Class Struggle 119

Capitalism
Is Upside
Down Overturn
It!

Class Struggle 119

Summer 2016 -2017

Syrian Revolution
PM Key Resigns
Marx & Science

Abolish Prisons
Climate Crash
Dump Trump!
Revolutionary
Party

Summer 2016-2017

Class Struggle 119

Summer 2016 -2017

#FJK - Agent of Finance Capital

Prime Minister John Keys sudden resignation has created a flurry on the surface of NZ
politics. Left, Right and Centre are writing political obituaries about his legacy.
Legacies refer to what politician have done to establish their reputations in history.
But what are the hidden assumptions behind the evaluations of political reputations?
Unless these assumptions are tested and critiqued, John Keys actual historic role as
an agent of the international finance capital cannot be understood.
As usual the Left is wallowing in superficial chatter.
Keys reputation is as a smooth operator who kept a
fragile coalition majority lined up over a 3-term
government. Therefore, his departure becomes an
opportunity for the
opposition
to
improve
their
chances of winning
in 2017. Little has
to step-up and
Labour-Greens plus
a
rejigged
Mana/MP combo,
and
even
a
populist NZ First,
could combine to
form
the
next
coalition
government.
Much of the Lefts
animus is directed
at Key as if he was
personally responsible for the failure of the left to
win support and remove National from power. This
means the left failed because they could not put up
a leader who could compete with Keys popularity.
So the Left sees their failure as the direct
consequence of Keys success in winning the middle
ground. Yet Keys success can only be explained by
the way he represented the interests of his class, not
his personal attributes as such. And that can only be
explained by first acknowledging what those class
interests are.
Of course, this is equally true of the Lefts
representation of certain class interests. And we
have always argued that the true difference between
Key and his various Labour, Green and NZ First
leadership rivals, is that Key understands and knows
how to serve his capitalist class masters, while the
Left continues to subordinate the interests of
working class to those of the capitalist ruling class by
appealing to a classless middle NZ. We will develop
this point in the section Left Opposition in Capitalist
Politics below.

Economics determines politics

As we have argued in Class Struggle before, bourgeois
democracy is a false representation of reality. It
presents capitalism as based on the equal
opportunity
of
sovereign
individuals
who
delegate
their
sovereignty
to
their
political
representatives in
parliaments
or
congresses where
they legislate to
manage
the
economy in the
supposed
national interest.
Thus,
the
exploitative
capital
relation
based
on
a
fundamental class inequality in the ownership of
property, and the conflict and crises that result, are
obscured by the fetish of representative democracy
based on the will of sovereign and equal individuals.
Politics therefore is an extension of economics,
where parliament is no more than a committee to
manage the affairs of the ruling capitalist class. The
best capitalist politicians are selected (trained, coopted) to manage those ruling class interests. They
do this in two ways. The first is the use state power
to advance, protect and subsidise private property
and the production of profits. Second, is the role of
political leaders to manage the destructive social
consequences of capitalist economic policies.
In simple terms the success of Key in managing
capitalism then comes down to his performance in
advancing the conditions for economic growth on the
basis of profitability, and presenting the growing
social inequality arising from this as no more than the
failure of individuals to make the best of their
opportunities in the market. The radical critique of
crony capitalism does not penetrate this veil either

Class Struggle 119

because it implies a non-crony or egalitarian
capitalism as the Left alternative to the capture of
capitalism by cronies.
To assess Keys performance in serving not just his
cronies but internationalist finance capital, we
have to understand both the place of the NZ economy
in the world capitalist economy and the state of the
world economy as a whole. These structural
conditions determine the tasks of managing NZ
capitalism, and Keys success or failure, as with all
politicians, as a political manager. For an analysis of
why Trump cannot overcome the Terminal crisis of
capitalism or suppress the social conflict it creates
without turning himself into a Louis Bonaparte-type
dictator, see our article Trumped, Stumped and
Dumped in this issue of Class Struggle.

NZ: Neo-colony in global Terminal Crisis

The difference between the US and NZ is that the
former is an imperialist state while NZ is a semicolony of the US and, in the 21st century, of China.
China, along with Russia, is now part of an emerging
imperialist bloc in competition with the US-led bloc.
In relation to the US and China, NZ has an economy
that is integrated into the global economy as a
producer of mainly primary produce and tertiary
services open to foreign investment, ownership and
control. Trumps task to overcome the decline in US
imperialism means making weaker imperialist powers
such as China, and the neo-colonial countries like NZ
pay for the crisis. This is turn determines the task of
neo-colonial or comprador capitalists like Key to
act as the agents one or other imperialist countries.
When most of the NZ Left shares the superficial view
that NZ is a minor imperialist power, why do we insist
that NZ is a neo-or semi-colony? We can only
summarise NZs capitalist evolution here. For a fuller
Marxist account see The Evolution of Capitalism in
NZ. NZ from its settler colonisation has always been
some form of colony dominated by imperialism. The
extraction of surplus from agriculture etc., and
export of raw materials consigned the colony to
underdevelopment, rising inequality, and finally a
shift from protectionism to the neoliberal counterrevolution from the mid-1980s until today.
Rogernomics called for a new comprador class that
rejected economic nationalism as no longer in the
interests of international finance capital. From that
point on, NZ deregulated its protected market to
open it to the global capitalist economy.
A new set of politicians committed to neo-liberalism,
or its left third way variant were now thrust
forward to manage the deregulated economy. So,
John Key inherited the neo-liberal legacy of
managing a neo-colony a full 20 years after the neo-

Summer 2016-2017
liberal turn in 1984. He was uniquely suited to that
task as no other National Party leader had his
background in international finance. This is why some
of the conspiratorial Left has seen him as an agent of
Wall St, and this may well be behind Winston Peters
response to Keys resignation that he jumped ship
before the ship hit the fan. Key represents
international capital and knows that NZ is not a
healthy, Rockstar, capitalist economy facing a global
economy about to crash. NZ is a fragile, dependent
economy for which Terminal Crisis will pose a new
set of tasks, complementary to those of Trump, of
making NZ neo-colonial workers and working farmers
pay for the crisis with their livelihoods and lives.

Left Opposition in Capitalist Politics

Instead of basing its strategy on the demise of Key
freeing up the middle ground, the Left Opposition
should rethink its bourgeois assumptions about
politics. If Key is an agent of international finance
capital, and performed well in advancing its
interests, then the Left Opposition policy should
counter-pose the interests of those who work for a
living and produce a program that fights finance
capital. We dont mean finance capital as Wall St
speculators, but the Marxist definition of the fusion
of banking and productive capital. Instead of playing
its classic role of boosting illusions in a reformed
capitalism, the Left should understand that the
coming economic crash fused together with abrupt
climate change has exhausted the potential for
capitalist reforms. In the face of Terminal Crisis, we
need a Left Opposition that turns to socialism to solve
the crisis.
The Left has to give up on the failed utopia of Social
Democracy, and more critically, bourgeois
democracy serving all citizens and nations equally.
The history of bourgeois democracy is that it acts to
defend capital and prevent the independent
mobilisation of the working class internationally.
Worse, it softens workers up for fascism and
imperialist war. The delusion that class can be
legislated out of existence has to be exploded. The
Left has to overcome its failed legacy of reforms now
destroyed by the neo-liberal counter-revolution, and
go forward towards the working-class majority
building its own organisations outside parliament,
and increasingly committed to overthrowing the
capitalist state and the ruling class it represents. This
is what we mean by Survival Socialism!

