Class Struggle 150 by dbedggood on Scribd
Wednesday, September 18, 2024
Monday, June 10, 2024
Sunday, April 28, 2024
May Day: Facing the Crises of Genocide, Global War and the Destruction of Our Planet!
Walking in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, on April 16. Agence France-Presse
The Gaza genocide, unlike past genocides like that of the Congo, is being watched on smart phones around the world. The Zionist propaganda machine reveals itself as ‘white washing’ the colonial settler state and its 75 year project of Palestinian expulsion. The Zionists claim that any criticism of the Zionist state is anti-semitic and based on Jew hatred. This lie has been exposed in the streets in ten thousand demonstrations around the world where anti-Zionist Jews join arm in arm with Palestinians and their millions of supporters to oppose the genocide.
The Western world bourgeois regimes have lined up behind the genocidal strategy, while the rest of the world is screaming its support for the Palestinian bourgeois democratic right to self-determination. The means to fight genocide is limited only by the fact that workers lack a world party of socialist revolution which turns Palestinian national liberation into the cause for the global overthrow of the rotten and corrupt capitalist system which can survive only by means of genocide. The crisis of the survival of humanity as a whole comes down to the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the working class, ending capitalism and creating a socialist world.
In Israel, the U.S. and Germany, traditionally protected democratic rights to protest and speak out are being denied to students, academics and activists. Academics with tenure have been fired, suspended and hounded out of the profession. Student protesters are arrested and suspended from schools and universities and solidarity activists are targeted by the state and denied the right to speak to public forums.
Sustained protests for the duration of the genocide is radicalizing youth, many of whom were already politicized during the Black Lives Matter uprising and the strike wave that followed the end of the lockdown. This generation has already witnessed the false hope of the Democratic Socialists of America corralling activists as a left fringe of the imperialist Democratic Party. Kim Moody of Labor Notes writes in New Politics the electoral enthusiasm around Sanders and the Squad has faded as measured in hard currency contributions of small donors! It is past time to break with the capitalist parties of war, racism, sexism and strikebreaking!
As Marxists, we reject bourgeois pragmatism which began with genocide in the 16th century on the basis of racism and sexism. We reject electoralism which cannot cover up for genocide in Ukraine and Palestine. We defend the fundamental democratic right of youth to take to the streets and we recruit them to our PMP (proletarian military policy) alongside the ranks of the unions who need to organize self-defense militias against the state forces of imperialist powers of a system that is in its death agony. We know that class consciousness cannot blossom short of the lived experience of workers in struggle. And for that they need a political party that unites them on the basis of their common interest as workers creating the wealth, against racism, sexism and nationalism which the ruling class uses to divide and destroy our class.
By organizing our class in fighting labor parties we will destroy the hold of pragmatism, electoralism and divisions in our ranks and build a revolutionary movement. One capable of smashing the imperialist states and their proxies to raise up workers’ governments around the world that will expropriate the centuries of stolen wealth to build a socialist society. An egalitarian society which restores the harmony between humans and nature and creates the conditions for the survival of our planet.
Only fatalists think it will happen by itself! Even the capitalists’ spy agencies know better; that’s why they target the organizers of the workers and oppressed. We need an army of such organizers and leaders, a party to train them, and a class struggle that demonstrates its own power, independent and based on workers’ democracy! To begin, in the Unions we need class struggle caucuses that redirect the memberships’ thought and action away from class collaboration and to actions implementing a transitional program. These caucuses will fight to replace the class collaborators with ever more militant vanguard layers.
Only Trotsky’s Transitional Program for Permanent Revolution can arm the international working class to resolve the accelerating global terminal crisis of capitalism in decay. Unable to reverse the system in its terminal decline, the capitalist rulers have blown through every global warning marker. Oceans are warming, the poles are melting, reefs are dying, fisheries are depleted, climate systems change faster than the infrastructure designed for the 19th-20th centuries can be patched up by the capitalist grafters. The contending imperialist powers have turned trade wars into proxy wars over control of resources, markets and for strategic advantage. No surprise these rivalries are catastrophic for populations who find themselves in the way.
The Ukraine, Taiwan and Israeli regimes are wholly dependent on U.S.A. funding. The NATO encirclement of Russia is backfiring as the Ukrainian proxy regime is running short of ammunition and troops. Troops are mutinying, swimming across the Dnieper to safety. ‘Slava Ukraine’ is close to collapse as more men escape abroad rather than die in the meat grinder. Israel’s fragility is exposed; it is dependent on the U.S.A./UE (European Union) and NATO for both arms and defense. It cannot get away with its genocide of Palestine without the collaboration of the U.S.A. and the UE. Taiwan, despite its recognition as part of China, has been taken over and militarily occupied by the U.S. as a new proxy for the coming war: with China, Korea, Japan, the Philippines and the AUKUS partners mobilizing for war, coming perhaps as soon as next year.
