Class Struggle 112

Autumn 2015

Class Struggle 112

Cartoon Bombers
"... a horrid assault was perpetrated against the
French weekly Charlie Hebdo, who had published
caricatures of Muhammad, by men who screamed
that they had avenged the prophet. A wave of
compassion followed but apparently died shortly
afterward and all sorts of criticism started
pouring down the web against Charlie Hebdo,
who was described as Islamophobic, racist and
even sexist...We are all trying to find the narrow
path defending the French Republic against the
twin threats of fundamentalism and fascism (and
fundamentalism is a form of fascism). But I still
believe that the best
way to do this is to
fight for our
Republican ideals
secular and
democratic." Olivier
Tonneau "On Charlie
Hebdo: A letter to my
British friends."
This article reveals
much more than the
author intends. He is
right that
fundamentalism is the
cultural product of the
failure of the ideals of
the French Revolution.
But his naivety shows
through when he is
shocked by the ban
on Palestinian marches.
The ideals of the
French Revolution will
never by realised by
the Republic so long
as it is propped up by
liberals with illusions in the bourgeois state. That
the march in defence of free speech should have
been led by dictators, torturers and mass
murderers tells us that bourgeois society is
bankrupt. We should all know this by now.
In the immediate aftermath of the French
Revolution, the liberation of the slaves in Haiti
was revoked by Napoleon because of the
interests of the profits of the French bourgeoisie.
For all its liberty, equality and fraternity the
French state will never extend these values to
the colonial and semi-colonial workers they

Autumn 2015

continue to oppress and exploit whether in

former colonies such as Syria or in the banlieues
at home.
The rise of Islamic fundamentalism fills the gap
left by the liberals who preach liberal, secular
values, but deny the need for a new social
revolution to realise these values in practice.
This vacuum exists because the liberal left from
the Communist Party (which supported the
French side in the Algerian war) to the feeble socalled revolutionary left in France today that
politely protests French imperialism, has failed
to smash its powerful
state at home.
The left should stop
dreaming of the failed
French Revolution and
study the Paris Commune
of 1871 which for the
first time in history saw
the only class that is
capable of realising
liberty, equality and
fraternity, the
proletariat, momentarily
take power, only to be
drowned in the blood of
reaction.
Modern France is like the
tragic Paris Commune
recycled as a soap opera,
now played out on the
wider stage of the former
empire kept alive only by
bombs and mercenaries,
but where the proletariat
now plays the lead in a
farce dressed up as
jihadis and adolescent cartoonists.
Such is the decrepitude of the old Empire,
including its official, bought and sold liberal left,
all it will take is for the jihadis and cartoonists to
combine their talents and throw out the old
garbage of Napoleons, dictators and warlords,
smash their rotten state apparatus, and bring the
international commune into life.
But for that to happen revolutionaries have to
present a clear analysis of the decline and fall of
capitalism, and what is needed for a new
communist society to replace it.

Class Struggle 112

Autumn 2015

Smash the TPPA!

The Editor of the left journal Redline says that Marx
was for free trade as if this has anything to do with
workers taking a stand on the TPPA. In Marxs day
free trade was the market prevailing over precapitalist society to allow capitalists to compete to
produce commodities and develop capitalist society.
But today the TPPA has nothing to do with free trade.
Marx didnt live to see capitalism become transformed
from its competitive stage to in its highest,
imperialist stage where the world was divided
between imperialist monopolies and colonised
countries. In the epoch of imperialism, free trade was
replaced by monopoly state
capitalism.
Lenin wrote his pathbreaking book Imperialismthe Highest Stage of
Capitalism in 1915. This
epoch has advanced
considerably for 100 years to
the point where today NZ is
torn between the two major
imperialist blocs led by the
US and by China. The US has
been in decline since the
end of the post-war boom
and the onset of a structural
by sis of falling profits in the
1970s. Its response to that
was to embark on neoliberalism to gain access to
cheap labour and raw
materials in the semicolonial world and pursue its cold war with Russia and
China until those countries collapsed and opened up
to Western imperialism.
What the US and other Western powers did not
foresee however, is that Russia and China while
opening up new opportunities for massive profits to
rescue the ailing capitalist system, maintained their
independence and developed as new rival imperialist
powers. China in particular was able to emerge as the
main rival to the US, driving growth in the global
economy on the back of its rapid expansion.
This has brought a major confrontation between the
two blocs to a head in the Asia Pacific region
contesting control over all the other Asia Pacific
countries. This contest takes the immediate form of
rival economic zones based on the US led TPPA and
the China led FTAAP.
The TPPA is a continuation of neo-liberalism the US
policy dating from the 1970s to break down national
barriers to US corporations to buy up cheaply what is
left of scarce global resources needed to restore
profits. That policy included structural adjustment
that imposed punitive deregulation on semi-colonies

including removal of tariff protection. Many of those

countries, including NZ were forced to eliminate
tariffs to allow the penetration of foreign capital,
while the US and other big imperialist powers
maintained their protectionist barriers.
So is the TPPA now about the US reciprocating by
suddenly reducing its own tariff barriers? Not at all,
the US is now demanding that its partners eliminate
any political barriers to US corporations dictating
trade and investment rules at the expense of the
social needs of the populations and the destruction of
the environment of these
countries.
That is why the TPPA takes
the form of US bullying the
weaker states in its bloc to
remove all sovereign barriers
to US corporations buying up
all sorts of property from
state assets to IP and recolonise these weaker states
as sources of cheap labour
and raw materials. This
prevents these states from
giving equal preference to
China via TPAs with China,
and at the same time
allowing the US corporates to
piggy back into China on
these TPAs.
This is what is happening to
NZ today. Unlike Redline
that says that NZ is an imperialist country, NZ has
gone from a settler colony with limited self-governing
independence from imperialist Britain before WW2, to
a servile client state of the USA, and now in the 21st
century, also a neo-colony of Chinese imperialism.
The FTA with China is mainly about trade, although it
also allows access to Chinese capital buying up NZ
land, assets and IP. The US hopes to steal a march of
China by taking direct control of the NZ economy.
Therefore, the TPPA has nothing to do with
comparative advantage (the basis of the theory of
free trade) and everything to do with monopoly state
capitalism. Were Marx alive today he would recognise
that imperialism arose once the limits of market
competition to develop the forces of production had
been reached. In its place giant monopolies backed by
their states set about destroying the forces of
production, producing waste, creating a global surplus
of labour, and threatening the end of human
civilisation and most of the living species on earth.
Anything that mobilises the federation of
international freedom fighters against this
destructive death star would be actively supported
by Marx.

Class Struggle 112

Autumn 2015

Treaty Solutions
The difference between Tim Selwyn and Gareth
Morgan over the Treaty of Waitangi is just a matter of
numbers. Morgan thinks that things are moving
towards wider acceptance of the Treaty settlement
process, while Selwyn thinks even this wont happen
because of the waves of racists migrating to NZ.
So the drama of Treaty politics is still driven by a
racist horde clashing with well meaning liberals over
how to administer the ongoing settlement going
forward. Morgans money plus the Maori Party
representing the tribal elites at the cabinet table will
make sure the settlement process timeline is
extended. As we said in the last issue of Class
Struggle, the Tribunal lawyers claiming continuous
sovereignty may mean a few more crumbs falling off
the Cabinet Table into the Iwi capitalists pockets,
nothing more.
Meanwhile, the naked settler capitalist colonisation of
Aotearoa continues with the 1% refugees fleeing the
mess they are making of their own countries to buy up
coastal tracts, while working class Maori remain
exploited and oppressed in their own country.
The solution to this is to recognise that Maori are not
the only oppressed minority in NZ. Many migrants are

as badly off as most Maori. There are also poor whites

at the arse end of colonisation. They are all thrown
into the working class by capitalist globalisation. They
can be united by uniting to fight against the common
enemy the international corporations that are recolonising Aotearoa to rip, drill, shit and bust the
economy and destroy nature.
This united class has one common class interest
throwing out the corrupt ruling class that serves only
the interests of their 1% mates and their masters in
the US and China. When NZ is a socialist republic then
it will be time for Maori to stop begging the settler
state for handouts and win their right to selfdetermination by reclaiming control over land and
culture, finally realising the dream of Te Whiti up
against rampant settler colonialism under impossible
odds all that time ago.

