Voting Labour

Touring Zimbabwe

Bus drivers sold out

Youth Wages

Huntly miners

Workers Charter

Rank and File

Lula’s corruption crisis

 

WHOSE TERROR?

BAGHDAD COMES TO LONDON

 

Comrades of the CWG like most people in the world were forced to confront their political roots and take a position on the London bombings of July 7. Our horror at the bombings was quickly replaced by disgust at the craven British left that ducked for cover behind the Bush/Blair line that these bombings had nothing to do with Iraq or 'imperialism', at least not directly. The London bombings were Baghdad for a day. Blair had brought the war home. And we responded like Madrid workers to the Madrid bombings with the cry "your bombs, our dead" as an indictment of Blair backing Bush. While the suicide bombers were influenced by radical Islamist politics, for us this was the direct result of the failure of the revolutionaries in the imperialist countries to stop the invasions and the occupations, and the conditions of outrage and despair that generate such reactions. While we reject these methods as a means of smashing imperialism, in no way do we condemn suicide bombers for being driven to such methods by imperialism.

 

To condemn or not to condemn?

 

In its official statement the day after the London bombings the Communist Party of Great Britain hysterically condemns the bombings as ‘indefensible’, ‘reactionary anti-capitalism’, ‘inhuman’ and ‘anti-capitalist barbarism’.

 

“The July 7 terror attacks on London are indefensible. They were designed to maximise carnage. Communists unhesitatingly condemn those who planted and detonated the four bombs which killed more than 50 people and injured over 700 others. This was a deeply inhuman act. Reactionary anti-capitalism is no ally of the working class. It is antithetical to democracy, socialism and basic human values. It is itself a manifestation of capitalist barbarism.

These bombs will do nothing - not a thing - to hold back, weaken or divert the rulers of the G8. On the contrary their meeting at Glen-eagles was given a tremendous propaganda boost. George W Bush, Tony Blair, Silvio Berlusconi and Vladimir Putin - terrorists on a grand scale in Afghanistan, Iraq and Chechnya - eagerly paraded their so-called humanitarian and peace-loving credentials before the world's media.

Those who died, those who were injured, were ordinary working class Londoner –the very sort of people who on February 15 2003 rallied in huge numbers - two million of them - to demonstrate their opposition to the pending imperialist war against Iraq. July 7 was an attack on them. Not the warmongers and their obsolete system. What the bombers have done is strike a blow against the anti-war and democratic movement in Britain. Their action certainly plays straight into the hands of Tony Blair and the New Labour government .Blair will cynically use the bombs. He will beat the patriotic drum. He will strive to cement national unity in the 'war against terrorism'. He will use the attacks to justify the continuation of Britain’s junior role in the occupation of Iraq. He will insist that the case for the introduction of ID cards, more surveillance, further police powers, detention without trial and effectively turning Britain into a giant open prison is now unanswerable.

 

In another lengthy lesson on why communists should condemn the bombings the Socialist Workers’ Party is taken to task for being two-faced.

 

'On the left the last week has seen an argument between comrades from the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Socialist Workers Party about terrorism. This argument was sparked by the fact that, while Respect, the Stop the War Coalition and Muslim Association of Britain promptly condemned the London bombings, the SWP itself, once again, did not issue an outright condemnation, presumably because it is unwilling to appear to side with the oppressor and with the “real terrorists”, Bush and Blair.

The SWP is being pulled two ways and is clearly in the process of falling into complete incoherence. Its comrades have, either by accident or design, a Janus-like ability to speak with two voices and display two faces. One face, the one they want to show the public, is reformist and respectable: that is the one that in the name of Respect and the STWC condemns the bombings.

However, it fools no one, except perhaps those who want to be fooled. Because the other SWP face, the one they want to show each other, is stony-hard and full of puffed-up pride, talking in terms of an ‘anti-imperialist’ unity and ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’. Just as it did over 9/11, Bali and Madrid, this face does not condemn: it forgives, and says that the 50 deaths and 700 injuries were all the fault of Bush and Blair, and that anyway the term ‘terrorism’ has become meaningless.'

 

We don't know precisely what motivated the SWP not to condemn the bombings, not do we vouch for its politics in any way. But the CPGBs understanding of anti-imperialism is deficient. To refuse to condemn the bombings as 'anti-imperialist' does not make the radical Islamics the 'friend' of the workers. It is necessary to reject the methods of the Islamic terrorists and yet NOT condemn them precisely because they use a particular 'means' directed against capitalism in the form of imperialism.

The CPGB talks of ‘capitalism’ and ‘anti-capitalism’ abstractly and timelessly and then equates the means used by both sides on the same scale.

But the ends of capitalism and anti-capitalism are very different. One is barbarism, the other is socialism. The means used towards these opposite ends cannot be equated on the same moral scale. There are 'their' morals, and 'our' morals. To understand why morality is class based so that the same means to different ends cannot be equated, read Trotsky's Their Morals and Ours.

 

Right to national self-determination

The problem with the CPGB is that it doesn’t understand the right of nations to self-determination, and the obligation on the part of workers in imperialist countries to unconditionally fight for this right.

Since the end of the 19th century, capitalism in the form of imperialist invasion, war and re-colonisation, is the concrete expression of the capitalist class enemy. These forms of oppression are ‘barbaric’ and are to be condemned by communists unequivocally. They have no redeeming features; they do not defend democracy, human rights, social development; they have no ‘humanity’ (as a progressive historical social form) whatsoever. The first duty of communists is to turn imperialist wars into class wars and overthrow the imperialist states.

Anti-imperialist resistance is the fight of the oppressed workers and peasants (and also elements of the national bourgeoisie) for their national right to self-determination. The reason that anti-imperialists use methods that can be labelled individual terror is that these are forced on them by the overwhelming military dominance of imperialism. In the film 'The Battle of Algiers' a French colonel complained of the terrorist bombs used by the resistance. An imprisoned FLN leader replied: “you give us your planes and we will give you our homemade bombs”.

Nor are feudal or bourgeois class forces engaged in the national struggle a reason to impose conditions. Trotsky called for support for Haile Sellasie against fascist Italy in 1935. Today radical Islam draws its support from various national bourgeois or petty bourgeois fractions, clerical and secular. It is necessary to fight alongside these anti-imperialist currents with the purpose of winning over the masses from their reactionary banners to the banner of proletarian leadership of the anti-imperialist struggle.

The CPGB and other ‘leftists’ in the imperialists countries who have NOT fought against and stopped imperialist oppression by their own class struggle methods are in no position to impose ANY conditions on the methods used by, or the class composition of, the anti-imperialist resistance. Instead of moaning that Blair will be boosted by the bombs, they should fight for the independent, armed organisation of the international proletariat as the only political force capable of defeating imperialism and its national allies. Their first duty is to do this at home!

 

‘Lets join to fight the ‘common criminals!’

In a naked twist of logic that support’s Blair’s claim that the bombers were ‘common criminals’, Brendan O’Neill of Spiked Online claims that the bombers were not anti-imperialist fighters but British youth alienated from British capitalism. (After 21/7: still hiding behind the terrorists: By continuing to link the attacks in London with the war in Iraq, anti-war activists are conferring authority on the bombers.)

 

“To the extent that Iraq was a likely factor in the events of 7/7 and 21/7, it is not that the bombers were making a political strike against the heart of the imperialist beast that attacked Iraq. Rather, it seems more likely that they were influenced by a self-loathing about Iraq that has its roots firmly in British society. That would explain why this apparently 'anti-imperialist' strike involved British citizens planting bombs in the British capital: these acts have their origins, it would seem, in deep moral and political uncertainty and severe self-doubt here at home, rather than in wars of intervention abroad. The upper echelons of British society have partaken in some serious self-flagellation over Iraq, while continuously fretting that some nutter would attack us for our awful deeds. And then we got 7/7 and 21/7.

 

But more to the point, and to repeat: Even if one of the failed 21/7 bombers now claims that he was politically motivated by the war in Iraq, and even if it transpires that all of the other 7/7 and 21/7 bombers were similarly motivated, so what? Why should that become the focus of the argument for those who want British forces to withdraw from Iraq? Writing in yesterday's London Evening Standard, professor of defence studies Michael Clarke said, 'one of the suspected Tube bombers claims he acted because of Iraq….is it time to pull out?' (8) Why, because some failed bomber whose nickname is 'Bambi' and his mates didn't like the war? On that basis you could argue that a reasonable response to the Charles Manson murders in late-1960s America would have been to allow Manson to join the Beach Boys - apparently, one of his many murderous motivations was that he didn't make it into that band.”

 

This crude working class psychodrama takes away the political rights of workers in Britain to make an ‘anti-imperialist strike against the heart of the imperialist beast’.  Of course, they are just ‘common criminals’ likened to mass murderer Charles Manson. Why should Blair pull out of Iraq when faced with an upsurge of crime at home? He couldn’t have put it better himself.  And anyway says Spiked Online, it’s not good enough for the ‘left’ to oppose the war in Iraq merely because of the threats of bombs at home.

