the SFWU, if it looks like threatening the ‘industrial peace’ Helen Clark is sworn to promote. Nor will the SFWU leadership be willing to take on the Government heading up to an election. The membership of the SFWU should not be held back by the friendly relations between the SFWU leadership and the Labour Government, and should be preparing for the battles to come.

ENGINEERS UNDERMINE POSTIE NEGOTIATIONS

Dear Class Struggle comrades,

You will know that postal workers are divided into two unions – the Postal Workers Federation (PWF) and the Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union (EPMU). Over the years, negotiations over pay and conditions have been greatly hampered by this division. And it is the Engineers who are largely responsible for maintaining the division. The PWF has repeatedly written to the Engineers, asking them to negotiate jointly with New Zealand Post management. Each year, though, the Engineers have refused to cooperate. Last February, PWF leaders confronted top Engineers officials at a Council of Trade Unions ‘leaders meeting’ at Palmerston North. The PWF was hoping to get the CTU as a whole to pressure the Engineers into joint negotiations. But the problem is not an isolated one which can fixed by a handshake amongst officials. The EPMU leadership has a history of undermining other unions, by refusing joint work and poaching members from other unions.

Sure enough, Engineers President Andrew Little refused to be moved by the PWF’s appeal in Palmerston North. In a letter that was quoted in the May edition of Redback, the PWF’s bulletin, Little said ‘I consider it most unlikely [that EPMU negotiators] will agree to reserve a right, or even a wish, to communicate with your union during the course of negotiations’. In other words, Little will allow management to play posties off against one another, as they negotiate ‘blind’ with NZ Post.

The EPMU’s sectarian attitude is rooted in their ‘partnership model’ of unionism. The Engineers seek a ‘partnership’ with employers, where the union plays the role of a sort of low-level management, keeping the discontent of workers under control and making sure that worksites run smoothly. The EPMU aims to represent better-paid skilled workers, and is especially keen on big sites owned by multinational companies. The union pitches itself to these companies as the best way of controlling labour and of boosting productivity. The EPMU is very keen on productivity – in fact, it talks about productivity far more often than it talks about pay. The EPMU won’t cooperate with the PWF because the latter union rejects the ‘partnership model’. Instead of working with the PWF and running a campaign of strikes and pickets to win gains for posties, the EPMU hopes to ingratiate itself with NZ Post management by undermining the PWF. After all, it will be harder for the PWF to back any pay claims with the threat of industrial action, if the EPMU is able to promise keep a good chunk of posties out of any such action.

If unions won’t look after workers, who will? The bosses won’t! The EPMU fully deserves its vile reputation amongst militant unionists. Its divide and rule tactics remind me of the lockout of 1951, and the way that US imperialism and its servants in the Holland government were able to turn workers against one another by getting the Federation of Labour to undermine Jock Barnes’ Trade Union Congress by breaking its strikes and red baiting Barnes. It’s no coincidence that the EPMU is a big supporter of the war industry, and that last year its leadership was busy lobbying George Bush’s deputy sheriff John Howard to build some of his new frigates at Whangarei using EPMU labour. Traitors like Andrew Little are prepared to use New Zealand labour help build the war machines that will repress the next generation of workers in the United States’ semi-colonies.

The EPMU’s rotten policies and practices can only be changed by a rank and file revolt, but the undemocratic nature of the union’s organisation makes communication amongst the rank and file very difficult. I learned this the hard way, as a delegate! The best way to contribute to the renewal of the union is to inform its rank and file members about healthy developments in other parts of the workers’ movement. We need to let EPMU members know about struggles and gains that they are missing out on, because of the misleadership of Little and others.

Many EPMU members have no idea about recent events in countries with a high level of class struggle – countries like Argentina, where there have been hundreds of factory occupations by workers threatened with job losses. We should go out to the grassroots and tell them about the positive alternative that the Argentinean workers have found to class collaboration and cosying up to imperialism. Over the last decade the EPMU leadership has allowed Carter Holt Harvey to steadily reduce the workforce at its Kinleith Mill in Tokoroa. Hundreds of workers have lost their jobs because CHH, which is owned by a US multinational, has decided at the drop of a hat to move jobs offshore.

The EPMU says it can’t do anything about CHH’s plans, but the workers of Argentina have occupied their factories rather than face redundancy. Many of them have succeeded in running their factories themselves. But of course the EPMU keeps events in South America from its members at sites like Kinleith and Glenbrook, so that out of hopelessness they choose capitulation to capitalism over struggle. The role of activists it to counter the misleadership of the EPMU leadership with hard-hitting propaganda and to replace this leadership with one drawn from the rank-and-file which is accountable to the members.

Comradely Greetings,

Bob King (former delegate, EPMU)

LET’S OCCUPY THE FORESHORE, NOT CABINET!

An Open Letter to supporters of the Maori Party

Kia ora comrades,

We were proud to march alongside so many of you on the great seabed and foreshore hikoi. The hikoi has already taken its place beside the Great Land March of 1975, the waterfront lockout of 1951, and the anti-Springbok campaign of 1981 in the history of resistance to injustice in Aotearoa. We salute the courage and endurance of the marchers who defied the threats of politicians, the slanders of the media, and the verbal and physical attacks from racists and made Labour’s confiscation of the seabed and foreshore into a burning issue up and down Aotearoa.

We were proud to hikoi with you to Wellington, but we won’t be travelling to Wanganui for the launch of the new Maori Party. It’s not that we’ve changed our minds about the seabed and foreshore – on the contrary, we think that events since the passage of Labour’s legislation confirm the arguments of the hikoi ten times over.

We won’t be with you in Wanganui because we believe that the Maori Party represents a sharp turn away from the path of the hikoi. We don’t recognise the spirit of that great struggle in the Maori Party. In fact, we think that some of the pronouncements of the would-be leaders of the new party – Tariana Turia, Peter Sharples, and the rest – represent a betrayal of the politics of the seabed and foreshore hikoi. We think that you are setting out on a hikoi to hell, and we want to try to convince you change direction before it’s too late.

Hikoi to the Ballot Box?

We’ve been disturbed by some of the korero at pro-party hui held around the North Island, and by the statements that leaders of the new party have been making through the media. Movers and shakers like Tariana and Sharples have announced that they want the new organisation to be a ‘centre’ party, which can sit between National and Labour and negotiate with both to get the best deal – or, at any rate, the biggest number of Cabinet seats - for Maori.

Tariana tells us that the new party will be open to people of all political persuasions. Tuku Morgan has welcome at pro-party hui, and National’s Georgina Te Heuheu is being courted as a possible candidate in next year’s general election. Sharples has claimed that the new party ‘will have the same basic philosophy’ as Labour, and that Labour ‘would be fools to treat us as enemies’. On television with Gerry Brownlee soon after the hikoi, Tariana refused to rule out a coalition between the new party and National after the next election. Tariana’s by-election campaign manager Matt McCarten has defended the overtures to National as a ‘strategic’ measure designed to increase the Maori Party’s bargaining power. According to Tariana and McCarten, ‘the next hikoi will be to the ballot box’ and into a coalition with one of the big parties.

But why were we on the hikoi in the first place? Why did Maori and their supporters need to march all the way from Te Hapua to Wellington? What were all those blisters for? Wasn’t the hikoi necessary because Maori seats in Cabinet were not able to get a better deal for Maori? Hasn’t Tariana tried and fail to influence government ‘from the inside’? And didn’t Tuku and the rest of Tau Henare’s brat pack try and fail to do the same back in the late 90s?

New Party, Old Mistakes

We think that Tariana is repeating the mistakes she made after the occupation at Pakaitore back in ’95. Tariana won a lot of mana as a leader of that occupation, which defied the power of the state and won back a piece of the Wanganui River foreshore for Maori. After the Pakaitore, Labour dropped Tariana a line, telling her that she should occupy parliament. Tariana bought Labour’s line, and the rest is history.

Tariana lost a lot of her mana by becoming a Minister in a government which helped the US invade Afghanistan and Iraq, and which continued to implement National’s right-wing economic and social policies at home. Tariana’s decision to dump Labour for the hikoi has made her a hero again, but now she’s talking about going down the same old parliamentary road. Not only has Tariana not learnt from her mistakes, she’s hasn’t even learnt from the mistake of Tau and his New Zealand First mates. She’s talking about the possibility of going down Tau’s own road to nowhere, by forming a government with the Nats!

