Only workers can stop fascism

Two problems that have clouded this issue and given ammunition to the anti-Semites are first, using the 'war on fascism' as some justification for denying Uncensored the use of the public hall, and second appealing to local government to ban the use of the hall.

First, Maps is challenging those that claim that the holocaust is a myth by using a more dangerous myth, that the Second World War as a 'war on fascism' was just and defensible. It’s more dangerous, because if workers had rejected that war as imperialist, German fascism could not have made the holocaust.

This provides the anti-Semites with an argument in defence of their bourgeois democratic right of free speech as defended by the 'war on fascism'.

But the war on fascism was an inter-imperialist war between capitalist ruling classes that tragically sucked millions of workers into giving their lives for their ruling classes instead of turning their guns on their bosses.

Second, combating fascism and anti-Semitism is the task of the only class that has an interest in defeating it, the working class, and not of the state, even in the form of local government, whose interests are to defend private property, and hence the rule of capitalists, Nazi or Zionist.

This is the basis of Trotsky's refusal to call on the capitalist state to ban fascists. The fascists were openly calling on the smashing of the workers movement, and the state was in league with the fascist paramilitaries. Hence it was necessary for workers to organize their own ban, i.e. the 'no platforming' of fascists i.e. denial of right to free speech. So in Aotearoa, the national front is met on the streets with counter-demonstrations. And the neo-Nazis conferences should be disrupted by working class protests and their own counter-rallies and demonstrations.

Anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism

But a more immediate danger exists. By calling on the state to ban the ‘neo-Nazis’ for being anti-Semitic, the liberal left lets the Zionists off the hook. The neo-Nazis attempt to portray their anti-Semitism as anti-Zionism. So when they attack Zionism by questioning the holocaust more than 60 years ago, the liberal left ends up coming to the defence of Zionism. We explain here why this lets the Zionists off the hook and betrays the Palestinian struggle for independence.

Why do neo-Nazis who claim to oppose the existence of Israel and its genocidal attacks on Palestinians feel the need to deny the holocaust? It must be that they think that if the holocaust happened then that would justify the existence of Israel in Palestine.

It is true that this is popularly held to be the main justification for the existence of Israel. But this is a misreading of Zionism which argues for the right of Israel to exist on the basis of the Bible, not the holocaust. The holocaust (and the history of pogroms) was a reason used by Zionists to claim that Jews could not be assimilated in Europe and needed their own state.

Trotsky agreed that this was a legitimate national right for the oppressed Jewish people. But he did not agree that that state could be in Palestine unless it was with the consent of the Palestinians. To impose the state of Israel by force onto the Palestinians would be a travesty of the Jews right to self-determination because it denied the same right to the Palestinians.

Denying the holocaust happened, then, is a defence of Nazism against the charge of genocide against Jews. This is at the same time a denial of not only the right of Israel to exist, but an open attack on the national rights of Jews as ‘specially’ oppressed.

Reversing the Signs

For those who oppose the neo-Nazis, the holocaust can become an article of faith in the right of Israel to exist in Palestine. Zionism then becomes a legitimate national movement. One can oppose Israel’s occupation of Palestine but at the same time hold it has a right to exist by 'agreement' with the Palestinians. This is the basis of the "two-state" solution. Those who oppose Israel’s right to exist become by this logic anti-Semitic.

The CWG agrees that the holocaust did happen. But that does not justify the existence of Israel in Palestine; nor does the Bible. In believing that we are not anti-Semites but revolutionary socialists.

Nothing justifies the establishment of a settler state on the land of another nation in formation (still ruled by Britain as a mandate of the League of Nations) and its occupation and ethnic cleansing by terrorist militias.

The Jews in Europe were victimized by the Nazis and we do not dispute that about 6 million died. But the Zionists who occupied Palestine in turn victimized the Palestinians using similar methods to the Nazis. The Palestinian dead since the 1930s would be well in excess of one million.

Fascism is an extreme reactionary rule on the part of the national bourgeoisie that responds to the threat of socialist revolution by uniting the nation on the basis of myths of racial superiority in order to smash the revolution. The myth of the pure race fuels the repression and physical extermination of not only Jews but other races or oppressed groups and minorities: criminals, Roma, homosexuals, communists etc.

The Nazis were fearful that the German workers would rise up and make a socialist revolution. Jewish workers were overrepresented in the leadership of the communist and socialist organisations. By agreeing with the Nazis that Jews could not be assimilated in Europe the Zionists collaborated with the Nazis to smash the labor movement and made agreements to release a number of Jewish workers to be shipped to Palestine.

Against the Zionist state

In Israel, the Zionists used semi-fascist methods to impose their reactionary rule on the Palestinian workers who rose up in 1936 in a six month general strike, and in the years up to 1939, when there was a continuous uprising of the Palestinian people against the Zionist settler state in formation.

Zionism then, created a semi-fascist settler state regime to establish and defend its existence on stolen Palestinian land, facing the continuous resistance of the Palestinian people and therefore the ongoing threat of a Palestinian national or socialist revolution.

Thus, Zionism far from being a victim of the Nazi holocaust visited on Jews in Europe, collaborated with the Nazi movement to divide workers along racist lines, weakening their resistance to fascism, and then using the same methods in Israel against the Palestinians.

The Zionists claim that those who oppose Israel's right to exist in Palestine are anti-Semitic. For fear of being called anti-Semites or even neo-Nazis the liberal left does not challenge the Israeli state's right to exist.

The neo-fascism in Aotearoa is fuelled by the free pass the liberal left gives to the Zionists in Israel today. The only way out of this trap is to fight for the destruction of Israel as a Zionist state, and at the same time fight for the rights of Jews to self-determination within a free, democratic, secular, socialist Palestine.

However, we need to ask what do the republican militarists think can be gained from a resumption of the guerillaist strategy, "armed struggle", by a dedicated, secretive minority that failed so decisively when carried out by the P-IRA on the basis of much more support than is enjoyed by its splinter groups? We need to propose alternatives.