In the imperialist nations vital resources are channeled away from social programs and into military production. In the U.S.A. the equivalent amount of the entire national debt has been spent on the military budget since 2000. Despite the enormous outlay, Russia has fought the US/NATO proxy Ukraine to a standstill in what is an inter-imperialist conflict. The $95 billion just allotted for wars in Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan by the bi-partisan neocon cabal in Washington can’t match Russian missile production, let alone sustain Israel in a regional war. Those billions will never be more than a digital blip on Ukraine or Israel’s financial radar; the profits will go to Raytheon, Boeing, Rand, GE and the military industrial complex.
In the semi-colonies a national bourgeois comprador class participates in the imperialist parasitism perilously navigating between the declining USA/EU bloc and the rising China/Russia bloc. To the imperialists they offer the resources of the nation and the working class chained to the factory floor and broken by their ideological servants in media, academia, the union leaderships and the reformist and centrist parties. The economic crisis and imperialist competition expresses itself acutely in semi colonies. The burden of the capitalist system failing to counteract the Law of Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (LTRPTF) compounded by the necessary imperialist dynamic to dump the burden of the crisis on semi-colonies makes the working class in these countries super exploited.
South Africa, is threatened with sanctions for exposing the Gaza genocide to the world at the International Court of Justice. The sanctions only drive South Africa deeper into the China camp. The ANC and its left flank are hoping to attract Chinese investments which they then sell as ‘win-win’ deals to the masses as a path to a progressive form of state socialism modeled on China. U.S. imperialism responds by preparing for a ‘color revolution’ (HR 7256) backing the Democratic Alliance Party. Across the globe the workers, small farmers and oppressed are caught in a tug of war between these great powers!
In Zimbabwe, the state is attacking workers through capturing the dominant faction of the main trade union federation by enacting a Labour Amendment Act that criminalizes calling for and organizing collective job action. The state is maintaining a multi-currency system that they, together with business, manipulate to pay slave wages, giving the Chinese license and encouragement to disregard labor and environmental rights. Now they are introducing a new currency based on the theft of the value of workers incomes and savings. This goes along with the continued crackdown on basic worker rights to organize and strike and increased authoritarianism in defense of capitalist production with looting and corruption by the comprador bourgeoisie.
The rise of China as an imperialist state has found expression in the southern African region through fake anti-imperialist stances camouflaging the ongoing exploitation of labor power and the environment. Workers in the region must organize independently of both wings of imperialism and move beyond the collaborationist union leaders and bureaucrats through building shop floor controlled action bodies prepared to utilize tried and tested working class methods.
Imperialism is a death sentence for the workers of the world and only we can stop it! To do so we need our own political party, one based on working class political independence, based on our class experience of how labor is exploited by capitalism and how only class struggle and a transitional political program can resolve the crisis by building worker organizations to smash the capitalist state and create workers’ governments. Now is the moment to build a fighting workers-labor party and the revolutionary workers international needed to lead and coordinate the class struggle.
Our transitional program rejects the ideologies of pragmatism, patriarchy and post-modernism as the decadent genocidal culture of a dying capitalism throwing up and turbocharging all the old crap of past crimes against humanity. We reject racism, sexism and national chauvinism and denounce it as counter revolutionary. We affirm the positions of the Bolsheviks; down with Eurocentric white supremacy, national chauvinism of all shades, and the historic oppression of women. We build on the rich legacy of the historic collectivist struggles of slaves, women, peasants and workers in our struggle today. Workers and oppressed everywhere have the power and the will to resist and fight back.
The horror of the Zionist Israeli state violence against the Palestinian people cannot be stopped through moralist appeals to the parasitic exploiter class or their politicians! We need coordinated international actions: mass protests and worker actions such as labor political strikes, hot-cargoing of imperialist war goods to Israel, and sit-down strikes in the war industries. Workers parties, as part of a new Workers International, would organize and coordinate these actions on a world scale. But first we need to build our own mass revolutionary workers parties in every country to marshall the resources of the working class and poor farmers as one fist rather than atomized, decentralized, and apolitical protests sucked into single-issue dead ends and diversions in election years.
Independent workers parties and a workers’ international are needed that will take the rich historical lessons of the workers movement and encapsulate these lessons into a political program of transitional demands based on the method of Trotsky’s Fourth International that recognises the necessity for socialist revolution to halt the rush to extinction. For our class and species, we demand a future! For workers to live, imperialism must die!
Free Palestine!