Local Battle, Global War

But why is the hikoi through parliament so hard? Why did Tau and Tariana fail? Why did Mat Rata fail? Why did Apirana Ngata fail? Why are Maori still second-class citizens, after more than a hundred years of Maori seats?

To answer these questions, we need to step back and look at the big political picture. We hikoied to Wellington, because Wellington is the political capital of Aotearoa. Wellington is where parliament sits and the big bureaucrats draw their salaries.

But Wellington is not the place where the most important economic and political decisions affecting Aotearoa are made. To go to the real heart of power, we’d have to hikoi to Washington DC, or to the Wall Street Stock Exchange in New York City. Aotearoa is an economic semi-colony of the United States, and that means that the US dictates the economic direction and general political programme of both National and Labour governments.

Multinational companies based in the US and other imperialist countries control most of the biggest businesses in Aotearoa, and wealthy Americans are snapping up our land. US money has effective veto power over important economic and political decisions in Wellington. US military and spy bases are dotted around Aotearoa, and Labour’s participation in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is driven by a fear of offending US money and the US government. ‘Free’ trade treaties like GATT only tie government hands more tightly.

The US exports its own economic problems to the rest of the world, and calls its export globalisation. In Aotearoa, globalisation has meant the privatisations and cuts in education and health spending of the 80s and 90s. Globalisation continues today, as Labour works hard to win a ‘free’ trade deal with the US by removing remaining barriers to foreign investment and the purchase of land, opening the door to GE, and doing the US’s dirty work in ‘little Iraqs’ like the Solomons and East Timor.

It’s not hard to see why Labour is crapping on Maori. Those cheeky darkies who descended on Wellington are a threat to the smooth progress of globalisation in Aotearoa. The Maori Land Court and the Waitangi Tribunal threatened to tie the government up in red tape, when it wanted to get on with reducing the barriers to the US buy-up of coastal land, and the US colonisation of the sea farming business. And the Maori demand for better funding for kohanga reo, housing and other necessities runs straight into Labour’s concern to keep government spending down so that it can cut company tax and woo US investors.

How they Hikoi in Bolivia

The hikoi was a challenge to the politicians and bureaucrats in Wellington and to the globalisers in Washington DC. It was our local front in the global war against the imperialists’ globalisation. It’s no coincidence that many young people on the march identified with the Iraqi resistance, and that some wore the head dress of the Palestinians fighting colonisation in Gaza and the West Bank. And, there’s no doubt the hikoi scared the shit out of the local agents of globalisation. Helen Clark was too afraid to show us her face, when we made it to Wellington! (Of course, Helen will be much less worried about a Maori Party which refuses even to call her the enemy. She’ll be keeping that Cabinet seat warm for Tariana...)

Maori and working class Pakeha have to understand that winning seats in parliament and at the Cabinet table means nothing, as long as their country is owned offshore. To defeat the enemy, we have to think globally, even as we act locally. We may have a powerful offshore enemy in US imperialism, but we also have a power offshore ally too, in the international working class. From Iraq to Argentina, US imperialism is being resisted by working class and oppressed people. When we talk about strategy and tactics, we should be looking at success stories overseas, not at local failures like Tau and Tuku.

We all know about Iraq, but too few of us are aware of the massive anti-US revolts that have been shaking South America for two years now. South America’s workers and peasants are fighting US imperialism, and they are winning. In Argentina, workers have reacted to globalisation by occupying hundreds of factories that US-owned companies wanted to close down. In Venezuela, the CIA has twice tried to overthrow the anti-US government of Hugo Chavez with military coups. Bush wants to get control of Venezuela’s oil reserves, but he’s been defeated, because millions of workers have taken to the streets, and others have occupied their factories.

In Bolivia, workers and peasants last year staged a hikoi of their won, pouring into their capital city La Paz to protest the US-backed government’s plans to wipe out coca farming and steal the country’s natural gas. In La Paz the Bolivians built barricades and stormed government buildings. President Sanchez de Lozada needed a US helicopter to sneak him out of the country, as his government collapsed and the people took over the capital. That’s how a hikoi should end!

Unity with Workers, not the Nats

There are many lessons to be learnt from the victories in South America. In Bolivia, protesters united across ethnic lines, because they had a common interest in getting rid of Lozada, a wealthy businessman nicknamed ‘the Yank’ because he spoke with an American accent. The Indian coca growers the US was trying to ruin united with mixed race urban workers, against a common enemy. In Aotearoa, we need the same sort of unity between Pakeha and Maori workers. Many Pakeha trade unionists and leftists marched to Wellington, but the majority of non-Maori were sucked in by Labour’s promises that its legislation would protect their access to beaches.

Now, only weeks after the first reading of Labour’s bill, the Department of Conservation has teamed up with Tourism New Zealand and some local councils to promote plans to charge the public for access to popular beaches, including Coromandel’s Cathedral Cove. In the south, Clutha District Council has plans to make motorists pay for access to the road that follows the scenic Caitlins coast. In the Hawkes Bay, locals are up in arms over local government’s decision to allow a US billionaire to desecrate the beautiful Cape Kidnappers by building chalets and tunnelling into a cliff. Pakeha are beginning to understand what Maori have been so angry about!

We all know that the politicians and the media slandered the hikoi, by telling the country that it was made up of greedy Maoris who only wanted to privatise the foreshore and exploit the seabed to line their own pockets. The hikoi challenged those slanders: at hui after hui speakers reiterated their support for public access to the foreshore, placards on the march called for Pakeha to join in, and Hone Harawira constantly emphasised that the seabed and foreshore issue was one for ordinary Pakeha as well as Maori.

By the time it reached Wellington, the hikoi had attracted a significant minority of Pakeha members, and the media had to drop some of its more outrageous slurs. But now, just when Pakeha are beginning to grasp the real meaning of Labour’s legislation, Tariana and other Maori leaders are discrediting all the arguments of the hikoi, by extending the hand of friendship to Labour, and even finding kind words for National! The Pakeha who took part in the hikoi were mostly left-wingers disillusioned with Labour. They understand Labour’s pro-globalisation agenda and oppose its involvement in wars in the Middle East as well as its racism at home. These people will be disgusted by Tariana’s and Sharples’ overtures to Labour.

And the great majority of working class, Labour-voting Pakeha will be even more angered by the Maori Party’s overtures to National. Seeing Tariana cosying up to Gerry Brownlee will only reinforce these workers’ misunderstanding of Tino Rangatiratanga, and tie them more closely to Labour. For their part, working class Maori who have broken with Labour over the seabed and foreshore will also be alarmed to see that ‘their’ new party considers Brash and Brownlee possible coalition partners. If Tariana isn’t careful, these workers will rush straight back into the arms of Labour!

Occupy the Foreshore!

Tariana’s ‘hikoi to the ballot box’ cannot solve the problems of Maori. It can only result in another generation of Maori being chewed up and spat out of Wellington’s political machine. Only direct action which takes back land and resources – land and resources stolen from working class Pakeha, as well as Maori – can reverse the tide of globalisation in Aotearoa. The time is ripe for Maori and Pakeha to unite and occupy threatened sections of the foreshore. We need to revive the spirit of Bastion Pt, Pakaitore and the seabed and foreshore hikoi, and safeguard places like Cathedral Cove, the Caitlins Coast, and Cape Kidnappers with direct action! Let’s occupy the foreshore, not Cabinet!

Kia kaha,

Communist Workers Group

Occupy For Sure!

From Pakaitore to Parliament and Back!

The main outcome of the Hikoi of 2004 is the birth of a Maori Party. Tariana Turia is standing in Te Tai Hauauru. Is this the way forward for the vast majority of Maori who are workers? No. It subordinates the interests of Maori workers behind a few Maori who are politicians, bureaucrats and bosses. Maori workers should break with Labour but organise to occupy land and foreshore to meet their needs rather than follow some of their leaders back into the parliamentary dead end.

What's the alternative to parliament?

          Look at where Tariana Turia comes from. In 1995 she, along with Ken Mair, a public servant, and Niko Tangaroa, an Auckland union leader, combined to lead the occupation of Pakaitore (Moutoa Gardens) in Wanganui. The Treaty process was stalled under National and the Wanganui iwi wanted to speed things up.
          This was the last of the big occupations. Bastion Point won back land for Ngati Whatua before the onset of the 1980s' neo-liberal counter-revolution and has since become a major land owner in Auckland city. Pakaitore could not deliver these results. It was too little and too late. But pressure was exerted on the National government and a face-saving deal was done. The occupiers left with dignity, and the Labour Party made unspecified promises to deal with grievances.
          Labour courted Tariana Turia and co-opted her into the party with the promise of making her a Minister and promoting Maori issues. Several times she expressed her impatience with Labour as it pulled back from defending Maori but she and her mentor, Helen Clark, remained allies until the F&S (Takutai Moana) issue blew up.
          The lesson drawn by Tariana Turia and her supporters on the Hikoi is that Labour has now betrayed the Maori cause by confiscating the foreshore and seabed. This is true. But they are in danger of drawing the wrong conclusion - that this betrayal can be overcome by taking to the parliamentary road in a new vehicle – a Maori Party.

