Can the UAW Strike Become Labor’s Next Giant Step?

 

In the aftermath of COVID, labor has been trying to catch up. Not only from the runaway inflation and interest rates but from the givebacks, wage freezes, lockouts and furloughs suffered in the 2008-2011 global economic crisis. The crash was used to enforce austerities on workers around the globe. The Obama/Gettlefinger deal bailed out the industry so it could be restructured on the backs of the taxpayers and workers. UAW lost its COLA, the defined pension plan, tiers were implemented, wages were slashed, and for kickers the Obama/Biden deal blocked the right to strike until 2015. Profits soared but wages did not. Now the crisis of the world economy, climate catastrophe and inter-imperialist wars are exploding across the lives of all workers. The UAW members feel the heat and need a new direction which brings not only rank and file democracy but a class struggle strategy to win workers power! 

While the U.S. empire faces a decline in relative and absolute economic power the leaders of both parties pound the war drums against China. Patriotism is obsolete where investment capital is involved, the Big Three are invested all across the globe; ALL it means is an excuse to make YOU sacrifice for their benefit! The last thing we need to do is acquiesce in the offshoring and the gradual decline of membership that made possible a labor aristocracy that ate the lunch of workers the world over, especially those overseas. 

Two things happened since our parents’ time when they were sold the idea that a U.S. world empire was good for everyone. Balance of payments deficit became a balance of trade deficit and now the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall is in control of the productive economy and Wall Street and the banksters seek their superprofits in fictitious, speculative values. It makes NO SENSE and there is no reason to be put up to opposing foreign workers or their well-being. Anti-Asian hysteria and UAW indifference made possible the crushing of the Korean auto strike. We should make this clear as we strike “our own” robber barons.

The bosses on Wall St., in the corporate media and in the Democratic Party love a certain type of union leadership, a leadership prepared to sell out the members and ignore the class-wide implications in the class struggle, potentials of each negotiation and strike. 

Listen to how the former CEO of Chrysler, looks back nostalgically at Ron Gettelfinger’s sell out in this CNN hit piece against a UAW strike…,

“…Nardelli recalled the ‘wonderful relationship’ he and other auto execs had with Ron Gettelfinger, who led the UAW during the Great Recession.

‘Without Ron’s support, the three of us — Ford, GM and Chrysler — would not have been able to make it through that challenging period when the financial institutions melted down and took us with them,’ Nardelli said.”

Today labor and management are walking to the brink and hoping each other blinks. The UPS, Longshore, and American Airlines pilots’ contracts all resolved with wage increases which, while larger than the bosses wanted, do not make up for what has been lost or secure future increases guaranteed to keep pace with inflation. They were resolved by labor leaders who not only blinked, but were not prepared to stand up with the backbone the membership expected. Members were feeling militant, came out for practice pickets, worked to rule, applied slow down tactics and most expected to strike. But workers were swayed by somewhere between 32% and 40% increases over long agreements and the Big Three took note.

So we know that the 40% demand and the end of two tiers are not only possible but realistic, something the shareholders have already factored into their portfolio rebalancing. The call for a shorter work week is a response to frustrations of the masses over the toxic work day, but it will take an all out strike, calling out the entire union and spreading the strike across the entire working class to win a shorter work week for all! With the 97% strike authorization Fain has the power but is not preparing the union for such a fight! As reported in the Detroit Click, “Fain has indicated that the union is willing to be flexible on its demands in order to reach a deal….The UAW was initially demanding a more than 40% wage increase, and has since dropped it to a 36% increase.” Why doesn’t the membership know what “progress“ with Ford means?   

The bosses, the mortgage lenders, credit card companies, landlords, finance capitalists and price gougers of all stripes are calculating, right now, how to gouge us out of any wage gains we make. WE NEED A SLIDING SCALE OF WAGES AND NO RETREAT ON THE COLA!

We also know that unless new wage gains spread across the industry and the entire working class, a downward pressure on wages persists among the unorganized and lower wage workers. They can become the bosses’ scabs and fodder to break the union with non-union shops building Teslas, Toyotas and EV batteries. To win, to sustain and accelerate our wins we need to generalize this strike by sending UAW organizers into the unorganized shops at home and abroad to organize this industry wall to wall, including the open-shop South.

