Aleppo between Barbarism and Socialism

 

http://thedailyblog.co.nz/2016/07/25/guest-blog-dave-brownz-aleppo-between-barbarism-and-socialism/

Class Struggles in India

Workers at Honda Motorcycle and Scooter India’s (HMSI) Tapukara plant in Alwar, Rajasthan, went on a strike bringing production to a complete standstill.

India is undergoing a crisis of semi-colonial oppression facing the deepening world crisis of imperialism. Today this is evident in the student struggles at JNU; the Honda strike and the ongoing war in Kashmir. But what is the history behind this crisis? India is economically backward as it became capitalist belatedly and continues to be a semi-colony. ‘Independence’ from Britain was a fraud, based as it was on a reactionary settlement that broke up the sub-continent and created hostile client regimes based on casteism and communalism, trapping the sub-continental working class behind colonial borders. Imperialist Britain left this legacy of ‘divide and rule’ as time bombs that would blow up as crises forced the capitalist contradictions to break the surface.

Reactionary Hindutva and Caste System

The big time bombs are the reactionary nationalist regimes founded on religion and caste which each ruling class uses to legitimate its rule. In India, the ancient Hindu caste system, a hangover from pre-capitalist tributary society, was used to maintain class rule. In Pakistan appeals to the authority of Islam also a living relic of a pre-capitalist society was used for the same purpose. Such communal ‘bombs’ created by the departing colonial power drove East and West Pakistan to war and created the war in Kashmir as a running sore.

But while pre-capitalist Hindutva and radical Islam are the main ruling class ideologies contested in these bloody wars, they face opposition by bourgeois ideology that opposes these reactionary ideologies as ‘fascist’ aberrations which must be defeated and replaced by the completed bourgeois national democratic revolution. The main proponents of ‘bourgeois democracy’ today are not the bourgeoisie but the petty bourgeoisie led by the Stalinist and Maoist currents in the sub-continent.

Reactionary Stalinism/Maoism

So when radical secular youth are attacked by Hindutva such as at JNU, the Stalinist/Maoists delude the youth into believing that Hindutva as an ancient cultural hangover can be replaced by completing the bourgeois national revolution. To them, this requires a minimum/maximum program to fight for bourgeois demands such as national independence, land reform, labour reform, electoral reform, the abolition of the caste system, nationalisation of large foreign and national firms, etc, (as minimum demands) to prepare the conditions for socialism in the future (maximum demand).

For example, for the Stalinists India’s occupation of Kashmir is defending the unity and integrity of capitalist India, while the Maoists/Naxalites advocate secession to create an independent capitalist Kashmir. And when Honda workers strike against the bosses to defend their jobs and conditions both Stalinists and Maoists mobilise their supporters to fight for fair wages based on fair bourgeois labor laws. For both Stalinists and Maoists the realisation of such a bourgeois democratic revolution creates the pre-conditions for future socialism.

The problem with this Stalinist/Maoist ‘two stage’ theory is that in the epoch of imperialism, monopoly state capital relies upon an increasingly authoritarian nation state to regulate and repress the working class and the poor peasantry. The national bourgeoisie, in turn, is clearly subservient to the various imperialist powers that are major investors in the economy. In order to extract their super profits, imperialist powers use their client states to suppress all such demands for democratic rights and freedoms making bourgeois parliaments incapable of implementing minimal demands.

Nationalism is Counter-revolutionary 

 Tying the hands of workers who are fighting for basic democratic and economic demands to the machinery of the capitalist nation state is in essence counter-revolutionary. Historically, concessions won from the national bourgeoisie as a result of mass mobilisations are granted only until the movement is contained or suppressed and such concessions can be conveniently withdrawn. That is why to sow illusions that the nation state can make even minimal political and economic concessions in the epoch of imperialism when periodic crises of capital can only be resolved by the defeat of all working class resistance, dooms that class to defeat.

To understand this, we need only look at the struggles in the sub-continent, betrayed by the false notion of the two-stage bourgeois revolution as advocated by the Stalinists and Maoists, which led to crushing defeats of revolutionary armed struggles. The clearest example of such a defeat as the result of the betrayal of the rank and file membership at the hands of the Stalinist and Maoist leaders is Nepal where the Prachanda regime helped the bourgeoisie to suppress the revolution. Only where workers rapidly overcome those illusions and resort to independent and armed organisations of proletarian revolution can there be any prospect of the winning of bourgeois democratic right as part of a victorious socialist revolution.

Trotsky and Permanent Revolution

Against the Stalinist/Maoist minimum/maximum stageist sellout to the bourgeoisie, there is the Bolshevik program kept alive by Trotsky in the Transitional Program of 1938. The Bolshevik Leninist Party of India (BLPI) program for the Indian sub-continent was based on that program. Capitalist semi-colonies like India must fight to complete the bourgeois democratic revolution as part of the Permanent Revolution. Imperialism and their reactionary national bourgeois clients are counter-revolutionary enemies of workers’ democracy. The nations of the sub-continent must be re-united but as a Federation of Socialist Republics. 