It is the wrong conclusion because the parliamentary road is a dead end. Already the occupation of Pakaitore in 1995 had been weakened by focusing the struggle on parliament. This will not change with the formation of the Maori Party.

It doesn't matter if a minority exerts pressure outside or inside parliament. It can never win what it wants. The reason is that parliament is a numbers game and governments will always put minority Maori interests last to keep majority pakeha support. The best a Maori Party will do is a deal with the multinational fish farmers to allow Maori to work for them - just like the forestry industry.
More importantly, Parliament is not sovereign, capitalism is, and today it is US imperialism that rules the world. So jumping out of Labour's bus into Hone Harawira's 4-wheel drive is not going to alter the numbers game or the parliamentary outcome. So long as it is added up in votes the numbers game will always leave Maori as poor cousins using its 7 seats to negotiate starvation rations with the majority.

Worse, it divides Maori from pakeha workers and lets the bosses' maintain their parliamentary stranglehold on the only class able to throw out the bosses. So what's the workers' alternative?

Make Pakaitore work this time!

          Pakaitore can be seen as a lost opportunity. It was a highly visible occupation of a key foreshore site near the Wanganui river mouth which could have become a flax roots occupation. Instead of using it as a tactic to pressure the parliamentary majority, Pakaitore could have been a new start for Maori politics. It could have been a model occupation for Maori and pakeha workers to assert workers control over key sites and resources.
          In this way, Maori could have stopped playing a minority support role like the Winston Peters and Tau Henares in parliament and could have called on support from a section of pakeha workers to break out of the dead end of the parliamentary road.
          But for this to happen, the leadership of the occupation had to be won from the iwi leadership. Ken Mair is a bureaucrat who wants Maori to sit down at the table with pakeha. But the bosses have shown that even the Brown Table is permanently under the Round Table. The Maori elite of capitalists, lawyers and bureaucrats who want 15% of the profits of NZ Inc have not made it to 1%.

The bad news for Ken Mair is that Maori capitalism is doomed to extinction. It cannot be a vehicle for the welfare of the mass of Maori. Just look at the way Treaty settlements have led to the creation of Maori capitalists whose loyalty to the boss class far exceeds their loyalty to Maori.

Take Sealords. Sorry, you're too late, it’s been taken. Maori fishing rights under the Treaty were consolidated as a share of the quota owned by the Sealord corp in a half share with a Japanese corporation. In a capitalist economy, iwi or Maori corps are mainly sprats or at the most a few kahawai swimming in a sea of makos.
But was'nt Niko Tangaroa a staunch unionist? Yes, but in coming home to Wanganui, his ‘Ahi kaa’ (the home fires), he left his union support base behind to work for the iwi. This was sad and probably against his personal instincts, but his SUP Stalinist training was never centred on seriously uniting the working class, only containing it. While many unionists and leftists rallied to Pakaitore to show worker solidarity, the objective was always to win Pakaitore for Wanganui iwi and not for the united working class.

So the Pakaitore leadership showed that they had a limited iwi perspective which did not want to turn the occupation into a cause to unite the working class. The opportunity to turn Maori from a parliamentary minority, always making concessions to the majority, into the vanguard of a new working class majority, was lost.

Workers' Pakaitore everywhere!

This lesson should not be lost on us today. We do not have to get stuck on the parliamentary road. The bosses' parliament and not lickspittle Labour is the real problem. Labour is scared of their US bosses spitting, not Tame Iti. Elections are only held for us to vote our oppressors back into power every three years. Every time we fall for this, the bosses laugh all the way to the Citibank. We have to replace our faith in bosses' elections with a belief in the power of workers' occupations.
In every iwi or hapu, there is a piece of foreshore and related seabed, river or lake, which is the traditional source of kaimoana. This customary right should be asserted by occupations backed by the unions. The leaders of the iwi or hapu who see these claims as mere pawns in some larger political or legal game should be replaced by flax roots leaders.

The traditional concept of occupation-for- use can today become revived as the basis of property rights. This practical assertion of common ownership and use of resources to meet the needs of iwi, hapu and all workers living in the area, will create support from Pakeha, Pacifica, Asian and other workers.

New Occupations, Old 'communism'

Such occupations will prove to be very popular and not at all outdated. Rightwing politicians will say that this is a return to stone-age economics or 'primitive communism' against the market. These are the age-old racist objections to the Maori 'land-league' in the Waikato that refused to sell land to settlers in the 1860s, now being recycled again.

What these racist apologists do not say is that the real challenge back then, and what they fear most today, is Maori producing all the food and produce the settlers needed to survive, independently of private property, by adapting 'iron-age' technology to their 'stone-age' collective property rights!

In the same way, the now fashionable-among-liberals struggle of Te Whiti of Parihaka in the 1880s is remembered for its 'pacifism' and not for Te Whiti's defence of common ownership of land and the 'miracle' of collective labour.
These 'communist' traditions were rejected by land-hungry Pakeha settlers in the 1800s. But today they can be revived and supported by Pakeha, Pacifica and Asian workers who have no interest to dispossess Maori by force, and a common interest to re-possess capitalist property and resources as the class allies of Maori workers.

The Treaty is a Fraud!

Occupy the Seabed and Foreshore under workers control!

The celebrated Waihi family may be described as ‘middle class’ but in reality they are workers. Father teaches while mother minds the four kids. They both provide profits for the bosses out of their labour. Dad educates kids who then (he hopes) go on to be good workers. Mum does the same at home without pay, subsidising the cost of producing these kids to be exploited by the bosses. Topping up their wages in the budget package for working families is another subsidy to bosses because without it, bosses would have to pay for the complete training of their workers out of their profits.

Tax cuts are code for wage cuts

But to explain how this works we first have to get rid of the bullshit about tax cuts.

National and ACT made a huge fuss about Labour taxing people and then giving some of it back to buy votes in the next election. Admittedly, Labour had cynically phased in the benefits so that to get them it had to be re-elected. But all this talk about tax cuts is just a smokescreen to hide the real motive of wage cuts.

We pay taxes out of our gross income. This assumes there is a distribution of income between wages and profits (and rents for those who own property) that is like a ‘law of nature’. Workers get wages, bosses get profits, and landowners get rents. We are not supposed to disturb this ‘law of nature’ or else something like the global meltdown in the ‘Day after Tomorrow’ will destroy the world market.

All of the debate over the budget accepts this ‘law of nature’. We don’t question the plot. Taxes are a sort of theft of an individuals income, unless there is a national interest in taxing people to pay for ‘public goods’ like state funded health, education and welfare. The debate then comes down to whether or not people should pay for these things. Plots become conspiracies about who is out to screw whom?

But what if this concern about taxes is really a smokescreen that hides the reality of how the economy works? Karl Marx once referred to this ‘law of nature’ as the ‘holy trinity’ - a sort of blind faith in each class –worker, boss and landlord – getting their ‘fair share’ of the national wealth. But as Marx proved neither the boss nor the landlord create any wealth at all. Their ‘share’ is deducted from the wealth created by workers. He took delight in showed that this was a fact in the settlement of Australia and New Zealand, where landlords and bosses who had money and land, but couldn’t get any workers, made no profits and had to work themselves or starve!

So what is all the fuss about the Budget?

Of course the Nats and ACTs worship the ‘holy trinity’ that entitles them to profits as the reward for their innovation and sacrifice. They argue that taxing these profits to pay workers raises wages and cuts ‘their’ profits. In the past they were happy to allow some of ‘their’ profits to be taxed to boost wages if it was cheaper then pay higher wages themselves. The whole postwar period saw state-provided health, education and welfare contributing to profits until those profits started to fall dramatically. Not because workers wages squeezed profits, but because bosses could not screw enough wealth out of the workers.