 

Pointing to the bombings and failed bombings in London as an argument against the war in Iraq is a way of avoiding having the hard debate we need. In place of an argument against Western interventionism, and against the right of powerful states to override the sovereign rights of less powerful states, we get this alternative: 'If we don't stop launching wars, they're gonna come over here and bomb us!' Rather than challenging the politics of fear - which both Bush and Blair deployed to win support for the war on Iraq, with their fantastic tales of Saddam's WMD that threatened civilisation as we know it - anti-war activists and writers embrace it and try to turn it to their advantage. They are, in effect, morally blackmailing us into being anti-war, trying to scare us into opposing the war in Iraq: when the left-leaning New Statesman published a picture of a ticking rucksack on its front cover next to the words 'BLAIR'S BOMBS', it was almost a threat: Oppose this war, or else….

 

Who wants to die for a bosses’ war?

So we can’t oppose the war on the basis of irrational and groundless fear of terror. First we have to ‘debate’ why powerful states most not invade other ‘sovereign’ states. It hasn’t occurred to these patronising petty bourgeois intellectuals of Spiked Online (what do they put in their drinks?) that the vast majority of people don’t want to die for oil in Iraq. That is the problem, they don’t want to die for a bosses’ war or to stop it either. Either way, the war is already held by the big majority to be unjust, and what’s more the suicide bombers and their victims are increasingly seen as innocents dying together because of Bush and Blair’s war in Baghdad and London. 

The fact that more than 50 working class Londoners died is to be regretted not just because they were innocent; more importantly, because the British working class did not defeat imperialism at home. In the same way the children who died some days later in Iraq while surrounding US soldiers handing out sweets is to be regretted. Not just because the bomber hit the children instead of the military target. Rather because as yet the insurgency in Iraq is weak, and the anti-war movement in the US and UK has yet to make it impossible for the troops to stay in Iraq.

Nor can it be argued that because the London bombings will be used as a pretext by Bush and Blair to justify and intensify their ‘war on terror’ this is a reason to condemn the bombings. This endorses Bush and Blair shifting the blame from imperialism to the methods of the anti-imperialists. If this bombing is capable of strengthening Blair and ‘striking a blow against the anti-war and democratic movement in Britain’ that is only because this movement is committed to parliamentarism and pacifism and imposes the same standards on the anti-imperialist fighters.

Part of the problem is that the Western left has swallowed the ideology of Bush and Blair’s ‘war on terror’. Even though it claims that Bush and Blair are the ‘real’ terrorists, terrorism itself becomes a matter of degree not kind. By equating imperialist and anti-imperialist terror on the same scale of ‘humanity’ the pacifist left ignores the qualitative difference between terror used to systematically oppress, and terror used to resist oppression.

We should abandon Bush and Blair’s language of terrorism and reject the term outright. Terror is a method of warfare; war itself is an extension of politics; and politics is an extension of economics. There is a difference in kind between imperialist terror to bomb and destroy whole countries, to arrest and imprison without rights any ‘terrorist’ etc. and on the other hand, the methods of the suicide bombers or resistance fighters, opposing imperialism.

To say that Blair’s war and the attack on democracy at home will be strengthened by this bombing is the same old copout of the British left over the Irish national struggle. As Marx, Lenin and Trotsky always said, the British workers will never aid Irish freedom while they do not fight to overthrow the British imperialist state.

But to do this will mean first freeing itself from the social imperialist agenda of pacifism and taking up class war methods of fighting imperialism. Only such methods can strengthen the hand of the resistance fighters ensuring that the organized working class takes over the leadership of the anti-imperialist struggle from the various fractions of the national bourgeoisie. And by fighting for the defeat of our own imperialist bourgeoisies we can create a powerful working class opposition to imperialist war that will fill the political vacuum now taken up by the radical Islamists and their terrorist methods.

 

 

Youth rates suck for young people. In New Zealand, 16-17 year olds can be legally paid $7.60 an hour ($304 for a working week, 80% of adult minimum wage) for the same work as an 18 year old. Under-16-year- olds can be paid whatever the employer decides.

Paying young people a lower wage for equal work is discrimination pure and simple. The issue of youth rates is similar to that of pay parity for women with men. In both cases, a member of a social grouping is discriminated against in the workplace because they are a member of that social grouping. Young people are paid less simply because they are not deemed ‘adults’ by the government and employers.

A 2004 income survey put the average wage for full-time 15-19 year olds at $9.50 with 20-24 year olds expected to earn $12.70. This indicates a massive pay disparity based on age, largely a result of youth rates. We do the same work in the

 

Youth rates contribute to New Zealand’s growing poverty

Youth rates exacerbate youth poverty and the poverty of all workers in New Zealand. A recent University of Otago study that interviewed young people revealed many youth wanted more money for their families to meet basic house expenses like rent and food bills. This is no surprise with 3 out of 10 New Zealand youth living in poverty (at a conservative estimate). The young people said youth wages were too low, especially for those who needed to earn to supplement the family income or pay for their own clothes and education. A decent wage for youth would help raise families out of poverty and the need to borrow for necessities such as food and water.

The wave of economic reform begun in the 80s has only exacerbated structural problems in the New Zealand economy, increasing the exploitation of low wage workers, of which youth form a significant component. The median annual income of young people (15-24 years) plummeted from $14,700 to $8,100 over the ten-year period between 1986 and 1996.

The result of ‘Rogernomics’ (Privatisation, union-busting, attack on wages and benefits) has been that the rich have got richer and the poor poorer. 45% of families, many with 2 adults and young people working, now rely on some kind of government assistance to reinforce low incomes. This indicates that wage levels across the board for New Zealand workers are set far too low, with yearly wage increases not even keeping pace with inflation. We are getting poorer and life is harder because they are paying us less.

 

Youth rates suck for all workers

The discrimination faced by youth in the workplace is a deliberate strategy of business to divide employees and drive down wages across the board.  Youth rates encourage a low wage climate by setting wage standards lower than is deemed socially acceptable for adults. Employers often employ youth instead of adult workers as they are easier to boss around, have little knowledge of their rights, are not unionised and can be paid youth rates.

Youth actually lose out in this situation as well, as the children of the adult worker will be worse off due to the loss of potential income. These children will then be forced to look for work themselves to support the family. Thus patterns of exploitative youth employment and a low wage environment are perpetuated. At the 2001 Census 37% of 15 to 19 year-olds were employed as service and sales workers, a sector notorious for experimenting with new forms of low-wage and casualised labour. The youth economy is a fundamental battleground for all workers, as the shit they pull on the young today is the shit they pull on adults in the future.

 

What’s the alternative?

The only response to a low-wage, exploitative work environment is struggle. We must demand living wages for all workers, regardless of age. Youth rates must be abolished immediately, with minimum wage and benefits raised considerably for all New Zealanders. Let the rich foot the bill. 5% wage increases are not enough to reverse the poverty created by 15 years of the Rogernomic’s offensive. Workers are already demanding more, now we need action to translate demands into success. 

The fight has two faces – against the employers and the government that protects them. Neither National or Labour have any love for the youth and workers of this country. Young people and adults can not allow themselves to be turned against each other, but must see each-other as important allies in a fight to guarantee an end to poverty and exploitation in New Zealand.

http://www.blackcat.enzyme.org.nz/

 

 

VOTE LABOUR NOW TO SMASH CAPITALISM LATER

It’s election time again. Why should we bother voting for our exploiters to go exploiting us for another 3 years?  Unfortunately, in New Zealand workers are not rushing to the barricades to join the communist party and overthrow capitalism. That’s because there is no communist party that intervenes in their daily lives and offers an alternative to parliamentary democracy. Nor are workers rushing to the polls in high hopes of Labour reforming capitalism. Their horizons have been crippled somewhat by 20 years of neo-liberal defeats. Therefore, once again, Labour is the party that most workers will vote for in the hope that it will defend what is left of the welfare state and reject the future of NZ as an outright US colony.  We oppose Labour’s bourgeois program but while workers still see Labour as the party historically linked to unions we will vote tactically for a Labour Government. To do this we have to put socialist demands on Labour to prove that it will always put the bosses’ profits before workers needs, and that only the organization of a mass workers’ movement based on the unions can deliver on these demands by fighting for a Workers’ Government!

 

Communists do not believe in the bosses elections as a means of winning any significant reforms let alone transforming capitalism, but the vast majority of NZ workers do not yet agree with us. We could say it over an over again, but this would not change anything. Workers would rather vote for a party that has a better chance of defending and extending their historic gains than any socialist pie in the sky. While the economy remains strong and small gains can still be won by this means there is no way that the working class will set out on the long march to overthrow parliament.

Tactically, therefore, communists have to accompany the mass of workers as they once more trudge down the parliamentary road at the same time always pointing out clearly that it’s a dead end. At the same time we have to raise a socialist program to demand answers to what workers need now. That fact that Labour cannot deliver on these demands and will increasingly turn on and attack workers will sooner or later expose them as a bosses’ party.

This may take some time. We know that in countries like Bolivia where the revolutionary workers and peasants are mobilised in the hundreds of thousands, the parliamentary road becomes seen to be a dead end only when it turns the state forces onto the workers making them pay with their dead. New Zealand is still some way from such a revolutionary situation.  

It pretty obvious to most workers that right now Labour meets the immediate needs of workers better than National. Yes, Labour turned from being a party that protected NZ manufacturers before 1984 to one that forced them to compete internationally after 1984. This cost many jobs and much misery. But for all the neo-liberal reforms of 1984-1990 Labour did not take an axe to the welfare state or to the unions. Its role is to manage capitalism by disciplining the working class on behalf of capital. It does this by subsidizing a skilled labour force that can produce rising levels of surplus-value, and empowering the unions to bureaucratically control that labour force.