Yanis fake Marxist

In several articles and interviews Yanis Varoufakis
claims to be an erratic Marxist. Michael Roberts
comments that Varoufakis is more about burying Marx
and reviving keeping Keynes. Unlike Piketty,
Varoufakis at least has read das Kapital, even if he
got stuck on the maths in Volume 2. Yanis cannot
forgive Marxs basic errors that led to dogmatism and
authoritarianism. He was dogmatic and produced a
closed system based on his exposition of capitalism
on his Volume 2 reproduction schemas. Keynes,
however, was genius because...
It was this determination to have the complete,
closed story, or model, the final word, is
something I cannot forgive Marx for. It proved, after
all, responsible for a great deal of error and, more
significantly, of authoritarianism. Errors and
authoritarianism that are largely responsible for the
Lefts current impotence as a force of good and as a
check on the abuses of reason and liberty that the
neoliberal crew are overseeing today.
Roberts is far from convinicede: This erratic Marxist,
now negotiating with the neo-liberal Euro leaders
aims to save European capitalism from itself so as
to minimise the unnecessary human toll from this
crisis; the countless lives whose prospects will be
further crushed without any benefit whatsoever for

the future generations of Europeans. Apparently

socialism cannot do this. YV says we are just not
ready to plug the chasm that a collapsing European
capitalism will open up with a functioning socialist
system.
Instead, according to YV, a Marxist analysis of both
European capitalism and of the Lefts current
condition compels us to work towards a broad
coalition, even with right-wingers, the purpose of
which ought to be the resolution of the Eurozone crisis
and the stabilisation of the European Union
Ironically, those of us who loathe the Eurozone have a
moral obligation to save it! Thus YV has campaigned
for his Modest Proposal for Europe with the likes of
Bloomberg and New York Times journalists, of Tory
members of Parliament, of financiers who are
concerned with Europes parlous state.
Lets see what the Greek people think of his attempt
to save European capitalism from itself.

Class Struggle 112

Autumn 2015

State Houses for All!

The NACTs (National and ACT) are making a major
push to sell off the state housing stock to developers,
and pretending that the private providers of social
housing will meet the need for affordable housing.
Rubbish. The NACTs are kicking working class
communities like Tamaki out of their houses and
selling off the valuable land to their property
developer mates as a market solution to housing.
For the NACTs
workers should pay
out of their wages for
housing in the
market. Where slave
wages mean workers
cannot afford market
rents the state relies
on private charities
and Maori trusts to
step in.
Labours answer is to
promise to subsidise
private affordable houses for $400k that no working
class family on the minimum or even median wage can
afford. The Greens promise more state houses but
their middle class focus is on affordable, sustainable
housing which includes more private ownership.
Mana offers to build many more state houses, but it
will allow tenants to buy them! It also wants
government to pay for cheap $200k houses for sale.
Hone Harawira seems to approve of Maori Trusts
buying state houses in Tamaki and shifting them up to
Kaitaia. So far this Trust has taken nine houses from
Tamaki tenants. Hone got arrested for opposing the
eviction of Tamaki state housing tenants. Is he now
backing the selling off of state houses to Maori Trusts?
So it looks like there is no political party that stands
on the principle of affordable state houses as a
basic right to workers as part of a living wage. A
major social gain that was won by workers in the
1930s depression is being destroyed and with it any
possibility of workers achieving a living social wage.

What is the social wage?

NZs health, education, welfare and social services
provided through the State are all part of the social
wage. The social wage is heath, education and
housing paid for out of taxation that supplements the
market wage as Working for Families does.
However, none of the political parties will tell you
that the social wage is really just returning to workers
part of the surplus value their labour power creates
which is taken off them as profits and taxes. The
buying power of the market wage plus social wage
equals the real wage. So the sale of state houses is

yet another cut to the social wage and therefore the

real wage of NZ workers!
Social Housing providers will be picking up the
deferred maintenance and development that is
required (by the state) to house the NZ population.
We do not accept the do gooder social housing
trusts, taking over from government.
This divides the working
class among those who
are eligible under this
trust scheme or that
trust scheme, and those
who miss out.
We say: No Sales! Not
for $1 not for $0! No
social housing takeover! No tenants
buying our houses! No
dividing the working
class!
The capitalist state is so bankrupt National is
desperate to sell state assets to prop up the profits of
the rich through another round of tax cuts. The
temporary tax relief for the rich comes at the long
term expense of the working class.
We must fight back against this asset sale and
undertake to take back all privatised state assets
built by the labour of the working class. For this we
need a revolutionary workers party.
Mana movement is not that party when it leads the
fight for state houses on marches to parliament,
diverting the energy and resources of Mana (as a flaxgrass roots movement) into the hot air and dirty
politics of the parliamentary talk shop.
Our fight has to be based on mobilising those who
refuse to move, and need support. We need to
organise occupations in state housing areas - defend
each house, each street, each neighbourhood. Build
Mana as a movement on the streets and
neighbourhoods start with occupations of state
houses.

Occupy! defend and resist evictions

Occupy! Build support for those willing to
occupy against privatisation.
Occupy! Build solidarity of working class
communities with trade unions ranks!
For a crash program to build state houses for
rents pegged to the living wage determined by
workers rent tribunals!
For the right of every working family to an
affordable state house for life!
5

Class Struggle 112

Autumn 2015

NZ Troops Out!
Victory to the Arab Revolution!
The Middle-East today is a morass of bloody revolution and counter-revolution.
Despite the growing rivalry between the US-led and China-led blocs, they
collaborate as a lesser evil against the greater-evil of the Arab Revolution in
the name of the war on terror. The nominal target is the IS, but the real
target is the Arab Revolution. So the barbarians have always been the
Western powers invading and occupying the Middle East. The NACTs and Labour
are both sucked into this. NACTs want to be in the US Anglo-American Club,
Labour wont oppose the war, just NZ sacrificing lives. Only an Arab socialist
revolution can end the US led War of Terror.
PM Keys decision to go to war against ISIS and
join the coalition of killers is very unpopular in
NZ. The Government doesnt have a clear
majority so will not ask parliament to endorse is
decision. It banks on the threat posed by the IS
to the West to win support for its stand. So
despite this unpopularity the ruling class of US
lackeys is happy to be part of the five eyes
club and
hoping to be
rewarded
with bigger
profits from
the TPPA
that the US
wants to
impose on
all its client
states and
partners.
The Labour
Party hates
IS and wont
openly
oppose the war. Its OK with US airstrikes but
doesnt want to sacrifice NZ lives for no good
result. It would prefer a UN sanctioned
intervention. The Greens are pacifists. They
think the war resulted from the US invasion of
Iraq in 2003 and further intervention will do
more harm.
Elsewhere on the left there is a current that
thinks that IS are Islamic fascists and New
Zealanders should go to fight IS like New
Zealanders went to fight the Spanish fascists in
the civil war in the 1930s.

The irony is that this left doesnt see that NZ

was part of the British Empire then and Britain
did all it could to prevent fighters joining the
Republican side in that war. Just as the Key
client state does all it can to prevent NZ workers
joining the revolutionary side of the Syrian civil
war.
In Spain a
bourgeois
democratic
republic was
attacked by a
fascist army.
Volunteers
from the
Western left of
all shades
joined the
ranks of the
republican
army to defend
it against the
fascists.
Some mistakenly joined the bourgeois republican
Governments in Madrid and Barcelona rather
than forming militias independent of these
regimes. The Stalinists did so because they
feared an independent working class at a time
when they were in alliances with the Western
democracies against fascism. In Barcelona the
anarchist leaders betrayed their rank and file by
also joining the bourgeois Government.
The civil war was lost because the fascists were
armed by Italy and Germany while the Republic
was dis-armed by the Western democracies.
6

Class Struggle 112

They did all in their power to prevent the arming
of the Republic.

Autumn 2015
against the jihadists armed by the West and its
local allies.