For a Workers Government, capable of

expropriating capital and building a socialist
economy and society as part of a Pacific
Federation of Socialist Republics!

Class Struggle 119

Summer 2016 -2017

Abolish Prisons!
The NZ state announces another $1billion to be spent building another 1800 prison
beds. Under capitalism prisons are part of a justice system which criminalises
workers by locking them up for petty crimes against property and persons while
white collar criminals if charged often get name suppression and home detention.
While some other countries are getting over the war on drugs and punitive
imprisonment, NZ is getting more draconian applying the 3 strikes and youre
out viciousness of Senseless Sentencing. We say: organise workers power to
stop the war on drugs, make jobs or all, pay a living wage, and abolish prisons!
Police and prisons and the (in)justice system all
exists to protect the ruling class, to defend their
property; private property (capitalist property).
The overall function of their laws clearly results in
the imprisonment of the working class (including
unemployed) disproportionately, with youth and
Maori particularly over-represented = harshly
oppressed.
The history of colonisation was the introduction of
capitalism in NZ. This included the theft by force
from Maori (land
wars and colonial
laws,
including
confiscations) of
Maori land (part
of the means of
production in an
agricultural
settler economy).
The effect of
losing
lands
(means
of
production) was
also to turn Maori
into a working
class: reliant on
1
waged slavery to
survive.
The ruling class (capitalists) legal system was wholly
to defend the ruling class: including their
entitlement to lands.
Now a few Maori under Waitangi treaty settlements,
are bought out with deals, and so have transformed
into capitalists. The promise of tribal trickle-down $
to ordinary iwi members is not to be seen.

Prisons create a criminal class

The suicide rate in prisons is 10 times the general
population rate which for NZ is obscenely high. The
harm that occurs in prisons is generally ignored. News
media reports about fight clubs occurring, is an
exception. Inhumane treatment of transgender

woman in solitary confinement due to assaults in a

mens prison, is exposed mostly due to the
campaigning of the No Pride in Prisons activist
group. Inhumane treatment of a terminally ill
woman, in the Wiri womens prison is exposed due to
the preparedness of family to campaign and speak
out on her behalf in public media. The individual
cases that make the media are worth of better
treatment, however these are the rule in a prison
system built on a model of control, punishment and
vengeance.
And despite a
focus
on
reducing
reoffending (goal
of 25% by 2017)
the
so-called
Department of
Corrections
(responsible for
running
prisons
and
probation
services) clearly
fails to reduce
re-offending
faster than the
state changes law
and
increases
crimes and jail terms.
The recent announcement of needing to build
another prison is in-part caused by the popularity of
methamphetamine. The cash paydays available in
manufacture and distribution of methamphetamine
are attractive to anyone tired of working class
condition (waged slavery) struggling for a decent
reward. And of course the drug itself provides a
direct neural reward (short-term) that is a break
from harsh realities of life under capitalist rule.
Methamphetamine was re-classified class A (approx.
2003) which meant the (in)justice system has since
then dealt out longer prison terms for manufacture
and dealing. It also meant an overload in the High

Class Struggle 119

Court where Class A drug manufacture and supply
cases are meant to be tried. So rather than maintain
the pretence of justice, the State tipped the playing
field and reduced trials by jury, reduced access to
legal aid lawyers, and confiscated private property
as proceeds of crime, without proof of economic
gain.
A huge proportion of crime is drug related. Drug
use itself is a symptom of the failure of capitalist
society (eg. Bruce K Alexander, in his 2008 book the
globalisation
of
addiction
http://www.brucekalexander.com/ described the
rise of addiction with the rise of capitalism which
he calls neoliberalism).
Capitalism is alienating of the working class, tearing
families apart, to deliver workers to capitalists where
they want them. Capitalism fails to provide
meaningful social connection. Under these conditions
drugs are an alternative experience: an attractive
escape. Recovery from addiction has been described
not as abstinence from drugs but regaining social
connection even the old
school AA can be seen in
this context as providing
(meetings) opportunities
for social connections
(alternative to alcohol).
Capitalism benefits from
the oppression of the
working class through
drug
laws,
and
criminalisation of drug
consumption. The gangs
(and
their
drug
distribution economy) are
a socially necessary (for
capitalism) counter-point
to the existence of
police. Gangs (and drug
laws) provide a reason for the police to continue to
exist; else the true mission of the police to protect
capitalist property and the capitalist class would be
exposed.
The capitalist state has twisted democracy further,
by excluding prisoners from the right to vote. Given
the class nature of the (in)justice system this was a
blatant attack on the democratic rights of the
working class.
Drug laws provide a mechanism for the capitalist
class to oppress and discriminate against working
class. The majority of people use drugs. It is much
more likely that Maori, Poor and Unemployed will be
convicted and sentenced more harshly: Compared to
the Richer, Whiter, and those who can find an
employer to vouch for their connection to capitalist

Summer 2016-2017
production. CWG reviewed our position on drug laws
and decided that drug (laws) should be under the
control of the working class; not the capitalist class
through
their
laws.
See
http://redrave.blogspot.co.nz/2014/06/a-marxistreview-of-capitalism-and-drug.html
We have no confidence in capitalist laws being
anything but a means for the capitalist class to
oppress and control the working class. The
criminalisation of people, forces many into unskilled
jobs, poor wages (or subsistence wages with on-call
work, casualization, the precariat). Few skilled
jobs will accept anyone with a criminal conviction.
This of course makes the easier money of criminal
activities are more attractive earning options, which
can perpetuate re-offending.

Socialist solutions
A goal of socialism would be to abolish prisons.
There may be some offenders so damaged by abuse
in their personal histories that they need a highly
structured environment
like prison. However, they
would be an exception
rather than the norm.
Most crime is property
related, and if real work
(socially necessary) is
justly rewarded then
much of the motivators of
crime will be diminished.
Other crime is complex
however social inequality
and real relationships
between people are more
likely
to
rehabilitate
faulty
beliefs:
than
systems of punishment
and vindictiveness. There
may be a few capitalists,
who dont want to share their ill-gotten gains, that
may need to be detained. However, a programme of
real work and participation in socially necessary work
programmes for the good of all people may be able
to rehabilitate either of these groups of antisocialists.

Restore the democratic rights of prisoners!

Abolish prisons!
Real Jobs with living wages for All!
Public works to build public transport by
renewable energy!
Reduce the working week until there is full
employment!

Class Struggle 119

Summer 2016 -2017

Syrian Fact Sheet

Victory to the Syrian Revolution!