Biden claims to be the most pro-worker president ever. “Record Profits,” he said, “requires record contracts…, .” We remind workers it was the Obama/Biden/Gettelfinger deal that dug us into the hole in the first place. It was under their watch the GM/Toyota deal closed plants, opening the way for the anti-union Tesla to muscle into the Fremont, CA NUMMI plant. Thousands of ex-UAW workers lined up for work at Tesla’s scab wages and in unsafe and unhealthy conditions. This while Musk was being courted by the Silicon Valley crowd and toasted as a visionary by the capitalist class and the politicians of both parties. We 100 times prefer an industry-wide sit-down strike to a one-time Presidential photo opp on a picket line! The sitdown is the effective means of securing a better living. The photo opp is Biden campaigning for next year for nomination by one of the bosses’ parties. Workers don’t have a party, something you should address. Will he do anything about your sisters and brothers being laid off? He broke the rail strike and caused the UPS Teamsters to cave in. What is Fain up to?

To win, workers need to employ class struggle methods to unite the entire working class against the union busters and the political parties who cater to them. We know the Republicans hate unions while the Democrats will almost always show up at the Labor Day picnic to eat the workers beans. Their modus operandi is to allow our leaderships minimal access as long as they are committed to reigning in the militancy of the membership before it gets out of hand. And when push comes to a little shove, the Democratic Party will join with the GOP to clamp down on labor struggle such as with the 2022 rail negotiations. The Biden administration and both political parties played their real role as strikebreakers by imposing contracts on the rail workers with the threat of capitalist state repression waiting in the wings.

The eyes of the entire working class are on the UAW right now as it is launching the second tranche of strikes after one week on the picket lines. With the authority of the 97% strike vote,  if the UAW made this a class-wide fight and called for all workers who have lost ground to unite in struggle, this strike could be the next Giant Step for labor. The UAW strike has broad majority support today as do other labor struggles. 

Will Fain provide the necessary leadership to win? We do not know if his caucus is prepared to switch its strategy in time. Winning takes solidarity in action which means breaking Taft-Hartley and other anti-labor laws which outlaw solidarity strikes. The Democrats have allowed these anti-labor laws to stand for decades; they are treated as untouchable. Unions cannot win by abiding by those laws. Workers as a class must be  politically independent. If a political labor conference were called to unite all workers around the strike, to launch organizing drives and solidarity strikes and put up independent labor candidates today they would get a broad hearing and launch labor’s next Giant Step. 

We’ve seen support for a GENERAL STRIKE in the event of a government shutdown next week. We support this; there’s corruption everywhere we look and banksters plotting another crash. We need a politics that smashes Taft-Hartley and all anti-labor laws and both organizing drives and general strikes logically make a workers’ government possible. We need a workers government that will never go on strike against us! Would Fain support such class political independence? 

When asked on Face the Nation, UAW president Shawn Fain said the union has not endorsed Biden, putting it on Biden to show in action that he deserves it. The strike, he said, will be won on the picket line not by the intervention of politicians! At this new moment of accelerating class conflict, when the political failures of the twin parties of capitalism to address the crisis are increasingly apparent to all, he did not take advantage of the moment to call for working class political independence! Instead he threw Biden a soft ball, inviting him to join the picket line, and Biden went for it. This is the set up to keep the UAW and the working class locked into the capitalist Democrats.

Militant trade unionists, and revolutionary socialist workers, however, must disagree with brother Fain who makes support for the capitalist Democrats optional while welcoming Biden to the picket line. We say this is time for labor to proclaim its organizing drive and its political independence. To win this battle we have to reorient labor. Right now Fain’s popularity in the working class is strong. Enthusiasm for the strike can be leveraged into a class wide offensive from the shop floor to the halls of power. A call by Fain for a hard break from the Democrats would breathe life into the new militancy and excitement into the working class. 

Against Chauvinism: 

For decades the capitalist class has pitted U.S. workers against the workers of the world.  Demonizing immigrants and workers abroad for taking ‘our work.’ Indeed the UAW has been enlisted in and willingly participated in chauvinist “Buy American” campaigns. In their simplicity these campaigns direct the anger of workers away from the corporations who outsource and close union factories moving the work to Mexico, China and hard to unionize areas in the poverty stricken Republican states of the south east. Weakened and unwilling, the UAW did not vigorously attempt to organize the unorganized south or campaign to unite workers of the world in a fight for the same contract for the same work.  

