Class Struggle 107 Rape culture, Dirty Dairying, Comrades and Cossacks, Pike River Disaster

“Rape Culture” and Patriarchy

The ‘Roast Busters’ scandal created a national protest about teenage boys bragging about getting underage girls drunk and having sex – in fact rape. Many agreed that there was a culture of rape that made this sort of behaviour OK. Moreover the police share rape culture hiding behind excuses for failing to act on written complaints for three years. Many said this culture was part of the patriarchy – a system of male gender domination of the female gender. This is only half the story however. It reduces rape to a symptom of male power over women that can be changed by social reforms.

The problem with this is that it doesn’t explain why patriarchal power and a rape culture exist today. Humans lived in relative gender equality for tens of thousands of years before men imposed their dominance on women. Engels called this the “overthrow of Mother Right”. The matriarchy where public wealth was allocated through the female line for the benefit of the whole society became the patriarchy where men now controlled the accumulation of private wealth.

Patriarchy was the first class society to come into existence. Women fought their oppression and were met by male violence and a culture that justified oppression. The real ‘herstory’ is the resistance of women to the changing forms of patriarchy over the ages. It has persisted through slave and feudal class societies where women were oppressed in ruling and ruled-class families. Today it serves capitalism which exploits unpaid domestic labour to produce each generation if wage-labourers.

Since the patriarchy originated in the overthrow of gender equality it can itself be overthrown and gender equality restored. But to do that women and men have to join forces in the working class to overthrow capitalism.

We learned all this from the Marxist women who participated in the Russian Revolution and the German Revolution from 1917-1923. Women took active roles in the revolutionary parties fighting male prejudice to be treated as equals. Because they were socially oppressed under capitalism they won the right to form independent caucuses and present motions in their name. Moreover they played key roles in leading these socialist revolutions.

In Russia in 1917 it was striking women textile workers demanding bread that sparked off the February revolution which led months later to the October Revolution. In Germany, Rosa Luxemburg was the main leader of the German revolution before her cruel murder in 1919. She was betrayed and killed because she would have played a decisive role in making the German revolution a success.

We urgently need new generations of Bolshevik women. Can the Pussy Riot women jailed by Putin as ‘hooligans’ give us some pointers? It is significant that they brand Putin as an ex KGB dictator and draw inspiration from the ‘Trotskyist resisters’ who stood up to Stalin in the 1930s. Rather than making friends with pseudo Marxists like Slavoj Zizek, they should look to the life and work of Rosa Luxemburg, the many Bolshevik women, and those who fought as ‘Trotskyists’ against Stalinism, then join the struggle for a new revolutionary Marxist Party today.

Dirty Dairying

Dirty dairying arises from the large scale expansion of dairying by corporates who are hungrily exhausting land, destroying environment and producing dirty products to extract as much monopoly rent as possible. Rent is the value that labour-power produces on the land arising from the inputs of soil, climate, location etc. Monopoly rent arises from the limited supply of land that is fertile, in a temperate climate and has good access to markets. The expansion of dairying in Aotearoa makes use of all of these factors to meet a growing demand for milk in the emerging economies of Asia.

The business takeover of Dairying is not a new gentry or new feudalism as some argue. It’s capitalist farming. NZ farming since British settlement has always been part of the global capitalist economy. Large scale farming employed agricultural workers, while small scale family farming was a source of profits for the banks, stock agents, meat works and shipping companies. During depressions indebted farmers walked off the land and governments made the less valuable land available. Wealthy farmers bought up the best land and got wealthier. The amalgamation of farms in the recent decades continues the trend towards the concentration of large scale or corporate ownership of capitalist agriculture.

Rod Oram writes about how this concentration of assets is highly debt-laden as amalgamations, new technology and economies of scale require big outlays usually financed by bank loans. Oram shows how this is leading to the growing involvement of foreign investors. The word ‘foreign’ here is misleading as most of NZ big business is always been owned by banks and firms that operate globally. Agriculture is no exception.

Fonterra, NZ’s biggest dairy corporation now operates globally, and it’s only a matter of time before it will offer shares that are not under the control of the cooperative producers making it a target for takeover or merger by some other big food monopoly. The concentration of ownership in large scale international British, US, Japanese, Australian and Chinese monopolies on the one hand, and the increasingly internationalised working class on the other, proves Marx prediction that as capital becomes global, so does the working class.