The only way that this war could have been won,
was the formation of a popular councils and
Militias independent of the bourgeoisie and the
Stalinists, backed by massive workers brigades
from around Europe which would have begun a
revolutionary war to smash fascism right across
Europe.

Unlike the Kurd PYG that has fought to defend

Rojava from the IS with the benefit of US etc
air support, the Syrian revolutionaries have
been starved of military support by the US bloc
(including NZ) and supported by the cringing
Western left, except for a few notable
exceptions.

In Syria we have a fascist dictator, Assad,

opposed by a popular democratic revolution.
Some in the leadership of that revolution, the
FSA for example, want to form a bourgeois
republic as an alternative to Assad. But many
revolutionary fighters reject these bourgeois
leaders as aligned to one or other imperialist
powers.

One is the Leon Sedov Brigade made up of

Trotskyists that still exists as an example how to
organise independently of the FSA bourgeoisie,
the imperialist powers and their local stooges,
and fight on three fronts to unite the Syrian
revolution with the Palestinian revolution and
with the wider Arab Revolution.

There are
numerous
militias that
are locally
organised and
loosely
coordinated so
effectively
that they have
resisted Assad
despite being
dis-armed by
the
democracies,
so that without
SAMs Assads
planes still dominate in the war.
Moreover, most of the Western left has defended
Assad and parroted his line that he is being
attacked by foreign terrorists (an irony since he
has mercenaries from many countries including
the Iranian Republican Guards) funded by the
Saudis, Turkey, the CIA, you name it. Assad also
released from his jails many who went on to form
the ISIS in Syria.

The Guardian
underscores
that the US is
now in an
informal
alliance with
Assad to deal
with IS. So
sending NZ
troops to fight
IS and jailing
(like Aussie)
those who
want to fight
Assad, is siding
with the worst
enemies of
human rights the US, its convenient ally Assad,
its military ally Israel, against the target, IS, that
originated with the US funding the Taliban and
Al-Qaeda in the 80s and 90s.
Against this coalition of the evil, perpetrators of
terror, is the coalition of the masses, popular
militias armed and supported by the
international working class to defend and extend
democracy and socialism.

Because of this reactionary campaign in the West

the revolution and its democratic objectives has
been largely ignored, and unlike Spain there has
been no massive flood of left wing volunteers to
join the militias.

No NZ troops to the US imperialist war of

terror!

Yet these popular militias that organised Local

Coordination Committees that are run on a
democratic basis have been able to survive for
four years against Assad, and in the last 2 years

For mass revolutionary parties to lead the

fight for socialist revolution!

Build international brigades to fight on the

side of the Arab Revolution!

For a Federation of Socialist Republics of

the Middle East and North Africa!

Class Struggle 112

Nous ne sommes pas Charlie Hebdo

Autumn 2015

Most of the Left publications we have seen identify the violent attack on the
French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo as an attack on the sacrosanct free
press. We do not. All historical evidence says the Free Press is a fiction in
class society. CLASS WAR and the Liaison Committee of Communists see this as
a reactionary attack on what the perpetrators say is blasphemy. Far from
being a left publication, it is a liberal after birth of the 1968 events;
Charlie Hebdos satirical viewpoint today is decidedly bourgeois and in as bad
taste as the term bourgeois connotes in France.
Revolutionary
workers
and
socialists
oppose
censorship. Bourgeois laws that impose censorship
are always directed against the publications of and
speakers for the working class, sooner or later, and
usually sooner. We see tremendous hypocrisy both in
calls for censorship from the Wahhabi inspired right,
presumably the backers of the assailants in Paris, and
from the parallel calls by French and western
liberalism who
routinely
confuse
freedom for the
bourgeois press
with freedom of
speech.
First
and
foremost these
attacks must be
put
in
the
context of the
war
on
terror,
in
MENA which is
really
an
attempt
by
U.S./EU
imperialism to
contain
the
Arab National
Revolution.
To win the ideological and propaganda aspect of
war the ruling-class-owned free press reduces
class war to a clash of civilizations between
barbarian hordes and the enlightened
democratic west.

this
the
the
and

The free press wants to hide from you the fact that
the war is a consequence and a cost of doing business
in the region, because the subjective factor, the antiimperialist aspirations of the masses, challenges the
economic interests of declining U.S. imperialism and
their comprador henchmen for control of states and
aspirant states sitting atop the oil and on the geostrategic pathways for the delivery of that oil.

We denounce individual terrorism as it is not a

legitimate tactic of the revolution (democratic or
proletarian). Individual terrorism, even for the most
salutatory motives, permits propaganda victories for
and repression by the enemy social class. We are for
the effective action of the masses to wage decisive
warfare against the ruling class oppressors and
imperialist exploiters.
The
Charlie
Hebdo event was
a terror attack
and does not
correspond
politically to any
small unit action
by any power of
the
working
class. It does not
advance
the
revolution;
it
pushes
the
masses already
trapped by Social
Democracy and
the
Stalinists
forms of social
chauvinism
further to the
right.
Some youth mistake the terror attacks of religious
zealots for defense of Islam and are drawn, by the
vacuum of leadership in the revolution, to jihad.
Every Islamic warlord who wants to disguise his
bourgeois ambitions to become an oil magnate as a
caliph who exploits the weakness of the revolutionary
leadership by calling upon oppressed and unemployed
young Muslim workers around the world to join the
jihad against the 'West'.
Their military operations and terror attacks are then
characterized by the corporate bourgeois media as
asymmetric warfare initiated by the Sunni Fellahin
and not as a response to the armed-to-the-teeth
imperialists centuries-long history of brutal
subjugation.

Class Struggle 112

Let there be no mistake, CLASS WAR takes the side of
the Arab revolution. But the forces of the religious
right in the Arabic speaking world are not a part of it.
They are the internal enemies of the revolution and
are either past or future partners with the imperialist
masters.
What future could an ISIS or any Boko Harram regime
hope to have while embracing the market and private
property, as matters of religion and culture, without
the sponsorship of some imperialist master? Each of
these movements aspires to rule after the fashion of
the Saudi monarchy, any of their professed
republicanism not withstanding and even immaterial.

Autumn 2015
imperialism while battling the Assad regime, the
jihadists and now ISIS.
Now Washington is cozying up to Assad in its tack
toward returning Iran to the pro-U.S. imperialist fold.
The U.S. no longer objects to Irans building of
nuclear facilities in areas under Assads control. And
we hear none of the alarm we are accustomed to
whenever the Geiger counter ticks in the region giving
excuses for Israel to launch first strikes. Instead,
Zionism is given a green light to attack anti-Assad
rebels in Syria, expand settlements in East Jerusalem

The revolution stands for the greatest religious

freedom and this immediately puts revolutionaries in
collision with all theocrats, each of whom seek a
monolithic religious state and in this their enmity
towards Iran and/or Israel is a fake. Only the greatest
religious freedom can permit the organization of
inter-communal militias to guarantee the safety of
each and every community. The workers, as the
revolutionary class, have the responsibility to organize
these militias.
Right now Syria is the front line of revolutionary
struggle; the working class position is for the defeat of
the Assad dictatorship. Stalinism, in the form of the
Syrian Communist Party and the neo-Stalinist sects
(Marcyites, Castroists, etc.,) has played a reactionary
role in Syria; consequent of their stageist theory of
revolution, which finds progressive agency in the
national bourgeoisie of semi-colonies.
When the spark of the Arab Spring ignited the Syrian
masses the neo-Stalinists ignored the butchery of the
Assad regime, which they cast as progressive, and
placed it in a progressive bloc which they have
conjured out of the Russia-China alliance.

and welcomed as a victim in the anti-Semitic attacks

that followed the Charlie Hebdo bombing.
We denounce the French regime and its entire
response to the attacks on Charlie Hebdo. The
Hollande regime is social-imperialist in a way that is
as brazen as any we have seen in the century since
Social Democrats supported their bourgeoisie at the
outbreak of WW I. We condemn the CP for being
errand boys for Hollande and for supporting every
imperialist attack going back to the days of the
Algerian independence struggle.
France has played a nationalist propaganda card in
support of the U.S.-led war no. 3 in Iraq, both by
manipulating the mass revulsion against the political
assassinations at Charlie Hebdo, the real attack on
free speech of the Islamist right, and by redoubling its
commitment to the U.S. war, sending the aircraft
carrier and battle group Charles De Gaulle to join the
U.S.-led air campaign.
Official France, of the bourgeoisie, has allowed itself
to be viewed as an ally of Israel, which it is, a police
force in Mali, Chad and the Central African Republic
and the U.S.A.s no. 1 client for threats, bombing and
logistical support against the Libyan revolution.