But now that the economy has been opened up to international competition, the bosses have to cut their wage costs. They want to pick and choose skilled workers, pay them a market wage and refuse to pay for the education and health of the pool of unemployed and service workers. They also want benefits to be cut to force people to work for lower wages. In the twenty years since the onset of Rogernomics in 1984, the income gap between bosses and the poorest workers has grown much larger.

But if we reject this blind faith in the ‘holy trinity’ we see that the NATACTS attack on welfare is another way of extracting more wealth from workers to increase their profits. Instead of workers clawing back some of the wealth they create in the form of benefits, the bosses want to keep it all, blaming those they exploit, or make jobless, for demanding that the state taxes ‘their’ profits! They have the cheek to try to get workers onside by calling them ‘taxpayers’ too and not exploited workers!!

If this is what the rightwing bosses say does this mean that Labour’s tiny token redistribution of income back to the poorest families on a drip feed system over the next 3-4 years means a cut in profits?

Labour’s smartass subsidies to bosses

The NATACTs opposition to taxing profits to boost workers incomes is typical of bosses who own banks or run hotels and who want wage cuts in order to maximise profits. Their blanket attack on welfare is that it reflects the narrow interests industry where high tech productivity gains are not at stake. Yet the major growth points in the NZ economy today are in high-tech, high productivity, value-added areas such as pastoral production, biotech, forestry etc. The only way that NZ bosses can compete internationally is if they can out-smart their competitors.

This is what is behind Labour’s promotion of the ‘knowledge society’. It is the recognition that high-tech growth in the economy is necessary before any ‘social dividend’ to the most needy can be made. The idea of a ‘knowledge society’ is a society in which the blind faith in the ‘holy trinity’ has become politically correct. It takes the form of the ‘social partnership’ between the godfather (the bosses), the son (workers) and the holy ghost (government –as landlord).

Labour’s ‘Blairites’ (after Tony Blair’s ‘third way’ politics that takes a middle course between neo-liberalism and socialism) want to ‘balance’ the raw market with social policies that ensures that people are ‘included’ in the benefits of market. This is the smart state that backs winners in the knowledge economy, tailors state subsidies to education to match skills to jobs, and tries not to leave anybody ‘deserving’ person out. Labour’s shift of industrial law, the foreshore legislation, and the budget, are designed to ensure social harmony rather than social conflict or exclusion.

The problem is that this Blairite strategy requires rapid growth in productivity to create new jobs and rising incomes to offset the pool of unemployed and the downward squeeze on wages. But in the global economy high-tech itself cannot save the global capitalist economy as it cannot generate enough wealth to make sufficient profits. Therefore there is no surplus profit to be taxed to spend on boosting the incomes of the poor. The ‘social partnership’ is doomed to economic and political bankruptcy.

Capitalism is not sustainable

The anti-globalisers like the Alliance or the Greens say this is because of the greed of the multinationals operating globally to suck profits out of the high performance sector inside nation states where they own the resources or control the market. According to ARENA, foreign investment in NZ owns half of productive wealth, and in some sectors like the Banks all of it. The effect is a squeeze on wages and social spending inside Aotearoa/NZ to suck the profits out. The anti-globalists answer is to cut the pipeline and keep the profits inside Aotearoa/NZ. But this is a pipedream.

As Marx would say: capitalism is global. The corporates are driven not by greed but by the survival of the fittest. The enrichment of global corporates at the expense of the mass of impoverished does not respect national borders. The Blairite Budget in NZ 2004 is a futile attempt to keep the faith in the ‘holy trinity’. But this ‘partnership’ is doomed. God the father must betray the son, and the holy ghost hasn’t got a shits show in hell of doing anything about it.

This means that to break out of the bosses globalisation we need a workers globalisation. Workers need to take control of their own welfare; socialise the ownership of the means of production so that the wealth they produce is retained for collective use; renationalise and expropriate the property of the corporates and put them under workers control; take control of the state and expel the ‘holy trinity’ into the dustbin of history; build unions of socialist republics in the Pacific, in the Middle East, in Asia, in Latin America, in Europe, in North America, in Africa.

NZ the seductive semi-colony

The drive to integrate the two economies has been going on for 200 years. NZ began its colonial life as part of NSW, and was a self-governing colony within Australia until 1901 when it refused to go into the Australian federation. There is still a clause in the Australian federal constitution that allows NZ to join as a state of Australia.

The colonial capitalists in NZ led by then Prime Minister Dick Seddon had delusions of grandeur, of beating Australia as the “Britain of the south seas’’ with plans to rule the Island states to the north on behalf of the British Empire. From 1901 to 1984, NZ applied a policy of economic nationalism. This was the social democratic ideal that NZ was an independent nation whose economy could be controlled for the benefit of all. It tried to insulate its economy from Britain and Australia so that it could keep as much of the wealth generated in NZ as possible. And depending on which political party ruled this wealth was to be distributed among the various productive sectors in NZ.

However, the weakness in this national plan was that to develop industry internally, NZ had to turn to investment, technology and marketing agreements with overseas firms. So by the 1980s economic insulation had not stopped Aussie and UK (and increasingly Japanese and US) firms acting as the Trojan horses of globalisation and setting up ‘branch plants’ behind the protectionist barriers, and from sneaking profits offshore by ‘transfer pricing’.

Studies of foreign ownership since the early 80’s show that NZ was no longer run by a bunch of local families and the British banks, but that UK firms like Unilever, Aussie firms like Comalco, Japanese companies like Nissan and US corporations like Mobil had a dominant stake in the economy. NZ was still overseas owned but that ownership and control had shifted so that NZ was now, according to Bill Sutch, NZ’s foremost economic nationalist, only a ‘book entry’ in the accounts of the Multinationals.

Globalisation whacks home

What the century up to 1984 proved was that capitalism could be implanted and thrive under state protected hothouse conditions only until the local firms got too big for the domestic market. Once the biggest firms outgrew the market protectionist barriers had to come down, the economy deregulated and opened up to the global market. Barriers to trade and investment were largely removed and the NZ economy was now up for sale to the highest bidder.

Overseas companies moved in to buy out poor performers or undervalued companies or state enterprises (some already carved up for sale by asset strippers like Brierley and Alan Gibbs) like NZ Rail, Telecom, BNZ, Air New Zealand, NZ Steel etc. Ownership and control of homegrown industry rapidly passed from local and state hands into Australian, British, Japanese and US corporate hands.

CAFCA which documents trends in foreign investment produces statistics which back this up. Direct Foreign Investment (DFI) grew rapidly after 1984. By 1995 DFI in NZ had reached nearly 47% of GDP, and made about half the total profits. (Bill Rosenberg, Foreign Investment in NZ: The Current Position). Rosenberg showed that the overseas corporations tend to be the biggest, but employ fewer workers and pay less tax (25% average). They accumulate profits of the order of $30,000 per worker a year (compared with $20,000 for local firms). Today the foreign domination of the economy is higher still. Between 1994 and 2003 foreign corporations made over $42 billion in profits. http://www.canterbury.cyberspace.org.nz/community/CAFCA/keyfacts.html

What all of this proves is that the NZ economy has been integrated into the global capitalist economy so that the main industries are owned and controlled by large monopoly corporations with their bases in the Australia UK, US, EU, Japan and the rest of Asia. China too, looms on the horizon as a major economic force in NZ. This is all part of the globalisation of production under the influence of the monopoly corporations (to say it is no longer imperialism is so much globalony). What motivates the corporations is access to cheap resources and labour and the lowest cost barriers imposed by national governments (taxes, environmental and labour laws etc) as possible. This explains the drive to free trade and investment agreements allowing global capital free movement in search of lowest costs and biggest profits.

Aussie bosses own a third of New Zealand

Of all the overseas countries to increase its stake in NZ, Australia now dominates. It owns 100% of the trading banks, NZ Rail, NZ Steel, major road transport companies, shopping malls and supermarkets (Westfield).

To facilitate the smooth operation of Australian capital to further its ownership and control of NZ capital, the bosses are now making a play to remove all the barriers to form a common market like the EU. What is planned is a common currency which would be run by the Australian Reserve Bank, a single stock market, and a common border for citizens and travellers. This would certainly reduce the compliance costs for Australian capital.

But Australian capital is itself dominated by US (and to a lesser extent Japanese) capital. The Australian-US free trade agreement has opened up Australia to US investment. So an Australian-NZ common market would facilitate the ability of US capital to piggyback into NZ and increase its holdings and profits. The US (along with its Canadian partner-state in NAFTA) already owns a large slice of key industries such as merchant banking, power and communications, forestry, tourism etc.