When National came into office in 1990 it introduced sweeping changes to industrial relations (Employment Contracts Act) that virtually smashed the unions.  Membership dropped from around 50% to around 15% and workers rights were attacked wholesale. Along with this, within a couple of weeks of being elected Ruth Richardson slashed welfare benefits and superannuation and ensured that a whole new generation was born into levels of hardship and poverty not heard of since the 1930s.

National’s full frontal attack on workers between 1993 and 1999 was held back by its dependence on a slim majority from 1993 and coalition partners NZ First and others after 1996. In other words National could not muster a majority of votes to complete its new right agenda by 1999. What appears to be attracting many people back to National in 2005 is National’s stealing of ACT’s clothes to finish the new right agenda with tax cuts and the privatisation of health and education via bulk funding.

Moreover, while Labour has kept most of the new right economic reforms intact (low inflation, low taxation, social spending in check etc) the key areas of the welfare state, health, education and housing have been defended and unions have been made ‘stakeholders’ again alongside business and government. By comparison with Labour’s funding of superannuation and scrapping of interest on student loans, National’s return to tax and spending cuts, work-for-the-dole and union bashing, makes Labour look almost ‘socialist’.

But most telling, Brash has made it clear that National will return to the foreign policy of the 1960s and 1970s when Holyoake backed the US war in Vietnam. While Labour would have fought a UN-sponsored war in Iraq, Brash would have sent in NZ troops alongside Bush, Blair and Howard etc. Furthermore, Labour stakes its whole liberal reputation on keeping the nuclear ban in place, but Brash will get rid of it “by lunchtime”.

Labour has kept its distance from the US and has paid the price by losing a free trade agreement. Yet Lockwood Smith wants NZ in lockstep with Uncle Sam for a few cents more on the price of beef. Labour has largely gone along with the ‘war on terror’, sending troops to Afghanistan and frigates to the Gulf. It has jumped to impose ‘anti-terror’ legislation at home, but it still opens its borders to large numbers of refugees and asylum seekers. National would march with Bush, Blair and Howard to Guantanamo and back. And if it forms a coalition with NZ First it will be expelling Muslims by morning prayers.

That’s the stark choice facing workers; a government that creates profits for US imperialism by subsidizing workers’ productivity, or a government that uses workers as cannon fodder for US imperialism? Voting Labour against National in this election is to keep in power a party that believes it can exploit workers better by enlisting their support and not killing them without UN approval, as opposed to another party that like Bush, Blair and Howard thinks that the best way to exploit workers it to treat them as greedy individuals or collateral damage.

Yet workers don’t yet see that the Labour alternative is social imperialist. It pays for welfare at home by backing imperialism abroad. They share Labour’s illusions in the UN as a multilateral world community that is capable of replacing naked Anglo/Yankee imperialist terror. Right now they will vote Labour to stop Brash from sending their children to Yankee wars.  We support them tactically to prove in practice that Labour’s ‘human rights’ imperialism is a ‘soft cop’ version of Bush and Brash’s ‘tough cop’ military imperialism.

National may need the help of NZ First to form a government. Would NZ First have moderating effect as it did in 1996? No! In no way should workers vote NZ First in the hope that it will back Labour or put limits on National.  Peter’s scurrilous attack on Muslims under the cover of ‘terrorism’ is a thinly veiled appeal to racism and much more virulent than that against Asians because the ‘war on terror’ labels radical Islam as the new threat to civilisation.

NZ First is likely to pursue a more right wing agenda than last time when they showed they were no friend to workers.  Indeed, some of them turned out to be even more in National’s pocket than their leader.  Ex-union official Tau Henare and others left New Zealand First to help prop up the National Government when the bulk of the New Zealand First caucus decided it was no longer in their political interests to stay in bed with National.  Today Henare is a full-blown member of the National party, standing as a list candidate.

A Labour government may need the backing of the Greens. They are a party which often appeals to more “progressive” voters.  Commentator Chris Trotter said that the New Zealand Greens are probably the most left-wing Green party in the world that has made it into political office.  On the face of it there seems to be some truth in this with people like ex-Socialist Action League member Keith Locke and ex-Workers Communist League member Sue Bradford.  Young people in particular, are often attracted to the Greens Environmental approach and pro-cannabis platform.

Some left parties such as the Socialist Workers organization encourage people to vote for the Greens seeing them as a progressive voice. We do not see the Greens as progressive in the slightest. While they get workers’ support they divert them from voting Labour and putting demands on it in office, and from organising a labour movement independently of parliament.

While the Greens have supported Labour on some important issues for workers it is important to always remember it is a petty-bourgeoisie party which does not have its base in the working class.  Its interests are not ultimately that of workers but with ‘democratic’ national capitalists. It opposes free trade agreements to defend jobs at home by opposing jobs in free trade zones unless ‘democratic’ capitalists legislate for labour rights. It opposes Mugabe’s neo-colonial regime in Zimbabwe by backing Bush and Blair’s hypocritical policy of sanctions. It also adopts an anti-science position on GE and nuclear power because it believes that capitalism can be managed to sustain the environment. For all these reasons we do not advocate that workers vote for Green candidates or the Green Party as this takes votes away from Labour.

The Alliance has moved left to form a small democratic socialist party since the split over Afghanistan when Anderton and Robson went off to form the “Progressive Party”. The Alliance should have liquidated itself back into the Labour Party in 1993 when it was obvious that workers were prepared to back Labour again against National’s new right attacks. Its survival as a separate party says more about Jim Anderton’s ego and the machinations and ambitions of his lieutenant Matt McCarten wheeler dealing in parliament.  Today Anderton has renamed his party “Anderton’s Progressive Party” like a brand of snake oil. McCarten “went off” to the Maori Party and then to Workers’ Charter.

All of these currents are oriented to parliament but are engaged in bitter infighting so that they are thankfully largely irrelevant to the main contest between National and Labour. We do not advocate a vote to the Alliance, Progressive or any other ‘left’ party on the basis of this or that supposed ‘workers’ program since that only diverts and delays workers from breaking with Labour and parliament. This is also the problem with the Maori Party as it is hoping to use the ‘balance of power’ to pressure a Labour or National government.

The Maori party will obviously appeal to many Maori disillusioned with the Labour Party’s approach to Maori issues, particularly over the Seabed and Foreshore issue. We took a strong position against Labour’s legislation on the Seabed and Foreshore, calling for occupations that could be backed by both Maori and non-Maori workers. But we didn’t support the formation of the Maori Party. We characterised it as a cross class party that splits the labour movement and draws Maori workers in behind petty bourgeois leaders whose program is for Maori to vote as a bloc to reform capitalism rather than mobilise workers for land,  foreshore or industry occupations. The Maori Party may continue Turia’s voting record for Labour on some things and National on others consistent with its kaupapa of Maori petty-capitalism first, workers second.  We do not advocate votes for Maori Party Candidates or the Maori Party.

As communists we harbour no illusions that Labour can deliver socialism for workers but it is important to give it tactical support while most workers see their policies as able to meet the interests of their class. In tactically supporting Labour we recognize all their failings and see it for what it is, a right wing social democratic bosses’ party which manages capitalism to the greatest extent it possibly can by keeping the labour movement on the parliamentary road. The parliamentary road is not the road to socialism but it cannot be boycotted until an independent workers movement and a revolutionary party is built capable of ultimately challenging parliamentary rule and that of the capitalist ruling class.

 

WORKERS’ ACTION PROGRAM

·          Jobs for all on a living wage – 35 hour week! 24 hour free child care!

·          Tax the Rich; Tax Capital Gains!

·          Open the borders to worker migrants!

·          Re-nationalise Rail, Telecom, etc with no compensation and under workers’ control!

·          Troops out of Afghanistan!

·          For a Workers’ Government!

 

YES TO THE TOUR, YES TO LAND REFORM

Those on the left such as the Auckland Global Peace and Justice Alliance calling for a boycott of Zimbabwe are lining up, not with the workers and poor farmers of Zimbabwe, but with the governments of the Western powers responsible for much of the misery of Africa, with reactionary local politicians like Don Brash, Winston Peters and Phil Goff, and with the Movement for Democratic Change, an organisation funded by the CIA and dominated by white politicians from the Rhodesia era.

 

Why Target Mugabe?

This year, Mugabe has displaced 200,000 citizens by destroying their homes - that's 100,000 less than the city of Bombay displaced in a similar operation last year, and 300,000 less than the US-UK displaced when they razed Fallujah last year.

Why has nobody called for the Lions to be banned from NZ, as a consequence of British actions in Iraq? Why aren't Goff and Brash enraged by British or American war crimes? Why have they chosen to focus on Zimbabwe, instead? The reason, of course, is that the hysteria over Zimbabwe is not motivated by any genuine response to oppression and suffering there. When was the last time Goff or Brash or Blair or John Howard cared about such things?

Zimbabwe has been singled out for a variety of reasons, but the most important one is the fact that Mugabe has, in his grotesquely distorted way, attacked the property of capitalists - big farmers, mainly - with long-standing links to Britain and NZ.

Let’s be clear: Mugabe is no friend of workers. He is a nasty national bourgeois who rode the anti-colonial struggle to power by cutting a deal with the British that prevented socialist revolution and real land reform in Zimbabwe, and for many years, through the 80s and most of the 90s, he loyally followed the dictates of the International Monetary Fund. Mugabe has been forced to move to the left and take on imperialist powers like Britain by the strength of Zimbabwean anger against white farmers, the IMF, and the imperialist governments that bleed Africa dry...'