British troops were re-introduced in 1969 to ensure the maintenance of the border dividing Ireland since 1921 and to defend British interests in a much broader context than 'just' in Ireland. The Provisional IRA emerged as the defenders of the beleaguered Irish nationalist minority. Their goal was to "get the British soldiers out" of Ireland. Their campaign enjoyed mass support among those Irish nationalists under occupation, as well as among Irish immigrants worldwide.

Bobby Sands

This support peaked in 1980 and 1981, when Republican prisoners went on hunger strike to win their rights as Prisoners of War against Margaret Thatcher. Hunger Strike Committees sprung up all over the world, mostly in former British colonies. The working class of much of the world was mobilising in defence of "the men behind the wire" against world imperialism as represented by the British Government.

Thatcher's intransigence, with the total support of Labour’s shadow Home Secretary, former Northern Ireland Minister Don Concannon, an NUM sponsored former union official, and the cowardly inaction of much of the far left, caused the deaths of ten hunger strikers between 5th May and 20 August 1981. A brief look at the worldwide reaction to the death of Bobby Sands on 5th May shows its powerful anti-imperialist effect. This is from the Wikipedia account:

“In Milan, 5,000 students burned the Union Flag and shouted "Freedom for Ulster" during a march. In Paris, thousands marched behind huge portraits of Sands, to chants of 'The IRA will conquer'. In France, many towns and cities have streets named after Sands. Examples include Nantes, St Etienne, Le Mans Vierzon and St Denis. In the Republic of Ireland, his death led to riots and bus burning. In Dublin, the famous Moore Street market closed for the day of Sands funeral. In Liverpool a march in support of Sands took place from Upper Parliament Street to the Pier Head, chanting "Bobby Sands MP".

It was besieged by enraged Liverpool Orange Lodge members along the whole route. The International Longshoremen's Association in New York announced a twenty-four-hour boycott of British ships. Irish bars in the city were closed for two hours in mourning. In Hartford, Connecticut a memorial was dedicated to Bobby Sands and the other hunger strikers in 1997. The lower house of the New Jersey Legislature, voted 34-29 for a resolution honouring his "courage and commitment.

In 2001, a memorial to Sands and the other hunger strikers was unveiled in Havana, Cuba. After the 1979 Iranian revolution the government renamed Winston Churchill Boulevard to Bobby Sands Street. In the Indian Parliament, opposition members in the upper house Rajya Sabha stood for a minute's silence in tribute. A large monument dedicated to Irish protagonists for independence from Britain, including Bobby Sands, stands in the Waverley Cemetery in Sydney, Australia.

The all-Ireland Hunger Strike Committees and the mobilisations, were dominated by Sinn Fein who used them to build popular front alliances with Fianna Fáil and Labour local councillors in the south. Their policy was no confrontation with the southern state forces and this was rigorously enforced in this second revolutionary situation in May 1981 following the death of Bobby Sands; the other was in August 1969, both, of course, were all-Ireland upsurges.

In the late 1970s early 80s the radicalisation in Ireland was always to pressure the British state to negotiate a way out, so the roots of 1998 Good Friday Agreement (GFA) were firmly planted then. SF used the hunger strikers as voting fodder. But the only force that could have got the Brits out was a united front with the British working class. However, except for currents like Irish Freedom (RCP) and some others, the ‘Brit left’ refused to give unconditional support and fight the Prevention of Terrorisms Act in the unions etc. It was this early British version of a War on Terror that exposed the chauvinism of the British left on Ireland.

The leader of the Hunger Strikers in the Maze Prison, Bobby Sands, was elected with 30,492 votes from his death-bed as an MP to Westminster for Fermanagh and South Tyrone as an Anti H-Block/Armagh Political Prisoner. Sinn Fein won the by-election caused by his death from starvation. With Thatcher trashing the industrial base of the British economy at this time - taking on the most well-organised sections of the British working class "salami-style" (first the dockers, then the steel-workers leading to the great Miners' Strike of 1984-5), the mass influx of workers into the branches of Sinn Fein in the 26 County Republic and... the possibilities for a mass campaign to rid Ireland of imperialist domination, led by the organised workers were certainly there.

Good Friday Agreement

However, this seems to have been the beginning of the end for the Provo campaign against the British occupation of Ireland which finished with the signing of the GFA in 1998 and the subsequent decommissioning of Provo weapons. The central occurrence in the intervening years , 1981 to the mid-1990s' striking of a deal between the petit-bourgeois nationalists of the P-IRA and the imperialists of the British Government (the GFA), was the world-historic defeat for the proletariat of the collapse of the deformed and degenerated workers' states of Eastern Europe, the USSR, China etc in 1998-91.

This victory for imperialism dramatically shifted the whole balance of world forces away from progressives and toward neo-liberal capitalism: its effects being seen everywhere with a huge ideological offensive by imperialism, spreading neo-liberal economics everywhere in the world. Politically we saw the collapse of former opponents of imperialism in the form of political formations 'making deals', or supporting nasty, thoroughly anti-working class Governments.

This was collectively known as "the Peace Process", most famously involving the PLO in Palestine, the ANC in South Africa and Sinn Fein in Ireland. In April 2009 Gerry Adams and his team visited Israel and Gaza to extol the benefits of the GFA. Nowadays, Sinn Fein as junior partners at Stormont, sit almost at the top of the new structure of Government for the occupied 6 Counties - overseeing the running of the hated Northern statelet that their predecessors fought and died to destroy, actively assisting the British imperialists in their continued occupation by attempting to legitimise the occupation and its political structures!

It would seem that the aims of those that carried out the attacks on the British Military and the PSNI colonial police force were to de-stabilise Sinn Fein's involvement in the Stormont regime to collapse the structures. From reading the various websites of these republican militarists, including their statements of Easter 2009, it is clear to see that they offer no way forward for the workers and poor of Ireland or anywhere else in the world but by their actions they damage the opportunities for the workers - the only truly and consistently progressive force in modern society, to impose their own solution to the various crises facing them and the planet.