Alongside these fakers to leadership, the faux

Trotskyists (ICL, IBT, Socialist Fight, Revolutionary
Tendency, etc.) see the hand of the CIA behind every
anti-Assad action and so ignore, denounce or oppose
the legitimate uprisings of the masses that took form
in the Local Coordinating Committees (LCC.). These
LCCs struggle to maintain independence from

We call for a Lets go home movement amongst the

French troops and political strikes against Obama and
Hollandes wars. Revolutionary workers in the
imperialist centers of the U.S., France, and the U.K.
must take a defeatist position against their own
bourgeoisie and advocate for their labor organizations
to form up international workers brigades to support
the Syrian, Kurdish and Iraqi revolutionaries that build
the inter-communal fight against imperialism, Assad
and ISIS.

Class Struggle 112

France has deployed 120,000 troops to augment its
police in defense of Jewish institutions. France with
500,000 plus Jewish citizens has the largest
concentration in Europe, but we have no confidence
that this deployment will prevent real anti-Semitic
attacks.
Similarly we
dont see the armed bodies
of the bourgeois state
protecting Frances Muslim
population
in
any
meaningful way.
Quite the contrary, the
police particularly suffer
from the same racist
reactionary mindset
as
their brothers in blue in the
U.S.A. and are anti-Muslim,
anti-immigrant, anti-Roma
and not incidentally anti-Semitic and belong to a
variety of reactionary groups from Le Pens National
Front to the Croix de Feu and latter day neo-fascist
groupings.
We distinguish between real anti-Semitism and self
defense by Palestinians and their supporters who
stand against attacks by Zionists on the streets, as has
happened numerous times over the summer of 2014,
when tens of thousands in France protested Israels
Mowing the lawn war on Gaza.
The police, in all capitalist countries, are the
guarantors of the availability of the option for
authoritarian rule.
The nominal champions of
democracy, the Social Democrats, have as usual
enabled the state forces of repression to expand their
budgets and operations and this can only be bad for
the working class and its manifestations.
France is right at the center of the capitalist crisis in
Europe. The World Bank has just announced their
2015 forecast for the world capitalist economy and it
is flat at 3% growth. The world population is expected
to grow 3% and this renders the growth fictional.
But in France there is no forecast for 3% or even a
larger fraction of 1% growth, while France almost as
much as Germany is the holder of the bad debts of
Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece. So the bourgeois
regime can be expected to attempt to take more
austerity out of the life and flesh of the French
workers and anti-Muslim hysteria will serve that
purpose and has even begun to do so now.
Minority religious communities need to be defended
and we can only entrust this task to the working class.
The way to put an end to rightist violence against
Muslims and Jews in France is for militant workers,
their organizations and inter-communal defense
guards to smash the fascists on the street, putting no
faith in the troopers of the state.

Autumn 2015
Unlike the Committee for a Workers International
(CWI), and not them alone, we declare the plain
truth that cops are not workers but the gunslingers
of capital. Their only relationship to the means of
production is their role as strikebreakers.
In the U.S.A. we are
calling for the expulsion
of the Police Benevolent
Associations
from
all
labor movement bodies
and for the formation of
workers tribunals and
militia exactly to begin
suppression
of
racist
violence, racist police
murders,
and
for
community prosecution of
racist murderers. In this
way black, brown and immigrant communities will be
defended by the working class as a whole.
Naturally this puts the LCC in collision with identity
politics which we see as ultimate props under
bourgeois property relations. Since each identity
politics denies or subordinates the class question to
their utopian project, be it feminist, nationalist, or
other separatist tendencies, each of which would
leave the oppressor capitalist class fundamentally
unmolested in the commanding heights of the
reproduction of their social order.
Liaison Committee of Communists
30 January 2015
Notes:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkeycage/wp/2015/01/18/french-hate-speech-laws-areless-simplistic-than-you-think/
The specific wording of French law forbids insult,
defamation, or provocation to discrimination,
hatred or violencetoward a person or a group of
persons because of their origin or their belonging or
non-belonging to an ethnic group, a nation, a race, or
a determined religion.
French citizens are perfectly free to challenge or
blaspheme religious ideas, symbols, practices, and
even leaders. Obnoxious, insulting, highly offensive
speech is protected speech. Charlie Hebdo has been
sued not only for its depictions of Muhammad, but
also for caricatures of the pope. In fact, Catholic
groups have sued it for anti-religious speech more
often than Muslim ones. Charlie Hebdo prevailed in all
of these cases, except for one (which was initiated by
the Catholics).
http://redrave.blogspot.co.nz/2015/02/nous-nesomme-pas-charlie-hebdo_1.html

10

Class Struggle 112

Autumn 2015

The Revolutionary Crisis in Greece

The January 25th parliamentary elections were a victory for SYRIZA, but is it a
victory for Greek workers? It is to the extent that it opens the road, not to the
utopia of an independent Greek capitalism, but rather to an independent Greek
Socialist Republic as part of a Socialist United States of Europe.
SYRIZA is a social democratic coalition of mainly
former Communists and Social Democrats who left the
KKE and PASOK. They left the KKE because it stands
for an independent Greek capitalism when that is not
possible, since Greece is a semi-colony of EU
imperialism. No semi-colony like Greece can win
independence
unless it becomes a
socialist
republic.
They left PASOK
because it did not
fight
austerity.
SYRIZA offered the
hope that Greece
could fight austerity
and yet stay in the
EU. The January
25th
electoral
victory reflects the
growing hope that
SYRIZA
could
achieve this goal by
negotiating a compromise with the Troika (EU, ECB
and IMF). But what will it have to do to realise these
hopes?
First, SYRIZA has to reject its alliance with ANEL
(Independent
Greeks)
a
rightwing
bourgeois
nationalist party. It is the KKE of the right with links
to Russian fascism. No left government can survive an
alliance with a bourgeois party that represents the
shipping magnates and the high command of the
military. It ties the hands of the working class and
disarms them facing a fascist coup. Those on the left
who claim that this choice was forced upon it by the
KKE refusal to give SYRIZA support in parliament are
parliamentary cretins. A popular front with ANEL will
drive away KKE supporters and vindicate the KKE
characterisation of Syriza as in bed with EU capital.
SYRIZA must break with ANEL and fight as a minority
government on the policy of cancelling the debt to
win the support of the KKE membership and win
enough MPs to win an absolute majority to fight for a
socialist program. Workers must be told the truth that
any negotiated deal to reduce the debt will still leave
generations of Greek workers as debt slaves. This is
the way to prove to the workers of Greece that to
survive they must be prepared to repudiate the debt
and leave the EU and the Euro. Nor should the masses
be fooled that Russian or Chinese imperialism will
rescue the economy. For the masses to live, Greece

must become a socialist republic independent of the

US/EU and Russia/China imperialist blocs!
To avoid the destructive consequences of a default
and break from the EU leading to the collapse of
Greek capitalism, SYRIZA has to prove to workers that
only
a
Workers'
Government
that
comes to power on
the back of workers
councils and workers
militias can turn the
break
with
EU
imperialism into a
victory
for
the
working class - a
Workers Republic.
Such a republic can
only survive if it is
based on the armed
power of a workers
militia that defends
the revolution from the counter-revolution.
Whether this can happen depends on the ability of the
revolutionary left inside and outside of SYRIZA to
overcome its reformist illusions and its sectarian
practices. The majority on the left are reformists who
think that socialism will come through a process of
peaceful transformation via parliament. Most ignore
the popular front as a necessary evil or realpolitik to
form a government. Those like Left Unity who still
think of the bourgeoisie as the enemy and attempt to
justify the popular front with ANEL are complicit in
tying the hands of workers on behalf of the Greek
bourgeoisie.
Those who saw SYRIZA as another cynical manoeuvre
to fool the masses, and refuse it critical support or
even call for its overthrow, are anti-parliamentary
cretins. SYRIZA is a coalition that contains the
contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the
proletariat. That is a bourgeois program and a
proletarian mass base. It is necessary for the
revolutionary left to put proletarian demands on
SYRIZA to explode this contradiction from below so
that the majority of workers who have hopes in
SYRIZA will now see that a mass revolutionary party
can only be built, not on electoral lists, but on the
basis of workers councils and militias.
The popular front will not solve the problem of
unemployment. The alliance with ANEL would not