Victory to Palestine! Defend the Palestinians! Drop all charges and free all Palestinian solidarity protesters! Down with Israel and theocracy! For a Socialist, federated West Asia!
We need to convene a new Zimmerwald to build a revolutionary opposition to inter-imperialist wars such as Ukraine and to agitate for dual defeatism to turn these wars into class wars at home against our “own” imperialist and proxy ruling classes.
Not one person, not one penny for the imperialist militaries! Billions for public works! Jobs for all through a 30 hour workweek at 40 hours pay! For a 100% cost of living increase linked to inflation!
For free quality healthcare, childcare, housing and education! For free abortion on demand! For women’s liberation through socialism!
The capitalists will only ever offer exploitation, war, racism, poverty, climate catastrophe…and fascism as their last line of defense. We need a Workers’ Government based on workers councils and defended by a workers militia to smash capitalism and carry out the tasks of building a socialist future.
For the nationalization without indemnification of the commanding heights of industry under democratic workers control as part of a centralized, planned world socialist economy.
Build Revolutionary Workers Parties and a new Revolutionary Workers International! For the World Socialist Revolution! Workers of the World Unite!
International Leninist Trotskyist Tendency (ILTT), 04/25/2024
Monday, April 15, 2024
Smash the Genocidal Zionist state! U.S.A. Hands off Iran! U.S. Imperialists Out of West Asia, Now! The tail does not wag the dog! Stop funding Israel! Zionists Out of Gaza and the West Bank Now!
An MH-60S Sea Hawk helicopter lifts off from the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln as it transits the Strait of Hormuz off the waters of Iran [File: US Navy/Reuters]
Netanyahu has been trying to drag the U.S. into its ongoing ‘shadow war’ against Iran for decades. The U.S. wants its war with Iran but on its own terms, economic isolation, limited proxy engagements, shots across the bow, tepid challenges for sea lanes. None but the most flagrant neocons want tit-for-tat sparring to escalate to full blown and potentially nuclear warfare. Yet today sectors of the Israeli establishment seriously consider the Samson Option. The west holds its breath as Netanyahu’s war cabinet considers its options.
The working class needs its own intervention to stop the escalation towards WWIII! The UN and International Court of Justice have proven themselves as feckless talk shops of the imperialist dominated by ‘world order’ which negate any independent action of the Global South. Today workers and oppressed people need a New Zimmerwald to organize an internationalist class struggle against war and the root cause of war today–capitalist exploitation at home and imperialist oppression abroad.
By bombing the Iranian embassy in Syria and killing General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, Israel provoked Iran in hopes of a retaliation of measured proportion which would stiffen the U.S. resolve. Losing the media war, Israel needs to turn world attention away from the genocide in Gaza and to reassert its role as the primary victim of irrational international anti-semitism. Zionism’s war has exposed its character as the bulldog of western imperialism so it needs to change the world’s conversation from its attempt to drive Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank, to the Iranian response. Never mind the fact that bombing the embassy violated the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations article 22, which made the premises of foreign missions inviolable.
Invoking Article 51, Iran responded on April 13,th 2024 by hitting Israel with dozens of drone and missile strikes targeting military installations, emphasizing their adherence to rules of engagement by not targeting civilian populations. The U.S. and UK responded as could be expected placing the blame on Iran and employing its resources to shield Israel from the incoming. This of course stands in stark contrast to the fact that they not only stood by failing to protect the civilians of Gaza while Israel bombed them, but continued to provide arms and logistical support to the Zionist aggressors even after having been exposed in the international court of Justice.
Western media brushes aside the provocation attempting to rally international outrage at Iran–as if history started yesterday! This won’t work in the Global South! The masses are applauding Iran’s action and have been hoping someone would intervene on behalf of the Palestinians! Of course, Iran will not press on to liberate Palestine, citing violations of their sovereignty as cause. In an alignment of forces even the Arab theocracies which are today navigating the space between the Chinese and U.S. imperialisms do not speak for their own people while they close their air space to Iranian overflights, distancing themselves from the Iranian action.
The hawkish Democratic Party, dominated by the neocons in Washington, are committed to the defense of Israel regardless of the 34,000 dead in Gaza. Arms keep flowing despite the feigned outrage at the deaths of a few aid workers! Biden feels the pressure on the campaign trail as Democratic party events are being disrupted by Palestine Solidarity activists and his government stands accused of participation in the genocide by arming the Zionist settler state. Netanyahu, observing the backpedaling of the U.S., has been stoking the fires of regional war, cashing in on the U.S. promise of unconditional defense and catching Biden in the crosshairs. Trump, sniping from the sidelines, claims this would never have happened on his watch.