The militarists have a warped idea that the increase in repression that is an inevitable side-product of their 'terroristic' forms of action is in some way progressive (sounds a bit like recommending a vote for the Tories in a British election - 'because the working class need to be whipped like a dog before they shall get off their knees and fight' or something!). Of course the closing down of civil liberties can in no way be to the advantage of the working class, which needs the utmost liberty in order to arrive at a programme for the conquest of political power.

Hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle

Do we share the aims of the republican militarists? Well, they rarely criticise the partitionist Government of the 26 Counties Republic of Ireland and think that 'justice' shall be done if the 6 Counties currently under occupation were to comprise part of a capitalist 32 county united Ireland. We as revolutionary socialists have to ask what the class nature of such a future united Ireland might be, and we stand with James Connolly who wrote in the Shan Van Vocht in January 1897:

If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.

That is the story of the 26 counties. We are in favour of a 32 county Workers' Republic in Ireland which would be part of a socialist federation of the islands of Britain and of Europe, and of the whole world. We recognise that the only genuine solution to the present finance and economic crises—as well as for problems such as the "national question" in Ireland—is the ending of the nightmare of capitalism worldwide which is based on the private ownership of everything in the world - a tiny number of capitalists own and control the whole of the Earth's resources.

We fight for a world revolution, the vision of October 1917 in Russia. Easter 1916, August 1969, May 1981, were part of that objectively; the Irish working class needs a leadership that consciously fights for it.

The formation of WERC could become a step in the right direction in the massive fight against the biggest attacks on the working class since the Great Depression. Unfortunately, however, WERC’s platform, as currently formulated, has some serious shortcomings. It is a list of generally supportable demands, but along with the demands there are built-in limitations seemingly designed to keep this campaign palatable to capitalist “friends of labor,” such as the Greens and the Progressive Democrats, who have signed on as endorsers of WERC.

The current gaggle of “liberal/progressive” Democratic politicians, as well as the bloated and entrenched labor bureaucracy, have come together to negotiate away our jobs, our social programs, and our benefit packages. In the coming weeks and months, we can expect a further watering down of the Employee Free Choice Act; a total inability to provide a plan for affordable, quality universal health care; layoffs and/or furloughs of thousands of public workers and teachers; school closures; tuition rises and restrictions on student registration at public colleges; and the commensurate ever-increasing expansion of prisons and the military-industrial complex.

To counter the current attacks against the unions and all working people, we need massive united labor actions from coast to coast. Factory occupations, such as the one at Republic Windows and Doors, are necessary to stop massive layoffs and closures of factories and workplaces. Unified strikes of public workers, teachers, and students are the only tactic that can save social programs, education, and the social safety net. But the current labor leadership, entrenched in its love affair with the Democratic Party, is incapable of launching the type of struggle that can win against the current attacks.

WERC’s current platform and program are not adequate as a fight-back strategy. For example, WERC calls for nationalizing the banks and the automobile industry. But reformist social democratic governments have nationalized banks during this crisis and before. They keep the banks and the financial institutions going for the benefit of the bankers and the capitalists, and then they de-nationalize them when it is safe to do so, returning the bank’s assets and operating capital to private hands once the risk of failure has been averted with the aid of public resources. Therefore, in contrast to pro-capitalist nationalization schemes, we must call for the nationalization of banks, financial institutions, and basic industries under workers’ control and without compensation.

Similarly, WERC’s action plan is limited to measures such as writing letters to President Obama begging him to turn against his benefactors. WERC’s program suggests that labor activists conduct a cross-class campaign of educational forums, devoid of any concrete preparation for the type of militant struggles labor must engage in if we are to turn the current class war around. Of course educational forums are needed to supplement the education we get from the bosses’ frontal attacks every day. But what we really need from labor activists are strategies and tactics for turning our unions back into truly democratic fighting organizations that act in the interest of the entire working class, rather than in their own narrow interests or that of the labor aristocracy.

We propose that WERC commit to organizing and publicizing regional, inter-union general meetings to organize and coordinate preparatory committees in every local.

The preparatory committees, in turn, can take the lead in preparing, mobilizing, and motivating workers in their own locals to help lay the necessary groundwork for massive actions. WERC’s role should be to serve as a framework around which workers can construct sustained, ongoing, democratically run coalitions of unions, working class communities, and the unemployed, with the goal of building for broad-based, militant direct actions such as massive strikes and occupations of workplaces, schools and universities. Our brothers and sisters in France have shown that such actions are the natural response of the working class. We should start organizing and follow their example.

We propose that the WERC adopt the following program and method of transitional demands, to be implemented by mobilizing the working class for a massive fightback:

1. Full Employment at prevailing union rates for all who are willing and able to work. To assure full employment, thirty hours of work for forty hours’ pay must be implemented to spread the available work to all and to compensate for the increased rate of production over the last 50 years that has been exploited by capital to sustain high unemployment rates and lower real wages. Passage of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) will assist workers in forging fighting unions capable of winning full employment. To that end we must mobilize demonstrations demanding the right to organize not be impeded and for passage of the EFCA.

2. Failing industries (both financial and industrial) must be taken over (nationalized) under workers’ control without compensation to provide adequate access to credit and to get the wheels of industry rolling again. For example, the Big Three automakers, as well as the domestic plants of foreign auto manufacturers, should be taken over under workers’ control. Only then can the industry be rationally planned to assure that production is retooled to provide, first and foremost, a public transportation and energy infrastructure that obviates the need for excessive auto production and the commensurate waste of petroleum. The production of non-polluting electric cars, for example, must be planned and coordinated under workers’ control as a step toward staving off the environmental disasters threatened by climate change.

3. STOP LAYOFFS! When the bosses declare layoffs or attempt to close down a workplace, workers should occupy the factories and the workplaces and establish workers’ control. Follow the example of our Argentinean brothers and sisters, and go even further by establishing a massive network of occupied workplaces as democratically run organs of an incipient planned rational economy.