11

Class Struggle 112

survive
concrete measures to
provide full
employment. These would be seen as a provocation by
the whole bourgeoisie and the EU, NATO and U.S.
imperialism. Consequently the working class
vanguard, while calling for the destruction of the
popular front must not rely on parliament to lead in
providing full employment. This will come from the
workers own actions: factory occupations and sit
down strikes and nationalizations under workers
control that result from work-ins and the
reorganization of production to employ the
unemployed. Work site occupations will require armed
pickets because they will be subject to violent attack
by the fascist Golden Dawn and the police. The
legitimacy and legality of the workers
reorganization of production will derive from the
support of the workers councils not the bourgeois
parliament.
Now is not a moment too soon for worker militants to
begin wholesale fraternization with the enlisted ranks
of the armed forces, the workers in uniform. It is time
to begin the organization of soldiers, sailors, and air
forces councils and to coordinate their actions with
those of the organized workers. It is time to sort out
and replace the defenders of the popular front in the
trade union movement, as well as the treacherous
leaders of PASOK and KKE, insofar as they support
capitalist solutions that are based on pipedreams that
capitalism can resolve its crisis without putting
workers through many more years of life on the rack
of IMF austerity.
So while it is urgent that to open the road to a
socialist republic, SYRIZA must break with ANEL, at
the same time it is even more urgent that the
membership of SYRIZA mobilise mass support for the
party to fight as a Workers Party on a Socialist
Program based on the demand to 'cancel the debt'.
This mass support has to be based on building workers
councils to mobilise action on the streets, building to
a political general strike, and workers militias to
defeat the fascists and defend the strike, leading to
the seizure of power and installation of a Workers
Government.

Break with the popular front now and for

good!

Class political independence is the first

prerequisite for the survival of the working
class. And class independence requires
adoption of a revolutionary socialist
program.

Abrogation of the repayment agreements

with the Troika. Repudiate the debt!

Guaranteed union wages and benefits for

all! For a thirty hour work week and forty
hours pay with a sliding scale of wages and
hours so that all able bodied persons can be
employed. The right to employment is the
last right the workers have before the
complete triumph of tyranny. For billions to

Autumn 2015
employ
workers
remediation.

in

environmental

Not one cent for the French and German

bankers! For free quality socialized
medicine/health care for all. An immediate
investigation and national dialogue on
womens health care needs. End denial of
access of birth control and abortion. For full
free abortion on demand. For free 24-hour
child care!

Equal pay for equal work! Free quality

education for all. No tuition and open
admissions. Living wage stipends for
students!

Greece to quit NATO! Publication of all

government secret treaties! Withdraw all
Greek troops from all NATO military
adventures!

For Greek solidarity with the Syrian and

Arab revolutions! For military support for
the Local Coordinating Committees in Syria
and for their proliferation across the MENA!

Defend the immigrant populations and

support their rights to self-determination!
For workers tribunals which investigate, try
and sentence those who are guilty of racist,
ethnic, homophobic and misogynist crimes
of violence!

Defense of minority and alternative

sexuality populations and neighbourhoods!
For LGBTQ democratic rights now! These
rights
will
only
find
their
fullest
development when guaranteed by workers
democracy!

For labor defense of minority populations

and neighbourhoods! For the immediate
organization of inter-communal workers
militias. For the suppression of the counterrevolution!

Organize a Marxist revolutionary workers

party that has as its principal activity the
advancement of the working class to power
and the consolidation of a workers state
with an internationalist revolutionary
program!

For
a
new
revolutionary
workers
international based on the program and
method of Trotskys 1938 Transitional
Program, the first four congresses of Lenins
Third International and the resolve to
accomplish all the revolutionary tasks of the
completion of democracy, socialism and the
march of civilization to communism!

For a Socialist United States of Europe!

http://redrave.blogspot.co.nz/2015/01/therevolutionary-crisis-in-greece.html

12

Class Struggle 112

Autumn 2015

Syriza: Revolutionary lessons from

Russia to Greece!
Mike Treen, National Director of Unite!, the NZ union, argues that Syrizas
success in Greece may vindicate those who claim that bourgeois parliament can
open the road to socialist revolution in the 21st century. He attempts to justify
this political conviction by illustrating how history proves him right. Of course
we reserve the same right. We follow him through his historical examples from
the Russian October to the Greek March and prove him wrong!

Mike Treen states: The SYRIZA victory and the

electoral victories of left-wing governments in Latin
America over the past 15 years have placed on the
political agenda the issue of whether socialists can
use elections in capitalist society as springboards to a
deeper revolutionary socialist transformation of
society in the interests of the majority of working
people.

The Russian Revolution

We agree that this is an important question. But the
examples Mike Treen uses dont prove his point. The
political tendency he once belonged to, the Socialist
Workers Party (SWP-US), in the 1980s revised their
view of the Bolshevik revolution claiming that
although Lenin called for soviets to power he was
actually for a democratic dictatorship in which
workers and poor peasants shared power with rich
capitalist peasants. This shared power was necessary
because Russia still had to complete the bourgeois
tasks of national independence and overthrow the
feudal landlords. The bourgeois revolution had to be
completed before the socialist revolution was
possible.

Yet Lenin famously rejected the workers sharing

power with rich peasants. In his April Theses he
stated: The specific feature of the present situation
in Russia is that the country is passing from the first
stage of the revolutionwhich, owing to the
insufficient class-consciousness and organisation of
the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the
bourgeoisieto its second stage, which must place
power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest
sections of the peasants.
Yet, the SWP now claimed that Lenin, despite the
April Theses, never abandoned power sharing with
rich peasants in April 1917 and that the Bolshevik
program remained the Democratic Dictatorship of the
Proletariat and the Peasantry. The implication must
be that the Bolsheviks made a mistake and were
premature in sending the Cossacks (rich peasant
soldiers) to disband the Constituent Assembly
(parliament) for which elections had already been
held, and replacing this bourgeois parliament with a
Workers and Poor Peasants Government' based on
soviets of workers, poor peasants and soldiers and
sailors.

13

Class Struggle 112

Mike Treen may no longer subscribe to the SWP (US)
theory today, however in his blog post he infers that
in practice, the Bolsheviks realised their mistake and
encouraged the rich peasants to enrich themselves in
a desperate attempt to bolster the economy (the New
Economic Program or NEP). Stalins dictatorship, in
reversing these market reforms and collectivising
everything, led ultimately to the decline and fall of
the Soviet Union.
What the SWP was actually trying to do in its revised
version of the Bolshevik Revolution was to return to
the pre-April Theses position that workers would
share power with the capitalist peasants in a
democratic dictatorship; that is, a bourgeois
parliament that would destroy the remnants of
feudalism and develop capitalism sufficiently to allow
the majority of workers and working peasants to make
a socialist revolution.
This was an open attack on Trotskys theory of
Permanent Revolution, which argued that such
democratic tasks could not be completed in a
power-sharing alliance with any capitalist class whose
interests firmly aligned it to imperialism. In the epoch
of imperialism all democratic tasks could only be
completed under the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Lenin in the April Theses endorsed this theory. It
meant that henceforth, only the workers and poor
peasants in power could complete the outstanding
tasks of the bourgeois revolution such as national
independence and the end to landlordism. It excluded
all power sharing, later known as popular fronts, with
the bourgeoisie, including the rich peasants.
But the SWP needed to revise the history of the
Bolshevik revolution and the theory of Permanent
Revolution so as to legitimate the power-sharing
popular front parliamentary road as the correct
revolutionary strategy for socialists today.
In reality, the Russian Revolution did not succumb to a
wrong strategy on the part of the Bolsheviks. Russia
faced either a workers revolution where workers led
the poor peasants to power, or a Tsarist counterrevolution supported by the rich peasants. The rich
peasants could only become part of the revolution if
the counter-revolution was defeated and their petty
capitalist interests were subordinated to the workers
state.
This was proved when the Provisional Government
under Kerensky allied itself to the Tsarist General
Kornilov in an attempt to smash the soviets and was
defeated when his troops were won over to the
soviets. The October Revolution took power and
incorporated the rich peasants into the socialist plan
but never shared power with them.
As to the degeneration (bureaucratisation) of the
revolution, this was due not to the mistaken
revolutionary program of the Bolsheviks, but rather
the capitalist counter-revolution that surrounded,
invaded and isolated it, and defeated the revolution

Autumn 2015
in Germany. One of the results of this setback was the
reliance upon the rich peasantry in the New Economic
Policy (NEP).