Today GM employs only 49,000 workers in the US while employing 58,000 workers in China. Repatriated profits go to the big shareholders while the capitalist media and politicians of both parties (who GM contributes to) stoke anger and hatred for China. It is a ruse, don’t fall for it. Our real enemies are not the Mexican or Chinese workers; it is those who closed our factories, sent the jobs away, and the bosses and owners there: where foreign auto strikes are broken by their bosses, our bosses win on their investments and push our wages down. 

1937 Flint Sit-Down Strike

For a  Class Struggle Leadership of Our Unions!

In order for workers to win it requires solidarity, militancy, organization and leadership.Those worker leaders who want to fight with one hand tied, or not even fight at all need to be replaced with a leadership thrown up by the ranks who will. Bringing out only part of the union disperses union power and undermines class solidarity. More than that, a union leader who is merely a “trade union secretary”, focusing on narrow economic demands undermines the power of the whole working class. The UAW strike (just like the derailed UPS strike), could be turned into a fight for the whole working class and the oppressed who have been hit hard: Blacks, women, Latinos, immigrants, the unemployed and the other specially oppressed. And there needs to be a perspective to extend the strike internationally, into Mexico and China for example. We call on union militants to build class struggle caucuses within our unions based on a political program of transitional demands of today to fight for leadership both on the shop floor and within the official union leadership!

This will take a new class struggle leadership that can envision a world beyond capitalism. Objectivists, economists, reformists and anarchists line up to promote this moment as the spontaneous empowerment of the working class. Where this empowerment exists apart from  their pronouncements we can’t say, unless it’s just a theory, something to make conversation. Revolutionary socialism rejects objectivist spontaneism which results in uncritical adulation of every upsurge. They report on the struggle but with no intention of building a class struggle leadership which escalates towards political independence. We say, the path to victory is not via spontaneity and struggles confined to minimum economic demands. And those who remain opposed to workers launching their own party outright, or with excuses such as, “now is not the time,” are traitorous interlopers and the transmission belt of bourgeois ideology and pessimism into the workers movement. To win the workers must take advantage of this moment when the unions poll higher than the politicians to build our own workers’ party and new workers international to press the fight for workers’ governments.

Modern Workers Struggles are Inherently Anti-Racist

UAW pickets, largely Black, were yelled at with racist slurs and physically attacked by a man and his family, and this and other accounts of physical attacks are documented in conditions where nazis parade openly. Workers are left to their own initiative, which as a legal matter is proscribed and all such engagement, even vocal, is discouraged by leadership. 

“Leadership” organizes zero physical response and no defense against such attacks, exactly after the fashion of liberal politicians’ 100% reliance on the police. Of course constabulary model police departments hunt perpetrators after the fact! The history of police strikebreaking has been flushed; the mantra now is they’re the saviors of democracy, (Jan. 6th, etc.) Ergo we need armed, trained workers’ self-defense and a uniting of these pickets into union-based Labor-Black-Brown Community Defense Guards! 

Fight for Socialism

“The revolutionaries always consider that the reforms and acquisitions are only a by-product of the revolutionary struggle. If we say that we will only demand what they can give, the ruling class will give only one-tenth or none of what we demand. When we demand more and can impose our demands, the capitalists are compelled to give the maximum. The more extended and militant the spirit of the workers, the more is demanded and won. They are not sterile slogans; they are means of pressure on the bourgeoisie, and will give the greatest possible material results immediately.” Leon Trotsky: The Political Backwardness of American Workers (1938) (marxists.org)

Today, to survive the terminal crisis of capitalism, the environmental crisis, and the unfolding inter-imperialist conflict and hot wars, the working class needs political independence borne out of class struggle to unite the entire working class against the rule of the capitalist class.

A class struggle leadership could use this moment to call for a national organizing drive and a congress of labor’s representatives to launch a fighting workers labor party. A fighting workers party would be tribune of all the oppressed and organize with class struggle methods in every work place, school and community against repressive anti-labor laws that outlaw solidarity strikes which can become general strikes.

Such a party would not be limited to electoralism, but linked to the unions and oppressed communities it would launch a class wide debate on how a working class program could resolve the basic contradictions of capitalism wherein all production is social but the gains and profit are private. 

A transitional program to resolve this contradiction would end joblessness by implementing 30 hours work for 40 hours pay, end homelessness, poverty and hunger with trillions of dollars for public works programs, including environmental restoration and transition to clean energy sources. Child care, bodily autonomy, educational opportunity and care for the aging and infirm would all be addressed by a workers party arising out of class struggle. 