4. Housing is a right! Stop all foreclosures and evictions. Move the homeless and those in overcrowded housing into housing already vacated due to foreclosures and the falling real estate market. Massive public works projects to build adequate housing for all, and put people to work doing socially necessary construction, must be financed by a banking industry nationalized and coordinated under workers’ control.

5. Quality universal public education at no charge from daycare and pre-school through the graduate level. Working people know that without a good education, our children have no future. To confront the current economic and environmental crisis, everyone’s intellectual potential must be cultivated. Through education we can build a rational economy and divest the world of poverty and drudgery. Education should be under the control of teachers, parents, and students old enough to participate. In that way, we will assure quality education and not the miseducation, overtesting, and ruling class propaganda that currently plague our public schools.

6. Quality free universal health care at no charge from prenatal to the grave is long overdue. Each person must be given access to the benefit of medical science and current treatment options. Insurance companies must have no “place at the table”; the only way to provide health care for all is to divest it of the profit motive. To accomplish democratic health care, all medical institutions must be placed under worker (Doctor, Nurses, Staff) control with community/patient participation.

7. End attacks on undocumented workers! End the ICE raids! Full employment rights for all workers! To end capital flight through working class solidarity across borders, we demand: Same work, same contract, same wages and working conditions! Down with the maquiladoras! Open all the borders. For the right of all workers to cross the borders and seek work and establish their homes without restrictions and arrests. Free all detained undocumented workers!

8. US troops out of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the rest of the world. Down with imperialist oppression. The defeat of imperialism is a victory for workers and the oppressed in the world.

9. We cannot count on Obama and the capitalists to clean up the environment and prevent catastrophic climate change. For them, profit always comes before the environment and the need of the workers. But the time to stop climate change is running out. The working class must combine its struggle against capitalist exploitation, and against the current economic crisis, with environmental consciousness. We must fight for workers’ control of industry in order to transform the current, outmoded technology of industrial production to totally green and sustainable technology.

10. Break with Democrats. No cross-class coalitions with Democrats and pro-capitalist Green Party politicians. For a struggle to replace the union bureaucracies that give our dues to the capitalist Democratic Party. Fight for the independence of the working class! We need to build a workers’ or labor party based on democratically run unions and organizations of the oppressed and the unemployed.

11. For a workers’ government that can and will implement and defend all the above transitional demands. To accomplish these goals, working people need their own government. If we allow the capitalists to control the state via their government, they will continue to attack and ultimately destroy our social gains. To defend our gains, we need workers’ power.

Humanists for Revolutionary Socialism are based in the US and are a Fraternal Group in discussion with the FLT.

You can find information about them on their website here.

http://www.humanistsforrevolutionarysocialism.org/index.html

Why did the ordinary soldiers side with the exploited?

Since late January, the working class and poor peasants had been fighting in the streets, holding demonstrations, general strikes and clashes with the police and the mercenary presidential guard. Over 100 have been killed. During those two months of fighting the union bureaucracy of the four unions of the CTM (Confederation of Malagasy Workers) set up a "Council of the Republic for economic and social affairs" uniting government, employers and unions and condemning the struggles of the workers and peasants as "vandalism".

But what is decisive, without doubt, is that the militant workers and peasants lynched some of the police, and left their bodies hanging from trees and lampposts in Antananarivo. These actions proved to the rank and file soldiers that the workers and peasants – their parents, brothers, uncles, cousins etc - were willing to go all the way in their campaign, convincing the soldiers that they had the strength and confidence to mutiny against their officers and with their weapons join the rebels.

As Trotsky said of the revolution of February 1917: “… the disarmament of the Pharaohs [police. Ed] becomes a universal slogan. The police are fierce, implacable, hated and hating foes. To win them over is out of the question. Beat them up and kill them. It is different with the soldiers...The critical hour of contact between the pushing crowd and the soldiers who bar their way has its critical minutes. That is when the gray barrier has not yet given way, still holds together shoulder to shoulder, but already wavers, and the officer, gathering his last strength of will, gives the command: “Fire!”...The guns waver. The crowd pushes. Then the officer points the barrel of his revolver at the most suspicious soldier. From the decisive minute now stands out the decisive second...At the critical moment, when the officer is ready to pull the trigger, a shot from the crowd forestalls him...This decides not only the fate of the street skirmish, but perhaps the whole day, or the whole insurrection. ...The street fighting began with the disarming of the hated Pharaohs, their revolvers passing into the hands of the rebels. …The way to the soldier’s rifle lead through the revolver taken from the Pharaoh. (History of the Russian Revolution, Gollanz 1934: 128-142, our emphasis).

In Madagascar, the way to the soldier's rifle was through the policemen’s lynched bodies hanging from trees in Antananarivo with their pistols passing into the hands of the rebels, which then gave the soldiers the confidence to disobey their officers when given orders to suppress the people. In this way, the March 8 revolution began. Since late January a growing crisis developed out of a split in the bourgeoisie between the pro-US fraction led by President Ravalomanana and a pro-French faction behind Andry Rajoelina, mayor of Antananarivo. Ravalomanana appointed himself president of a “Transition Authority” to hold a referendum. At that point, the rank and file soldiers who had remained "neutral", as the guarantors, ultimately, the interests of the bourgeoisie as a whole, mutinied.

This mutiny on March 8 was the beginning of a workers and peasants armed insurrection that overthrew Ravalomanana and his regime. This could be called a classic “February Revolution” that causes a revolutionary crisis and creates a power vacuum in the regime.

The revolutionary uprising creates a power vacuum in the regime

For nearly a week between 8 and March 16, there was no government in Madagascar. Faced with the insubordination of its base and the opening of the revolution, the leadership of the armed forces had remained on the sidelines, waiting for an agreement between the two bourgeois fractions. It issued an ultimatum saying that if the two fractions had not come to an agreement in 72 hours, the generals would take control of the government. Ridiculous: no one could believe that a handful of generals and colonels whose troops had mutinied and taken over the largest arsenal in the country could mount a coup.