Australia and NZ as ‘Pacific Powers’

Jane Kelsey’s recent paper “Big Brothers Behaving Badly” (http://www.arena.org.nz/)

attacks Australia’s and New Zealand’s role in forcing free trade onto the small Pacific nations. In particular she accuses them of bullying these nations to remove tariffs, export subsidies and any protectionist measures for agriculture, so they can sell more goods. As Kelsey points out in the case of Tonga’s agreement to remove $6 million tariffs on NZ meat exports (mainly mutton flaps) will be a cut of 40% of state revenue for services to a people made up of 80% subsistence farmers!

Behind all this is the plan of Australia to subordinate NZ and the rest of the South Pacific into its ‘EU-style’ Pacific Economic Community in the interests of Australian imperialism. NZ grandiose delusions of 100 years ago that it could be a junior imperialist power in the South Pacific are now fully deflated. Via its subordination to Australia, NZ, along with the rest of the South Pacific, is being further incorporated into the US imperialist bloc as a semi-colony of US imperialist finance capital.

What’s it got to do with the workers?

But this is the way the capitalism operates. It doesn’t matter which country owns capital, workers are still exploited. The question is: what is the workers position on the future of NZ as a semi-colony exploited by imperialism? And in particular being dominated by its nearest imperialist big brother, Australia? Should we fight to remain economically independent of both Australia and the US? Or should we fight to speed up the move towards a united states of Australasia in preference to union with the US? Then, maybe we should remain neutral in what is like a game of musical chairs where it doesn’t matter which boss sits down on us when the music stops, we still get shat on?

Our starting point has to be to distinguish between our interests as workers and those of the bosses. We fight for our interests and oppose those of the bosses. We fight against the bosses measures to make us boost their profits and pay their debts whatever the nationality of the boss. Our basic fight has to be the defence of our jobs and conditions. Without these the working class becomes divided and demoralised. Regardless of the nationality of the companies that own industry we demand nationalisation without compensation. Any closure or sacking of workers has to be met by occupations under workers’ control.

Because the Aussie and NZ bosses are heavily integrated, struggles against them must obviously unite NZ and Aussie workers - but not at the expense of foreign workers. For example we should fight for a common border to allow free movement of workers. But the common border has to be an open border. We don’t beg our bosses to legislate to protect our jobs at the expense of foreign workers. On the contrary we unite with the workers of all countries against the global corporations that exploit and oppress them, so that the demand for nationalisation becomes socialisation on a global scale.

Workers’ control means workers’ planning

How would this solidarity between Aussie and Kiwi workers operate? If we take those sectors where Australian and NZ capitalist ownership is most integrated, the unions should also be integrated. In Banking, NZ workers cannot fight the Aussie banks without the support of Aussie workers. As soon as we get into wage and job negotiation the boss plays one off the other. We need to call for the nationalisation of the banks under workers control. The division of the banks assets between Australia and NZ workers would automatically raise the need to unify the two countries.

Same with NZ Steel, 100% owned by BHP the largest mining corporation in the world. BHP jointly owns the huge Cerrejon Zona Norte coal mine in Colombia where it ‘manages’ its relations with the indigenous Wayuu and the unions by using the notorious paramilitaries to kill their leaders – the same death squads that recently entered Venezuela to kill President Chavez. http://www.thewest.com.au/20040607/business/tw-business-home-sto126156.html

The US United Mine Workers and United Steel workers unions have taken solidarity action with the Colombian miners. Australian and NZ workers need to demand the nationalization under workers control of BHP!

Same with Toll Rail that now owns NZ Rail. Nationalising Toll Rail under workers control would call for workers in both countries to exercise ‘joint control’ and pose the question of a single shared planned economy. Automatically the demands for workers control mean workers planning and a workers state. Would this be a single socialist republic or a union of socialist republics? We can’t say until workers have come to power and decided democratically what workers states would look like.

For Occupations and Nationalisations without compensation under workers control!

For a workers’ planned economy!

For a Socialist United States of the Pacific!

Before April 2002, no CIA-organised coup has ever been defeated, and the US has not given up on the task of ousting Chavez’s government. The CIA has continued to fund right-wing opposition to Chavez, including a national lockout which nearly paralysed the economy at the end of 2002 and beginning of 2003, and the Pentagon has used counter-insurgency operations in neighbouring Colombia as an excuse to cross Venezuela’s border and attack Venezuelan troops. Just last May, a plot of Colombian death squads to assassinate Chavez and send his head to Castro was discovered.

Today, soaring oil prices caused by the debacle in Iraq make Venezuela an even more tempting target for US ‘intervention’. It’s more important than ever that the victory of April 2002 be remembered and analysed, by Venezuelan workers and workers around the world.

A lot of leftists, in the West especially, believe that Chavez is a socialist committed to using his state power to overturn capitalism and establish a planned economy. For example, the film The Revolution will not be Televised which is making the rounds, like much of the left-wing media coverage of Venezuela takes a quite uncritical attitude towards the government of Chavez, treating him as the guiding light of a ‘Bolivarian revolution’ which is moving Venezuela away from servitude to US imperialism which has blighted so many countries in South America and around the world.

Chavez is a national capitalist

The reality is that Chavez is a national capitalist. Venezuela is a semi-colony of US imperialism. Chavez wants to reduce this dependence on imperialism by strengthening Venezuelan capitalism. Traditionally it has been dependent on the export of raw materials – agricultural products and oil – to the West. At the mercy of the ups and downs of world prices for these exports no real industrial base has been built. What industry does exist is in many cases owned by multinational companies, which are able to make big profits because they pay very low wages for labour and very low prices for raw materials and refuse to pay high taxes to enable the government to fund social services. Despite being one of the biggest exporters of oil in the world, Venezuela sees 80% of its population living below the poverty line.

Since coming to power in 1999, Chavez has tried to deal with Venezuela’s problems by encouraging the growth of a strong capitalist class. Chavez showed his capitalist credentials early on. In his first year in office he cut public spending by 20% to please the International Monetary Fund. Chavez actually kept on the Finance Minister of the previous right-wing Caldera government. Instead of nationalising assets or increasing funding for health and education, Chavez used a new Banco Popular to put money into credit schemes for small and medium-sized businesses. A ‘Buy Venezuela” policy was begun to boost the profits of local manufacturers.

Chavez’ policies were actually applauded by advocates of the ‘Third Way’ in the West. Blairite academic Julia Bruxton, for instance, wrote that: “In addressing his country’s development crisis and vulnerability in the globalised economy, Chavez took the middle road…a middle ground can be chartered between state-led development and [neo-liberal] orthodoxy”. The new constitution Chavez gave Venezuela is often praised by Western leftists but it only institutionalised the national capitalist politics the Chavez regime had been following since 1999.

Reforms not anti-capitalist

Most of the reforms Chavez has introduced can be understood not as attempts at socialist transformation, but as efforts to strengthen local capitalism, in opposition to US imperialism. Chavez’ land reform and reform of urban property ownership have created much interest in the West. Chavez has legislated to give urban slum dwellers title to their houses, and has provided for the distribution of rural blocks to farming families. But Chavez has shown little willingness to set up collectivised agriculture or to nationalise housing – rather he is distributing land and house titles to individual families. This is consistent with wanting to create a stonger national capitalist sector.

Chavez has introduced laws banning capital flight, and halted the privatisation of many industries, including the oil industry. But the ban on capital flight is designed to prevent ‘unpatriotic’ Venezuelan capitalists taking their money offshore, rather than investing in business inside the country. Likewise, the halt to privatisation is designed to stop the US buy-up of Venezuelan assets, and the consequent draining of the profits they make from the country. Chavez has no objections to Venezuelan capitalists taking over public assets.

Chavez’ vision of a strong national Venezuelan capitalism is matched by his vision of a South American bloc of capitalist economies challenging the power of US imperialism in the continent. Chavez is close to Presidents Lula of Brazil and Kirchner of Argentina, who share this vision. All three leaders are part of a new breed of social democratic leaders who are trying to ride a new wave of class struggle and anti-imperialism to power in South America and around the world. The World Social Forum founded by Lula’s Brazilian Workers’ Party is an organising tool for these ‘new’ social movements.

Chavez failed vision

Chavez and his friend have no chance of success. The history of social democracy shows that when a government comes into power and under pressure from workers tries to enact left-wing reforms, it quickly creates a crisis. If it wants to get enough money to pay for the reforms, it has to challenge the foreign companies that have a stranglehold over the economy. These companies don’t want to see their profits threatened, and they are backed by the governments of the imperialist countries in which they are based. They resist attempts to make them pay more taxes or to nationalise their assets by getting imperialist governments to destabilise and if necessary overthrow the regimes that threaten their profits and property.