 

Land Reform?

But GPJA claims that the land reform process in Zimbabwe has no progressive qualities. The land reform process is simply the invention and plaything of Mugabe. In fact, land reform is a long-standing demand which Mugabe has attempted to co-opt and control, in the hope of retaining power. The invasions of the superfarms of the white capitalists - the very people who founded the MDC in the late 90s - involved thousands of ordinary families, as well as Mugabe's state forces and organised supporters.

In all, one hundred and ten thousand square kilometres of land have been seized - that's almost the size of the North Island! Does GPJA's friend really believe that all of this land has been moved into the hands of Mugabe and his cronies, or that all of it could have been seized by Mugabe's weak and inefficient state forces alone?

Thanks to the land reforms, tens of thousands of poor Zimbabweans have received land on which they can grow food and stay alive. For GPJA this seems to be such a trivial fact that it is not worth mentioning, but in a poor African country where land has been locked up for over a hundred years it is anything but trivial. Nor is it trivial to the many Maori activists who identify their own struggle for the return of stolen land with the heroic efforts of the Southern African peoples.

That’s why Mugabe's parody of land reform is very popular in South Africa, where the UK has huge investments and the black population is simmering after a decade of declining living standards caused the maintenance of economic apartheid by a parasitic black elite. In NZ, the ruling class frets about the possibility of a renewed outbreak of Maori occupations, as the 'Treaty process' is shown to be merely a vehicle for the advancement of a handful of Maori capitalists. No wonder that the Maori Party has for all its faults been able to see through the anti-tour hysteria.

 

Opposition MDC

GPJA reproduces the flawed criticisms of Mugabe coming from the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). Anybody who still has illusions in the Movement for Democratic Change as a left-wing party could do worse than visit its website, which features a forum where members brainstorm about policy and strategy.

Here are a couple of charming excerpts from MDC members discussing on land reform:

'There is no sight of recovery in agriculture as long we do not consider property rights...With Mugabe's expropriation of land creates a greater political risk to invest in Zimbabwe similar to the 1970 policies of Chile and Nicaragua where bilateral agreements were broken and the US government had to recover its assets...My uncle is now running a ranch and tobacco farming in Manica province in Mozambique...'

To which another 'comrade' added:

'A commercial farm must be given to a competent commercial farmer. If this means further resettlement so be it.'

In other words, the poor families who have taken over land seized from white capitalists will have to be 'resettled', to make way for the old owners.

Here's another piece of MDC wisdom, from the same thread of discussion:

 

'In my post I do not mean that whites should be excluded from any re-settlement program. Merit should be balanced with a lot of other issues, eg the fact that some people are landless, and that 'Zim is predominantly an Agric. country and therefore we have to maximise production. This obviously means the commercial land will have to be allocated to the tried and tested commercial farmers, and qualified starters who have real potential to produce, not only for their immediate families, but for export as well.'

Read the whole discussion at:

http://mdczimba.proboards3.com/index.cgi?board=general&action=display&th

Many of those who marched on The GPJA organised protest were rightly disgusted by the eviction of poor Zimbabweans from their urban homes by the Mugabe government. Yet, as the discussion quoted above and numerous official statements show, the MDC and its Western backers are determined to enforce a far larger eviction, by 'resettling' the poor farming families who have been taking the countryside back from white capitalists!

The sooner the reformist left realises this and stops supporting the MDC the better. Perhaps GPJA and co should read the 2002 Zimbabwe report of Human Rights Watch, an organisation they seem happy to trust in other contexts, which criticises Mugabe but nevertheless states very clearly that:

 

'Some people from communal areas who genuinely need land to raise themselves out of poverty, as well as some middle class people from urban areas who wish and have the capabilities to enter commercial farming, have been among those who have obtained access to land for the first time.'

http://www.hrw.org/reports/2002/zimbabwe/ZimLand0302.htm

In other words, Human Rights Watch can make the distinction between ordinary Zimbabweans fighting for a better life and Mugabe. They know that the struggle for land reform being waged in Zimbabwe is a just struggle, despite the nature of the Mugabe government. Why, then, can't GPJA also grasp this basic fact?

Those who want to oppose Mugabe effectively should stop chasing after a bandwagon being driven by Blair to re-colonise Africa, and instead try to learn something about the history of Zimbabwe, and the legacy of the Lancaster House agreement, which ensured the present crisis by attempting - like the phoney transition in South Africa, and the Treaty 'settlement' process here - to put a black bourgeoisie in charge of an unmodified capitalist economy dominated by a white elite and foreign imperialists.

CWG supports the building of rank and file workers, landless farmers and poor farmers’ councils with a program of:

·          land to the tillers;

·          nationalisation of the banks without compensation and under workers’ control to provide cheap credit for farmers;

·          Workers’ and Farmers’ Government to socialise private property and plan the Zimbabwe economy as part of a Southern African Union of Socialist Republics.

Here's an article ‘From Zimbabwe to Ngawha’ which looks at the situation in Zimbawe in more detail

http://www.geocities.com/communistworker/cs48.html

 

 

 

 Many drivers are angry that they have been sold out by their union officials and end up with a take home pay cut. Some are taking court action under the ERA. Too little and too late! There are lessons for the whole union movement in the struggle of the Stagecoach drivers’ both for a living wage and for a democratic union that can really fight and win. We reprint below a leaflet CWG put out to drivers,

 

The recent deal is bad because, first, the $16 an hour Stagecoach deal is not available to all drivers.  New recruits are on “training wages” for 3 months.  These training wages are now extended over a longer period.  These workers do the same work and may be used first for overtime (because of their lower rates).

Second, the $16 dollars was traded for a cut in overtime rates and extending ordinary hours from 40 to 45 before drivers get paid overtime.  And the penal rate drops from time and half to time and a quarter. So in terms of money in pockets the loss of overtime means that a number of drivers will experience a wage-cut.

Meanwhile Stagecoach managers continue to look after their profits.  Already they are saying some bus routes are unprofitable and they will cease to run them – unless the council (Auckland Regional Transport Authority) subsidises these routes. 

The officials were working for the bosses rather than the members.  They came out in public saying that the deals were OK. The delegates only went back to the workers when they decided, not the workers themselves. Most reporting back was done informally in conversations at depots.

The ratification on the last offer was done by splitting the workers into depots where they voted in improvised cardboard boxes. The all-up meeting on the Sunday did not suit drivers who were doing other things with their families.  The workers were entitled to an all-up stopwork meeting on a weekday.  In this way workers were prevented from a mass rally at which full democratic debate within the whole workforce was possible. Maybe this was done because a mass meeting had rejected the previous offer overwhelmingly after Froggat had gone on public radio saying it was a good deal!.

Three workers with the support of 100s of others have now taken legal action to challenge the deal. They argue that the short notice of the site meetings meant 309 workers missed those meetings and that the democratic process was compromised and distorted the results.  They claim that the way the officials and Stagecoach management set the timing of meetings amounted to rigging the vote. 

We agree that the union officials and Stagecoach have done a rotten deal for a large section of workers.  We can understand that workers want to fight this.  However, taking the legal road puts individual workers at a disadvantage relative to the employers. First the have to finance the legal action and second, it diverts efforts from building a fighting, democratic union.

Third, legal actions do not involve the rank and file and cannot undo the damage already done. The BEES group won a court case in the 1990s but got minimal compensation and has since dissolved.  While those involved deny that they are being threatened with the sack or victimized, without strong backing from the rank and file, this is a strong likelihood. 

 

The way to fight the company and the sold out union officials is to organise to roll Froggat and Co now!

Elect a new leadership and delegates capable of representing the interests of workers!

 Defend everyone victimized by the company! 

For a democratic, fighting union!

 

Solid Energy is a “state owned enterprise” (SOE) a label which the 1984-1990 Labour government first used to describe the free-market capitalist management for state property.  The capitalist state has set up coal to run as a business.  That means it exploits workers in an outright capitalist form, returning profits to the state, managed by another Labour government. 

The workers, members of the Engineers Union (EPMU), have been negotiating over the rate of pay with the management of Solid Energy.  During this process the management locked out the workforce.  Of course the EPMU says nothing about the workers kicking out the management and taking control of the SOE! After all it believes in forming partnerships with the bosses in the private sector.

One of the biggest contracts for Huntly coal is the Glenbrook steel mill.  Its owners, BHP Billiton, had decided to ship coal from overseas to run Glenbrook steel mill. BHP-Billiton is one of the major energy companies responsible for the super-exploitation and oppression of workers and farmers in Latin America. For example it part owns the new pipeline to carry Bolivian gas across Brazil.

Huntly miners approached workers of Glenbrook (also EPMU) and asked the workforce to ban the use of scab coal.  Unfortunately Glenbrook workers refused. They said they could not strike in support as it would have broken their employment contract. However they did offer financial support.  We know the EPMU leadership preach respect for the industrial law, but did they organize a fighting fund for the Huntly miners?

We heard that the miners were running short of money, and some approached the unemployment office for financial aid (and were denied this until they had been on strike for 3 weeks).  Why did the officials to leave the workforce in a situation of no money?  Who owns the union funds?!  Striking and locked out workers need a strike fund under their control!  A union that looks after its own would have plans to help members to pay their bills while they are involved in industrial action. 