Ravalomanana ignored the ultimatum and remained in one of his palaces surrounded by the mercenary presidential guard and a few thousand followers. The generals saw that Rajoelina was at the head of an armed mass insurrection and decided that the best way to save bourgeois property and the bourgeois regime was to allow Rajoelina to become the President.

On Friday March 13, Rajoelina along with the generals and the officials of the Transitional Authority occupied the presidential palace. To give some semblance of legality to Rajoelina's investiture as president of Madagascar they gave Ravalomanana four hours to resign. Ravalomanana finally resigned on Monday 16 so that on that day the power vacuum was finally filled by Rajoelina.

The working class and poor peasants who fought with such heroism and spontaneity, attacking the police, dividing the army and toppling Ravalomanana, found that suddenly they faced the question of who would take the power and rule Madagascar. Since there was no revolutionary leadership with a program to fight for power, the generals stepped in an appointed Rajoelina leading the pro-French fraction of the bourgeoisie to fill the power vacuum. Thus the “dual power” of the masses mobilised on the streets and backed by the ordinary soldiers was for the present suspended.

The workers, poor peasants and soldiers began a revolution with their “dual power”

But the revolution has already begun: the government of "national salvation" of Rajoelina is weak, the regime and all its institutions are destroyed, and most importantly, the state is completely breakdown because his pillar, the armed forces were destroyed and divided by insurgent masses who beat the soldiers to rise up against the caste of officers and moving with their weapons on the side of the exploited.

The masses are still in the street, rebel soldiers sent tanks to the capital to counter any possible attack by the mercenaries of the presidential guard, and in the streets, squares, including the churches, can be seen carrying their weapons defending the workers and poor peasants. The soldiers were ordered to clarify things very well for the media that they do not take orders from Ravalomanana or the military, not even Rajoelina.

The revolution has begun and Madagascar and has already gone beyond the heroic workers and peasants of Bolivia 2003-2005, and the revolutionary struggle of the working class and students in Greece in December 2008: it has split the ranks of the army from the officers and the workers and poor peasants from the bourgeois state to create a dual power situation. The evidence is the masses of armed soldiers who mutinied and have control of the main military base and the entire arsenal of the country.

There are two powers now in Madagascar; one of the weak regime of Rajoelina, supported by a fraction of the national bourgeoisie, by a military leadership that neither controls the soldiers the main arsenal; the union bureaucracy, which was overthrown by the insurgent masses, and the leading government officials recognised by the majority of the imperialist powers and governments of various countries of Africa. The other power is that of the workers, peasants and armed soldiers, which is the only power recognised by the broad exploited masses.

This dual power situation can only last a short period of time: sooner or later one must impose itself on the other. Either the working class, peasants and soldiers will centralize its national bodies of power and form a national workers and peasants militia to organize and mount a successful insurrection (in which a government of workers, por peasants and soldiers rule, that is the dictatorship of the proletariat) or, imperialism and the bourgeoisie, deceiving and dividing the masses through class collaboration and the terror of fascism will smash the revolution with fire and drown it in blood.

But this will not be resolved in a single act, but over a period of time. We are at the beginning of a great revolution in which the masses have won a “brilliant victory" in the words of Trotsky referring to Russia in February 1917, the German revolution of 1918-1919, the Hungarian revolution of 1919 and the Spanish in 1931. Today, the masses feel victorious as they are armed in the streets, cities, villages, and the countryside. It's the bourgeoisie that is terrified of losing everything, is status, power and property. But as Trotsky said in 1936, of all those brilliant victories “... it was only in Russia that the proletariat took full power in their hands, expropriated their exploiters and, therefore, knew how to create and maintain a workers’ state. In all other cases, the proletariat, despite his victory, was stopped, by its leadership, midway. The result was that the power in its hands flowed from left to right, ending up as the spoils of fascism. In a number of other countries, the power fell to a military dictatorship." (Wither France?)

The struggle for land, bread and for national independence against the brutal imperialist plunder

The beginning of this revolution in Madagascar is not an isolated storm in a clear sky. It is, first, part of the general revolutionary uprising that shook the French colonies from Guadeloupe, Martinique and Guyana in Latin America, the island of Reunion, a few miles from the coast of Madagascar, and Polynesia. Thus, while the Malagasy working class, peasants and soldiers began their revolution, on the island of Reunion the exploited workers had been on a general strike since March 5, for the same demands as their brothers of the West Indies. But unlike in Guadeloupe and Martinique, as of Monday 11 March, the masses threw out their leaders, and leaving behind the "peaceful protest" took to the streets French style.

Moreover, Madagascar has become a shining example in the colonial and semi-colonial world, of Africa in particular, of mass resistance to the global crisis and the fierce inter-imperialist disputes of control of resources, land, markets, cheap labor, etc.., which have imposed unprecedented levels of exploitation of these nations.

70% of the population lives below the poverty line on less than one euro per day. The workers are super exploited in the chrome and other mineral mines owned by imperialist corporations, particularly Japanese, also in the maquiladoras located in the so-called "free trade zones" and the services linked to tourism. Much of the population live in the countryside, in small plots without title deeds, achieved thanks to the anti-colonial struggle and the expulsion of the French landowners, but can only plant subsistence crops. Thus, of around 33 million hectares of arable land, only about 3 million are exploited.

Madagascar, since it ceased to be a French colony, has been ruled by France as a semi-colony. In 2002 Ravalomanana became president winning elections against the former president who was a direct agent of French imperialism. Ravalomanana, a wealthy businessman, who owns a chain of supermarkets and large stores (looted and burned throughout the country by the rebels since January 2009) created free trade zones for mainly German maquiladora companies, and signed contracts for the exploitation of mines by non-French imperialist corporations. He also leased 1,300,000 hectares (equal to half of Belgium) for 99 years to a South for growing palm oil and corn for biofuel exports to South Korea. In return the consortium has made false promises to "invest 6000 million dollars" and "to create 70,000 jobs" etc.