The story is no different when left-wing governments like Chavez’ increase democratic rights by, for instance, making it easier for free trade unions to operate. Workers tend to use their new liberties to organise strike action to win higher wages and better conditions from their employers, who are usually directly or indirectly multinational companies. Since higher wages and better conditions cut into profits, the companies and their imperialist backers start to destablise the government which gave workers greater freedoms, in the hope that these freedoms can be rolled back.

Time and time again, left-wing reforming governments have run into the brick wall of the domination of poor semi-colonies by imperialist money. In Guatemala in 1954, in Chile in 1973, and in Fiji in 1987, reforming governments have been ousted when the companies they have alienated have turned to the imperialist powers for support. In Chile in 1973, the Allende government angered the US-based multinationals which its plans to nationalise key areas of the economy like the mining sector. Nationalisation meant the end to super-profits, so the multinationals conspired with the CIA and the US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to organise the military coup that put General Pinochet in power, killed thousands of leftists and unionists, and made sure that the economy staying in US hands.

Role of the army

Chavez has struggled to convince the Venezuelan capitalists to buy into his project. This is because they are mainly comprador bourgeoisie, used to administering and living off US imperialism. They are alarmed by the decline in relations with the US that and Chavez’ policies have provoked, and they continue to conspire with the CIA to bring down the Chavez regime.

Because most Venezuelan capitalists have sold out to imperialism, and there is no existing class of ‘patriotic’ national capitalists to take control of the economy, Chavez has to rely upon the state to run the economy. He has turned to the army as a sort of substitute bourgeoisie. They army is used as a sort of stop-gap measure in a huge variety of contexts – it helps bring in harvests, repair infrastructure, and so on. The army has also been integrated into the grassroots working class organisations of Venezuela, the Bolivarian Committees. Chavez recently called for the arming of these Committees under the supervision of the army.

But for all its populist claims, Chavez’ army is still a bourgeois army. It exists to defend capitalist property and will always side with capitalism against working class revolution. April 2002 showed this fact clearly: while the coup leaders took control and Chavez was transported to an island prison, even the pro-Chavez sections of the army sat on their hands. Only the mass mobilisations on the streets and the spectre of civil war succeeded in splitting the army and defeating the coup. It was the independence of the Venezuelan working class from Chavez’ state, and in particular his army, that defeated the coup.

The victory of 2002 showed that there is no social base for the Bolivarian revolution other than the working masses, and that only they have the ability to break with imperialism and Venezuelan capitalism. When the workers set up grassroots ‘Bolivarian circles’ to defend Chavez against the coup, he responded by trying to close down these circles from challenging the power of ‘his’ army and police. When he called recently for the arming of the neighbourhoods this was under the control of the army.

Even worse, Chavez has used the ‘peoples’ army’ to crush the factory occupations which have broken out spontaneously in parts of Venezuela in opposition to the bosses’ complicity in the coup attempts. After the 2002, for instance, Chavez sent the army to break up a workers’ occupation of the Pepsi Cola factory in Caracas. In an action which perfectly symbolises his politics, Chavez ordered the army to ‘confiscate’ thousands of cans of Pepsi and distribute them to the poor of Caracas as spoils of his ‘anti-imperialist’ struggle. The next day Pepsi was back under the control of the imperialists.

Chavez should be defended from the CIA counter-revolution, but workers should organised themselves into militias independently of him. Rather than having illusions in him or his army, or being part of a political alliance with him, workers should make a ‘military bloc’ with him against imperialist coups and subversion only. For example, now that Chavez has agreed to the rigged recall referendum, workers should turn out to defeat the opposition vote, but be prepared to defend themselves arms in hand from the coup that will inevitably follow.

Workers need to be independent of Chavez so they can get rid of him when he becomes an obstacle to the socialist revolution, which alone can actually achieve the improved living standards and democratic rights Chavez promises. What is needed right now is a revolutionary Marxist party and program that can arm the workers ideologically and organisationally to break with the Bolivarian movement and create workers councils, or soviets, everywhere!

Defend Chavez from an imperialist coup!

For workers councils and militias!

Build a Revolutionary Marxist Workers Party!

For a Workers and Peasants government!

For a union of Socialist Republics of Latin America!

(8) Proletarian vs bourgeois culture

Capitalism attempts to obliterate the culture of all indigenous peoples by commercialising and trivialising what it cannot physically destroy, and by reducing the cultural level of the worker to that of the non-unionised factory – to barbarism. In resistance to capitalism, international working class culture takes all the revolutionary elements of traditional cultures and fuses them together as the ideological weapons of the world’s workers. The Maori wars, Maori resistance to conscription, the May Rebellion, the Tahitian uprising against the French – all these live on in the world proletarian culture to inspire and further the Polynesian socialist revolution. International working class culture has absorbed and will continue to absorb far more from Polynesian culture than from crass Anglo-Saxon empiricism, sterile emotional withdrawal and pacifism.

Phrases like ‘Maori culture’ and ‘international working class culture’ are not mere abstractions. In Aotearoa, there is an international working class, a class consisting of pakehas and Polynesians from Aotearoa and other island states. The Maori culture of the past which survives is the culture which is remembered now by Maori workers on job sites and passed on to their mates; the culture which they remember when they are on a long, bitter strike and recall past records of courage, endurance and fortitude, which inspires other workers as it inspires Maori workers. Rewi Maniapoto at Orakau is now remembered by many workers who are not of Maori ancestry but are in the class struggle together with Maori comrades. Maori culture too, links Maori workers with other Polynesian workers: Polynesian languages are used to beat the boss, to attack his exploitation or discuss industrial tactics in a language he does not understand. Difference groups of Polynesian workers find their struggles against imperialism have been part of a common struggle. The Maori tradition of community now maintains a closer union solidarity than pakehas can achieve.

Against this living Maori culture absorbed with other cultures into a common stock of ideological weaponry needed to fight bosses and to survive as workers in day-to-day industrial work and conflict, there is a dead Maori culture, a culture from and remaining in the past, with no relevance to where the Maori people are now, which tries to isolate them, and keep them apart from other workers, allowing the pakeha ruling class to smash the Maori people by dividing them from their allies.

The praise of “cultural treasures’ of indigenous peoples is not restricted to black radical. De Wit Wel, the South African Minister of Bantu Affairs and Development said in 1959:

“…there is something…which binds people, and that is their spiritual treasures, the cultural treasure of a people. It is those things which have united other nations in the world. That is why we say that the basis of our approach is that the Bantu, too, will be linked together by traditional and emotional bonds, by their own language, their own culture, their national possessions…” [1]

Apartheid and Bantustans are at the end of the road of “cultural” or “spiritual” autonomy! While this is clear to South African apologists for apartheid, it escapes white radicals in New Zealand. The Republican applauded Ripeka Evans’ speech as the first clear statement of “Marxist spiritualism”, reinforcing the black radicals’ abandonment of Marxism for Maoritanga.[2]

Walter Benjamin, in Illuminations, saw fascism’s role as rendering politics aesthetic, while “communism responds by politicising art”.[3] His understanding of the reactionary implications of making politics ‘cultural’ still expressed the perspective of Leninism. “Cultural treasures” writes Benjamin are the spoils of wars between ruling classes which owe their origin not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries – in Maori society, all those who could not claim to be an ariki or a rangatira.

“There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.” [4]

Maori culture as it is now, consists of the spoils of war which the white ruling class has plundered. Historical materialism, on the contrary, wishes to retain that image of the Polynesian past which unexpectedly appears to the Polynesian worker in crisis, singled out by history at the moment of danger. That danger affects both the content of Polynesian tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every area the attempt must be made anew to wrest Polynesian tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. Only that militant: “will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the [Polynesian] past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And that enemy has not ceased to be victorious.”[5]

The Maori people, at this stage of their history, have become proletarians. Their self-determination mans the emancipation of the working class. It is both utopian and reactionary, in this context, to move backwards in history for a vague goal of a classless ‘autonomy’. The Maori people from where they are now in the working class must reclaim a culture which the pakeha ruling class is trying to bury in order to judge what is living and what is dead within it. Capitalism is trying to destroy Maori culture before it can make the contribution it should to international working class culture. It tries to erase from history the Maori victories in the land wars, the successes in military tactics, their declarations of independence from imperialist rule, their economic achievements, their community feeling extending over all areas of life, their revolts against pakeha religion, their history as workers.