The German revolution

In Germany, the soviets were, as Treen says, defeated
by social democracy committed to bourgeois
parliamentary elections. This was inevitable because
the Spartacists (the German Bolsheviks) were too
weak to win a majority in the workers councils
(soviets) and make a proletarian revolution. Therefore
the new bourgeois republic had to go through a stage
of sharing power with the bourgeoisie in preparing the
working class for socialist revolution. However, in
fact, the conditions for proletarian revolution did
exist as the soldiers and sailors mutinied and formed
armed soviets all over Germany. What was lacking was
the revolutionary leadership to guide the armed
workers towards revolution.
The Spartacists led by Luxemburg and Liebknecht had
only recently broken from the United Social
Democratic Party (USPD) of Kautsky (which advocated
a parliamentary transition) and the old Social
Democratic Party (SDP - the Second International
Party that voted to go to war in August 4, 1914), and
did not have the influence of the Bolsheviks to win
majorities in the soviets and lead an insurrection. The
USPD and SPD were able to persuade the majority of
workers to vote them into power in the new capitalist
republic. Ebert, the SPD leader became the
Chancellor.
Yet, instead of ushering in a progressive transition to
socialism, these capitalist elections became the front
for a counter-revolution in which the SPD, USPD led
Government allied to the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy
(Junkers) and the fascists smashed the armed soviets,
and assassinated its leaders, including Luxemburg and
Liebknecht, ushering in a long period of fascist
reaction in Europe that culminated in the rise of
Hitler to power. As mentioned above, the defeat of
the German revolution isolated the Soviet Union. So it
was German social democracy in league with fascism
that led directly to the bureaucratic degeneration of
the Russian Revolution under Stalin.

Revolution in Yugoslavia,
Vietnam, Cuba...

China,

The revolutions that followed in China, Cuba, Vietnam

etc all followed more or less the Russian model of
workers and poor peasants governments replacing
capitalist governments. While the leaders of these
revolutions were Stalinists or petty bourgeois
nationalists who attempted to share power with the
bourgeoisie (including the rich peasants), as in the
bloc of four classes of Stalins famous popular front
in China in the 1920s, they were always faced with
armed counter-revolution, and survived only because
the mass pressure from below of workers and poor
peasants forced them to go all the way to socialist
insurrection.

14

Class Struggle 112

Events proved that the bourgeoisie will never share
power in parliaments with the working class when that
class is armed and fighting a civil war. We saw it in
Germany in 1923, in China in 1927, in Italy and
Germany when the fascists staged parliamentary
coups. In Spain during the civil war the Republican
parliaments trapped the workers in the popular fronts
in Madrid and Barcelona where they were disarmed
and slaughtered by the fascist army.
History shows that bourgeois parliaments are death
traps disarming workers in the face of fascism, and
so must be overthrown and replaced with Workers
and Peasants Governments.
The defeat of the fascist regimes in Europe (mainly by
the sacrifices of the Soviet Union) created the
conditions for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie. In
Eastern Europe the Red Army kicked out the
capitalists. In Yugoslavia Titos partisans took power.
In China the long March led to a peasant uprising in
1949 which became a Government of poor peasants
allied to the workers. In Vietnam a war of
independence against the French liberated the North
but was met by the armed intervention of US
imperialism in the South. Cuba threw out the US mafia

bourgeoisie in 1959 and despite attempts to remain on

good terms with the US was attacked militarily and
forced into the arms of the Soviet Union.
In each of these cases, these revolutions fell short of
the Russian Revolution because the armed workers
and soldiers were not in command. Such was the total
blockade by imperialism, their isolation and
dependence on the Stalinist Soviet Union that these
revolutions were born as bureaucratised deformed
workers states.
So it was not any failure to follow the parliamentary
road in these countries that led to the eventual
collapse of their revolutions and the restoration of
capitalism. It was armed counter-revolution,
encirclement, cold war and imperialist propaganda
that resulted in their bureaucratisation and
ultimately to the restoration of capitalism.
In fact, the strategy of the imperialists to destroy the
workers states was one of democratic counterrevolution. The capitalists sucked in most of the
left including all those who long held illusions in the
parliamentary
road,
to
propagandise
the
parliamentary road back to capitalism. The evils of

Autumn 2015
communism were portrayed as godless collectivism
counter-posed the righteous capitalist democracy and
free market. The bureaucratic elites in the workers
states played along with reforms ushering in
democracy and market freedoms.
In most cases the restoration of capitalism was via the
democratic road of replacing One Party States with
bourgeois democracies. However, these democracies
arose as the result of bloody invasions as in Vietnam,
or of murderous ethnic cleansing as in Yugoslavia.
Only where imperialist intervention failed to create a
democratic faction within the Stalinist bureaucracy
to take control of the party, did restoration take the
form of market socialism as in China and Cuba.
All this proves, contrary to the ideology of the
parliamentary road opening the road to socialism,
that it has proved to be either a barrier to socialist
revolution, or, a counter-revolutionary means of
opening the door to the restoration of capitalism
under the guise of bourgeois democracy.

The Bolivarian Revolution

The Bolivarian Revolution that Treen speaks of has so
far failed to build soviets based on workers and poor
peasants capable of taking power from the popular
front capitalist governments of the Chavistas in
Venezuela and the MAS (Movement for Socialism) in
Bolivia. This is because there is no vanguard party in
Venezuela or Bolivia capable of breaking workers out
of their popular front parties, as Trotsky called them,
the PSUV and the MAS. These are the more commonly
called populist parties which combine workers and
petty bourgeoisie sharing power with the so-called
progressive national bourgeoisie, in one political
party.
When Trotsky was exiled to Mexico in 1936 he was in
the box seat to observe the nationalisation of the
Anglo-American oil companies in 1938 by the regime
of General Cardenas. He said that while workers
should support these nationalisations they did not
amount to the socialisation of capitalist property. The
state in essence remained the state of the capitalist
class and would have to be overthrown and state
property turned into workers property. Failing that, it
was easy for the capitalists, especially a coup backed
by the US, to privatise state property back into the
hands of privately owned companies. Therefore, the
task for revolutionaries was to break from the populist
parties and their regimes, seize power, and install
Workers and Peasants governments with the armed
workers, peasants and soldiers in command.
These lessons were written into the Transitional
Program that Trotsky drafted in 1938, two years
before his assassination by an agent of Stalin. The first
major test of this program in Latin America was in
1952 when the miners in Bolivia staged an armed
insurrection against the Bolivian ruling class. Instead
of taking power and installing a Workers and
Peasants government, the miners abandoned their

15

Class Struggle 112

program (Theses of Pulacayo) and shared power with
progressive capitalist Caudillo Paz Estenssoro in the
petty bourgeois MNR government. This allowed the
ruling class to rally, arm its own supporters, and
defeat the revolution.
A revolution that finishes in a half-way house power
sharing government with the bourgeoisie is already
half dead. Many such betrayals of workers in Latin
America including that of Peron in Argentina, and
Allende in Chile, right up to the populist
party/regimes in Venezuela and Bolivia today, follow
the same pattern of revolutions strangled by workers
sharing power with the bourgeoisie in popular fronts.
Therefore it is defeatist to wait for the populist
leaders like Allende, Maduro or Morales to call for
communes when they actively suppress independent
workers and peasants armed mobilisations. Not until
armed soviets are built from below and workers split
from the popular front parties will the bourgeoisie be
thrown out of power and replaced by workers and
peasants
governments
that
advance
the
revolutionary transformation.