Miners were gagged – they were told not to discuss with anyone outside the union, including the media – apparently to avoid attacks on the union.  Yet this same union advertises in the media, including funding pro-Labour Party adverts.  Class Struggle demands: all up members’ votes on any donations to the Labour Party (or any other Party). 

About an official of the EPMU one miner said, “We don’t want a bar of Sweeney down here”.  Class Struggle agrees with a level of distrust of union officials – whoever they are.  They can play a rotten role to sell out wages and conditions.  This is because the role of union officials is only to negotiate over the rate of exploitation – not to end capitalist exploitation. The labour bureaucracy of the union officials is an appendage of capitalism that needs to be overthrown and the unions put under rank and file workers control. 

                So what have the EPMU dealt to workers this time? The Huntly workers returned for a 2 year collective agreement with a 5% wage rise now, and some areas getting 3% next year, others only 2%.  These workers do a rostered 5 days (at 11hrs a day) and 4 days off, or can work an extra day, making 6 days on (66hrs) and 3 days off.  That averages a 42hr week, or with an extra day, a 51hr week. 

Meanwhile, other local workers are unemployed, and one of the biggest offices in town is WINZ.  To overcome the overwork and poor pay and conditions of the workers and provide work for all, we call on the SOE to be renationalized under worker’ control!

One of the first moves of any industry under workers control must be to reduce the working week until the work is shared out on a living wage and good and safe conditions. 

 

 

We print a contribution by an EPMU member dissatisfied with the union followed by a few comments from us.

 

The recent 40cents a week hike in membership fees for members of the Engineering Printers & Manufacturing Union (EPMU) equating to a weekly increase of $20,000 into the union’s coffers, has highlighted the need for some transparency on behalf of the members, to be able to scrutinise an easily available audit of the union’s annual accounts.  Since this undemocratic increase, members’ spouses & family have been cut from benefits.

Over the recent years the EPMU appears to have neglected its core duties towards it’s members, at the expense of funding it’s own bureaucracy.  Delegates and Convenors are being manipulated by the Union to rubber-stamp the needs of the Union’s bureaucrats.

The funding of Union Organisers (using members funds) to stand for parliament on behalf of the Labour Party needs also to be seriously questioned.  A particular example was in the 2002 General Election when the EPMU’s Lynn Pillay was put up by the Labour Party against the Alliance’s Laila Harre, an experienced Trade Unionist.  Harre had a long sound record of genuinely supporting legislation for the improved conditions of lower paid workers.

There is nothing wrong with Union Organisers pursuing a career path outside the Union, especially when further career advancement within the Union has been exhausted.  But senior staff within the Union should at least been seen to disassociate itself or take a guarded attitude to those Organisers that join employers who indulge in practices that are detrimental towards it’s low paid workforce many of whom are EPMU members. 

A disturbing example of this is the recent appointment of an EPMU organiser becoming the Industrial Relations manager of Stagecoach with the blessing of the EPMU’s then president.  (The EPMU backed Labour Party is quick to disassociate itself, from any Labour Party MP who party hops). 

In 1999 it is believed that top senior employees within the EPMU, Rex Jones and Mike Sweeney were paid Salaries of $112,000 and $92,000 a year respectively.  Today it can be assumed these salaries would have increased by at least 20%.  Andrew Little’s current salary is believed to be a six figure sum, and with his ever-increasing profile it can be assumed he too is being groomed for a career as a Labour MP.  There is nothing wrong with high salaries such as these, being paid to those whose performance is deserving of it.  But how are these performances measured and by whom?

A common practice in other Trade Unions is that senior personnel on high salaries have to become re-elected to their positions every 3 years by ballot, from that particular Union’s members. This acts as a safety valve to protect the Union from becoming top heavy with carpet-baggers.

There have also been recent examples of rank and file EPMU members being faced with disciplinary action from their employer, when a member has a disagreement with their delegate.  This misrepresentation by a delegate to their EPMU member could be easily rectified by newly elected delegates going on training courses, coupled with the more experienced delegates attending refresher courses.  This could easily be funded by the EPMU’s financial resources.

The EPMU’s financial surplus gathered from the approximate $14 million a year revenue received from its members should be used primarily for the benefit of those whose money it is, the members.  Such as going into strike funds for those striking members struggling to make ends meet when forced to take industrial action resulting from poor working conditions, like the workforce at Stagecoach. 

The $100,000 spent to get EPMU organisers into parliament as Labour MPs, could have been used to help the striking workers at Stagecoach to maintain their industrial action.

            If the members had access to an audit of the EPMU’s annual accounts the members could then decide for themselves, if they want to be a financial contributor to a Union that helps bankroll a political party in conflict with their own personal views.  Thus members could become better informed in deciding if they should vote with their feet, and join a Union more conducive to their work related concerns. 

 

We respond

This member picks up on a number of bad practices in the EPMU. But they are endemic in today’s highly bureaucratized, statized, and Labour Party serving, unions. He doesn’t go far enough in calling for rank and file control. Unions should be bound by the resolutions of annual conferences of delegates of the membership. All union officials and delegates should be under rank and file control, elected, mandated and instantly recallable. The accounts should be always open to scrutiny of members. Officials should be paid no more than the average members pay. All officials should not become career bureaucrats and return after a period of 3 years to the ranks. Unions should have no political affiliations that are not debated and renewed at annual conferences.

 

The PSA (another pro-Labour union) is bargaining for a multi-employer collective agreement (MECA) across the 3 Auckland District Health Boards (DHBs). It tried to get a funding rise from the government to cover the wage increase the workers wanted.  PSA members have voted for strike action, a one day (24hr) strike is planned for the 15^th August.  12% to 20% increases for mental health nurses and allied health professionals (physiotherapists, psychologists, OT’s, Social Workers). However, why is the PSA leaving other support workers and administration staff out? The non-DHB workers are also left out of this deal. Par for the course for the union that pioneered ‘partnership’ between management and workers! PSA does not stand for Peoples’ Socialist Army.

 

- Ford Wiri, Swanndri, CHH

Ion Automotive is the current title under which the old Ford plant at Wiri is running.  They had continued to make Alloy wheels supplying Ford internationally after the Assembly plant closed down.  The EPMU tells us that the last 500 jobs are to be exported as the major customers Ford in the US and Australia choose the cheapest supplier in Asia.  This was only a matter of time as Ford produces a ‘world car’ made up of parts sourced in many countries. But there is not much option for nationalizing wheel hubs unless you get a synchronized move by unions in every Ford plant in the world to nationalize their world car parts.  That needs a bit of international solidarity unionism! (see below)

 

Swanndri is about to lose 30 jobs in Timaru will be lost as the firm moves to China. The union talks emotional claptrap about losing kiwi jobs and a kiwi icon. But these jobs were never ‘kiwi jobs’ as capital is international and now so is the labour market. The only alternative to the global capitalist market is to occupy and socialize industry under workers’ control! The Brukman clothing factory in Argentina is a good model.  Of course cooperatives need to be the collective property of all workers, not only those who work in the plant. And to survive they need to be backed by the nationalization of the banks and other industries under workers control. In NZ Swanndri could survive if it was part of a planned socialized economy along with the banks and major industries like forestry. . .

 

Carter Holt Harvey look like it’s about to bought from its US majority owners by Graeme Hart the kiwi multimillionaire and owner of Burns Philp. http://nbr.co.nz/home/column_article.asp?id=12665&cid=8&cname=News

It’s not that we especially like Kiwis before Yanks or Aussies. Kiwi bosses are no better or worse than any other. The fact is that CHH is a suitable case for nationalization under workers’ control. NZ has comparative advantage in cultivating trees. The biggest forestry firm is highly competitive and should be the first targeted by the unions as a model for workers’ ownership and control!

 

7 Universities are engaged in a prolonged dispute with their vice-chancellors to get them to recognize a national MECA and pay a ‘quality’ wage (10% this year). VCs are really CEOs as the universities today are run like State Owned Enterprises – funded mainly by the state but producing knowledge for private sector profits. So far after two 24 hour strikes and rotating one-hour strikes, only 2 of the VCs have expressed a willingness to join the MECA.

At Auckland University, VC Stuart McCutcheon is leading the opposition to the MECA saying that it will undermine the competitiveness of his university as an international ‘leader’. McCutcheon’s vision of Auckland Uni is laid out in the new Strategic Plan for the years up to 2012. He sees Auckland Uni as one of the world’s leading universities as measured by knowledge outputs and private investment in research.  Unionists at Auckland University are gearing up for a long battle with McCutcheon to rescue the university from this neo-liberal push towards making it a provider of knowledge for profit and not for the public good.

Strike action has been put on hold by an agreement between the VCs and the unions to enter further negotiations. There is a urgent need to organize a strong rank and file to strengthen this struggle for a MECA and open a fight for workers control of the universities.

 

A WORKERS’ CHARTER?

We reprint below a draft of the program of ‘Workers Charter’ recently formed as a bloc of the Socialist Workers, Unite Worker’ Union leadership in Auckland and other ‘leftists’. The revival of the labour movement is long overdue in Aotearoa, and we certainly need a mass workers party. But we don’t need a party that replaces Labour as a parliamentary party. We need a revolutionary party.