Maori culture, unlike other Polynesian cultures, and certainly unlike pakeha culture, requires effort to reclaim from commercialism and pakeha philistinism. Marxists recognise that the present revival of the Maori people demands a re-discovery of their culture and their history, and that Maori workers without links to their culture, and the pride and independence that go with such links, will have nothing of their own to contribute to working class culture, and so will fail to find their destined place in the class vanguard. A new consciousness of Maori identity is necessary if the conquest of power by the working class is to be the final historic realisation of the Maori national struggle.

Over Maori culture, hermetically sealed from the present and cut off from the working class, however, hangs the spectre of the disintegration of other Polynesian cultures which have been turned into state institutions by ‘independent’ Polynesian governments. Albert Wendt has written of this in one of his most biting poems: [6]

(9) Whose Right to Self-Determination?

The logic of petty-bourgeois “cultural nationalism” is to struggle for the suppression of other nationalities. On this question, Ms Awatere in her one sympathetic reference to a Marxist thinker, manages to turn poor Gramsci on his head.[7] While Gramsci understood the need to make Marxism a hegemonic ideology, Ms Awatere wants to make Maoritanga a hegemonic ideology. Where Gramsci saw the need for class alliances to this end, Ms Awatere substitutes for alliances, ultimatums, in the best left sectarian tradition. These ultimatums are enforced, not by ideological arguments, but by threats of future repression.

The reactionary character of the struggle for ‘cultural autonomy’ which displaces class struggle, is shown by Ms Awatere’s attack on ‘multiculturalism’. Petty bourgeois nationalists, whether on the cultural or political level always, when in power, oppress other nationalities, but Ms Awatere argues for the suppression of other national cultures before she has any power! It is all too clear how cheap talk of oppression is when it goes hand in hand with threats of repression [8] It is not the theory of the “four oppressions” that is important for cultural chauvinists but the theory of the “four repressions” – Samoa, Cook Islands, Niue and Tonga, the four island groups whose culture is represented in Aotearoa. In disallowing other Polynesian cultures ‘rights’ in Aotearoa, Maori chauvinists limit the right to self-determination to those ‘homelands’ within the South Pacific designated as ‘nations’ by the colonial master.

However, Ms Awatere and other chauvinists are not alone in the advocacy of cultural repression. The Socialist Action League (SAL) in their youth paper Rebel, ‘raise’ this suppression from the cultural to the political level with their demand for a “bi-national state” – Polynesians whose ‘homelands’ are outside Aotearoa will not doubt (as now) be deported.[9] The Spartacist League, in part of its 1970 programme commenting on the SAL’s “Maori Programme”, pointed out to it that Polynesian islands outside Aotearoa existed and that people from such islands were in the working class too.[10] Neither reality nor political debate over the ensuing twelve years have brought them to realise these facts. Like Ms Awatere, the Socialist Action League also depart from the Maori tradition in failing to give any definite form to their demand for a bi-national state. But unlike Ms Awatere, they do at least discuss political issues, however abstractly and wrongly.

Rebel contends that “Maori workers are called upon to fulfill two historic tasks” 1) leading the Maori people in their fight to end their oppression as a people. 2) leading the working class as a whole to overthrow capitalist rule and the institution of a workers’ and farmers’ government to achieve socialism. We have argued in this pamphlet that these two goals are not separate, but identical. To pose them separately is to adhere to a Stalinist two-stage theory of revolutionary change. If, however, two stages are really necessary, what is the content of the first stage? Rebel does not raise directly the issue of ‘national independence’ (we will discuss later what this might mean), rather, it supports “full national equality” between Maori and pakeha and the “right of Maori people to live under whatever political, social and economic forms they choose.”!

It would appear that the pakeha revolutionaries who dominate the SAL will twist and turn in every direction to avoid commitment to the real meaning of the right to self-determination: the Maori right to secede from pakeha New Zealand if they so choose. If SAL supports ‘national independence’ as a first step to socialism, it should say so plainly. If not, it should also make that plain. Certainly the Rebel document is so convoluted it can in no way lay the basis for a Marxist programme, either for a ‘bi-national state’ or for international workers’ power in Polynesia.

If the Maori people as a whole decided to break away from pakeha New Zealand, and form their own black government of Aotearoa – and no organised group has yet raised this demand – the Spartacist League would support them. While the Spartacist League is not a nationalist party, it uncompromisingly opposes all national oppression and all privilege based on race and nationality. If national and racial exploitation becomes intensified to the point where Maori are forced to set up their own state, revolutionary black and white workers will fight for that state’s establishment.

In the Maori movement the demand has already been raised for a black government. Ms Awatere is afraid of it: the SAL is afraid of it; the Spartacist League is not. Whether in the context of a black or a multiracial government in Aotearoa, the Spartacist League will argue for workers’ councils as the form of government to replace the existing racist and capitalist state, and the incorporation of such a government of Aotearoa in a socialist united states of Polynesia. If the demand for a black government is raised by the majority of the Maori people, their secession will form part of a movement to socialist revolution.

It is possible for a ‘black nationalism’ to come to power in Aotearoa, in the sense that a black comprador bourgeoisie have come to power in other Polynesian islands. Although we see those ‘black nationalism’ as now totally economically subordinated to white racist New Zealand – the Bantustans of Muldoon’s imperialist labour policy- we support those islands’ achievement of political independence; but we wish to make political independence more of a reality, through socialist internationalism. ‘Black nationalism’ instead of socialism, has been secured in the less developed islands of Polynesia because of the undeveloped character of the working class in these islands.

Such a situation, however, does not exist in Aotearoa. But, if Andersen’s expulsion of Maori workers from working class organisations was intensified, and the white ruling class and white labour bureaucracy combined to force the vast majority of Polynesian workers into the reserve army of labour, we should then support declassed Black Nationalists movements by trying to win working class support for them. At present, though, the forms of ‘black nationalism’ which are dominant represent the ideological pressure of a Maori petty bourgeoisie on the Polynesian proletariat. While we do not wholly oppose such movements – they are an important and probably unavoidable first step in the political re-awakening of Polynesian workers, which in the absence of a strong Marxist movement, must inevitably take a populist form – we show their real class character, and demonstrate that their progressive tendencies result from their proletarian composition, and not their petty bourgeois leadership.

If Aotearoa were open to free migration from other Pacific islands, the proletarians entering Auckland and other cities to find work would increase the size of the Polynesian proletariat. The ruling class and its National and Labour Party hacks fear nothing more than a black majority in Aotearoa – as the panic reaction to the Privy Council decision to grant New Zealand citizenship to some Samoan citizens showed. Numbers alone do not add up to fundamental political and economic change, as in the case of Azania, but the white ruling class’s response to a growing Polynesian proletariat would be to turn to even greater racist repression than at present. Such repression, would inevitably spur a united internationalist working class to take power for all working people.

The perspective of a black majority in a Socialist Polynesia is the perspective of the Spartacist League alone. The history of the proletarianisation of the Polynesian people must and should end with Polynesian working people who earn wages in Aotearoa controlling that country, along with pakeha workers. It is for these reasons that we demand that Samoans choose whether or not they wish to retain New Zealand citizenship; the end to all racist immigration laws which discriminate against non-Europeans; and equality of all Polynesian languages along with English as official languages.

(10) Land Struggles

Bastion Point is one of many struggles to regain land for the Maori people, lost to Europeans or the state. The attitude of Marxists to such struggles is determined by their understanding that the expropriation of Maori land is inevitable under capitalism. Survivals of the Polynesian mode of production were, are, and will be forcibly expropriated by pakeha capitalists (for example, for forestry), unless in the fight against expropriation, elements of a new, socialist mode of production emerge side by side with (or even combining with) survivals of earlier modes of production.

Donna Awatere, in a recent speech, emphasised that such combined forms of fightback are emerging, when she spoke of defending traditional Maori society in all possible ‘pakeha’ ways (by ‘pakeha’ in this context, she meant working class). In the Bastion Point take, the Auckland Trades Council placed a green ban on development of the site, effectively threatening industrial action to keep control of the site in Maori workers’ hands. The capitalist economy divided the Ngati-whatua by offers of money over the last century, with many Maori succumbing to offers of ready cash for land. Now the tribe is split in two, with a group of reactionaries under the bourgeois professor Kawharu who say Bastion Point land is the government’s because if was “sold” – abandoning traditional Maori rights in the ‘sacred’ name of capitalist private property – while others, led by Joe Hawke, reject the sales in the name of traditional Maori claims.