Syriza and the Greek Revolution

Syriza and Podemos have arisen to replace the
betrayals of PASOK and the Socialist Party but are
modelled on the Latin American popular front of class
collaboration between workers and the bourgeoisie.
Syriza has formed a popular front with ANEL a
rightwing nationalist party and is talking about
nominating a former minister in the bourgeois New
Democracy party as its Presidential candidate. As with
all popular fronts, its purpose is to contain the
demands of the masses within what is acceptable to
the bourgeoisie. In this case the Germany imperialist
bourgeoisie.
Thus the Syriza leadership has turned its back on the
rank and file demand to repudiate the debt and end
austerity and is negotiating with the banks for more
favourable terms. All of the left in Syriza with the
exception of the Communist Tendency accepted the
bloc with the rightwing ANEL, and none have
protested the appointment of its leader as Minister of
Defence. So much for parliamentary democracy
opening the road to revolution!
Syrizas parliamentary strategy immediately came to
grief. The EU as part of the world capitalist economy
is in trouble. German imperialism if facing decline as
its economy stagnates and is in no position to grant
Greece even minor favours. Letting Greece off even
part of its debt repayment would send a message all
the bankrupt fellow PIIGS. So Syriza has already
betrayed its supporters in doing a deal that recycles
Greek debt and delays the implementation of its antiausterity program.
The reaction of the left of Syriza however, does not
question the parliamentary road only that Syriza must

Autumn 2015
get off the highway and take the byway in renouncing
the debt and leaving the Euro.
Apart from the Communist Tendency It does not even
call for a break from ANEL or for mass popular
organisation to defend it against a rightwing coup!
Thus the left version of the popular front is still a
death trap. The Minister of Defence can stage a coup

from inside cabinet!

The revolutionary left in Syriza must draw the
historical lessons. Workers participation in bourgeois
parliaments cannot be progressive in the epoch of
imperialism. This is true of workers parties forming
governments which are powerless in the face of the
institutions of the state including the armed forces,
the bureaucracy and its paramilitaries. It is even
worse when workers are trapped in popular front
parties like the PSUV and the MAS, or workers parties
enter parliamentary blocs with open bourgeois parties
like ANEL. They are no more than fascist fodder. As
we saw above, Bolivia, 1952, tells the truth about the
popular front!
The next step towards the Greek revolution is for
workers to split Syriza from its bourgeois partners in
Greece, and from its imperialist masters in the EU, to
unite to build a mass workers party and to form
independent workers councils and militias to defend
the class from the state and its fascist paramilitaries.
Only then can it open the road to a victorious socialist
revolution the formation of a Greek socialist republic
within a wider Federations of Socialist Republics of
Europe.

Forward to the Revolution!

Bourgeois elections
can only
advance
the
revolutionary transformation by default. That is by
dashing the hopes of the masses that support them
and in the process exposing bourgeois parliaments, as
in Germany 1920 and 2015, as no more than a
democratic front for the counter-revolution.
That is why it is a matter of urgency to build
revolutionary parties with a program for armed soviets
of workers and the oppressed in every country to
resist the inevitable reactionary fascist movements
that will be unleashed by the bourgeoisie to smash the
revolutionary mobilisation of the masses.

16

Class Struggle 112

Autumn 2015

U.S.A. became Imperialist, what about NZ,

South Africa and Australia?
Arising out of our analysis of the reasons for the emergence of China and Russia
as new imperialist powers, a few other questions have arisen. If China and Russia
can, why not Brazil, India, even South Africa? The answer is that semi-colonies
cannot accumulate enough surplus value to become economically independent of
existing imperialist powers. However, there may be one category of semi-colonies
that could break out of this trap, or so some of the left thinks. These are the
European settler colonies. We think we can prove them wrong.
The epoch of imperialism arose in the late 19th century
as the main European powers expanded beyond their
borders to embark on colonial exploitation to escape
the limits to capital accumulation. Marx in Vol 3 of
Capital explained the need to find cheaper land, raw
materials, and labour power to escape the limits of the
Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (TRPF).
At the time Lenin wrote his pamphlet, Imperialism The
Highest Stage of Capitalism, in 1915 he envisaged a
world economy in the process of being divided among
all the imperialist powers into rival spheres of
interest. Competition to expand further would mean
more wars unless the workers of the world rose up and
overthrow their imperialist ruling classes.
Given this battle to re-divide the world by the
imperialist powers, none of the colonies would be able
to break free of dependency upon imperialism short of
socialist revolutions. Failing that, they would remain
colonies, semi-colonies or neo-colonies. Their political
independence was rendered inoperative because of
their economic dependence.

European Settler Colonies

One category of colonies, European Settler colonies,
may be the exception to this rule. They seem to have
more real political sovereignty and control over the
economy than other semi-colonies. Thus the US,
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Brazil
and Israel are often held up as countries that were able
to make the transition from settler colony to imperialist
powers (if relatively small), while the vast majority of
colonies that were not settled by Europeans, remained
trapped in neo-colonial dependency.
Yet if we look at these countries, only the US was able
to become a major imperialist power. The fate of the
others is less clear cut. The reason for this is that the
US had a complete national revolution where it broke
its ties of political and economic dependence on its
former colonial master, Britain. It could impose tariffs
on British goods and protect local manufacturers until
they were big enough to compete. It also had a Civil
War that eliminated backward pre-capitalist modes of
production.

All the other countries settled by Europeans, however,

did not have wars of independence against their
colonial masters (except in Latin America where the
wars of independence fell short of economic
independence from European capitalist powers). While
they had a limited self-government that enabled them
to protect their domestic economies, this was
insufficient to prevent imperialism from retaining a
large share of national surplus-value and limiting
national capital accumulation. Nevertheless, some
argue that they were sufficiently decolonised in the
20th Century to achieve economic independence and
become minor imperialist powers.
We can test the proposition that political
decolonisation in the 30 years between the Great
Depression and end of the post war boom enabled the
former
settler
colonies
to
resist
economic
recolonisation during the neo-liberal years from the
1970s to the present. To what extent did national
economic development enable these countries to
become sufficiently independent so as to resist neoliberal recolonisation?
We can test this fairly easily in the case of the weakest
states, New Zealand, South Africa and Australia. These
settler colonies very early became part of an imperial
division-of-labour where they produced raw materials
for export and imported finished goods from the
imperialist motherland. Tariff protection enabled a
degree of domestic manufacturing but this always
remained relatively limited mainly based on branch
plants owned by imperialist capital and financed by
imperialist banks. In other words, the decolonisation
process was largely illusory as surplus value was
siphoned off by imperialism leaving these countries
relatively
underdeveloped
and
economically
dependent.