Biden, losing in the polls, has made gestures to counter the Arab American community’s campaigns of withholding votes in the Democratic primary. Netanyahu also wants to stay in office to stay out of jail and could not let Biden play big daddy and broker an unwanted peace. Provoking war with Iran is a gambit to pull Biden off the fence. But the U.S. does not want nuclear war and knows the unhinged Netanyahu with fantasies of Biblical proportions could cross that trip wire. No doubt after Iran took its shot, Biden was on the horn with Netanyahu trying to calm the whole affair down. Biden lost Afghanistan, or so the story goes….he does not want to lose Israel, at least before the election. The next few hours will be a walk back from the brink. But the masses in the streets want a resolution that ends the genocide in Gaza and the accelerating pogroms and occupations in the West Bank. So neither Biden nor Netanyahu can resolve the contradictions that are foremost in front of the world today. The Zionist colonial settler state must be smashed. For workers revolution and a socialist Palestine! For a Socialist Federation of West Asia!
The terminal decline of capitalism offers up a cesspool of the most reactionary ideas. Ideas which the ‘forward thinking’ intelligentsia presumed were shadows of a long buried past are today normalized in the rantings of Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, Trump and and even many old fashioned liberal Democrats. They dehumanize oppressed people from Haiti to Gaza as pests, gangsters and terrorists. This is awkwardly reminiscent of how every oppressor throughout history has demonized the oppressed!
Zionism is losing the propaganda war because the mainstream media is rigged by its corporate owners in favor of imperialism, and everyone knows it, so they can no longer maintain the hypocrisy that white supremist colonialist regimes are forces of democracy!
Israel is a puppet state which cannot survive without the U.S. backing. The U.S. won’t swat them down because it is the U.S. aircraft carrier on land in the region. It stands as a bulwark against the regional powers and serves to divide the Arab nations and their Iranian neighbors. Israel serves to keep the national bourgeoisie of the neighboring nations tied to imperialism and committed to stopping the masses from advancing the permanent revolution and winning socialism by defeating imperialism.
Israel is an occupier founded upon the mutual interest of Western Imperialist intention to control Arab oil and Jewish capitalists’ class interests.
Palestine is the last of the 20thC. settler colonial states in struggle for its liberation. 75 years of determined struggle hardened ideological lines on both sides.
So we need an international proletarian military policy to turn war in Palestine into war against the actual puppet master, the U.S. ruling class, and all the other imperialist governments who support the Zionist Israeli state. In the unfolding war between the U.S. proxy Israel and Iran we stand for the unconditional military defense of Iran without giving any political support to its theocratic capitalist regime.
Build the mass actions in solidarity with Palestine and Iran up into labor struggles internationally against the imperialist backers of Israel (USA, UK, France, Germany and their proxies Ukraine etc). Create teach-ins at every labor council, to debate Palestine in front of the working class. Fight for the political independence of the working class! Give no votes to capitalist and popular front parties!
Win the workers movement to political strikes in defense of the Palestinians, against the arming of Israel and against all Israeli and imperialist military actions. Block military shipments. Dockers must initiate strikes to refuse loading Israeli commercial ships and hot cargo and divert military and humanitarian aid to the Palestinians. This is how anti-imperialist workers must turn the imperialist proxy war into a class war at home!
Propagandize the soldiers, sailors and airmen; show them the facts that they are to be used for genocide in order to hold back the working masses and keep oil profits flowing between the comprador bourgeois oil barrons and big western oil interests.
Victory to the Palestine Resistance! Defeat the IDF! Defend Iran! Build revolutionary workers’ parties in the imperialist nations and throughout West Asia! For a new Zimmerwald to organize against imperialist wars! For a new Workers International, the World Party of Socialist Revolution!
International Leninist Trotskyist Tendency (ILTT), 04/14/2024
Wednesday, April 10, 2024
US Hands off Haiti! For a Socialist Republic in a Federation of Socialist Republics of the Americas!
Haiti is experiencing yet another moment of great instability as state power is disintegrating. Hunger and misery plague the country and armed gangs are spread across the capital, blocking roads and taking over public buildings. A consequence of centuries of control and exploitation by French and later US imperialism of the country.
Haiti had the only successful slave revolution. Its military defeat of France in 1804 sparked the wave of national independence across Latin America led by Simon Bolivar who began his struggle to ‘liberate’ Latin America from the European powers from an already liberated Haiti.
Yet Bolivar refused to come to the aid of Haiti fearing that it might inspire workers and peasants to overthrow the Latin American bourgeoisies. Isolated without support from the Bolivariains, Haiti was re-colonised by France and Napoleon forced the free slaves to pay the price of their freedom as part of the national debt well into the 20th century.