Our party would demand easy credits (at tolerable interest rates) for families and small businesses against the bankers currently driving up loan rates. Our party would demand the opening of the books to expose the parasitic nature of the corporations, the collusion of the insiders and politicians, and show cause to the entire working class for the nationalization of the commanding heights of the economy, without indemnification and under workers control. To win these demands, a fighting workers labor party will organize disciplined and armed labor defense guards as the masses are mobilized to win by means of general strikes, occupations and industry takeovers. Likewise inter-imperialist conflict and the forces of destruction, the war industries, threaten human survival. They turn our tax dollars into their war profits in Ukrainian and Russian bloodletting and have no interest in ending it.  Against this inherently self-destructive element of imperialism workers need a dual defeatist attitude toward war. To win peace the UAW and all labor organizations must take the lessons from the failure of the socialist workers to prevent WWI. We endorse the example of the Left Zimmerwaldists who waged revolutions against that war and won. Like them, we must declare, “Our Main Enemy is At Home!” We must say to the workers of the world we unite with you, not our capitalist bosses!

Build strike committees that unite strikers and workers in each district/region.

Build class struggle caucuses in every union. 

Hold a conference of all workers in the struggle to resolve questions of tactics and strategy.

For an all out strike! Bring out all the UAW! Seize the plants! Revive the sit-down strike!

Smash Taft-Hartley in the streets! Revive the solidarity strike! Build the general strike to unite with all workers on strike and/or organizing. 

Turn the strike momentum into an organizing drive across the industry and internationally. 

Defend immigrant workers’ fight to organize labor on both sides of the borders!

Against Anti-Chinese racism stoking the fires of war.

Picket lines mean don’t cross- for Labor Black/Brown self defense against scabs, racists and cop interference. 

Turn the 2023 strike wave into a fight for political independence. 

Jobs for all! 30 hours work for 40 hours pay.

For a sliding scale of wages and prices under control of workers’ wage and price committees.

Nationalize the commanding heights of the economy without indemnification to be run under working class control.

For a fighting workers labor party to fight for a workers’ government!

For socialism and a planned economy against the anarchy of production and the forces of destruction of world capitalism.

CWG-USA, September 23, 2023

AOTEAROA: FOR A WORKERS’ GOVERNMENT

 NZ is a neo-colony, nominally politically independent since it ceased to be referred to as a ‘dominion’ of Britain in 1945. Yet NZ never had a national revolution and its ‘dominion’ status was never repudiated. The ‘dominion’ has passed from Britain to the two giant post-war imperialist powers, the declining US, and the rising China. By definition, the political independence of neo-colonies is a lie, as they remain subordinated to their neo-colonial masters.  What passes for politics in NZ remains determined by imperialism, expressed most directly through the politics of the various governments which hold parliamentary power. The upcoming October 2023 election provides an opportunity to analyse what power, if any, governments can exercise independently of imperialism. What are the limits to that independence? Does it make any difference that the Labour Party is more non-aligned historically, and today inclined towards China and the BRICS, while the National Party is historically aligned with the US? We argue here, that despite such differences, and the degree to which left and right centre governments are aligned with China or the US, in the last analysis it doesn’t matter. The only force that can liberate NZ from imperialism, East or West, is the revolutionary working class, as part of the global formation of Workers’ Governments, East and West, North and South. 

NZ as a Neo-colony of Imperialism

To explain what us going on in NZ we have first to understand its position in the global economy. This is what sets the conditions determining its economic development and in turn its political and cultural dynamics. To survive, capitalism must increase its share of the wealth produced by labour. The definition of a neo-colony is a country which has formal political independence but remains dominated economically by one or more imperialist powers. For Marxists, a country that remains dominated economically cannot be politically independent. 

The history of successive government in NZ proves this point. NZ has always been politically dominated by imperialist finance capital, that of Britain in the interwar period, and increasingly the US and China in the post-war period. Since the end of the post-war boom profits have fallen and never recovered. The end of the boom in the 1970s exhausted the limits of Muldoon’s Keynesian economic nationalism, forcing the Lange government to impose its neo-liberal counter-revolution in the 1980’s. While neo-liberalism has increased the share of profits at the expense of the share of NZ workers – topped by the NZ$ 1 trillion transfer of wealth from labour to capital during the height of the Covid pandemic 2020-22 – it is not enough to save global capitalism’s terminal decline. US and Chinese imperialism have no option by to increase their exploitation of their neo-colonies, including NZ, downloading the cost of their terminal crisis onto workers and poor farmers.