U.S. sheds crocodile tears over Aleppo while their own coalition is waging attacks on
people across the region; the tears are for the deal they had with Russia. The U.S.
never had a problem with Assad while they were employing his torture chambers
against captured Afghanis and Iraqis during the Iraq war or while he kept Palestine in
check. Indeed the U.S. refusal to arm the opposition with heavy artillery, anti-tank,
anti-aircraft MANPADS and SAMS has long indicated the two-faced non-commitment to
any revolutionary upsurge of the masses for democracy.
The U.S. has always been hedging its bets in search
of the new pawn or in deference to Assad. The
Obama red line declaration after Assads Sarin gas
attack on Ghouta proved this. That pro-Assad figures
in the west have had so much fun disputing the truth
of the attack is due to the Obama administrations
refusal to energize their press control, exactly for
doublethink reasons when they found no support in
Congress for enforcing
any red line.
The Arab national
revolution
emerged
again in 2011 with the
democratic
and
economic demands of
the masses across the
Middle East and North
Africa. The people's
demands could not be
met under regimes that
sustained imperialist
control and perpetual
semi-colonial
subjugation. So the
masses
came
in
collision
with
imperialism. Both the
dominant
western
imperialism and the
emergent Russia/China
bloc contesting for
geopolitical advantage
and control of semicolonial resources and
markets.

players and are external expressions of intra-royalty

factions in Saudi-Arabia and/or counters to Iranian
intervention, and a virtual invasion by Iran with
Russian technical and logistical support. To survive
the masses have had to find arms where they can.
This disturbs sectarians who equate the stencils on
the arms crates with imperialist control over the end
users. Some of these sectarians say there is no Syrian
working class.
The bourgeois army
officers and Syrian
capitalist
renegades
around the FSA/SNC
who abandoned Assad
and ran off to Geneva
to make alliance with
imperialism
claim
leadership
of
the
opposition and make
alliance with western
imperialism in the hope
of gaining control in a
post
Assad
regime
subordinate to the
U.S./EU and free from
the Russian bloc. They
do not speak for the
revolution, nor for the
Local
Coordinating
Committees (LCC).

Aleppo in Ruins

The counterrevolution emerged from multiple

quarters against the masses in the region from Egypt
to Libya to Syria. The majority of local
counterrevolutionary forces are proxies for
imperialists, East or West.
So, we see Hezbollah backing Assad, while additional
counterrevolutionaries are the proxies for regional

Russia is not antiimperialist; Russia is

looking at Syria as a
fertile territory for
investment
of
its

surplus capital.
The bombing of civilian populations by Assad and
Russia with no real opposition from the west is aimed
not at ISIS or Al Qaeda but at the civilians who are
organizing their own self-defense, including their
own self administration.

The Local Coordinating Committees (LCC)

established across Syria are the form that selforganization takes, they are the natural organs of
self-defense and survival created by a civilian
population under siege. Inside the LCCs both the
democratic aspirations of the masses and the
need for civil administration and defense from the
neo-liberal barrel bombs of Assad unite a civilian
opposition against all anti-democratic forces. So,
they are an embryo of workers councils for selfadministration of the society by the working
population and the lower middle class and
dispossessed farmers driven to the cities by
climate change.
U.S., Russia and China suffer overproduction of
Capital and are desperate to find places to put it to
use where they can assume profit in actual
investment and not speculation. Syria has the
misfortune of geographic location to be right where
profitable pipelines can be built. For Russia, Syria is
a host that offers naval and airbases on the
Mediterranean, a geopolitical objective of the first
order as a counter to the U.S. bases that ring this
body from Morocco to Turkey.
This is also a proxy war over the allegiance of
important business partners for both imperialist
blocs, namely the business of Turkey and Iran. For
Turkish and Iranian business, the Russian bloc, just
like the U.S. bloc would sacrifice the national
liberation of the Kurdish people just as readily as
sending their bombers or facilitating invasions of
Syria.
But make no mistake, none of these profit-making
objectives can be achieved by either bloc so long as
the revolution is contesting political power with the
regime; both Russia and the U.S. endeavor to crush
the Revolution; Russia seeks to obliterate it and
fortify the personal regime of Bashar Assad; the U.S.
seeks to combine elimination of the revolutionaries
with co-optation of forces it can make amenable to
the survival of an Assad regime minus Assad.
The revolution increasingly comes to understand
that national liberation from the combination of
the Assad dictatorship and the invaders allied to
Assad requires breaking with imperialism
completely.
This places socialism on the order of the day as
the only way out and that the national democratic
revolution has no hope of realization in a
bourgeois parliament. It must be carried through
to victory by the armed masses and their own
workers-democratic organizations. Stalinophiles
count as nothing the proliferation of hundreds of
Local Coordinating Committees or their five years

of experience administering and exercising

growing powers in areas liberated from Assad.
Defense of Rojava against ISIS was at first heroic and
led by the Kurdish YPG (Peoples Protection Units)
with armed womens detachments taking the fight
against brutal counterrevolutionary theocracy. But as
has happened numerous times in the post-WWII era,
Kurdish national liberation has collapsed into an
unholy alliance with U.S. imperialism.
That this time, the betrayal was managed by the
Maoist PKK (Kurdish Workers Party), the same group
that lately abandoned the armed struggle within
Turkey, shows how the stageist theory of Stalinism,
in practice, abandons the masses when a
revolutionary victory is within their reach. The U.S.
forced the YPG to abandon the fight against Assad,
just as it co-opted FSA forces on the southern front
Co-opted forces allied to one or the other bloc can
only deliver a carved-up Syria corresponding to
contemporary spheres of economic interests. Assad
howls that this is what Washington wants, but has
nothing to say about the forced redistribution of
populations-- actual ethnic cleansing -- that is the
object of the Russian air campaign against Aleppo
and the invasion by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards
Corps
Since the end of WWII the semi-colonial states have
been driven by the need of their peoples to liberate
their economies from the parasitism of imperialism.
The Russia/China bloc is not leading an antiimperialist bloc that can win national independence
for semi colonies from imperialism.
Russia and China are not leading an antiimperialist united front a la the World Social
Forums dream of a 21st century Socialism,
rather they are trying to wrest countries from
U.S./EU imperialist control across the global south
and claim the semi-colonial prizes for their own
profit. Did their BRICS bank bail out their
preferred popular front in Brazil and head off the
U.S.-inspired impeachment? No!
Today internationalist workers must defend the
Syrian Revolution as it is the front line in the struggle
of the international proletariat and oppressed masses
against the designs of imperialism, the system that
each of the two blocs employs in a quest for control
of all the worlds trade and labor. This is what is at
stake in besieged Aleppo.
Take the side of the masses against every one of
their would-be masters! Victory to the Syrian
Revolution!