Imperialism and the Latin American bourgeoisies never accepted Haiti’s freedom because it stood out as the only example of a national liberation struggle led by slaves. Since that time it has suffered countless occupations and interventions by American imperialism which regarded it as the poor child on its back door step, either occupying or creating puppet governments for more than a century until the election of Aristide in 1991. The populist priest Aristide was elected President in 1991 but ousted by a US backed military coup that same year. Another US military occupation followed and Aristide returned in 1994 to complete his term of office. Aristide was re-elected in 2000 but fell out with the US and its neoliberal policies and was forced out of the country in 2004 by a US/French coup.
In 2004, MINUSTAH, a US intervention fronted by the UN, militarily occupied Haiti, which lasted until 2017. Under the pretext of taking care of security, it imposed terror on the population and ensured that American companies could control oil and other resources etc without risk of democratic intervention.
MINUSTAH was led by Brazil, which at the time was governed by Lula, a Popular Front government that served the interests of imperialism, whether at home or abroad. The general that Lula sent to command MINUSTAH in Haiti was the general who later became Bolsonaro's right-hand man in his government.
Haiti is the historic expression of naked capitalist barbarism from colonisation in the 15th C to its terminal crisis today. It turns the imperialist narrative of the civilizing mission on its head when slaves were the only exploited class to win freedom from bourgeois rule. In a time of decadence in American imperialism, which is in dispute with rising Chinese imperialism, the USA intends to hold on to Haiti at all costs. Through the UN, it is trying to create a security force in Haiti that appears to be independent of the hated US and UN occupations. Its attempt to use Kenyan police officers is opposed both in Kenya and in the Global South. In Haiti, the rebels have rejected all external intervention outright.
In the face of all imperialist exploitation and attacks, workers and poor people in Haiti have always resisted. Today, many of the gangs that the media demonizes are organizations that were formed in neighborhoods for self-defense against state abuse and crime. One of those who is recognized as the main leader of the popular revolution, Jimmy Cherizier, who has united a number of territorial ‘gangs’ into the G6 which fights corruption and crime and seeks to organise all the working masses in an armed struggle.
Cherizier makes it clear that he is fighting against the foreign intervention that has led the country to misery and chaos for decades. Tired of government leaders who are just puppets of imperialism, he demanded the departure of the US favoured Prime Minister Ariel Henry and prevented his return to Haiti. He is now fighting the installation by the US of a Presidential Transition Council that is not elected by the people and does not represent them.
We support the rebels who take up arms and resist imperialist domination and the national bourgeoisie who only follow orders from their international leaders. It is a basic democratic right to rebel against hunger, famine, poverty, lack of infrastructure and corruption that plague the country.
We strongly oppose the demonisation of working class rebels like Cherizier as ‘criminals’ and ‘terrorists’ on the part of the bourgeoisie and the fake Left. It is patronizing and racist to label the descendants of revolutionary slaves as doomed to fight among themselves and incapable of resisting their oppressors. The duty of the revolutionary left is to come to the aid of such incipient armed anti-imperialist rebellions and fight for their national self-determination.
It is also the duty of the revolutionary left to win the resistance to the permanent revolution for a socialist republic and prevent the revolution being overwhelmed by the bourgeois counter-revolution. Haiti was betrayed by the first Bolivarian revolution and now by the second of Castro/Chavez. The G6 led by Cherizier needs to advance towards the organization of workers and poor peasants into armed committees who make this fight in an organized and classist way. Haiti has no way out of the barbarism it finds itself in without the seizure of power, the expropriation of the bourgeoisie and the expulsion of imperialism.
It is necessary to build a party of world revolution that guides workers in this moment of instability that affects countries around the world, especially in the global south. The so-called global south means the semi-colonial countries exploited and controlled by imperialism and which today are suffering the instability of a world order in which the decadence of the USA puts it directly in dispute with the ascending imperialisms of China and Russia, transmitted to the semi-colonies and moving towards a new world war.
We are for a new Zimmerwald to bring together a revolutionary left and build a program of transition to socialism for the working and poor masses in the struggle for the world revolution. A revolutionary leadership that fights Castro-Chavism as a counter-revolutionary force that prevents class independence and leads workers to an International Popular Front with the Chinese imperialist bloc and to die in inter-imperialist wars.
For class independence, for the World Party of Socialist Revolution based on Trotsky's Transitional Program! For Permanent Revolution!