French imperialism, the former colonial power, was livid with anger that their competitors were stealing part of their business. So, France backed Rajoelina and his fraction of the bourgeoisie with Development Aid and financed the purchase of tow islands Nosy Hara and Mitsa to develop for business and luxury tourism. Thus, the bourgeosie was divided into two fractions, one around Ravalomanana, client of the US, Germany and Korea, and the other around Rajoelina in the pay of French imperialism. This split in the bourgeoisie saw both fractions competing to exploit the masses, but that around Rajoelina was able to divert the masses justifiable hatred towards imperialism towards the downfall of Ravalomanana.

This anger was fuelled in part by the displacement of peasant families and the expropriation of 1.3 million hectares leased to Daewoo Logistics. The announcing of the lease and the first attempts to evict the peasants brought about a mass revolt to defend their land rights. The mayor of a village who was ordered by Ravalomanana to evict the peasants off the land for Daewoo, refused to do so, saying that he "would be lynched by the peasants."

This uprising of the rural poor, together with the struggle of the working class and the exploited of the cities against slavery and poverty wages of the transnationals in the maquiladoras was against the starvation caused by imperialist super-exploitation. The riots in January and early February, condemned by the sell-out union leaders, were the justifiable response of starving workers and farmers to feed their children. In the face of their poverty the owner of the supermarkets Ravalomanana, and the imperialist businessmen and rich parasites from France, the US, Germany and Japan were living it up in the luxury tourist resorts.

No support in the government of Rajoelina agent of French imperialism!

The Malagasy bourgeoisie has as its main objective to make sure that the regime of Rajoelina resolves the dual power situation by disarming and repressing the masses. First it has concentrated all power into the hands of the Presidential office and the generals. It has dissolved parliament and has announced new elections within two years. Second, it deceives the masses with false promises. It promises to halt the lease of land to Daewoo, to regulate the transnationals, lower food prices etc. Meanwhile during this period of Presidential/military rule the Malagasy bourgeoisie will bargain with all the imperialist powers including France to retain a better share of the wealth produced by the exploited Malagasys.

But events are still up in the air. The power vacuum has been filled but the split in the bourgeoisie has not been mended. Daewoo and the Yankees have not given up. They are condemning Rajoelina’s “coup” and promoting a pro-Ravalomanana demonstration on March 24 in Antananarivo “in defense of democracy”, that is to say a “democratic front.” Imperialist bastards, talking about democracy for which they paid Ravalomanana in Malagasy currency, which came with accessories such as a state of siege, police killings of more than 100 workers, and a real coup against a popular uprising!

Rajoelina seems to be adopting a type of “Bolivarian” popular front in which he wants to break the unity of the workers and peasants and soldiers to strangle the revolution and subordinate it to the French fraction of the national bourgeoisie. But before he can do that he must disarm the masses on the streets. And to do that he has to break the soldier rebellion and get them to obey orders to repress the people. He must convince the workers and poor peasants to return their seized weapons to the police and accept the “authority” of these same murdering bastards that they yesterday hung from the trees.

The masses, armed and victorious, feel strong. The bourgeoisie, are weak and scared, and afraid that the crisis will expose the lies and demagoguery of Rajoelina, leaving the masses strong enough to finish the revolution they have started. But if they do not take the power the popular front will arise to tie the hands of the masses and paralyze their will, while behind the scenes the forces of the counterrevolution, the military officers, or fascist bands, or both, gather strength to smash the revolution. We must not forget the tragic lesson of Bolivia!

¡For a National Delegates workers, poor peasants and soldiers at the Soanierana Base held by rebels! ¡Set up and centralize the national workers and peasants militia!
Any program that claims to be for revolution in Madagascar today must begin by calling for workers, peasants and soldiers not to give the slightest support to the government Rajoelina, nor fall into the trap of "democratic front" backed by the US, Ravalomanana and other killers of workers and exploited. It must call for the insurgents to continue their offensive and revolutionary struggles and to occupy the lands, mines, factories and banks! If they stop they will not get bread for their children from the supermarkets! The same with the soldiers. Do not surrender or give up your weapon to Rajoelina’s generals! Do not stop; complete the military insurrection to defeat the officers!

If you stop disbanding the police they will rearm and kill you! Let's not stop: create popular courts of the workers, peasants and soldiers to try and punish Ravalomanana, his presidential guard of mercenaries and those who killed the more than 100 worker and peasant martyrs during the fighting. No time to lose! Every minute that the uprising is stopped the bourgeoisie gains strength! `

"Who has weapons… has bread, land and jobs with living wages”. The armed insurrection brought the workers close to winning bread, land, decent wages and the end of the imperialist rule of Madagascar. Therefore, that armed power must be expanded and concentrated into a powerful militia. Every factory, every business, every industry, every village and every quarter, must choose one delegate for hundred workers, poor peasants and soldiers, to meet at the Soanierana Base and create a National Congress of workers, peasants and soldiers together with a national militia!

That National Congress of delegates of the exploited masses will take into its own hands the authority to impose solutions to problems facing the masses and unite all the exploited in the oppressed nation, led by the workers, and make the imperialists and the national bourgeoisie pay for their crisis!

· Workers, poor peasants and soldiers take up arms to win bread!

· Imperialist out! Get out Daewoo Korea-Pacific U.S! Get out French Development Aid!

· Expropriate without payment all US, French, Japanese and German transnationals under workers' control!

· Nationalise all the mines, factories in the Free Trade Zones, tourism and all other imperialsts interests!

· Repudiate the external debt and all political, economic and military treaties with imperialism!

· Impose capital controls and a monopoly on foreign trade!

· Nationalise the land with cheap loans to poor family farmers who wish to work their land!

· Collective farms on uncultivated lands under workers control to provide food for the people of Madagascar!

· Expropriate without compensation under workers control all capitalist supermarkets and food outlets!

· For Popular Committees to control prices and supply local councils of workers, peasants and soldiers!