Reprinted from CWGUSA

7

Class Struggle 119

Summer 2016 -2017

Climate Crash or Survival Socialism

The recent news about the lack of ice in the Arctic has shocked mainstream climate
scientists even if a few have been predicting such abrupt changes for years. Paul
Beckwith is one of the latter. His work focuses mainly on the Artic only because the
changes there are critical to whether we can stop a climate death spiral or not. As he
says What happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic, unlike Las Vegas. So,
we face a climate change emergency that could end the existence of the human
species. Why is it an emergency, and why is Beckwiths Three-Legged Barstool strategy
a logical response? Will it work? Who can say until it is tried. But it won't be tried until
we have overthrown capitalism and created a new society based on restoring a
harmonious relationship with nature.
Now that climate science is catching up with events,
it is time to look more closely at Beckwiths proposals
on how to stop it. It becomes clear that even to try
to implement his geoengineering solutions, we have
to overthrow the capitalist system which has no
interest in spending the billions needed to try out
these solutions. So, lets assume that everyone now
agrees that abrupt climate change is upon us and we
are about to fall off the
cliff.
We should all know by
now why the Arctic ice is
critical
to
climate
change. If not watch the
video. Beckwith builds
the scientific case for
being in a climate change
emergency. The build-up
of CO2 and Methane in the
atmosphere and oceans is
occurring at an increasing
exponential rate.
The consequences are the
slowing of the jet streams
that allow warm air to
reach the pole in winter
which melts the ice and
creates
a
positive
feedback system that creates more global warming.
Beckwith predicts the end of Arctic ice by 2020. The
resulting breakup of climate patterns around the
globe is what is causing the dramatic increase in
extreme weather events.

Can we stop it?

Responses to the threat of climate change are now
less about whether it is happening, and how fast, but
what to do about it. These responses fall into three
broad categories:

(1) The dominant capitalist discourse, of leave it to

the market. A good example is the shift from coal to
Natural Gas (methane). Far from a clean
alternative Methane is several times worse than coal
in rapidly raising global warming. Under market rule,
not until the costs of climate change threaten
already weak profits will any significant shift from
burning carbon take place. China is a case in point.
Now a global capitalist
power competing on with
other imperialist powers,
China has moved to cut
coal burning. But this is
far short of what is needed
to stop rising CO2 in time.
(2) The second response is
to recognise that climate
change is abrupt (posing
the possibility of human
extinction with decades),
and that short of a total
collapse
of
industrial/capitalist
society,
cannot
be
stopped. Those who take
this view divide into those
who pin their hopes on
such a collapse and those
who hold no such hope.
Guy McPherson (currently touring NZ) is an example
of a maverick early-warning scientist who thought
that the GFC of 2008 might bring about a collapse of
industrial society. When the banks were bailed out
he gave up that hope and now argues that there is
nothing we can do to stop human extinction, so it is
best to prepare ourselves for the inevitable going
dark.
(3) The third response is that abrupt climate change
can be stopped by emergency geoengineering
techniques that slow down and reverse global
warming before it is too late. Of those who think this

is possible there are those who look to capitalist

society to leap into action to implement urgent
solutions, and those who think that capitalism is part
of the problem and will have to be removed before
any solutions are tried.

capitalists living off centuries of stolen wealth, they

will risk the destruction not only of the climate, but
the habitability of the planet necessary for the
working class to survive to create the surplus-value
needed to maintain and increase their wealth.

Beckwith falls into the first category but has doubts

about how capitalism can respond in time. Lets look
at his Three-Legged Barstool metaphor for a geoengineering strategy to see if his pessimism is
justified. For Beckwith, the three legs of the stool
each stand for a major intervention to (a) stop
carbon/methane emissions; (b) restore Arctic (and
Antarctic) ice in winter; (c) reclaim carbon from the
atmosphere and oceans. If you want to know what
these interventions involve, check Beckwiths
explanation here.

Would a social- democratic majority government

make any difference compared with those of right
wing deniers like Trump? No. The political program
of social democracy is to nationalise the private
property of capitalists only as a subsidy to all
capitalists. What social-democratic government
would implement taxes against the rich or against
polluters to raise the billions necessary for
emergency climate action? Even if such a government
was elected it would be on the basis of defending a
threat to private property posed by a rising mass
workers mobilisation to take power.

Reform vs Revolution to fix the climate?

Like Beckwith there are those who share his optimism
that such interventions could work, and that they
would require a major transfer of GDP from military
and other budget items into emergency climate
rectification programs. They
also share his pessimism
about whether they can be
funded in time by the
existing
capitalist
economies.
Marxists understand that the
capitalist market does not
produce commodities unless
it can make a profit. The
market cannot respond to a
global climate emergency,
nor
can
capitalist
governments which serve
the capitalist ruling class act
collectively for humanity
when its own class interests
are paramount.
Beckwith argues we need a new Manhattan program
or Marshall plan to mobilise the resources. But war is
not a good analogy because of its proclaimed defence
of national interests from which the arms industry
profits. So, it is not a question of fatalism of the
doomers or the pessimism of climate activists like
Beckwith that is critical. The question becomes, if
not capitalism, what social system can be created in
time to act against climate collapse?
Lets see what would have to happen to stop climate
change in time. The capitalist ruling class will not
allow their profits confiscated to fund climate
action. Its motivation is to protect and increase its
historic accumulation of capital. So not only are

Better Red than Dead

This is why more and more Marxists, and leftists in
general, see socialism as the only road to human
survival. First, to stop abrupt climate change bringing
a destruction of nature and
society and with it human
extinction within decades, it
will
be
necessary
to
expropriate the wealth of the
ruling class, in particular the
big banks and corporations,
to pay for climate correction.
Second, since the ruling class
will
not
agree
to
expropriation by legislating
higher taxes etc., and will
stage coups to remove leftist
governments, it is necessary
for the vast majority of
workers to mobilise as an
organised movement to take
power;
removing
the
capitalist ruling class and creating a workers state.
A workers state that is based on the democratic will
of the working people would immediately use the
expropriated wealth to fund the massive geoengineering interventions that are necessary.
Even if these desperate measures do not work in
time, or only mitigate climate change partially, a
socialist society is the only way to prepare for
meeting the challenges of living in a post-capitalist
world by prioritising what is necessary to ensure the
conditions for human survival over the interests of
warring nations and gangs of mercenaries, collapsing
economies and social destruction. The least-bad
world is one where we are better Red than Dead.

Class Struggle 119

Summer 2016 -2017

A World Upside Down

The common phrase The World is Upside Down reflects the widespread concern that
things are not right in the world. I will argue that it is not the world that is upside
down but capitalism, and that this has always been so. The catchphrase Capitalism
is not working is closer to the truth, but likewise when has that not been true? What
we face today is the decline and fall of an upside-down society making way for a new
society which is right way up.
Neo-con market rules

Liberals and Labourites

Neo-cons (my term for all neoliberals, neo-cons and

neo-classicals) assume that capitalism is the best
society yet and anything wrong with it results from
interference by monopoly interests taking control of
the state. Capitalist society is seen as made up of
individual citizens buying and selling commodities.

Liberals have always been in love with the big state

because they think that the market can only work if
regulated by the state. The left in government can
use the power of the legislature and bureaucracy to
work in the interests of social harmony, equality and
welfare. Witness the First Labour Government.
However, this is a Faustian pact because in the
process workers are turned into slaves of the state
which regulates them as
drones to supply the
profits of the bosses e.g.
the labour unions.