 

The workers’ ‘rights’ raised are OK as far as they go. But they are no more than bourgeois democratic rights. They don't say anything about workers owning and controlling the whole of society, just the 'public' controlling 'social' assets. Even the Wobblies (International Workers of the World) who are syndicalists (all we need is “one big union” to beat the bosses) say that workers’ and bosses’ class interests are fundamentally opposed! (see IWW statement in this issue)

In fact there is no definition of the working class to justify calling it a 'workers' charter. This is a dead give-away because both the SWP and McCarten are used to making alliances with those who are not working class. The SWP is the main driving force in the Respect Party in Britain, a cross-class organisation, and McCarten was in the cross-class Alliance for nearly 15 years before he became organiser for the Maori Party also a cross-class party.

This suggests that the purpose of the Charter is to build an electoral movement and to harness the new unions to found a new workers party, just like the old existing unions today serve the Labour Party. While the draft talks about workers ‘organising to extend democracy’, there's nothing about our history where every workers' right was won by workers' might outside parliament (and taken away by parliament)

 

A Workers’ Dignity Party before long!

Militant workers in the past were never held back by lack of legal rights when they went on strike. They took that right against the advice of their officials whose job is to defend the bosses’ industrial law. These are called ‘wildcats’ and it was always officials that armed the guns to shoot them down! We have to learn from our history that the first step to workers power is workers’ independence from the state and its labour lieutenants in the labour movement.

The critical issues facing workers in countries where they are demanding basic rights to life and work, is about throwing out their rotten officials and occupying and controlling industry – as an independent class movement, and not cheerleading for ‘public’ ownership of ‘social’ assets, like Chavez who legislates for workers co-management with the state of industry under a bourgeois constitution.

This suggests that the kiwi Workers’ Charter is being deliberately linked to the reformist World Social Forum. Grant Morgan at the launch referred to several examples of workers unity that are headlined by the WSF, including Galloway’s Respect, the French ‘No’ to the EU Constitution; Venezuelan workers’ control of oil, Bolivian workers nationalization of gas and Portugal’s Left Party’s 8 MPs. The ‘unity’ in every case is a popular front that ties workers to bourgeois forces in doing deals with ‘democratic’ imperialism!

It confirms our view that the SWO, McCarten’s group and others on the reformist left are looking to form a new party to fill the void in the labour movement left by the rightward movement of Labour. But these currents are also moving right to contain militant workers inside popular fronts trapping them behind petty bourgeois or bourgeois leaders like Galloway, Chavez in Venezuela and Morales in Bolivia.

The SWO has taken a further turn to the right with its international leadership burying itself in the anti-capitalist populist movement, kicking out its US group for not slavishly following this line, and now promoting Respect in Britain as an open popular front. The UK SWP has notoriously abandoned its defence of abortion rights to appease the Muslim Association. The SWO has now dropped its paper Socialist Worker and puts out a paper called ‘Unity’. It’s now clear what the SWO means by ‘unity’ – a broad coalition around the Workers’ Charter.

The founders of Workers Charter have a history of shonky shackups in New Zealand. McCarten and Casey when they were leading members of the Alliance were involved in a commemoration of the role of the ‘Cossacks’ (farmers sworn in as ‘special’ mounted cops to smash the general strike in 1913) in a conference titled ‘Comrades and Cossacks’ in 2003. One of the authors of the program below, Dean Parker, a long-time leftist writer and activist, wrote an article about the Comrades and Cossacks in Metro proving that the specials helped smash the strike, but still supported the commemoration.

 

Unity with Cops not unemployed workers

McCarten obviously agreed that specials would not be necessary to suppress striking workers today so long as he was in charge, and crossed a picket-line organized by Waitemata Unite!, and joined with senior cops to legitimate the role of the armed 'specials'.  Casey, herself a one time auxiliary cop from Scotland, has since written a book calling for the formation of ‘civilian’ constables in Aotearoa today! Joining or promoting ‘unity’ with the cops has no place in a Workers’ Charter! http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO0311/S00125.htm

 

McCarten spent the 1990s covering for Anderton in the Alliance.  He now runs Workers’ Unite in Auckland, a new branch of the Unite union that organises casualised and low paid workers. While the Unite constitution calls for Unite to recruit low paid, unemployed and beneficiaries, McCarten’s union is exclusively for employed workers. This question and the fact that Workers’ Unite has poached workers belonging to other unions, has led to a dispute with Waitemata Unite! made up mainly of beneficiaries. This dispute has turned nasty with the national executive of Unite issuing an ultimatum to Waitemata Unite that it must stop its criticisms of McCarten or risk expulsion. What is really at stake here is the fact that McCarten put unity with cops ahead of unity with unemployed workers.

We are not at all impressed with the draft ‘workers’ Charter, nor those who have ‘united’ to draft it. It fails to call for the rebuilding of the unions on the basis of rank and file democracy. As fare as we can see Workers Unite is not under rank and file control. Independence from the Labour Party is not the same as independence from the bosses’ state. It substitutes for workers democracy, the bosses’  ‘democracy’ leading workers by the nose back down the parliamentary road. We think that what workers in Aotearoa need now is not a recyled left bureaucrats Charter, but a genuine rank and file movement in the unions that can take up the fight for  ‘workers’ democracy’ and for socialism!

 

To kick off a serious debate on this question we reprint a IWW statement on Solidarity Unionism following the Workers Charter.

 

 

.

 

SOLIDARITY UNIONISM

 

The experience of the Tramways drivers shows that they need to kick out their officials and take over the running of the union. The existing unions are totally subordinated into the state machine via the ECA which sets the legal framework for industrial relations. It was the labour bureaucracy that capitulated and betrayed the workers in the face of the ECA in 1991.

Today, the ERA has restored some rights to unions so the bureaucracy can entrench itself further. This fits with the Labour Government’s concept of capitalism as a partnership between bosses and workers regulated by the state as a neutral referee. However the ref has been bought and works for the bosses.

As Trotsky pointed out, in the epoch of imperialism, unions become part of the bosses’ state machine. To advance the interests of workers it is necessary to break away from the state, from the straight jacket of labour law, and the labour bureaucracy who act as the bosses’ agents or ‘labour lieutenants’, and form politically independent unions.

It’s clear that the way forward for the unions is rank and file control. This means using the union rules to fight for complete rank and file democracy.  Ordinary members are the union and elect delegates and officials mandated on rank and file policy, and immediately recallable if they fail to follow the mandate. The IWW has a few guiding principles that can be adopted as a start.

 

 

1.     Organize the unorganized into self-managed industrial unions. Unions built from the grass-roots by worker organizers.  Unions run by the membership to address their own needs and aspirations on the job. Unions that are independent of government and political parties. Unions that welcome all wage workers and unemployed, regardless of nationality, race, gender, political or religious creed, sexual orientation, etc, on the basis of strict equality. Unions in which all officers are directly elected by those they serve and are immediately recallable by the membership. Unions in which remuneration for officers is tied to the average wage of the workers involved; where term limits for officers are strictly observed; and, where the officer returns to the job when their term in office is over. We call this Solidarity Unionism.

2.     Re-organize the miss-organized of the business unions via establishment of shop-committees that can take direct action on the job in pursuit of workers’ needs outside of the restrictions of legal collective bargaining agreements. We reject dues check-off because joining a union should be a conscious commitment to solidarity not a “condition of employment”. We reject no-strike deals because we need to be able to act to defend and extend our rights at every opportunity. We reject “management’s rights” because they are inimical to our own.

3.     Establish horizontal links between and among unions and shop committees to foster solidarity on a local, regional, national and international level. Build workers’ centers in every community to reach out to all sectors of the working class and unemployed, including their kids.

4.     Solidarity Unionism recognizes no restriction on what we should strive for. Health and safety at work, the environmental and social impact of what we produce, shorter and flexible hours of labor, universal health care - everything is fair game! Ultimately, we reject the employing class’s so-called ‘proprietary rights’. We want to gain control of the means of life!

 

Trackback URL for this post: http://www.iww.org/en/trackback/1194

 

BRING DOWN THE HOWARD GOVERNMENT!

On June 30, the Australian workers movement put on an impressive show of force. 120,000 marched through the streets of Melbourne and tens of thousands marched through other centres. They made it clear that they were not going to take this reactionary legislation lying down. The mood was militant. In Sydney, a day later, the efforts by the bureaucrats of Unions NSW to fragment the movement succeeded in decentralising meetings and reducing the march to twenty thousand workers.

The Sydney bureaucrats moved a motion deliberately aimed to be ambiguous. Militants interpreted the motion as supporting strike action. But Unions NSW has made it clear that strike action is the last thing that they want. They argue that it is “counter-productive”.

Strike action is in reality the only way that workers have to make employers and governments listen. It was strike action, in 1969, that released Clarrie O’Shea from prison and effectively smashed the Penal clauses legislation.

Kim Beazley made an impressive speech about how Labor will oppose this “un-Australian” legislation. Labor opposes this legislation not because it opposes penal clauses but because Howard wants to take industrial relations power away from the states and territories (all administered by Labor).

But it was Brack’s Labor which introduced some of the most reactionary anti-union legislation and which jailed militant unionist Craig Johnston.

Labor is arguing that that the status quo is good enough – to contain working class struggle. Workers must oppose all anti-union legislation whether introduced by Labor or Liberal. The only type of government which can really serve the working class is one based on working class power. It would be committed to expropriating the ruling class.