· Jobs for all on decent wages. No more slavery! Maquilas Out!

· Sliding scale of wages and hours of work, on a living wage pegged to the cost of family cost of living!

· Expropriation without payment under workers' control of any plant that closes or sacks workers!

A National Congress can raise these demands but only a Workers Government backed by a militia can impose them. Because in Madagascar, as in all semi-colonial countries, it will not be the national bourgeoisie who are the junior partners of the imperialist powers, but only the working class that has no interests in defending imperialism or capitalist property that will end the imperialist yoke and win land, bread, work and wages, health and housing for the exploited. Only a government of armed workers, peasants and soldiers, with the revolutionary party at its head, can smash the bourgeois state, break with imperialism and expropriate the expropriators.

The revolution in Madagascar shows the way for the other French colonies and France itself!

The beginning of the Madagascar revolution is a new blow to French imperialism. Already shaken by the revolutionary uprisings of the colonies of Guadeloupe and Martinique where general strikes and factory occupations raised the specter of revolution and inspired the metropolitan French proletariat to open up a pre-revolutionary situation. Sarkozy and his 5th Republic imperialist regime has contained the revolution in the Antilles but, the fire is still alive on the island of Reunion, where the masses, looking to the onset of the Malagasy Revolution, threw out their leaders and continued with and indefinite strike.

The Revolution in Madagascar shows the way for the other French colonies and semi-colonies to win national Independence and land, bread, work and living wages!

· Long live the general strike ended and the street fighting of the masses of Reunion!

· French imperialism and occupation troops out of Reunion, the Seychelles and Mauritius Islands!

The armed power of the Malagasy workers, poor peasants and soldiers, raises the program for the common struggle of all the French colonies and semi-colonies against French imperialism. At the same time it raises the program for the French proletariat to extend its struggles from the barricades and factories for jobs and wages in France to take up the fight against “their” own bourgeoisie for the victory of the anti-imperialist struggles, the immediate and unconditional release of political prisoners, and the immediate removal of imperialist troops from the colonies. If the massive strike actions in France condemned Sarkosy’s crony Rajoelina and raised the demand for workers to power in Malagascar it would unite the workers and peasants of the colonies with those of the imperialist heartland and create the conditions for successful socialist revolutions in the colonies and semi-colonies.

The international character of the revolution in Madagascar

The revolution in Madagascar reopens for the first time the period of defeats following the strangling of the South African revolution in 1994 by the popular front government of the ANC, the South African Communist Party and the union bureaucracy of COSATU. This huge betrayal of Stalinism and the Popular Front was an historic defeat for the masses of the oppressed and exploited of the whole continent.

This defeat led to Africa becoming a reservoir of slave labor of 600 million workers, hundreds of thousands of whom fled in desperate attempt to get to the imperialist powers of Europe. Tens of thousands of black workers and peasants died in the struggle to reach Europe and those who survived bécame a caste of slave workers super-exploited in the imperialist countries, and then when the crisis hit, deported en masse. In the most recent period of growth, imperialism has increased its investment in Africa to exploit for example the rich oil reserves in Nigeria, diamond mines as in Sierra Leone and the minerals in the Congo. China entered the race to plunder Africa along with other Asian countries to use the land to produce food and crops for biofuels. As the crisis worsens the scramble for Africa intensifies as the various imperialist powers compete to plunder its enormous natural wealth.

But as Marx and Engels said over 150 years ago, the bourgeoisie produces its own “gravediggers”, the proletariat. The flow of capital into Africa in recent years has expanded and strengthened the working class. So, today, as capitalists try to solve their crisis by attacking the workers, Africa is not only a site for fierce inter-imperialist rivalry, but by a mass black working class that has begun to resist these attacks on their jobs, living standards and their lives. The vanguard of this black proletariat in Africa is in the North, where the Arab and Muslim masses revolted in the Maghreb from Morocco to Egypt in defence of the Palestinians, opening the road to the socialist revolution and a Federation of Socialist Soviet Republics of North Africa. This vanguard has now been joined by the insurgent peasants and workers of Madagascar, widening the struggle towards a united socialist Africa by opening the front for a Federation of Socialist Republics in Central and South Africa.

As we said above these revolutionary uprisings in the colonies and semi-colonies of France and other imperialist countries must become adopted by the working classes in the imperialist heartlands. In France, Britain and the US, the millions of oppressed migrant workers treated like slaves become the vital link to combat the treachery of the labor aristocracy and bureaucracy in fusing the revolutions in the colonies, semi-colonies with that of the imperialist heartlands. Such international revolutionary unity can also reverse the counter-revolution that has restored capitalism to the former workers states and re-open the road to the dictatorship of the proletariat in these countries. Thus the revolution in Madagascar poses again the question of power, not only in that country, not only in Africa, but of the world revolution.

Once again Trotsky writing in 1932 on the role of Black workers in revolution has been vindicated. "... the Black workers, by virtue of their whole position, do not and cannot strive to degrade anybody, oppress anybody, or deprive anybody of his rights. They do not seek privileges and cannot rise to the top except on the road of the international revolution. We can and must find a way to the consciousness of Black workers, the Chinese workers, the Indian workers, and all the oppressed in the human ocean of the colored races to whom belongs the decisive word in the development of mankind”. (Closer to the proletarians of the “colored” races! Leon Trotsky, 1932).

The revolution in Madagascar demonstrates that the vanguard of the international proletariat must declare war on the labor aristocracy and bureaucracy who are the agents of capital inside the working class. Only by defeating these traitors can the working class solve the crisis of revolutionary leadership, on which, as it says in the Transitional Program of 1938, rests the fate of humanity.

For a new Trotskyist world revolutionary Party founded on the Fourth International program of 1938!

The revolution in Madagascar proves once again that workers, poor peasants and soldiers in Madagascar must solve the leadership crisis of the revolutionary proletariat. Based on its spontaneous insurrection the workers could only go so far: to overthrow Ravalomanana, to weaken the bourgeois state by splitting the army, and to create a situation of dual power. But to succeed in going all the way to a proletarian revolution they need a revolutionary leadership. And just as the revolution in Madagascar is not “national” but has an international character and content, the only leadership that is capable of taking the revolution to victory is an international revolutionary leadership.