The role of the state is to defend the private

interests of such individuals from those who would
use
the
state
to
dispossess
them.
Spending on the police
and military are a
justified overhead cost
of running capitalism.
This ideology of a class
neutral state was always
an attempt to hide the
real role of the capitalist
state
in
making
capitalism work.
In fact since NZ was
colonised
by
white
settlers,
the
state
always
played
the
leading role in creating
the market and then
regulating it to manage
the economic use of land, labour and capital. NZ
history abounds with examples of the use of the state
power to dispossess Maori, subsidize farmers,
regulate unions and monopolise producer boards and
so on
This history disproves the ideology that the market
rules without state intervention. There would be no
market without the state. The neo-cons suffer from
hubris and bad faith and when it becomes obvious
that they use the state to advance their private
interests. They bait and switch like crazy to deflect
attention away from the key role of the state back
to the dogma of market rules. For them the World is
only Upside Down when the state does not work to
make capitalism profitable by filling their pockets.

When they realise their

dreams of social equality
have fallen into the great
abyss between the rich
and poor, their refrain is;
oh dear, The World is
Upside Down, Capitalism
is Not Working. For
liberals to put the world
right side up and make
capitalism work they
have to try harder. This
means turning into neoliberals
and
using
monopoly state power to
deregulate
society.
Workers become more productive (that is exploited)
making more profits witness the Fourth Labour
Government. Scratch a liberal and you find a neocon.
In fact, as the global capitalist crisis worsens and
threatens to bring with it climate collapse, liberals
are in a state of panic clutching as all sorts of
panaceas to make capitalism work and stand the
world right-side up. The problem is that it is they,
the liberals, who are Upside Down. Liberals try to
make society free of conflict. They get upset when
they realise they cant make capitalism work without
collaborating with neo-cons. Labours great search
for the middle class is running away from its workingclass base and the reality of class society. But the
futile search for a classless state to manage a kinder,

gentler society cannot overcome their cognitive

dissonance.

Radicals roused
Radicals reject both the neo-con market rule mantra
and the liberal delusion that social harmony and
equality can by created by state reforms. The more
market dementia of neo-cons and the cognitive
dissonance of liberals
cannot be solved unless
the deeper cause is
challenged

class
struggle.
Once
the
power of the classes is
equalised then wealth
can be equalised and
capitalism is turned
right side up and begins
to work.

relations. The key to understanding this is that

bourgeois ideology is not invented by intellectuals
but produced along with commodities as the
fetishism of commodities.
Capitalism appears right side up because the unequal
social relations where labour power is exploited are
inverted to appear as equal exchange relations. Marx
explains this inversion
of reality as commodity
fetishism. Instead of
workers labour power
being seen as the
producer of value, value
appears to be inherent
in
the
product

commodities. Hence the

struggle
over
the
distribution of value
becomes represented as
one over the exchange
of value in the market
between
workers,
capitalists
and
landlords.

But what sort of classes?

For
radicals,
the
problem is the unequal
distribution of wealth
made
possible
by
capitalist control of the
Marx thinks Hegel inverts reality
It
follows
that
state. The bosses screw
capitalism cannot be
the workers by cutting their wages to increase
made to work by eliminating state interference in
profits. To correct this the bosses control of the
the market (neo-cons) reforming it (liberal) or taking
state has to be overthrown so that workers can
it over (radicals). Capitalism as a society is created
organise society by regulating equal exchange. For
upside down to allow one class to profit from the
some (socialists) this means workers must take
exploitation of nature. It only works because it is
power to control the state, for others (anarchists)
upside down. So when capitalism works for neo-cons,
once state power is destroyed, there is no need for a
liberals and radicals, it is still upside down. It can
state.
only be made right side up by a critique which goes
to the roots of capitalist society and which drives a
However, anti-capitalism in all of its forms fails to
revolutionary transformation of capitalism into
get to the root of capitalist exploitation and
socialism.
oppression. Classes formed by unequal exchange
cannot be eliminated by workers replacing
How Marx arrived at his critique of capitalism,
capitalists with workers running the state or
penetrating the fetishism of commodities and
substituting workers control over exchange. This is
understanding of the contradiction between
because capitalist exploitation does not result from
capitalist society and nature, stems from his critique
unequal exchange (except as a bonus) but by the
of the German philosopher Hegel, who, while
expropriation of value at the point of production.
standing on his head was stood right side up by the
Without the expropriation of the means of
young Marx. We deal with this in another post
production owned by the capitalist class, no amount
reproduced in this issue as Karl Marx: Revolutionary
of workers power in the state can overturn the
Scientist.
exploitative social relations of capitalism.
http://thedailyblog.co.nz/2016/10/10/guest-blogMarx to the rescue
dave-brownz-the-world-is-upside-down-capitalismis-not-working/
Marxs critique of capitalism proves that neo-con,
http://thedailyblog.co.nz/2016/10/31/guest-blogliberal and radical ideas are all expressions of the
comrade-dave-brownz-responding-to-dimpost-onideas of the ruling class, that is bourgeois ideology.
behalf-of-marxists/
The neo-cons celebrate this, the liberals are
ambivalent and impotent, the radicals are fooled by
capitalisms classes appearing as based on market

11

Class Struggle 119

Summer 2016 -2017

Trumped, Stumped and Dumped!

The fear and loathing of the triumph of Trump has called forth the usual load of
garbage trying to fathom the causes and consequences. Was it endemic white racism?
(Is there any other kind?) Was it the criminal Clintons? No, its not about race, or the
Clintons, its 'about the economy stupid'. The low turnout, the refusal of progressive
Bernie-ites to get in behind Clinton, the switch of the rustbelt deplorables from nonvoting to Trump, created the perfect storm for the Stormtrooper.
But these 'facts' cannot be understood unless the
deeper causes of the crisis of US capitalism are made
clear. These explain why Trump is no more than an
evil clown in the circus that is electoral politics, and
that he cannot solve the problems of US capitalism
dying on its feet. Trumped means Stumped. As Marx
pointed out more than a century ago bourgeois
elections every four years allow the subject citizens
the right to vote for one or other faction of capitalist
to rule over them until the next election. The very
nature of the bourgeois state is that it is founded on
a constitution that defends private property, the
essence of capitalism. Because of its ownership of
private property capitalists can force workers to
work for them and create the surplus-value that
becomes their profits. Enforcing that class
exploitation is the state's mission.
Therefore, whoever is periodically elected to
government rules in the spirit if not name of private
property. This charade will repeat until the subject
citizens form a class conscious majority and
overthrow the capitalist state itself. And the
essential aspect to that class consciousness is seeing

right through the charade of bourgeois democracy to

recognize the necessity to replace it with workers'
democracy and a workers' state.

Make America Great Again

Trump won because the working class was divided
and subordinated by the Democrats, the unions led
by the labour bureaucrats and the fake left that
always sucks up to the Democrats. Being locked into
electoral politics prevents the working class from
uniting around an independent class program to
overthrow capitalism.
Yet since politics is no more than applied economics,
we can see in Trumps triumph the beginnings of the
break of workers from the Democrats. Some of those
who backed Bernie did not vote for Clinton. They
risked Trump because they hated Hillarys role
enforcing institutional racism and practicing imperial
warmongering. But now that Bernie has 'united' with
Trump, those who are already on the streets against
Trump cannot look beyond this double betrayal to
any revival of "progressive" Democrats. Michael
Moore is pissing in the wind.