This is the international class structure that underlies the increasing inequality globally. It is certainly inherently unstable as it requires one class to exploit the other and pretend it’s doing it in the common interest. Workers first response is local and national. For example, as the social costs of Fonterra’s dirty dairying become clear, when contamination, dumping of excess milk, poisoning of catchments etc become better known, there will be working class demands to re-nationalise dairying, with cooperative ownership under working class management and control.

Capitalism will not collapse but be revolutionised by the vast millions who already constitute its global productive apparatus. Those multi-millions are also part of capitalism. It is their power over the productive apparatus that will render the political power of the tiny parasitic class impotent. The only question is whether this revolution will happen before global warming kicks off enough feedback loops to make as all equally extinct.

 

Comrades and Cossacks

Putting up a memorial to Cossacks who broke the strike of the Auckland wharfies and helped set up a scab union in 1913 is a provocation to today’s workers and the Labour Party which evolved out of the Federation of Labour formed in 1909.

That FOL (known as the ‘Red Fed’ because of its socialist principles) broke from the Arbitration Court because it refused to increase wages in 1908. The Miners Federation became the FOL and other unions like the wharfies, flaxworkers and shearers joined. Acting as free unions registered under the 1878 Trade Union Act. There was no prohibition on strikes and these workers gained better wages and conditions than under the Arbitration Court.

Also formed in 1909 was the Reform Party led by Bill Massey a small farmer. Small farmers newly settled on land broken up by the Liberal Government in the 1890s and assisted by state loans became a new force for private property opposed to the more progressive wing of the Liberals who favoured state leaseholds over freehold. The prize of capital gain was the main route for the landless out of the working class.

From 1910 the freeholders and business class behind Massey organised to force the FOL back into the Arbitration Court. It became the Government in 1912 and the first major fight was at the Waihi gold mines in 1912. The Waihi Miners Union joined the FOL in 1911 and won better wages and conditions. The mine owners used the Arbitration law to form a scab union imposing a wage cut on the FOL miners locked out until they agreed.

For six months the miners held out supported by the FOL and overseas unions. Police, scabs and armed thugs attacked the locked out workers. George Evans was killed. 68 of the miners including all of their leaders were jailed for attempting to keep the scab union out of the mine.

This dispute was a dress rehearsal for the 1913 strike which again began as a lockout this time of the Wellington Watersiders by British shipowners who refused to employ men not in an arbitration union. Now the bosses were emboldened to smash the whole Red Fed and the newly formed Social Democratic party and force all workers into the Arbitration Court. Strikes in support of the locked out Watersiders spread around the country and were faced by police, armed scabs, the Cossacks, and even the army and navy (the latter with permission of the British crown).

According to WB Sutch in Poverty and Progress in NZ p. 165:
“Young farmers, ‘Massey’s Cossacks’, rode into the main ports as ‘specials’ to intimidate the strikers and the public, to form arbitration unions and take the place of watersiders and seamen…When police and specials took over the Auckland waterfront so that scab labour could work the ships, many other unions (including craft unions) struck in protest. There was almost a general strike in Auckland. Strike leaders were put in jail (there were 169 convictions); at the ports the Employers’ Federation formed new arbitration unions, often based on the young farmers were there partly for this purpose; the ports were worked by these people and other scabs; and the Supreme Court decided that arbitration unions could not contribute strike funds to another union. The arbitration unions formed by the employers were registered, and the watersiders told that if they wanted to work again on the wharves they must join these unions. By 20 December 1913 the strike was over, and Massey was able to give Waikato farmers medals for strike breaking.”

In case anybody thinks that that episode can never be repeated it most certainly was in the 1951 lockout, and will inevitably again when organised labour stands up for its rights against the class that owns the means of production and controls the state to enforce its class rule.

Pike River Disaster is us all

The NACTs are so far refusing to be shamed into making state corporate and ministries pay court ordered compensation to the Pike River families. After Key’s crocodile tears at the public rally following the disaster, he now claims there is no legal or moral reason to compensate the families. What do you expect? The NACTs crony capitalist regime is speeding up its rip, shit and bust style of plundering Aotearoa’s natural resources. This means privatising land, water, minerals into the hands of crony capitalists, destroying nature and furthering the carbon burning climate collapse of the failing capitalist system.