Each insurrection and semi-insurrection that has taken place, in Greece, in the West Indies and other French colonies, in France itself where the workers are standing up to fight, poses the question of who shall rule. Standing in the road of the revolutionary proletariat are the parties of the labor aristocracy and bureaucracy which are social patriotic and social imperialist. The Malagasy revolution which now poses the question of power and the urgent need to arm the masses to overthrow the bourgeois state, has become an acid test which separates out the reformists, and the centrists – disguised as ‘Trotskyists’ – from the revolutionary internationalists.

Already the Bolshevik fraction of the international working class is entering the fight to expose and defeat the reformists and centrists traitors. It seeks to intervene in the revolutionary events in Greece, Guadeloupe, general strikes in France, the uprisings of the Maghreb, the Palestinian struggle, and now the revolution in Madagascar. As the proletariat enters into combat the reformists and centrist strain to contain the new layers of fighters and subordinate them to the Popular Front of many colors. Against these counter-revolutionaries the healthy forces of international Trotskyism are fighting to unite around the banner of the Fourth International and the program of its Founding Congress of 1938.

To refound a Trotskyist international it is necessary for the healthy forces of Trotskyism to regroup in an international conference that does not make verbal boasts about “socialism” and “revolution”, but proves in practice that it can defeat the counter-revolutionary leadership in the critical revolutionary struggles, and build a new revolutionary international that the international working class deserves to lead it to victory and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The Fourth International was founded in 1938 to fulfill the task that is stated clearly in its program: “Our task: the abolition of capitalist domination. Our goal: socialism. Our method: the proletarian revolution.”

We must reunite the revolutionary internationalists around the world are committed to completing the task, method, and goal of the Fourth International set for us by Comrade Trotsky in 1938.

FLT, March 24, 2009.

What We Fight For

Overthrow Capitalism

Historically, capitalism expanded world-wide to free much of humanity from the bonds of feudal or tribal society, and developed the economy, society and culture to a new higher level. But it could only do this by exploiting the labor of the productive classes to make its profits. To survive, capitalism became increasingly destructive of "nature" and humanity. In the early 20th century it entered the epoch of imperialism in which successive crises unleashed wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions. Today we fight to end capitalism’s wars, famine, oppression and injustice, by mobilising workers to overthrow their own ruling classes and bring to an end the rotten, exploitative and oppressive society that has exceeded its use-by date.

Fight for Socialism

By the 20th century, capitalism had created the pre-conditions for socialism –a world-wide working class and modern industry capable of meeting all our basic needs. The potential to eliminate poverty, starvation, disease and war has long existed. The October Revolution proved this to be true, bringing peace, bread and land to millions. But it became the victim of the combined assault of imperialism and Stalinism. After 1924 the USSR, along with its deformed offspring in Europe, degenerated back towards capitalism. In the absence of a workers political revolution, capitalism was restored between 1990 and 1992. Vietnam and China then followed. In the 21sst century only Cuba and North Korea survive as degenerate workers states. We unconditionally defend these states against capitalism and fight for political revolution to overthrow the bureaucracy as part of world socialism.

Defend Marxism

While the economic conditions for socialism exist today, standing between the working class and socialism are political, social and cultural barriers. They are the capitalist state and bourgeois ideology and its agents. These agents claim that Marxism is dead and capitalism need not be exploitative. We say that Marxism is a living science that explains both capitalism’s continued exploitation and its attempts to hide class exploitation behind the appearance of individual "freedom" and "equality". It reveals how and why the reformist, Stalinist and centrist misleaders of the working class tie workers to bourgeois ideas of nationalism, racism, sexism and equality. Such false beliefs will be exploded when the struggle against the inequality, injustice, anarchy and barbarism of capitalism in crisis, led by a revolutionary Marxist party, produces a revolutionary class-consciousness.

For a Revolutionary Party

The bourgeois and its agents condemn the Marxist party as totalitarian. We say that without a democratic and a centrally organised party there can be no revolution. We base our beliefs on the revolutionary tradition of Bolshevism and Trotskyism. Such a party, armed with a transitional program, forms a bridge that joins the daily fight to defend all the past and present gains won from capitalism, to the victorious socialist revolution. Defensive struggles for bourgeois rights and freedoms, for decent wages and conditions, will link up the struggles of workers of all nationalities, genders, ethnicities and sexual orientations, bringing about movements for workers control, political strikes and the arming of the working class, as necessary steps to workers' power and the smashing of the bourgeois state. Along the way, workers will learn that each new step is one of many in a long march to revolutionise every barrier put in the path to the victorious revolution.

Fight for Communism

Communism stands for the creation of a classless, stateless society beyond socialism that is capable of meeting all human needs. Against the ruling class lies that capitalism can be made "fair" for all; that nature can be "conserved"; that socialism and communism are "dead"; we raise the red flag of communism to keep alive the revolutionary tradition of the' Communist Manifesto of 1848, the Bolshevik-led October Revolution; the Third Communist International until 1924, the revolutionary Fourth International up to 1940 before its collapse into centrism. We fight to build a new, Fifth, Communist International, as a world party of socialism capable of leading workers to a victorious struggle for socialism.

Class Struggle is the Bi-Monthly paper of the Communist Workers’ Group of New Zealand/Aotearoa, a member of the Leninist Trotskyist Fraction [LTF] . Other member are:

International Workers League (LOI-CI) Argentina, International Workers Party (POI) Chile, Revolutionary Trotskyist League (RTL) Peru, Red October International (ORI) Bolivia, and the Trotskyist Fraction (FT) Brazil.

PO Box 6595, Auckland, NZ. Mail address:

PO Box 6595, Auckland, New Zealand.

Email [email protected]

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

http://redrave.blogspot.com/