Other workers in the de-industrialised rust belts have

not voted for the Clinton Democrats for 20 years.
That is where the rhetoric of 'jail her' comes in. Many
came out for Obama when US finance capital played
the race card of cosmopolitan liberal democracy,
before switching off again as Obama turned into
another Clinton. They went for Trump because he
promised them a return to the time when America
was great not just for the bosses but for the 'middle
class'.
The slogan in
their
minds
meant
the
return to the
time when they
had
secure,
well paid jobs
in
manufacturing
and
mining
before
'globalization',
and
before
'neoliberalism'. The
so-called
'middle
class'
workers,
is
itself
an
oxymoron. In
reality
high
paid workers in America in the post-war boom were
not a 'middle class' but high paid workers who
benefited from US imperialism in a period of
capitalist expansion.
The 'middle class' in America is a state of mind not an
economic category. Especially when the frontier
bourgeois ideology of the 'free individual' is designed
to write class out of history. Yet classes are
constituents of capitalism. We have the selfemployed, farmers, small business owners, etc., who
are petty bourgeois in the classic sense of living off
ones own labour. Of course, many are disguised
wage workers or even slaves when exploited by big
business as 'independent contractors'.
The 'middle class' workers in America are really
labour aristocrats, well paid workers whose wages
reflect in part the super profits that the US can
extract from its exploitation of labour in developing,
or emerging economies. Since labour aristocrats are
paid at a rate beyond the cost of reproducing their
skill they share in imperialist super profits. Their
wages are subject to rises and falls depending on the
economic cycle of boom-bust. Just as they benefited
from the US empire in its prime during the post-war

boom, so they are the victims of the decline of US

imperialism since the 1980s.

The End of the Golden Age

As we will see, there can be no going back to the
'golden age' of post-war capitalism, not in the US or
in any other country. The Rate of Profit has fallen in
the US since the 1980s apart from a rise in the 90s
that never regained the post-war level. Since the
2008 recession, the US economy has stagnated, along
with most of
the rest of the
world.
Moreover, that
Long Recession
failed
to
restore
the
conditions
of
profitability so
that the global
economy faces
a
major
depression to
destroy labour
costs and plant
and machinery.
While such a
'recovery'
is
possible, that
of the labour
aristocracy is
not.
Can Trump deliver on his promises to Make America
Great again? No, he cannot. The reason is that the
export of jobs from middle class America followed
the export of capital away from falling profits to the
developing countries to super-exploit cheap labour
and raw materials. This is what neo-liberal
globalization means; the export of capital from the
imperialist countries to open up and economically
dominate these oppressed economies in order to
pump out super-profits to compensate for the
Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (TRPF) of US
finance capital.
Without globalization, US capitalism was trapped by
high wages at home and further pressure on the
TRPF. That is why the New Democrats adopted neoliberal globalization with gusto because their
constituency is the new labour aristocracy, employed
in the new tertiary knowledge, digital and media
'industries' driven by the logic of globalization to reap
super-profits. That is why the Democrats have
overseen the export of capital to China to take
advantage of its rapid capitalist development since
the 1990s.

13

Therefore, Trump's whole retreat to isolationism as a

solution to the destruction of manufacturing effects
of globalization will cut off the sources of superprofits from offshore that US capitalism needs to
survive. A trade war with China will end this flow of
US super profits taking advantage of cheap labour
and consumer goods. His is a deluded circus trick that
will blow up in his face and in the face of those who
voted for him. Trumped is Stumped by those who own
and control the US state - finance capital-- and
sooner or later he will be Dumped by the angry
'deplorables' unless he mobilizes them as fascist
fodder to smash the rise of a militant labour
movement.

Caught in a Contradiction
Trump cannot break with the 'establishment' any
more than the Clinton new Democrats could. The
reason is that
the US state is
not under the
control
of
politicians,
even
those
who do the
rounds
from
Wall
Street
and
the
corporate
headquarters
to Washington,
but by the
ruling class of
finance
capital.
That
ruling
class has already proven that it will not reinvest in US
manufacturing unless it can cut wages to a China
Wage or raise the rate of exploitation by employing
robots. Neither can meet the needs of full
employment at a living wage of the abandoned
"middle class." Therefor the ruling class committed
to globalization to survive will force Trump to break
the promises to his constituency. And this is where
the racist, sexist rhetoric comes in.
When it becomes clear that Trump cannot return
America to the golden age because his policies
cannot restore jobs or profits, this will exacerbate
the class struggle greatly. The radical left that is
already mobilizing against Trump will be forced to
mobilize also against the Democrats who back
Trump. These young, multiracial students and
workers have already started, and pose a challenge
to the state at all levels, on the streets, campuses
and in employment. To divert attention away from
his economic failures Trump will use the racist,

sexist, anti-immigrant and anti-Islamic rhetoric that

he has employed in the election race to blame these
activist minorities for all the economic ills of US
imperialism.
Trump in the White House has a Republican Senate
and House behind him. Even so he can act
independently by invoking the "terror" state created
by the Bushes and Clintons to declare a ruling class
'war on terror' at home 'over the head' of Congress.
He can build his symbolic wall, boost the police and
military, quarantine and deport Latinos and Muslims,
ban protests and strikes, etc., and unleash his state
forces as well as his paramilitary storm troopers
against the attempts by "progressive" forces to
defend the rights of minorities and labour.
Trump will be in the position to expand his executive
power from that left him by Bush and Obama, and
become a Louis
Bonaparte
standing above
the classes to
rescue
the
nation
from
"terror"
at
home
and
abroad. If that
fails, he is in
the position to
stage a fascist
coup against
the
constitution
drawing on the
support
of
reactionary
elements of the petty bourgeois and labour
aristocracy against a militant mass labour movement.
This means that already Trump poses the question of
power rhetorically to a mass working class divided
and subordinated to a treacherous labour
bureaucracy aligned to the bourgeois Democratic
Party.
To overcome these divisions, it is necessary to
urgently build a working-class party that advances
a revolutionary action program to lead every
struggle against the power of capital concentrated
in the Trump Presidency. That party will have to
become the leadership in the unions, in all
workplaces, in the schools, on the streets, linking
all the many, various social movements into one
massive united front, creating the organs of
workers power, workers councils and workers
militias, capable of defeating the state and
paramilitary forces, smashing the bourgeois state
and putting in place a workers state.
14