The Royal Commission, numerous testaments of miners, crusading journalism like Rebecca Macfie’s book, and committed working class histories like Paul Maunder’s book, put the case beyond reasonable doubt: capitalism rapes nature and chews up and spits out workers and their families in the process so it can make its profits out of their blood and guts.

What we have said consistently about this disaster is that it is typical of capitalism in its terminal decline and no faith in the bosses’ state or in any of the capitalist parties, NACTs, Labour or Greens will change that. Labour and the unions are part of this retreat into rip, shit and bust. The old miners union has been replaced by the EPMU who are committed to working within the confines of capitalist laws.

We need to fight like the Red Fed of the early 1900s before the labour movement was co-opted into parliament. The Red Fed was notorious as a federation of labour that put the interests of workers before the bosses’ law. They broke from the IC&A Act – labour’s ‘leg iron’ in the words of Harry Holland – and fought the bosses attempt to break their federation by violent attacks and force them back into the Arbitration Court. This year, 2013 is the 100 anniversary of the 1913 General Strike that signified the defeat of the Red Fed.

A Red Fed today would be in a very different situation than 100 years ago. As Maunder points out, the capitalist world division of labour has changed. While the NZ economy is still based on extraction and export of raw materials, workers interests do not lie in defending their jobs by the further plunder and destruction of nature. A Red Fed would face climate catastrophe not by fighting for ‘fair shares’ in the destruction of the planet, but by fighting for a new sustainable socialist system in which the working class plans production for our need and not the profits of the 1%. So while the families should get their compensation in this life, the workers need to go on the offensive. The alternative to ongoing destruction of nature and deaths of workers is to rebuild their unions and fight for a Workers’ Government that would socialise the strategic industries without compensation to private owners, and plan production under workers control for a socialist economy.

Class Struggle #106, July-September 2013

http://www.scribd.com/doc/171946537/Class-Struggle-106-July-September-2013#fullscreen=1

   Class Struggle 106 July-September 2013 by davebrownz

Smash NACTs Austerity Attack

                                                        John Key and Wen Jiabao

How to defeat NACTs austerity attack

The NACT governments new package of labour reforms is designed to improve 'productivity' and 'create jobs' says John Key. This is the neo-liberal language for increased exploitation of workers under worse conditions to restore profits. Under the new law workers will have fewer rights than they had under the ECA in the 1990s. This is why the CTU has been forced to call for street protests. However, like the social democrats in Greece and Spain, where the EU is imposing tough austerity measures, the CTU will use street protests to try to pressure the Labour Party to the left and defeat the NACTs at the next election. But Labour will not challenge capitalism and imperialism. Its purpose has always been to reconcile workers to capitalism. We say that the working class must organise independently of the Labour Party and fight for a revolutionary party and program to socialise the economy and plan production for need and not profit.

What drives the NACTS?

The NACTs have shifted up a gear to declare an open class war on workers in this country with a series of attacks on work rights (90 days fire at will for all new jobs) beneficiaries (toughening work tests for sickness benefits, DPBs) ACC (denial of sexual abuse counselling) savings (reducing employers Kiwisaver contributions), cuts to health, education, privatisation of social services, tax increases (GST) and so on ad nauseum. The whole point is to force down wages and to cut the social wage to shift more value produced by workers to the bosses and increase their profits.

The rise in violent crime is a direct result of the crisis and the call to arm the police is to up the level of state force to clamp down on workers and suppress refusal of workers to pay for the crisis. It is not a policy option for the NACTS, rural rednecks or bloody minded fascists as some think.

And it certainly can't be fixed by a Labour Government that Sue Bradford is calling for. It is a specific response by the NZ ruling class to the immediate crisis of profitability in the export oriented sectors. Resistance to the NACTs which merely aims to get Labour into government in 2011 will fail miserably as we explain below.

Chinese semi-colony?

The NACTs represent international capital in NZ facing a serious global crisis of falling profits that is heading for another great depression like the 1930s. NZ is a weak, low-wage semi-colonial producer of bulk commodity exports. Its a price taker and not a price maker in the world market which means that the NZ capitalist class has to drive down the costs of production to get any share of the profits from agriculture, mining, tourism and education etc., that have historically flowed to  British, US, and Australian imperialism. Today that value is increasingly flowing to Chinese imperialism. The national share of profits, wages, taxes and social services in Aotearoa depends on the profits retained from the value of export earnings of these commodities, and today it is the relationship with China that is critical to this distribution of the national income. 