NZ, South Africa and Australia

There is no question that NZ was very quickly
recolonised from the early 1970s as domestic capital
sought to modernise and compete internationally. The
neo-liberal counter-revolution during the Fourth
Labour Government 1984-89, virtually destroyed the
basis of economic protectionism built up over 40 years

17

Class Struggle 112

in 5 years. The fake left in NZ say that NZ is miniimperialist on the basis usually of its predatory role in
the South Pacific and historic high living standards.
In the case of South Africa, we have written about its
dependence
on
imperialism,
Anglo-American
historically, but now increasingly that of China. We
reject any notion that South Africa is imperialist by any
conception. Nor is it sub-imperialist in the terms of
the BRIC intelligentsia which adds to South Africas
semi-colonial dependence, measure of independence
earned by a share of the surplus for performing a
subcontracted role as manager of imperialist affairs in
the whole of Africa.
Australia, however, is viewed by many on the left as a
minor imperialism. This includes ourselves (CWG NZ)
since the 1990s. Australias protected manufacturing
allowed a weak national bourgeois fraction to emerge,
alongside the traditional pastoral and mining
bourgeoisie. Australia was more resilient than NZ to
neo-liberal deregulation as it was not dependent on
protected manufacturing alone and could sustain
growth in the late 80s and 90s due to its booming
mining industry.
However, the neo-liberalisation of Australia under
Hawke and Howard saw this national bourgeoisie largely
swallowed up by international finance capital. And
while NZ banks were all Australian owned, the big four
Australian banks became controlled by HSBC, JPMorgan,
Citigroup and BNP Paridas as the shareholders. As one
commentator puts it: Both commercial and mining
companies ownership are dominated by HSBC
Nominees, JP Morgan
Nominees, and Citibank
Nominees as the top three
shareholders
of
most
companies.
If
one
examines
company
directorships there is a
tight cross-linking across
commerce, banking and
mining in Australia today.
Commerce, banking and
mining are now part of an
oligopoly.

Autumn 2015
an Australian imperialist class but rather to
international finance capital of the major banks and
corporations. This control was demonstrated by the
defeat of the Rudd Resource Super Profits tax that
gifted $billions to the foreign owners of the mining
industry.
The OECD says that Australian federal revenue from
mining profits is the lowest in the world. The foreign
shareholders get about half of the value added: For
every $100 in value added by the mining industry, state
governments get $6 and employees get $20. This leaves
a profit of $74. Of that amount, the federal
government gets $14, foreign shareholders get $48, and
Australian resident shareholders get $12. It seems then
that far from breaking out of semi-colonial dependency
into mini-imperialism, Australia has been taken over
by international finance capital and Chinese
monopolies.

Australia as sub-imperialist
Various left groups call Australia small, minor, mini,
regional, or junior imperialism. Their method is
empirical in toting up the foreign investment figures
and pointing to Australias policing role in partnership
with Britain or the US.
Ashley Lavelle, in Who Owns Australia, writing in
2001, argues against the radical nationalist line that
Australia is being taken over by foreign investors.
Australia is an advanced capitalist economy as only
25% of Australian firms are owned and controlled by
foreign capital. This means that the main enemy is not
foreign capital, but the
Australian ruling class. In
the two main sectors of
the economy we find 9%
penetration in mining and
30%
penetration
in
finance. Even in 2000 this
is enough concentration of
finance
capital
to
dominate the Australian
economy.

We conclude that Australia developed behind

protectionist barriers for the period from the 1930s to
1980s yet failed to achieve economic independence. Its
national bourgeoisie remained weak and dependent on
international finance capital. The hallmark of
imperialism is the over-accumulation of capital that
must be exported to gain access to cheap land, raw
materials and labour power. Australia has failed to do
this on its own account. Its national finance capital is
dominated by EU, US and increasingly Chinese finance
capital. In the key growth sector of mining, the three
largest Australian corporations, BHP Billiton is 75%,
Rio Tinto 80%, and Xtrata 100% foreign owned. The
monopoly rent from mining has therefore been largely
siphoned off by international finance capital.

The Democratic Socialist

Party joins the pack
yapping at the nationalists
heels. It claims that Australia is a small, regional
imperialist power, a junior partner of Washington
with its own sphere of influence such as Melanesia
and East Timor. Sandra Bloodworth of the International
Socialist Organisation, writing in 2004 says Australia is a
minor but regional imperialist power. Australia joined
the war on terror in support of the USA and acted to
fulfil its regional policing role in the South Pacific, for
example in the Solomons. Australia profits from
investments in this region, e.g. in Papua New Guinea
mining and owns 50% of Fijian business. Another left
outfit accuses Australia of mini-imperialism in
exploiting and oppressing East Timor and seizing its oil
resources in the Timor Sea.

So the flow of FDI into Australia and OFDI out of

Australia does not represent super-profits accruing to

Tom Bramble of Socialist Alternative writing in the

Marxist Left Review Australian Imperialism and the

18

Class Struggle 112

rise of China aligns himself with other left academics
who speak of Australia and Canada as secondary
imperialisms. Bramble recognises the rise of imperialist
China has consequences for Australian trade and its
relationship with the US. But China has been imperialist
for some time according to the Cliffites.
Yet Australias dependence on the US and increasingly
China, does not cause him to challenge the prevailing
Australian Cliffite and DSP view on Australian junior
imperialism. He does not question Australias obvious
subordinate role to UK and US finance capital and as an
exporter of minerals to China. He fails to notice that
the Australian mining industry is largely foreign owned,
increasingly favouring China. And that Australias
regional policing role has been overtaken by its
integration under Gillard and Abbott as a forward base
for the US military.
The Northite ICFI
(WSWS) writing in
2014 sees Australia
as
imperialist
despite its political
subservience to US
imperialism. WSWS
argues that after
the Global Financial
Crisis and the 2010
coup to remove
Labour
Prime
Minister
Rudd
(because he was in
favour of US and
China
friendship
and the resource
tax), Australia has
been
drawn
completely into the
US pivot to Asia.
The Abbott Govt is even closer to the US. The result is
Australia coming under direct domination by the US
dictating a militarist foreign policy and an austerity
domestic policy which it calls a counter-revolution.
The Shorten Labor Party is also committed to war and
austerity. But for the WSWS Russia and China are not
imperialist, and Australia despite its dependence on the
US remains a minor imperialist power.
Its clear that while the case made for Australias
economic independence is weak, most of the left
regard Australia as a junior partner of US (and
increasingly) Chinese capital on the strength of its
imperialist policing role. Therefore, we can file the
various labels for Australian junior imperialism under
sub-imperialist which is the vogue term on the BRIC
left to mean a small power that serves imperialism and
is paid in a share of the subcontracted colonial tribute.
We have argued that the label sub-imperialist is
meaningless since it represents a distributional
definition of oppression which looks at shareholdings on
stock markets and living standards but ignores the

Autumn 2015
fundamental reality that the bulk of surplus-value
produced is expropriated by international finance
capital at its source, even if some of it flows back as
kickbacks to the Australian capitalist class. A good
example of a kickback for Australias military bloc with
the US is Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton licence to mine
public land in the US.
Reviewing the evidence of takeover we think that we
were wrong to get taken in by the flash statistics of
economic independence when foreign ownership of the
key economic sectors has always been British and
increasingly US. With China being welcomed to buy up
mining interests and privatised state assets by the Rudd
Government it seems that Australias economic
dependence must increase. While some of the left
have noted the growing influence of China and US, this
influence
is
not
taken to its logical
conclusions.
Australias political
sovereignty is up for
sale with the US FTA
and the impending
TPPA. China now has
a TPA and is also
ready
to
invest
heavily. Australias
independent
policing role has
been overtaken by
US bases in Darwin
and suborning its
navy to RIMPAC in
the
military
containment
of
China. It is the
sausage
in
the
sandwich
as
the
hegemonic US and
the rapidly rising China flex their muscles to contest
control of the Asia Pacific region.
Our conclusion is that for all Australias so-called
sub-imperialist role as South Pacific partner of
Britain and US has always been a form of dependency
and is now clearly exposed by the growing rivalry
between China and US imperialism. Even hard bitten
liberal journos can see that this rips Australia apart
as its ruling class tries to serve two imperialist
masters at the same time.
The political consequences of this reality are that
Australian workers have the task of kicking out their
ruling class and taking the leadership of the struggle
to win national independence from both US and
Chinese imperialism, creating a Socialist Republic of
Australia within a Socialist United States of Asia
Pacific!
Next Issue: Canada and the USA.

19

Class Struggle 112

Autumn 2015

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 labour 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 capitalisms 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 preconditions 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
capitalisms 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, in a

Liaison Committee of Communists with Communist Workers Group (USA) and

Revolutionary Workers Group (Zimbabwe)
Class Struggle and most articles are online at http://redrave.blogspot.com
Phone +64 0272800080
Email cwg2007@hotmail.com
Archive of publications before 2006 http://communistworker.blogspot.com/

20