Class Struggle 119

Summer 2016 -2017

Karl Marx: revolutionary scientist

Figure 2 Marx and Engels statues in Berlin

The disinterring of Marx today is now common, even if the body dug up is usually not
that of Marx but imposters like Zizek who claim to be Marxists but are really
academics who never organise the workers struggle. Marx had to suffer many attacks
in his own lifetime and further indignities in death as Marxism was plagued by a
constant stream of caricatures and misrepresentations, the most important being
that Marxism was never a science and has no relevance today. Some even attack
Marxism as a utopia that diverts us from making meaningful, incremental,
progressive change.
Danylmc writing in the Dimpost blog decides after a
quick skimming of Marxism that it never was
scientific and moreover is counter-revolutionary
because it calls for smashing capitalism rather
than evolving through many iterations into a new,
better societyor not. For some reason Danylmc
does not include the labour theory of value (LTV)
as one of Marxs utopian ideas gone wrong. Maybe
because Marx did not originate this theory as it was
a fundamental plank of the political economy of his
day. Either Danylmc understands the LTV as Marx
does, or not. Either way by accepting it he fails to
see that it makes a mockery of his argument. [i]
So lets see what Marx means by science. Was he
copying 19th century chemistry and reducing social
revolution to a law, like water turning into steam at
the right heat as Danylmc claims? No, social science
has to account for the interaction of conscious
subjects and their material environment. For
example, humans learn over millennia how to boil
water more efficiently (that is conserving labour
time) a reality that the young Marx observed when

as a radical journalist he campaigned for the right

of landless peasants to collect firewood in the
Rhineland. This experience proved that social
interaction is not the random behaviour of
individuals because humans actions are ultimately
determined by their social relations. And it was
capitalists that burnt coal to heat water to drive
their industrial revolution so as to exploit human
labour power more efficiently/profitably and even
enable workers to buy firewood or coal as a
commodity.
So lets go back to the make-or-break LTV. The LTV
was a theory shared by bourgeois political economy
which observed the flood of peasants off the land
into the factories. Marx also began with the
presupposition that humans must reproduce
themselves by means of their labour. Marx was
trained in philosophy and law which meant he had
to test the meaning of the words he used against
the social reality. What turned Marx onto the
scientific analysis of society was the failure of
Hegelian philosophy to account for the actions of
humans as part of Gods plan. Similarly, he rejected

the bourgeois political economy that turned social

history into a march of human progress culminating
in the rise to power of the bourgeoisie.
The difference between natural and social science
is that in the latter the scientist is a partisan or
interested observer. It was Marxs taking the side
of peasant wood collectors in the class struggle that
converted him from a bourgeois intellectual into a
proletarian intellectual. He did this by critiquing
political economy and developing the presupposition
of the LTV into the Law of Value (LOV).[ii] Political
economy was empiricist and merely described value
as the total labour embodied in commodities. Since
this commodity production resulted
from the contributions of workers,
capitalists and landlords, each
class could claim a fair share of
the total labour/value as wages,
profits and rents. It justified this
expropriation of labour value as a
reward to capital and land for the
use of private property in the
process of production.
This empiricist rationale was
elevated by Hegel into a divine
mission. For Marx, it was one thing
to defeat the bourgeois political
and economic holy rollers in
philosophical class struggle, but it
would not stick unless the
empiricist bourgeois political economy that justified
the exploitation of labour in the process of
production was blown apart by a scientific critique.

Marxs Scientific Method

Marxs method borrowed from Hegel in moving from
concrete appearances to abstract essence and then
back to the reconstituted concrete. Hegel observed
the social classes, politics, state and law of German
society of the early 19th century as a contradictory
unity of appearances accompanying the rise of
capitalism. The appearances formed a real
historical society (the market lives!) but the essence
which explained them was the spirit of God. The
Political economy of Smith and Ricardo also took
the appearance of developing capitalism but
appealed to the idealism of material progress to
resolve social contradictions into the universal
freedoms of bourgeois society.
Marx put Hegel on his feet and argued that the
essence was not ideal but material. God and
material progress were just idealist slogans used by
the bourgeoisie to claim it represented the interests
of all classes and nations. In the Critique of the
German Ideology, Marx and Engels settled their
accounts with the followers of Hegel. History was

one of social revolutions in which successive modes

of production made up of social relations of
production where the ruling class extracted the
surplus product of the producing class and justified
it by invoking Gods. Each mode reached its limits
when the ruling class oppression of the producing
class produced a rising class consciousness leading
to a social revolution. Capitalism would follow
course and give rise to its successor, communism.
For the young Marx this was still a philosophical
critique. The real task of proving it scientifically
began. Hegelian Marxists typically arrest at this
point and explain history as a lawful transition
without any conscious subjective intervention unless
it is the will to power of the heroic
individual!
Here we have to begin with Capital
Vol 1 and read it from start to
finish. It is no good relying David
Harvey as a guide because he
recommends leaving the difficult
Part 1 for later. Marx deliberately
started Capital with the concept of
the commodity because it was the
cell of capitalism. His method for
arriving at the essence of value was
to abstract from surface
appearances of equal exchange
down to the commodity cell and
then move back to the surface
where the appearances are now
understood as the result of many determinations.
The class struggles on the surface now reveal their
deeper causes. The commodity had a dual
character, a contradictory unity of use-value and
exchange value. Labour power could be exchanged
for its value and at the same time create surplus
value as it was the only commodity to produce more
value than its own value.
How did this come about? The primitive
accumulation of pre-capitalist material wealth in
the colonial world gave capitalism its kick start in
Europe. But capitalism as a mode of production did
not come into full existence until commodity
production was generalised by commodifying labour
power of wage labour as a result of creating a class
of landless labourers. The secret, hitherto denied by
political economy, was that the use-value of labour
power to the capitalist was defined as its capacity
to create more value that its exchange value, i.e.
the wage needed to reproduce it daily.
What is scientific about this discovery? The dual
nature of the commodity allowed Marx to resolve an
anomaly in political economy where labour as the
equivalent of value did not exchange at its value. It
if exchanged at its value capitalism would be all
16

wages and no profits. Therefore, political economy

had to fiddle with its LTV to account for this
anomaly, adding qualifications to explain why some
of labours value ended up as profits and rent. Marx
resolved this so that the LOV explained the
exploitation of labour-power and expropriation of
surplus-value during the process of production.
Capitalism was not an equal opportunity society of
the political economists assuming unequal exchange
could be corrected. Capitalism was inherently
unequal and would develop in a contradictory way
until it could no longer
reproduce itself giving
rise to the conditions for
socialism.
Marx learned from both
Hegel as well as Smith
and Ricardo, critiqued
their errors, using a
method of analysis that
exposed their limitations
and laid the foundations
for his own science. This
was to be a scientific
revolution greater than
those of Copernicus,
Newton, Darwin or
Einstein. From henceforth all social knowledge
would have to be subjected to the rigorous
methodology of the scientific method. Social
science not only incorporated natural science it had
to explain the constant interaction between society
and nature where social classes determine these
relations within limits set by nature.

Marxism: science or utopia in Russia?

Danylmc writes: After the Russian Revolution the
Bolsheviks were very disappointed to learn that (a)
history and (b) humans didnt work like this at all.
Firstly their revolution happened in an
underdeveloped, mostly agrarian economy, not an
advanced economy like Marx predicted. Second, the
revolution failed to spread so they were stuck with
Communism in one country. Thirdly, it turns out
that if you have a capitalist economy even a very
basic one like Tsarist Russia and you take away
the market and put the workers in charge of the
means of production (and execute anyone trading
on the black market) then instead of transforming
itself into a utopia because of the scientific laws of
history and the malleability of human nature, the
entire economy collapses, and people in cities end
up eating their own children to stay alive, and
everyone who can still walk rises up and joins the
capitalist counter-revolutionaries trying to
overthrow you.