In the case of China, NZ produces mainly raw materials with little processing. It sells milk products, raw timber, and allows China to invest in agricultural production with a similar level of processing. NZ imports mainly finished manufactures from China on the basis of competitive price. Is this no more than the normal operation of comparative advantage globally or does this amount to economic domination? It depends on the how much China is in the position to extract surplus profits from NZ both in NZs export to and imports from China.

NZ is also a neo-colony of the US – NZ has long been part of the Anglo-American Cold War story against Russia and China. But NZ is not yet committed to the inner security circle of AUKUS. Nevertheless, the US dominates NZ security and political relations, sharing Western Eurocentric ‘values’ – ‘rip, shit and bust’.  More recently it has invested heavily in tech startups and NZ state and corporate security and ‘cloud’ services. (eg Amazon). NZ is taking a relatively neutral line on the war. It didn’t join with the other 5 eyes in Iraq or Afghanistan. It waits for the UN OK to send ‘peacekeepers’ or ‘trainers’. In terms of the economic reality shaping the political, the NZ bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie are rent seeking realists.

The foreign policy of the NZ Labour Govt is dominated by trade favouring China and its BRICS partners while resisting US military ultimatums. Current government officials have made at least two visits to India to further trade relations (expand) and recently visited Saudia Arabia and the UAE for new bi-lateral deals. All are now members of BRICS which indicates Labour’s willingness to associate with the BRICS trading bloc despite pressure from the US – including the recent visit of US neo-con secretary of State Blinken. While both major parties put profits first, the National and ACT both have long term political and cultural relationships with the US during the Cold War.

ACT (Association of Citizens and Taxpayers) was founded by Labour Party who resigned who formed ACT after failing to push the Lange Government to enact the full-on US led neo-liberal counter-revolution to destroy the economic influence of the Soviet Bloc. The failure to reduce the Russia and China as pawns of the West didn’t stop the rot of US economic decline. Biden’s ‘neo-conservative’ proxy war against Ukraine to split Russia from China is its last desperate act to revive US imperialist hegemony. This warmongering threatens to escalate rapidly and draw NZ into a new world war. Given its political interests a NACT government in power would be more likely than a Labour led coalition to sacrifice trading relations with BRICS and cave into US political pressure to make war with China. To what extent will this different orientation in foreign policy towards East and West imperialist blocs, determine NZ’s domestic politics?

Governments Left, Right and Centre

The upcoming elections in NZ are designed to highlight the apparent differences between a Labour led left-centre government and a National led right-centre government?  This makes good political theatre in which governments appear to serve the interests of conflicting classes. In fact, both parties historically have converged on the political centre representing the petty bourgeoisie and its modern ally the bureaucratic administrative middle class that together serve the bourgeois ruling class.

The popular belief that a National led coalition will be hostage to the ultra-right ACT party, or a Labour led majority be hostage to the Greens or Māori Party, actually works in the opposite direction. These ideological outliers painted as ‘extremes’ create the fear that tiny minorities will dictate the political agenda. Yet the reverse is the case.  The ‘extreme’ minorities are locked into almost identical centrist majority governments which manage ‘middle NZ’ in the class interests of the national bourgeoisie and its imperialist masters. Meanwhile, the working-class majority becomes disillusioned in the parliamentary circus, disaffected in bourgeois democracy, and potential fascist fodder.

This is the classic argument for the popular front between workers and bosses which prepares the way for fascism. The Ardern coalition govt showed this. In its first term, NZ First’s centrist populist stance was the excuse used by Labour for not delivering on its ‘transformational’ election promises. In Labour’s second term the Covid pandemic saw the coalition make a huge wealth transfer from workers to capitalists on the pretext of stabilising the economy.  If a Labour/Green/Māori Coalition wins in October 2023 it will be no less a popular front based on the woke, liberal middle class, in bed with corporate capitalism.