If Bastion Point land reverts to Maori ownership and control, it will not be to Kawharu (who would either refuse to accept it or re-sell it) but to a section of the tribe supporting Joe Hawke. In the struggle against land sales – which effectively means capitalist property relations – economic sanctions have split the tribe, and divided it on political lines, so that those who will regain the land when Muldoon is defeated will be those Maori workers who are opposed to private property (whether they see themselves primarily as such or not). Capitalism has successfully split the tribe, and the more militant the struggle for land rights – themselves a traditional Maori claim – the deeper that split goes, polarising the traditional hapu or tribe and politicising its members, so that it is not finally the traditional tribe, but a working class vanguard, which expropriates the expropriators, with the aid of industrial action.

Bastion Point, as a relatively advanced struggle in an urban context, illustrates processes at work in all land struggles. In any take of this kind, Marxists support most Maori land claims as first steps in a class struggle for land nationalisation, not endorsing all traditional claims, but bringing into the open the (usually hidden) class character of the struggle. Most struggles to retain or regain Maori land are seen by the Spartacist League as workers’ struggles against private property in land and are supported as such. We call for total working class unity in such issues, white racist pakeha bureaucrats representing the labour aristocracy (and middle class) such as Andersen, and ‘professional people’ advocating black separatism equally help the pakeha governments and ruling class by fragmenting class unity.

It will be proved in practice who really supports Maori land struggles. The Stalinist Andersen (of the so-called Socialist Unity Party) has shown that Stalinism, the attempt to link white racist chauvinism with a phony ‘Marxism’ made by the Russian misleader Stalin, necessarily means racism and the disruption and splitting of land struggle in Aotearoa. Equally, ‘middle class’ black nationalists have shown that they phony ‘Marxism’ which separates the land struggle from the class struggle results in the splitting of the land struggles along national and racist lines. For the Spartacist League, the land struggle is the best practical demonstration of the disastrous results of the fake positions adopted on the issue of racism by the white and black ‘left’ in New Zealand. The struggle for land nationalisation can be won if the land issue is not separated from the struggle for workers’ control and expropriation of the factories, the banks and the state power.

Rural and urban land struggles can only be resolved by nationalisation of land under a workers’ and small farmers’ government; Maoris forming what is probably the majority of working farmers not employing hired labour. The Spartacist League Programme for agriculture applies most particularly to Maori on the land.

(11) Mana Motuhake

As the Labour Party under Rowling has moved steadily to the right – as the Spartacist League predicted in 1970 – its ties to the trades unions under threat, the Maori proletariat reacted to this rightward shift first, and most strongly, when Matiu Rata split from Labour to form Mana Motuhake. This split however, generally resulted from a wrong assessment of the reasons for Labour’s degeneration. It is therefore doomed to repeat Labour’s failures. At one level, Mana Motuhake exists as an alternative Labour Party for Maori voters in an area of work were Labour’s party organisation has never been strong. It is a predominantly parliamentary party, against the bias of the Maori proletarian tradition, but has yet to gain a single parliamentary seat. It has failed to make any appeal to non-Maori workers against Labour’s betrayal of the working class as a whole, and it has also failed to gain the support of Maori cultural radicals. It has considerable support from a Maori intelligentsia, which is in most ways unrepresentative of the Maori proletariat.

On crucial issues such as Te Tiriti o Waitangi, it is divided. It has failed to win support on the basis of a clear programme, instead relying on the traditional rotten ground of ‘Maori politics’, loose diplomatic alliances of tribal and religious groupings. As such Mana Motuhake can only be an unstable and transitional formation, though it is transitional from the Labour Party toward revolutionary Marxists positions. Within Mana Motuhake, therefore, the Spartacist League gives critical support to those elements moving to the left, toward direct action, and opposition to Te Tiriti o Waitangi. ‘Critical support’ however, must recognise that there is at present no wing of Mana Motuhake that is in any sense consciously Marxist, and that understands the position of the Maori people as proletarian. Such a consciousness can develop among the rank-and-file of the Mana Motuhake left. We support for this reason, the present democratic demands being raised by this grouping and try to carry them further.

(12) For a Socialist Polynesia

From the history of the rise of the New Zealand bourgeoisie, a chapter is missing that was, in Europe, the opening chapter of the history of capitalism: the struggle against imperialism. That chapter is missing from its history, for the New Zealand white settler bourgeoisie always too dependent on imperialism to oppose it, relied on imperialism to suppress the King Movement; and to colonise Polynesian people elsewhere in the Pacific. Independence struggles in the Pacific were not begun by the bourgeoisie, but by Polynesian people. The New Zealand bourgeoisie, therefore, became mainly a comprador bourgeoisie, lacking either political or economic independence from imperialism. As the pressure of the USA forced an unwilling New Zealand toward de-colonisation in the Pacific – to aid continued direct US colonialism – designed to promote more, not less, political and economic dependence, Polynesian ‘bourgeoisies’ emerged, black petty bourgeois compradors for a New Zealand comprador bourgeoisie.

The extremely small scale of local capitalism in Polynesia intensified the colonial character of exploitation of small capital outside New Zealand by relatively large New Zealand capital, itself dominated by Britain, the USA or Japan (most usually by Britain, the most backward major imperialist state). The growth of state bureaucracies outside Aotearoa took on a colonial character also. The unwillingness of white labour bureaucracies to challenge the colonial character of New Zealand’s economic development derives from the same uncritical acceptance of imperialism’ domination of ‘foreign’ workers by colonialism, and led to the purely ‘economist’ character of the struggles of the labour movement.

The failure of the New Zealand bourgeoisie to develop beyond comprador status led and still leads to the extreme industrial underdevelopment of New Zealand. Small-scale secondary industry vulnerable to every world depression, developed as an ancillary to a state-supported agriculture which was bound hand and foot to the British market, British shipping lines and British freezing company and stock and station agency capital. The lack of large-scale industry held back the formation of a strong multi-racial working class, and ‘big labour’ which successive which successive governments from Balance to Muldoon, have feared as their worst enemy. The relatively privileged position of agriculture tied New Zealand to a dependence on British imperialism for more than a century, and allowed the New Zealand ruling class a ‘Polynesian empire’, while at the same time held back the intensification of class war in an underdeveloped economy.

The failure of the New Zealand bourgeoisie to win its independence from imperialism – so as to facilitate its plans of annexation and expropriation in Polynesia – naturally means that the bureaucracies manipulated by New Zealand imperialism adapt state apparatuses created by colonialism. Where New Zealand can no longer export a white capitalist ruling class, it creates a block comprador bureaucracy. What this means in the epoch of imperialism, is that oppressed national peoples, imprisoned in imperialist chains as workers or poor peasants, can achieve their ‘national liberation’ only in the vanguard of the international socialist revolution, which alone can strike these chains from the working people.

[1] Quoted in H. Wolpe, Economy and Society, Vol. 1 (4), 1972.

[2] Editorial, The Republican, No 40, May 1982.

[6] “The faa-samoa is perfect, they sd From behind cocktail bars like pulpits and we all have alofa for one another, they sd drown me in your alofa, then, I sd their imported firstclass whisky was alive with corpses: my uncle and his army of hungry kids malnutritioned children in dirty wards, an old woman begging in the bank, my generation migrating overseas for jobs, while politicians and merchants brag obesely in the RSA, and pastors bang out sermons about the obedient and righteous life – aiafu all growing fat in a blind man’s paradise” ‘The Faa-Samoa is Perfect, They Sd’ From Inside us the Dead. Longman 1976

[8] Rebecca Evans, in Broadsheet, October 1982, rejects Samoan claims to New Zealand citizenship and tell them to “fuck off”.

[9] Young Socialist Rebel, ‘liftout’ May 1982

[10] Socialist Action’s reply to the Workers Communist League, August 13 and 17^th 1982, doesn’t add anything to the Rebel article.

Class Struggle is the bi-monthly publication of the

Communist Workers’ Group, PO Box 6595 Auckland, New Zealand.

[email protected] http://www.geocities.com/communistworker/

CONTENTS

5 Points for World Revolution

Beaches under attack

Sky City workers Win

Engineers shaft Posties

Open Letter to Maori Party

Occupy For Sure!

Budgeting for Profits

Nader can’t stop Bosses’ Wars

Socialise Australasia

Venzuela Alert

Socialist Polynesia Part 3

Notes and Comments