Tuesday, March 12, 2024
Sunday, March 10, 2024
Why the Treaty is still a Fraud
WHY THE TREATY IS STILL A FRAUD
| Hōne Heke chopped down the flagpole with the British flag at Kororāreka four times (July 1844-March 1845) |
All the old shit flying around the Treaty, everything that is not about Māori land rights and the necessity to nationalise the land to restore them, is immaterial. Ann Salmond documents what Māori chiefs said about the Treaty. They knew from experience that missionaries and settlers coveted the land as their private property. Yet they were promised chiefly sovereignty over their land; and their land rights protected by the Queen. They had the right to sell to the Crown which would stop land being wrongly taken. That promise was never kept. That was the fraud then and now and will remain so until the Treaty is honoured.
Marx on why Māori lost their land
The war in the north in the 40’s was the first land war as chiefs protested the fraudulent failure of the Governor to protect their land rights. Hōne Hekes symbolic felling of the flagpole at Kororāreka (see graphic) speaks volumes. Then, in 1852 the Queen signed off the Constitution Act granting the settlers a colonial state with the power to dictate land policy. Self-rule meant white rule only as those with private property had the right to vote.
The state began to create legal ways to privatise land, often creating rifts within hapu and iwi, leading inevitably to the Kingitanga and the organised resistance to fraudulent land sales. The settler state then declared such resistance to the colonial state land grab to be rebellion, and the pretext for war to take the land.
Marx in Capital Vol 1 chapter 33 published in 1867 writes that the white settler colonies reveal the truth hidden in the home countries, that capitalism must create the conditions for capitalist production – the privatisation of land, creation of a landless labour force, and capital to invest in the exploitation of labour power.
In Chapter 31 Marx also shows his long-standing interest in the whole process of ‘primitive accumulation’ necessary for the “Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist” at the expense of indigenous peoples.
E.G. Wakefield’s ‘Systematic colonisation’ planned to transplant capitalism fully assembled in the settler colonies by buying land, and artificially creating a labour force with NZ Company land priced ‘sufficiently’ to force workers to work for capitalists until they could afford to buy land. In reality the plan collapsed and gave way to the wild Southern frontier of decades of land wars against the indigenous people for land.
The Crown’s right of pre-emption might have slowed down the theft of the land if the state had honoured chiefly sovereignty. Instead, the colonial state became the wholesale land agent. In the 1850s Grey defrauded the chiefs, sold land cheap creating a free for all to set the price of land to meet the growing demand of the hordes of settlers escaping unemployment and destitution at home.
Marx depicts this wild frontier in the fate of John Peel of the Swan River in Australia. Having imported capital, machines and labourers to assemble a capitalist venture, he found his labourers owed him no loyalty and ‘shot through’ to the bush to claim land to work for their own subsistence.
Far from ‘transplanting’ capitalism to the colonies, the settler colonies became a state managed “free market” where white settlers and their colonial state collaborated to dispossess Māori and set up as self-employed peasant farmers. The second land war from the 1860s to 1880s followed inevitably as the numbers of settlers increased the demand for land which Māori chiefs would not sell.
Now the reality that British imperialist policy was driven by the laws of capitalist development is revealed. For the colonial state to create the necessary conditions for colonial capitalism, it was necessary to privatise property, remove Māori from the best land, create a landless labour force, and build a state which legalised this process and the military enforce it.
By the turn of the 20th century all the best Māori land was converted into private property, the people of the land, now labourers, subsisting on what was left of their land.
Marx on the nationalisation of land
Marx had a lot to say over the importance of land rights in the struggle to end capitalism and build socialism. The privatisation of land under capitalism becomes a barrier to the further development of the forces of production and raises the demand for land nationalisation.
Historically it was no accident that the predatory white settler wars against indigenous peoples was to privatise their common land. That is exactly what the tribal chiefs did after the fall of Rome when they setup tributary societies based on extracting rent from the peasantry.
Most of the feudal landed gentry had no incentive to increase labour productivity on the land. Those that did made the transition to modern capitalist agriculture throwing the surplus peasantry off the land into industry as wage labour or the reserve army of the unemployed.
As Marx explained, white settler colonisation was the result of this ‘destruction of the commons’ which created a surplus population of the unemployed who then migrated and grabbed the land off the indigenous peoples as their means of subsistence.
As we have seen, the failure to transplant the social relations of capitalism in the colonies ready-made, led to an expanding warlike frontier as waves of new settlers arrived hungry for land. The settler colonial states, freed from the direct control of the mother country, created a peasant family mode of production, from which rent would be extracted by the global capitalist mode of production.
What is named the Peasant Family Mode of Production (PFM) in Development of Capitalism in New Zealand, arises at the expense of the Māori Lineage Mode (MLM), but both are subordinated to the Capitalist Mode (CMP) in its extraction of rent (the labour value produced on the land).