Would a Left centre coalition be the ‘lesser evil’ compared with a NACT victory?  No. Both left and right blocs depend on not scaring the centre to prevent the ultra-left Greens/Māori and Ultra-right ACT from running the government. Yet the minority parties cannot dominate government when the centre is the centre of political gravity occupied by an electoral majority committed to liberal democratic capitalist government. Revolutionaries call liberal democracy ‘bourgeois democracy’ since all such governments are committed to the fiction of ‘democracy’ to hide the bourgeois ‘dictatorship’ of the ‘bourgeois’ ruling class.

So, while the ult-right ACT and center-left Greens express the politics of the disaffected middle-class and petty capitalists, both are ultimately directed at their common enemy – the organised and independent working class. Their parliamentary solution is the popular (or peoples’) front between workers and the bourgeoisie in a national unity government. If the upcoming elections throws up such a popular front it is the outcome is likely to be a hung parliament where National and Act to form a government must enlist NZ First Winston Peters as king maker, reversing his role in the previous Labour coalition.

If the left bloc between Labour and the Greens needs the numbers to form a government, it will be the leftist Te Pāti Māori that will act as the ‘kingmaker’. It remains to be seen, in this eventuality, whether TPM will accommodate to Labour and Greens middle class or refuse Confidence and Supply and risk losing a vote of no confidence. The neo-liberal counter-revolution decimated organised labour particularly Māori, and created a whole new class of petty bourgeois now hostile to the working class. This accounts for the shift in Labour from a bourgeois workers party to an open neoliberal capitalist party during the 1980s. We argue that a party that incorporates workers and petty bourgeois capitalists together is a popular front party serving as the ‘shadow’ of the big bourgeoisie. That is why no genuinely workers party claiming to represent Māori and Pākehā can give such a popular front any political support without helping prepare the defeat of workers as a class.  We can illustrate this danger when workers are fooled into voting for NZ First to prevent National from compromising with ACT in the hope that Peters will defend the interests of workers, Māori and Women.

NZ First Racist Populism

Peters is a scurrilous right-wing populist who loves to position himself as kingmaker in the centre of politics to keep governments of left and right honest. Despite his Māori heritage, Peters is an advocate of Eurocentrist white supremacy that defends the legacy of settler colonialism. His constituency is the aging ‘one people’ assimilationist rump scared of change under Left and Right governments which agree on woke post-modern capitalist globalism. Peters frightens his flock with his conspiracy theory that separatist globalism is caused by Marxist cultural wars over ‘race’ and ‘class’. Never mind that globalism is the face of the imperialism that dominates neo-colonial NZ and the mortal enemy of Marxism. Peter’s opportunism casts imperialism and Marxism as cultural warriors in bed together.

Behind this subterfuge, Peters real target is the white racists fear of racial ‘separatism’, that is ‘brown power’, as represented by ‘co-governance’ or ‘power sharing’ under Te Tiriti.  Specifically, the culprit is the ‘Marxist Globalist’ UN token resolution on Indigenous Peoples’ Rights adopted by both National and Labour. National sat on the resolution and then dumped it when the red flag of the reactionary ‘one nation’ assimilationist crowd was raised.  Labour, ever committed to Te Tiriti tokenism, tried to appease the woke left and legislate for the token co-governance, before sidelining it with the departure of PM Ardern, proving that under Labour, Te Tiriti will never be honoured. Not because Labour will probably be defeated this election but because it’s focus groups and the woke media both rejected co-governance.

However, it is women who have most to lose by voting for NZ First. NZ First has an ostensibly liberal position on women’s rights. It proposed the legalisation of abortion (2020) be put to a referendum. It postponed the undemocratic attempt by Labour and Greens to pass legislation implementing sex-self ID. Today, Peters has come out in support for women’s rights, especially to their own spaces such as toilets, and women’s sports. However, NZ First supports women’s rights from a conservative standpoint. It opposes men and women changing sex because that disrupts the historical relationship of the sexes in marriage and the family. Taken together, with its white supremacist patriarchal agenda, it supports traditional roles for women in which they are historically subordinate. If women vote for NZ First on the issue of Women’s Rights, it may get across the 5% threshold and enable a center-right popular front government to take power. 

Te Pāti Māori, Women’s Rights Party, Workers Now!

TPM stands for the honouring of the Tìrìti O Waitangi. Yet the Treaty cannot be honoured without self-determination which means restoring iwi land rights, self-rule and political equality. No capitalist government left, right or centre, will grant Māori self-determination. This was proven when Labour, which had led the reform process on the Treaty in the 1970s, baulked over Māori ownership of the Foreshore and Seabed (F&S). TPM was preceded by Mana Motuhake when Matiu Rata rebelled against Labour’s neo-liberalism and joined with the NLP as part of the Alliance in 1990. TPM was formed in 2004 when Tariana Turia split with Labour over the F&S.