The buzz expression for the union bureaucrats has been “united front”, probably learnt off Bob Gould. For the third international, under Lenin, the united front was a tactic aimed at gaining an audience for communists amongst the most advanced layer of the working class. Workers needed to fight to survive. Communists were committed to struggle. The bureaucracy, tied to capitalism through its privileged material position will be exposed as both unwilling and unable to fight. Therefore communists will influence and win over this advanced layer of workers. This type of united front is not what the bureaucrats mean. What they want to do is defend their privileges and contain struggle.

Of course for the bureaucrats “building the united front” means falling in behind their agenda. They hate Howard’s laws but are comfortable with those of Carr, Gallop or Bracks. Labor is fighting this legislation because it means that their beloved state governments will lose power and because they believe the status –quo is good enough to contain struggle and keep wages down. The meetings especially in Sydney were stage managed. No amendments were permitted so the options were fall in behind their impotent protest or nothing. Whilst there is some basis for joint unity in action, in some tactical circumstances, in no way must we fall in behind their agenda.

One organisation falling in behind the united front is the “Communist Party” Their glossy publication was only distinguishable from a similar one produced by Unions NSW by their organisation’s authorisation, in the fine print at the bottom of the leaflet. There was no mention of strike action. What they offered was practical measures such as “ring talkback radio”, “contact your member of parliament” and other respectable suggestions.

The Socialist Alliance is endorsing a united front called ‘Defend Workers Rights and Unions Committee’ which at least called for strike action especially if a union official is jailed. What is required is not merely strike action to fight this legislation, but a political strategy to bring down the Howard government.

It is not only unions which his government is attacking but unemployed and pensioners, Black people, refugees and small farmers. Workers must win over these sectors to their struggle. Workers must unite with them to fight Howard.

Howard has a reactionary imperialist foreign policy. Australian troops are still in Iraq as part of the reactionary ‘Coalition of the Willing’. Australian troops will shortly be doing imperialism’s dirty work in Afghanistan. Howard’s whole reactionary agenda must be opposed.

But who will fight Howard? The Labor Party is totally impotent. Worse still, a future Beazley Labor government will continue the system’s reactionary agenda. Labor has abandoned any attempt to “roll back” (let alone abolish) the GST. This tax redistributes the tax burden from rich to poor. Labor has repudiated any opposition to work for the dole.

The only party which will consistently fight Howard is a revolutionary communist party. Such a party will not only fight Howard and his policies but the whole capitalist agenda supported by both major parties – Liberal and Labor. Such a party will support not another bourgeois parliamentary government but a workers and farmers government

 

LULA’S CORRUPTION CRISIS

We reprint a leaflet issued by the Fraction Trotskista of Brazil for the Trade Union march on 17 August in Brasilia. It calls on workers not to be diverted by the smokescreen of ‘corruption’ which is normal bourgeois morality. The task is to bring down the Lula Government not because it is corrupt but because it is a popular front that had betrayed the workers and  sold out to imperialism, and replace it with a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government.

 

March on 17 August in Brasilia for the popular courts to judge and to punish the corruption of the Lula government and all the crimes of the bourgeoisie!

 

The Government of Lula’s-PT-PC of the B-FMI is bogged down in a deep political crisis.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0508/S00031.htm

The avalanche of denunciations of corruption involves figures at the centre of the popular front government (Jose Dirceu, João Pablo, Gushiken) only reaffirms that the bourgeois State and the government is a committee to manage of the most corrupt, violent, cynical and profligate interests of the ruling classes.

 There is no such thing as an ethical bourgeois government and State (right, honest, balanced, whole). Quite the reverse; corruption, immorality and violence are inherent in bourgeois governments, both in their classic form (the former FHC government) or in a distorted way in the popular front (the current example of the government of Lula-PT-PC and the B-FMI).  This is the normal ethics of the bourgeoisie. 

Behind the issue of corruption, the current crisis of the Lula government reveals the intensification of the inter-bourgeois disputes over the control of the State and government.

In particular it reflects the fact that a sector of the industrial bourgeoisie (allied to the old Northeastern agrarian oligarchies) sees its interests being neglected in favour of the interests of agro-business and financial capital.  Therefore, fractions of the São Paulo industrial bourgeoisie and the old agrarian-latifundium (big landowners) of the northeast, represented by the PSDB (Socialist Democratic Party) and PFL (Liberal Front Party), are in an open fight against the current government that brazenly favors agro-business and banking capital. 

The torrent of denunciations against the Lula government comes after demands by the industrial bourgeoisie on the Lula government to look after its interests instead of those of agro-business and banking capital.

Many other similar scandals have arisen since the beginning of the Lula government concerning the private use of the public money (Benedita Da Silva),and the case of Valdomiro Diniz (Jose Dirceu), which proves that the industrial bourgeoisie refrained from making the charges of corruption while it still had hopes that the Lula government would take care of its interests 

We denounce the criminal plan of the PSTU stops with the workers in first place when having called the vanguard, youth and the masses to vote in Lula; now when defending the CPI (parliamentary investigation commission).

 We denounce the PSTU (United Socialist Workers Party) calling the vanguard fighters and activist of CONLUTAS (Confederation of Workers in Struggle a left split from the CUT (Central Union of Workers) to march in Brasilia to change the economic policy of Lula.

This is an extremely treacherous act of the PSTU against the interests of the workers and its political independence because it creates the illusion of that this government can turn to the left in favor of the workers through popular pressure. 

Therefore, against the bourgeois politics and the reformist politics of the PSTU we reaffirm the independence of proletarian lessons in the Trotskyist program:  

 

• Out with the Lula government, its reforms and its economic policy;
• No confidence in the parliament bourgeois and its CPIs 
• For the peoples’ courts, the Workers and Peasants Government (dictatorship of the proletariat). 

 

Fraction Trotskista - Fourth Internacionalista.

 

Email:[email protected] - www.fracaotrotskysta.tk

 

 

On 23 of July we must constitute the National Congress of Workers and Peasants of the Original Popular Assembly as the organ of power of the exploited people of Bolivia!

All the workers, peasants and student organizations must choose their delegates, mandated and recallable by the rank and file!

During the revolutionary struggle of the worker and peasant masses, the 16 days of May and June of an insurrectionary political general strike, with blockades and barricades, the COR of El Alto became the acknowledged headquarters of the Bolivian revolution.  Thousands of the oppressed that engaged in the true art of pre-insurrectionary struggle, constituted embryonic organs of dual power advanced a strong revolutionary program.  With their blockades, the workers and the peasants paralysed the city of La Paz and all Bolivia, creating a dual territorial power; in El Alto, they created self-defence pickets; and they occupied oil wells and cut gas pipelines across all of Bolivia. On the 8 of June, COR of the Stop, the COB, the FSTMB, and the FEJUVE of El Alto, called for the constitution of an Assembly Popular Originaria (APO or Assembly of the Indigenous People), which the workers’ peasants and students’ organisations joined. Today the leaders of these organizations have called for a congress on the 23 of July in Cochabamba with the objective of constituting the APO at the national level.

 

This call which is made in conjunction with the indomitable COR of El Alto, is one more example of the pressure that the revolutionary workers and peasants have put on their leaders to organise and centralise the struggle. For this reason, the congress of July 23 is a new opportunity to centralize all the revolutionary energies of the heroic combative workers, peasants and students in a great national congress of workers and farmer in the APO, based on the mandated, and recallable delegates of all the workers’, peasants’ and students’ organisations  which would ensure that it is one of maximum direct democracy.

The second call made by the convenors of the the July assembly, at a time when the Bolivian revolution is making a huge and heroic impact on the workers’ vanguard of Latin America and the world, is to invite all the workers’ organizations of Latin America to a "Congress in defense of the Nationalization of Hydrocarbons in Bolivia, of struggle against the privatizations and for the defense of the national sovereignty of our peoples"  in Cochabamba on the 12, 13 and 14 of August.

Unquestionably the politics of the leaders of the masses right from February and October of 2003 squandered the opportunities to centralise organs based on the direct democracy of the masses in struggle defended by workers militias. Once more, and or the same reason,  opportunities were lost during the 16 days of heroic struggle of May-June, in particular the huge popular mobilisation of 6 June in La Paz that was transformed by the leaders into an occasion for festival speeches.

The task is not to make agreements among the leaders from above, but to create central organ of the masses in struggle!  Given the delaying tactics used by the leaders to prevent the formation of organs of dual power, and given the delay of several weeks to the 23 July APO, this congress could end up agreeing to the truce with the government of Rodriguez - the friend of Goni, the assassin of October 2003 - that allows the puppet parliament to continue in session, and the oil imperialists and national bourgeois to continue recruiting their fascist bands in Santa Cruz.

The workers and peasants are angry and prepared to break the truce made by Morales with Rodriguez to maintain the regime of the bourgeoisie, and this has forced the  leaders of their organizations to threaten re-impose the blocades and mobilisations. Therefore, to contain the  working masses and farmers led by the indomitable vanguard of the COR of El Alto who oppose the truce with the new government, Solares, Patana, Mamani and POR-Lora have been forced to call the national APO. While forced to call lthe APO, the leaders who have prevented the centralisation of workers and peasants power, will do all their power to limit the congress to talk by the leaders and not decision making by delegates of the masses so as to prevent the APO from being transformed into an organ of dual power.