Both submodes struggled to evolve, but the MLM faced a disadvantage as it has lost its best land. It becomes a source of cheap labour for the growth of the PFM creating a basic class division between the white petty bourgeoisie and Māori subsistence surplus labour that persists to this day founded on land theft justified by a racist ‘civilising mission’ culture.
Meanwhile the PFM divided into poor, petty bourgeois and capitalist farmers as the majority faced debt or bankruptcy while a minority increased their share of the rent by employing farm labour.
We can now explain why the ongoing debate around the Treaty is immaterial so long as Māori land rights are not the objective. If the fraud is the expropriation of communal land as a result of the land wars, then that stolen land must be returned to the Māori owners.
So it is time to dispense with the political theatre of Waitangi Day set aside for rehearsing old arguments about the Treaty unaware of the subterranean rumbles of the ongoing clash of modes of production.
The Māori leader who came closest to Marx in understanding that the colonisation of New Zealand was part of an international assault on indigenous peoples to subordinate their societies to imperialism, was Te Whiti o Rongomai. He saw the theft of the land and its money price as a necessary condition of the capitalist mode of production, and his solution was equally clear – occupation of the common land of hapu and iwi to defend the Māori lineage mode of production.
Today the minimum demand to honour the Treaty must be the abolition of private property in the land through its nationalisation by the state. This would confront the petty bourgeois racist culture head on and allow the majority to determine land policy by means of leases with conditions that respect Māori collective use of the land, and the respect for nature in the face of climate catastrophe due to global warming.
Of course, this is expressed as honouring the right of Te Tiriti for self-determination which in the Māori context means tino rangatiratanga. We have written about de-colonisation at length from the 1970s on. We argued for Māori self-determination in Towards a Socialist Polynesia (1982) in response to the impact of the Springbok tour and Donna Awatere’s book Māori Sovereignty which shuns Marxist analysis of land rights for a petty bourgeois cultural critique of white racism.
What makes ‘honouring the Treaty’ even more explosive today is the wave of radical Māori youth coming up against a reactionary white supremacist political barrier fuelled by the terminal crisis threatening global capitalism.
As that crisis is unloaded by the ruling class onto marginalised workers, poor farmers and youth, the contradiction breaks through the surface of society as the class struggle over land rights. That struggle will unite all workers and empower them to end capitalism and build a socialist world.
Forward to the Revolution!
Monday, February 19, 2024
Argentina in terminal crisis - for a Workers' Government!
The mounting escalation of global debt and stagnation of value creation gives no way out for capital other than attacking workers with extreme shock treatment - a forced depression in which jobs and living standards are destroyed along with the destruction of nonprofitable industry and business. History has thrown up Milei as the executioner of the workers, and there is no way out but the fight to destroy capitalism before it destroys us. The alternative is either socialism or fascism. For workers to live, capitalism must die!
Milei can’t solve the bosses’ crisis
The terminal crisis has thrown up Milei in a desperate attempt to make the working masses pay for the bosses’ crisis. Climate change is unforgiving especially to capital intensive, mono-cropping agricultural models which leave entire regions vulnerable as production for the world market replaces production for local consumption. Over-extended in debt to the IMF, the finance fraction of Argentina's ruling class has made a jump from the popular front to outright reactionary proto fascist solutions. This bloc of Argentina’s ruling class with its US masters can no longer depend on the Peronists to contain the masses and have opted for Melei to impose massive cutbacks in jobs and social spending to make the workers pay for the national debt. These conditions have been met by an upsurge in working class anger.
The US is pushing for a Bonaparte who can lead from above to impose austerity but maintain a balance of class forces. So far Trump and Bolsonaro have proven to be lumpen Bonapartes who cannot fulfill that task. Milei is already the most lumpen of all. Such is the terminal crisis he cannot even maintain a balance between the fractions of the national bourgeoisie. So far his edicts have blown up in his face. His anti-communism, dollarisation and rejection of deals with China are facing resistance from the Peronist fraction which can offer de-dollarisation deals from China and the BRICS+ and to bring agribusiness and the union bureaucracy into a new popular front with China.
What about the Workers
On January 24th the masses showed they are willing and able to fight! The leadership of the workers movement however, while quick to unfurl their red flags, initiated the Day of Action as a “pressure relief valve” more than a workers uprising. The FITU and its 5 constituent self- identified Trotskyist parties, act to divert the mass upsurge in defense of workers’ rights rights into their electoral project, a throwback to Bernstein and Kautsky opposed to the revolutionary method of Luxemburg and Trotsky. They have squandered 10 years of Argentina’s workers’ fight to build mass organs of extra-parliamentary power. Today workers’ councils, modeled on soviets as the basis for dual power, are at the top of the agenda!