Our position then was to reject parliament and occupy the F&S. Of course, TPM did the opposite becoming a coalition partner with the National Party of John Key for three terms! In 2011 Hone Harawira split from TPM joining with union leader former Alliance MP Laila Harre in a coalition of his Mana Party with the Internet Party of Dot Com!  The Mana Party was a progressive left party, but as a mini popular front of Māori, unionists, and tech millionaires dissolved when Harawira lost Te Tai Tokerau in 2014. TPM was reborn in 2020 under the leadership of former Labour MP John Tamahere as treaty-centred and economically leftwing, calling for taxes on wealth and land speculation. 

We recognise TPM today is a radical reformist party representing the interests of Māori as an oppressed people. Its leadership, while drawn from the labour bureaucracy and Māori middle class, is acting like the chiefdoms such as Te Whiti’s representing collective Treaty rights by raising demands that cannot be met short of an end to capitalist society. The demand for self-determination under the Treaty means the restoration of Māori land use rights, self-rule, and political equality. No capitalist government would enact them. TPM’s land tax on the unearned increment is in effect the nationalisation of the land as a use-value rather than a commodity producing rent. But for this to happen the end of money as capital, that is, no more than a measure of labour time, would demand a state bank replacing private banks.  TPMs program calls for a Workers’ Government to enact economic equality based on equal shares in a planned economy in a socialist Aotearoa.

Similarly, the Women’s Rights Party and Workers Now! are radical reformist parties, in the tradition of the Suffragettes and women’s organised labour.  Of necessity, women’s defence of the fundamental rights in the 19^th and 20^th century faces a counter-revolution in trans ideology, allowing men the right to be women and proving that the bourgeois right of free speech and association can only be realised by permanent or socialist revolution. These radical left parties of women and workers who have split to the left from social democracy should be given critical support by workers provided they don’t prop up a popular front with the Labour Party and the Greens. We call on these parties to reject any political endorsement of the ruling capitalist parties, including confidence and supply agreements, and to use parliament like Lenin and Liebknecht advocated, as a ‘tribune’ or rostrum where communists stood to raise their revolutionary platforms for a Workers’ Government, to take power, overthrow capitalist and patriarchal modes of production and to fight for socialism. 

From Capitalist NZ to Socialist Aotearoa

We have argued that New Zealand is a neo-colony of imperialism, first of Britain up to WW2, and since then, of the US and China. We do not link the word Aotearoa to this neo-colony but reserve it for a socialist republic as part of a wider Pacific federation of socialist republics. To make the transition from neo-colony to socialist republic it is necessary to fight for the permanent revolution. From Marx in 1848 to Trotsky in 1940 permanent revolution means that it is the working class alone that can end capitalism and create the conditions for socialism. The fight to defend and extend bourgeois rights cannot succeed without the overthrow of the bourgeois ruling class, and its replacement by the proletarian ruling class.

Workers need an independent workers’ party with a transitional program. We have shown how such basic demands cannot be met by parliamentary means in this age of imperialism. In fact, what rights remain are being eliminated. No capitalist government, no matter how many indigenous, workers and women are in the cabinet since the centre ground committed to stable capitalism strangles any real resistance. Workers Now, and Women’s Rights Party are in the fight for a new mass workers party where both sexes, and all peoples, Māori, Pacific, Asian, African and European belong. He task of a mass workers party is to fight for workers’ democracy in a Workers’ Government based on the independent working class organisations of all workers and peoples.

The Te Pāti Māori is also in this fight. Despite its middle-class leadership, its fight for Māori self-determination cannot be realised under capitalism short of permanent revolution. All are staunchly defending basic bourgeois rights of Māori and women workers who make up the huge majority of the reserve army of labour.  Yet this fight can be won only by breaking with the labour bureaucracy in politics and the unions, and with the bourgeoisie and its state machine. That is, breaking from the popular front regimes that tie workers to the bosses. These rights can be won only by the independent working-class party, uniting wage workers, contract workers, and unpaid workers, armed with its transitional program, as the only class capable of ending capitalism and building a socialist society in harmony with nature. 

September 13  

Class Struggle 146 September-November Spring 2023

 

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