To keep the whole economy buoyant the prices for commodity exports (agriculture, tourism, tertiary education etc) have to be held up by increasing demand in these imperialist and other economies. They want cheap milkpowder, cheap ironsands, cheap honeymoons and cheap degrees. This means competing with other semi-colonial exporters by driving down the prices of production including labour costs (fire at will, performance pay for teachers in schools and unis, workfare) environmental costs (gutting the RMA, cutting ETS obligations) and energy costs (privatise water, privatise national parks, foreshore and seabed, make workers subsidise corporations (eg RioTinto-formerly Comalco, electricity, and billions in ETS subsidies).

The main demand for such commodities at the moment is being driven by China which is rapidly overtaking the other imperialist powers as NZ's main trading partner. This explains the NACT's subservience to Chinese imperialism and NZ's weakening ties with its traditional trading partners - apart from Australia which is a weak imperialist power dependent on China for its growth and NZ's main trading partner.

The opposition to selling land to Chinese corporations and the growing Chinese migrant population reflects this increasing influence. China is the only large dynamic capitalist economy whose rapid growth is so far preventing the global economy going into a complete slump. That is why in the last analysis the NACTs policies are those of a NZ semi-colonial ruling class forced to serve the interests of Chinese imperialism.

Strategy for fight back

Understanding the class enemy then, is the key to fighting back. The NACTs represent a subservient, largely parasitic, NZ ruling class that is becoming the lackey of Chinese imperialism. They have no room to manoever but have to cut production costs to meet the demands of Chinese imperialism. Key signals this when he agreed to joint ventures with Chinese corporations in third countries. He is acting for NZ bosses seeking a stake in the profits from China's ability to super-exploit third world countries. Such pressure to outsource NZ production will grow if costs at home are not cut drastically.

This is the new template that shapes NZ politics. We can call it the Chinese century. Its excludes the possibility of reforms since these raise capital's costs and harm NZ's competitiveness. Whatever the antics of the NZ ruling class they are driven by this necessity. And NZ workers do not have the clout of Chinese workers who are winning higher wages from a very low base. The only alternative for NZ workers is to fight for a socialist Aotearoa.

Socialism needs a revolution

The make this absolutely clear, by socialism we mean the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by a socialist, planned economy democratically administered by the working class. We do not mean some fake socialism  which can be won by a 'progressive' bloc between workers and national capitalists benefitting from the relationship with China.  Much of the left models its brand of socialism on market socialist reforms. Parliamentary socialism is the  Standardista brand. The there is the Chinese brand which advocates a form of market socialist state that acts to 'develop' rather than 'colonise' the semi-colonial world. This is the Chavista or Bolivarian brand espoused by the Australian Green Left and local mimics.

We have discussed the danger for workers of these left reformist positions at length elsewhere. We argued that China is no different from the US or EU imperialists in Asia, Africa or Latin America, where it extracts super profits like all imperialist powers, even if its methods differ. We conclude that there is no possibility of the NZ working class being able to follow some imaginary Fabian, Chavist or Chinese road to market socialism.

Therefore, the fight for a socialist Aotearoa is not just against the NACTs, but also against the Labour Party backed by the CTU union bureaucracy which thinks that it can reform capitalism in the new Chinese Century because NZ's relationship with China is 'progessive'.

Aotearoa socialist republic

In its essence the fight for socialism is the not to kowtow to China but to join forces with Chinese workers to fight to expropriate imperialism and the NZ ruling class who are the junior partners of imperialism.

By socialism we mean collective ownership and also collective consumption of value as the product of labour. Nationalisation can become collective property only if workers take control and prevent the privatisation of value as profits (eg stop private mining of national parks). This means defending state owned assets not only from privatisation but also from private appropriation of value by putting them under workers control. This means nationalising under workers control all land and landbased resources, the key sectors of industry, and the banks,  as steps towards socialism.

How do we get there?

 The Maori struggle to regain customary ownership of the Foreshore and Seabed is one avenue. It would tie up land and sea-based resources as common property that opens the way to end private profits. However, in itself it does not stop profiteering by corrupt bosses or by capitalist partners (such as Maori held fishing quota in JVs with Japanese corporations).