This new opportunity cannot be let pass.  It is necessary that the workers and peasants transform the congress into an organ of dual power of the exploited masses, as the true representative and only legitimate power of the millions of workers and peasants.  To the democratic dictatorship of the national bourgeoisie, it is necessary to oppose the direct democracy and the power of the workers and peasants.

 

While the masses struggle to break the truce, Rodriguez maintains  the sacred alliance with imperialism, the Latin American bourgeoisies, the treacherous bureaucracies and the World Social Forum

In last confrontation between the classes, none of opposing classes - neither imperialism or the Bolivian bourgeoisie, nor the heroic workers and peasants, have won their objectives.  The enormous herioc insurrectionary general strike carried out by the expolited masses left the bosses’ regime more dislocated and in crsisis, but because of their reformist leaders they have not managed to solve the crisis in their favour. The bourgeoisie managed to resolve the crisis in the ruling class by replacing Mesa with Rodriguez, thanks to the actions of Evo Morales and the MAS who guaranteed that the parliament met in Sucre and could vote for Rodriguez and a 150 day truce leading to new elections.

Nevertheless, the revolutionary crisis remains latent as the ruling class fractions continue to fall out over the best method of containing the masses. In the puppet parliament the MNR, MIR and AND want Rodriguez to finish Mesa’s term until 2007, while the the MAS and the NFR want Rodriguez and the present parliamentarians to resign and summon elections for the Constituent Assembly.

            The weak government of Rodriguez is kept in power only by the truce between Evo Morales and the reformist leaders with imperialism, the lackey Latin American bourgeoisies, and the Cuban Castroite bureaucracy. The governments of Lula, Chávez, Kirchner, Lagos and Toledo, have created the “anillo energetico” ("ring of energy”), an economic, political and military plan to surround and to strangle the Bolivian revolution. All of these lackey leaders are under the orders of the O.A.S. and the butcher Bush, murderer of the Iraqi people and Middle East masses.  The Brazilian bourgeoisie, which it has major investments in Bolivia in Petrobra's - acts like a true "the mine-sweeper" and beach head of the US, French, British and Spanish oil companies, in this “energy ring” to contain the heroic Bolivian revolution.

 

To all the workers’, peasants’ and student organizations: 

Proposals of the International Trotskyists before the congress of the APO of 23 of July

The only way to break the truce of the reformist leaders, is to turn the APO into a centralised organ of the masses in struggle, a national congress of delegates of the rank and file defended by militias, a true government of the workers and peasants confronting the parliament and the weakened government of Rodriguez and the bourgeoisie.  There is no more urgent task than to mobilise rank and file assemblies of all the sectors, of all the workers’, peasants’ and students’ organizations, to elect mandated and recallable delegates to the meeting of the APO of the 23 of July.  The signatories to this declaration call on all workers and revolutionary youth and the indomitable COR of El Alto to fight for their proposals and motions.

1 That we take the power to defeat the truce:  constitute a true workers and peasants national congress of the the APO. The workers’, peasants’ and students’ organisations must elect their mandated and recallable delegates so that this congress has the most direct democracy possible. This congress must meet in the place that is the headquarters of the revolution:  the COR of El Alto, and should be open to all workers, peasants, students and militants so they hear what their delegates discuss and resolve in this congress.

2. That one of the first tasks of this congress is to dissolve the puppet parliament of the bourgeoisie and its government and to proclaim the National Congress of the APO as the only legitimate government of Bolivia.  Who can doubt that this workers’ and farmers’ national congress delegates would end all claims to legitimacy of the bourgeois state and would break the truce with Rodriguez, the friend of the murderer Goni!

3. That the congress summons all the deputies of the MAS and the MIP who support the new government of Rosca today, as they supported Mesa yesterday, to leave the puppet parliament of murderers of the people and the plunderers of the nation, and offer themselves as delegates to the Congress of the APO, to see if they are chosen by the revolutionary workers’ and farmers’ organizations they claim to represent.

4. While the illegitimate parliament and government of Rodriguez, with dulcet phrases, promise elections and to “democratise” the institutions of the oppressors who are totally discredited and hated by the masses, they cynically alllow the plebiscite for the autonomy of Santa Cruz to go ahead in August, and allow the paramilitaries and fascist bands of the oil companies and mine owners to arm themselves to the teeth. This is the deception which the truce made by the reformists leaders has made possible. The COR of El Alto already formed during the 16 days of struggle workers and farmers armed pickets to the combat of the cuts and the barricades. The armed pickets must now be centralised to form workers’ and farmers’ militias to defend the popular assembly and to defeat and disperse the fascist bands in the pay of the oil companies of Santa Cruz.

5. Rodriguez is keeping in reserve the army and its officer caste that carried out the massacres of October 2003 for the first opportunity to turn on and massacre the people. The officers’ caste is the representative of the mine owners in the Armed Forces.  Its existence puts in serious danger the life of hundreds of thousand of militant workers and peasants. The fight for the proletarian revolution is the fight to win over the rank and file of the army. The workers’ and peasants’ Congress would have enormous authority, as the legitimate power of the vast majority of the Bolivian people, to summon all the soldiers and non-commissioned officers to mutiny against their officers, - who massacreed more than 100 workers and farmers, and soldiers who refused to shoot the people in October 2003 - to create committees of ordinary soldiers and non-commissioned officers, and to call on them to elect their own delegates to reprresent them at the workers’ and peasants’ national congress. The Congress would have all the authority to constitute workers’ and peoples’ courts to judge and to punish the killers of those fallen in October, the assassinated cooperative miners of Sucre, and all the workers’ and peasants’ martyrs.

6. This congress can renounce all contracts and agreements signed with the oil and gas companies, decreeing the nationalization without payment of all hydrocarbons, mines and all resources; the occupation of the oil and gas companies, oil wells and fields, putting them to work under the direct administration and control of the workers; the nationalisation of the banks  without compensation and under workers’ control, with the creation of a single state bank that grants cheap leans to the small farmers and retailers.

7.  That the Congress of the working organizations and farmers distributes the best land to the farmers and the permits the production of coca.  That it guarantees the bread, work for all and a living wage to the workers with increases of wages and the movable scale of wages and working hours; that it guarantees the free, public, quality health and education for the workers and the poor people.  That it resolves to break with the IMF and that not a single cent of the external debt is paid to imperialism.

8. That the Congress of the workers’ and peasants’ organizations of Bolivia calls on its class brothers and sisters in Latin America to make an common international fight, that confronts the "energy ring" around the Bolivian revolution constructed by Lagos, Lula, Kirchner, Toledo and Chávez under the command of the O.A.S. and the butcher Bush. That all support to these governments is a betrayal of the Bolivian revolution because they are the servants of Shell, Repsol, Petrobras, Exxon, Totalfina and other companies that they plunder the people of Latin America and massacre the heroic Iraqi people.  A true unity of workers and peasants in Latin America will be possible with the destruction of the client states of Kirchner, Vázquez, Lula, Toledo, Lagos, and other servile agents of imperialism and oil companies, as happened recently when Gutiérrez pact with imperialism resulted in his regime being demolished by the militant workers and peasants of Ecuador. The objective of the workers and farmers international congress in August must be to defend the Bolivian workers and peasants, and to fight for a Federation of workers’ and peasants’ Republics of Latin America, confronting the imperialist alliance of Lula, Kirchner, Lagos, Tabaré Vázquez, and including that of Chavez who sells Venezuelan oil to feed the military machine of Anglo-Yankee imperialism in Iraq.

9. That the Congress of the workers’ and peasants’ organizations of Bolivia calls on its class brothers and sisters in Latin America and the world to take in its hands, from Alaska and the United States to Tierra del Fuego, from Portugal to Russian steppes, in the middle East, Asia, Africa and the Australian Continent, the program for the victory of the workers’ and peasants’ revolution in Bolivia. That the Congress calls on the heroic Venezuelan anti-imperialist masses to send to the workers’  and peasants’ militias of Bolivia the 100,000 Kalashnikov rifles bought by Chávez and the Venezuelan bourgeois state, because in the hands of the Bolivian fighters they are a deterrent against imperialism attacking Venezuela or any anti-imperialist struggle in any oppressed nation.

10. That the workers and peasants Congress of Bolivia demands that Cuba recognizes as the only legitimate power in Bolivia the constituted congress of workers’ and farmers’, because the victory of the Bolivian revolution and its extension to all Latin America will be the best means of defense of Cuba against imperialist attack.

11. The Congress of the APO, thus constituted and with these resolutions, will have then created the best conditions to finish demolishing the regime of the Bolivian bourgeoisie and their government, and for advancing to create a Workers’ and Peasants’ government defended by the direct democracy of the armed masses in struggle. The internationalist Trotskyists that sign this declaration are uncompromising in our fight for this program. We call on all the workers’ and peasants’ organizations of the continent to break the truces and the pacts that their leaders have made with the governments and regimes in Latin America. We call on them to take this program and fight for it in action not in words, by uniting workers and peasants of all of Latin America to defeat the client states of imperialism and the oil companies, by means of total independence of all the bourgeois variants of the workers and peasants organisations.  

The internationalist Trotskyist signatories of this declaration we will commit all our forces for the victory of the workers and peasants revolution in Bolivia, fighting to create the world party of socialist revolution to collaborate with the revolutionary masses in Bolivia and give the leadership they deserve so that their struggle will prevail. 

 

Workers and Student Group "Internationalist Red October" of Bolivia, 4 July 2005 FLT-CI, FT, CWG.