This is a complete travesty of what happened in

Russia. First as we have seen assumptions (a) and
(b) bear no relation to Marxism. Marx did not hold
to an idealist view of capitalism following
inexorable laws would arrive at a communist utopia.
Rather class conscious workers must overthrow it
and seize power. He excoriated the German Social
Democrats in the 1870s for thinking that capitalism
would evolve peacefully into socialism by means of
objective laws of progress. We have seen that
Marxs scientific method makes class struggle the
driver of capitalist
development. It
motivates the
contradiction that causes
periodic crises which we
can see today are now
terminal since the
bourgeoisie can no longer
overcome these crises
without the destruction
of humanity and nature.
Either we the workers
become the gravedigger
of capitalism, or
capitalism buries us all.
We only know this
because Marxism as a
revolutionary science proves that the dual nature of
the commodity contains the fundamental
contradiction between use-value (nature) and
exchange value (capital) that is the basis for
determining what happens at the surface of
capitalist society. Class struggle over the rate of
exploitation at the point of production explains
class struggle at the level of the market, nation
state and international relations. [iii] In Capital Vol
3 Marx shows how the LOV is the basis of other laws
of motion accounting for development of capitalist
production, crises of falling profits, and the drive to
expand capitalist production on a world scale. Here
he sets out his theory of crisis whereby the periods
of boom and bust, the concentration and
centralisation of capital, and the widening income
gap between capital and labour are explained.
While both he and Engels anticipated many of the
developments of capitalism in the 20th and 21st
centuries, we have to look to the work of
succeeding Marxists to see how they used his
finished and unfinished work as the basis for the
testing and validating of his scientific theory.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks

Lenin finished off Marxs unfinished volumes in one
small pamphlet entitled Imperialism: the Highest
Stage of Capitalism. To do this he had to go back
to Vol 3 and show how the state, world market and
17

international relations were explained by the laws

of motion underlying crisis and counter-crisis
tendencies motivated by class struggle. This
enabled him to break with the mechanical
evolutionary Marxism of the 2nd International in
Europe and the Mensheviks in Russia. The result
was Bolshevism, the concrete application of Marxist
revolution that made the revolution in Russia, the
weakest link in imperialism, and which led the 3rd
Communist International.
The most important breakthrough of Lenin was to
recognise the need to form a proletarian party as
the mechanism of uniting
theory and practice to
test the scientific
method of Marx. Without
Marxism that penetrated
the veils of capitalist
exploitation revealing
the essence of the
fundamental
contradiction contained
in the commodity, then
workers would lack the
consciousness
necessary to fight to
overthrow capitalism and
replace it with socialism.
While Marx had stood as the scientific authority
against the lapses into bourgeois idealism within the
ranks of the workers movements, it remained
trapped in by bourgeois ideology and constantly
lapsed back into class struggle over the distribution
of fair shares that did not require the overthrow of
capitalism.
The result was the Bolshevik party that was as
response to the extreme contradiction between
European imperialism and the old Tsarist feudal
regime. The party became the Marxist scientist that
tested theory in practice in the weakest link of
imperialism in Russia. The old evolutionary Marxist
utopia was destroyed in theory and practice. The
February Revolution that began as the strike of
women textile workers threw up a bourgeois
Provisional Government which was incapable of
breaking from British and French imperialism. It
proved this by collaborating with the Tsarist
General Kornilov in a Tsarist Coup. The Bolsheviks
quickly drew the conclusion that the workers must
take the road to socialist revolution in the almost
bloodless October insurrection.
Far from disappointment resulting from the
Revolution it inspired world wide support from
workers who rose to defend it when it was invaded
and isolated by the invasion of the imperialist
nations. The Bolsheviks already knew that socialism

could not be built in one country, let alone a

backward isolated country. The survival of the
Russian revolution depended on the spread of
revolution and they knew in advance what was
necessary to make this happen. They formed the
Communist International to organise Bolshevik type
parties, the worker scientists, in every country.
Only the failure of workers to break from their ties
to the bourgeoisie and its ideology of market
equality to form such parties capable of leading
revolutions, allowed the imperialist ruling classes to
hang onto their decrepit capitalist system and
condemning the
revolution to degenerate
into a Stalinist caricature
of communism.
The Bolshevik Revolution
still stands as the most
advanced struggle of the
international proletariat
against the reactionary
utopia of rotting, dying
capitalist society. If we
look around the world
today we can see the
bourgeoisie eating their
own children by the
million as they fight to
our death to hold onto the stolen wealth of
generations of workers. Our hope must be in the
revolutionary science of Marxism, embodied in the
international revolution party, capable of putting
into practice the scientific program that can guide
our struggle to take power and replace capitalism
with socialism.
NOTES
[i] The Labour Theory of Value was the issue in Marxs The
Modern theory of Colonisation Chapter 25 in Capital Vol 1. Mr
Peel emigrated to the Swan River (Perth, Australia today) with
capital, machines and men. The men shoot through to the bush
to become independent producers, so Mr Peels machines rust
and his land lies unproductive. Never mind, Mr Peel does what
any good capitalist does when he cannot profit from the
exploitation of labour-power, he becomes a land agent and
speculates in founders rent.
[ii] The LOV means that value equals the socially necessary
labour time required to produce it. Socially necessary labour
time equals the average time of work enabling wages to buy the
average commodity basket to allow the working family to live at
the average standard of living.
[iii] Vol 2 examines the circuit of capital including the
transformation of value into prices in the market while holding
competition constant. Vol 3 moves to the more concrete level
of competition among capitalists in the market. He had planned
3 other volumes on the State, World Trade and International
Relations to return to the most complex concrete level of reality
which he never completed drafting.

18

Class Struggle 119

Summer 2016-17

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.

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Class Struggle 119

Summer 2016-17

For a New World Party of Socialism!

Liaison Committee of Communists (LCC) Integrating the RWG

(Zim), CWG (A/NZ), RWG (BR), CWG (USA)
Revolutionary Workers Group of Zimbabwe (RWG-ZIM)
Email: rwg.zimbabwe@gmail.com
Website: www.rwgzimbabwe.wordpress.com
Revolutionary Worker (Paper of RWG-Zimbabwe)
Communist Workers Group- New Zealand/Aotearoa (CWG-NZ)
Email: cwg006@yahoo.com
Websites: http://redrave.blogspot.com
http://livingmarxism.wordpress.com
Class Struggle (Paper of the CWG-NZ)
Revolutionary Workers Group of Brazil (RWG-BR)
Email: gtrevolucionarios1@gmail.com
Site: grupodetrabalhadoresrevolucionrios.wordpress.com
Guerreiro da classe Trabalhadora (Paper of the RWG-BR)
Communist Workers Group USA (CWG-US):
Email: cwgclasswar@gmail.com
Website: www.cwgusa.wordpress.com
Class War (Paper of the CWG-US)
U

Class Struggle and most articles are online at https://www.redrave.blogspot.com

Phone +64272800080 cwg2007anz@hotmail.com
Archive of publications before 2006 http://communistworker.blogspot.com/
20