But we have no confidence in the Maori Party brand of iwi communalism. It would see customary land benefitting iwi capitalists rather than Maori workers. It would copy the Chinese 'Communist Party' capitalists. Land in China is state owned, but the capitalists  are able to make profits from the labour value extracted from workers on that land. To stop this Maori customary land would have to be democratically administered by the majority of Maori workers to ensure that the rent (value) produced was also collectively used to meet the needs of the masses and not the private greed of any class of shareholders. Maori workers have a common interest in this with Chinese workers to socialise nationalised property!

Land Nationalisation

This is the model for the agricultural sector. Here the demand for land nationalisation should not be based on opposition to foreign ownership (the CAFCA and Green Party and some Maori nationalists line) but collective working class ownership which requires class alliances with foreign workers. Agricultural workers would call for a class alliance with working farmers in NZ and poor peasants in China. And since nationalisation in itself does not prevent profiteering, the workers in this sector need to demand land nationalisation under workers and small farmers control.  This would remove the costs of servicing mortages as one major flow of rent from the land to a parasitic class or rentiers. Similarly the attempts by Fonterra to create shares that can be traded on the stock exchange is designed to allow international finance capital to profit from the labour of working dairy farmers.

It is interesting that the NACTs are opening up to Chinese imperialist investment in Agriculture while Alan Hubbard who offers interest-free loans to young farmers is seen as a threat to the profits of the corporates. Hubbard proves that farmers can benefit from their own labour without being mortaged to the big banks. Socialism however, cannot be built on Christian philanthropy. In exchange for land nationalisation farmers would have interest free state loans and access to state R and D to develop their land and retain the product of their labour.

Action Program

In this situation where NZ's economic role is that of a semi-colony to Chinese imperialism facing a global crisis, no trust can be put in the National or Labour parties that both subordinate workers to the capitalist class and to imperialism. In every sector where the new employment reforms are designed to drive down wages and conditions, such as in agriculture, mining, tourism, education, etc., to allow Chinese and other imperialists to reap super-profits from Aotearoa, workers have to fight for what they need now and not what the local or Chinese capitalists say they can 'afford' to pay.

Jobs for all on a living wage! Reduce hours and share the work. Benefits tied to the living wage!

For unions on every jobsite under the control of the membership with recallable delegates!

For rank and file control of the unions. For union independence from the state. Break with the union bureaucracy!

No sackings under the 90 days act! All for one and one for all!

Equal rights for all workers by age, gender, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality!

For workers committees and assemblies in every city.

For a national Congress of workers assemblies.

For a general strike to smash the NACTs austerity program!

No to privatisations! For nationalisation of the land and key sectors of the economy under workers control with no compensation!

For a socialist Aotearoa/New Zealand!

Fonterra and State Monopoly Capitalism

NZ Dairy giant Fonterra, NZ's biggest exporter, is implicated in the scandal over milk contaminated by melamine in China. This scandal is a metaphor for global finance capitalism in which companies privatise their profits but socialise their costs. Fonterra is a private corporation owned by dairy farmer shareholders in New Zealand. It has expanded internationally in recent years, into the US, Latin America and in 2005, China, when it bought a 43% share in Sanlu. The deal involved NZ production technology but no real control by Fonterra of the Sanlu operation. Fonterra therefore entered a partnership where it gained profits from the joint venture, but had little oversight and control of production.

Why would a company based on a farmers cooperative ownership which has a long history of advances in technology and quality control, risk its reputation and its future by gambling on such a risky venture? The answer is that to compete internationally against the other Dairy Giants, Fonterra went for high profits and passed on its risks and costs to the Chinese workers and consumers. At the same time it socialised its risks as the Chinese government and to the NZ Government will have to pay for the damage done to the families and to both economies.

Of course this makes a mockery of the ideology of the free market that argues that bad investment decisions should be punished by bankruptcy. Fonterra's fiasco in China then, is no different from all the corporations that depend heavily upon 'externalising' their costs onto the public sector.It is no different to Lehman Bros, and the AIG who have been rescued by the US Federal Bank. Or Air NZ and the Bank of NZ that have been nationalised several times by NZ governments. While the ideologues of the market complain that these corporates should be allowed to go bankrupt as punishment for their bad investments, corporate owners, central bankers and politicians know better. To allow the crisis to spread across the whole world economy will cause a major depression, a massive destruction of their wealth, and risk a popular challenge to the survival of the "system".