The vanguard workers supporting FITU and other left organizations must break the stranglehold of decomposing currents of Morenoism and Altamarism. The main strains of left reformism (PO, PST and the LIT-CI etc.) who still lay claim to the legacy of Trotskyism, have long sold out to capitalist rule. Altamira in 2017 cast the PST as “Podemos in diapers' which in turn called the PO propagandists. This rare moment of theoretical clarity did not alter the fact that both currents are drowning the masses in the Kautskyan marsh.
The nature of the FITU ‘united front’ is an unprincipled agreement, burying its differences and betraying internationalism on every burning acid test! The FITU has no agreed position on the Russo-Ukrainian proxy war between the Western and Eastern imperialist blocs! Since the outbreak of war we have called for a NEW ZIMMERWALD drawing on the legacy of Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht to fight against the inter-imperialist proxy war and for workers’ revolutions to end and prevent war.
Despite the infighting in FITU none of its adherents nor its electoral strategy remotely qualify as the United Front strategy of the 1923 congress of the Third International, or the 1938 Transitional Program of the Fourth International! Commanding tens of thousands of votes and a few parliamentarians, their Leninist pretentions are exposed as propping up electoral gains in a bourgeois parliament. Again electoral, national pacifist Kautskyism!
A new party and a new revolutionary workers’ international to end the crisis of revolutionary leadership is the order of the day! That party has to be rooted historically in the Argentine experience with a fully developed revolutionary program integrated into an international transitional program. Only such a program can turn bankrupt reformist electoralism into the revolutionary rostrum of Liebknecht, Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky. Those who know this on the factory floor should begin organizing to take back your unions today! From that vantage you can see your revolutionary road to socialism and take it!
Enter China
The international crisis of capitalism, its terminal crisis, requires the balancing of the IMF debt and trade imbalances on the backs of the workers across the Global South. Loans and currency swaps from China were used to pay back IMF debt in Yuan and IMF loans have been used to repay China! Workers carry the gold of one imperialist master to the banks of the other and back again while they rape our soil and enslave us with debt! For the working class to eat we must defeat not just the Austerity but its root cause imperialism. China is making its play to use finance capital and trade deals to counter the IMF and the Dollar debt draining wealth to Wall Street banks.
China may win the ‘left’ wing of the Peronists and layers of the Trade union leadership and left organizations to its “progressive” pose as the fair players on the international economic stage. We say China is not an oppressed semi-colony. Rather it has emerged as a great imperialist power in a bipolar world challenging for supremacy in surplus value extraction from the Global South - Argentina included. Don't fall for it!
Enough pressure relief “Days of Action” intended to pressure the left faction of the bourgeoisie against the right and ultra right! The bosses’ governments come and go, but all agree on one thing - make the workers and poor farmers pay for the crisis. We say vanguard workers must build our class’s revolutionary party armed with a transitional program. With these tools workers can create their own future based on a centrally planned economy, under workers self management which exposes the bosses as obsolete and makes them pay!
The Transitional Program
To win, Argentine workers, landless farmers and ranch hands, must build mass assemblies of the rank and file (base), form workers councils in every agricultural town, industrial center and working class neighborhood. Build workers' self-defense guards to fight the fascists and defend the mass movement to expropriate foreign and national capitals; cancel the foreign debt and reorganize the economy under workers control! Build socialism by igniting regional revolution that unites the industrial, mineral and agricultural might of all of Latin America! Prepare the indefinite general strike which poses the question of which class rules creating the conditions for for a workers’ government to expropriate the expropriators. To win, it is necessary to build a revolutionary party and program able to guide workers in the struggle to seize state power!
Jobs for all and a living wage now!
For the Sliding Scale of Wages and Hours enforced by price and neighborhood committees committed to survival of our class, something the Federations present leaders never have done!
For class struggle caucuses to carry out the renovation of our unions with ever more militant class struggle leaderships and immediate recall of class betrayers.
Down with Milei and all the bourgeois politicians. They must all go, and not one remain!
For the Indefinite General Strike! Form strike committees in every factory town and workers neighborhood!
Build workers self defense squads, from armed pickets to increasingly coordinated workers militias against the fascists and the capitalist and state thugs.
Convene a national congress of the workers base to set up workers councils across the country!
For a workers’ government based on workers’ councils and workers’ power!
Abolish the Debt!
Expropriate Big Capital, Capitalist Firms national and international and run them under workers control!
Smash the Capitalist State, servant of the stock markets and imperialist powers!
For a socialist federation of South America!
For a new revolutionary workers party in Argentina integrated in a workers’ international - the united world party of revolution based on the method and program of Trotsky’s 1938 Transitional Program.
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