In a crisis then, neo-conservatives and liberals agree that the state must come to the rescue to prevent the collapse of the "system". They argue only over who will pay. The neo-cons like John McCain want tax cuts for the rich so that the tax burden of the central bank bailouts will fall on the poor. Obama wants more taxes on the rich so that they and not the poor will carry the cost of the bailouts. But the liberals are only quibbling about who will bear the costs. It is clear that the rich will benefit most from the rescues as the biggest and strongest banks and corporations backed by the state banks will survive. On the other hand, all those workers who lost their homes and their savings and equity are basically bankrupted.

And in the case of Fonterra you can be sure that it is not the families of the children who have died or got permanent kidney damage that will win. The Chinese and NZ states will cooperate to rescue their Free Trade Agreement by paying part of the health costs of these children. Sanlu managers may be shot and the company will struggle to survive, but Fonterra will escape real damage because it will be bailed out by the liberal NZ Government against any claims for compensation as it is the biggest NZ exporter and the backbone of the NZ economy.

Radical socialists object to this fraud. For them the power and wealth of the elite should not go unpunished. In particular radicals see finance capital as parasitic on productive capital, and should be nationalised and put under public control. Hence the sub-prime crisis would not have happened had Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac (that were formed to provide workers housing in the 1930s depression) not been privatised and allowed to fund a huge speculative wave of gambling on housing. They are now saying "we told you so" and for every 'nationalisation' of a private bank or finance house, they say "more nationalisation" and "no privatisation"!

In the case of Fonterra radical socialists argue that the cooperative ownership should mean cooperative control. Farmers should throw out the management that is trying to privatise the company and investing in production offshore where profits are put ahead of people. If the producers were in control and not the financiers then Fonterra would be a responsible and sustainable company. Radical Greens would develop this argument in the direction of a partnership between the producer cooperative and the state in investing in sustainable technology to reduce carbon emissions and protect the ecology, and to ensure that these standards apply in its international operations.

For Marxists there is more going on here than meets the eye. First, nothing new is happening. It’s happened before over long historical cycles or waves of booms and depressions. Depressions are caused by overproduction of capital that cannot return a profit and they usually lead to the bankruptcies and buyouts by viable capital. In depressions (or to stop depressions) the public sector has increasingly intervened to subsidise losses to allow capital to recover its profitability and restore its growth. Big private corporations are nationalized to preserve them and prepare them again for re-privatization. With each cycle capitalist firms get bigger and more multinational in their operation.

Since at least the opening of the last century, big monopoly banks and corporations have fused as finance capital. Banking capital continues to operate closely with industrial or productive capital and both are intimately bound to the state. In fact in the 1950s US president Eisenhower coined the term “Industrial- Military Complex” to indicate how far this complex was embedded. And just as liberal generals recognized this fusion of capital and state, social democrats welcomed it as an opportunity for the tail to wag the dog. Post-war Keynesian economics fueled the boom by heavy state intervention. The return of neo-conservative monetary fundamentalism came only when profits began to fall in the 1960s and neo-liberal ideologues pulled their copies of Adam Smith and von Hayek off the library shelves.

We conclude that the subprime crisis is but a symptom of a crisis of overproduction of capital. It is not an aberration or novelty. The state monopoly capital “complex” shows that the state does not intervene in the market but rather frames it. ‘Nationalisation’ therefore is not a qualitative paradigm shift from market to state. Rather it is a quantitative intervention of the state on behalf of all capitalists posing as the ‘national interest’. Since crises are inherent in capitalist production, neoliberal, liberal and radical socialist solutions that involve various forms of state intervention can only resolve crises at the expense of workers and the ruined middle class.

In the case of Fonterra this can be seen clearly insofar as Fonterra has become a Dairy Giant at the expense of both its workers and its cooperative owners. Dairy production has become increasingly concentrated in a large scale corporate employing wage labor and ownership is shifting from small family farming cooperatives towards a fully privatized corporation listed on the share market. It fits the model of a state monopoly corporation that privatizes its profits and socialists its losses. The only solution to state monopoly capitalism and its inherent crises is the socialization of the means of production, distribution and exchange and the building of a socialist economy and society.