This cannot happen unless the workers and poor peasants of the sub-continent are united behind an internationalist party with a revolutionary transitional program that fights to turn the incomplete national revolution into the Permanent Revolution.

So what must be done in the Student movement? The Hindutva can be defeated only if the students reject the Stalinist line of a bureaucratic bloc with the non-existent ‘democratic’ bourgeoisie or the Maoist petty bourgeois substituting itself for the bourgeoisie. Students can only defend their basic rights by building a class alliance with industrial workers and poor farmers across all castes, genders and national/ethnic identities.

The example of the Honda strike proves that the industrial proletariat is ready and willing to fight. What it needs is the unity and leadership to break from the Stalinist/Maoist labor bureaucracy which serves the interests of the bourgeois state. Students must take up the fight of industrial workers and build strikes and occupations as the basis of workers councils and militias capable of bringing a Workers’ and Farmers’ Government to power.

Students must take up the fight for self-determination for all the sub-continental nations and peoples by means of permanent revolution. Self-Determination in Kashmir and in all the other nations or regions like Nepal and the Punjab oppressed by India can be realised only under a socialist federation where all nations and peoples are free of oppression with a right to secede. 

For an internationalist revolutionary workers party!

For a Federation of Socialist Republics of South Asia!

REVIEW: The Great Wrong War: New Zealand Society in WW1.

By Stevan Eldred-Grigg. (Random House NZ)

Future generations of New Zealanders may well thank Stevan Eldred-Grigg for setting the record straight about many aspects of WW1 crucial to understanding its true nature and its adverse impact on NZ society. His book proves beyond reasonable doubt that New Zealanders were misled into the war in both senses of the word “misled”. (i) The chauvinistic leadership of the country by the Reform/Liberal coalition government was irresponsibly inept in that it failed in its duty to rationally consider the consequences of NZ’s involvement, and (ii) it misled our citizens about its real reasons for involving them at all.  Above all he exposes the big lie that the war was fought to defend freedom, justice and democracy. It is better described as an aggressive war of imperialist expansion in which any properly informed and genuinely freedom loving populace would be ashamed to participate.

Amongst the relevant historical facts of which this reader was hitherto unaware, and for which he is grateful to Eldred-Grigg for having brought to his attention are that even while British propaganda was fabricating stories of German atrocities in Belgium British troops were massacring peaceful protesters in Nigeria; while Britain supposedly went to war because it was bound by treaty to defend Belgium’s neutrality. a similar treaty supposedly guaranteeing the neutrality of African colonies was also violated- not by Germany, but by Britain. And had German or Turkish occupying armies treated civilians in the way that New Zealand occupiers treated Egyptians and Palestinians, the Entente’s propaganda machine would certainly have accused them of barbarism.

That such facts have not hitherto been widely known is undoubtedly due to their having been suppressed because they nullify the state’s claim to be fighting in defence of freedom, democracy and civilisation against unfreedom and barbarity.

At the outset of the war the claim to be defending freedom and democracy was suspect to the class-conscious workers on account of the alliance with the Tsarist autocracy in Russia. (It was already suspect to most Maori who had experienced colonialist “justice” in the Land Wars and their aftermath.)  Eldred-Grigg shows that after the fiasco in Gallipoli became exposed-not by any candid admission of defeat by the government, but by the undeniable facts of the numbers of horribly mutilated troops returning from the campaign. The wider working class became increasingly sceptical and derisive of government war propaganda, and increasingly reluctant to volunteer for the armed forces. Having no popular mandate to wage war and unable to meet its commitments with volunteers the government imposed conscription in 1916. Opposition to the war thereafter manifested itself mainly in protests resistance to conscription, and politically in increasing support for the Labour Party, which in its youth was socialist and internationalist in outlook. The Federation of Labour also opposed conscription.

Eldred-Grigg relates many instances of resistance to the draft by individuals and anti-conscription leagues, and the severe penalties imposed, both on the draft dodgers and those who assisted them with practical acts of solidarity.

Eldred-Grigg says there is no way to accurately estimate the extent of opposition. However with general elections suspended until after victory, the only elections held were by-elections, and theses were all won by anti-conscription candidates.

Beyond being grossly wasteful of life and limb, which has long been widely acknowledged, the war had a corrosive effect on free thought and democratic institutions. With the co-option of the parliamentary opposition the war “in defence of democracy’’ increasingly became an assault on democracy within, with the criminalisation of dissent, the censorship of the press, the passage of laws restricting freedom of speech and movement, the introduction of passports, the spying on citizens, and the indefinite postponement of elections. Had Eldred-Grigg’s book been written under Massey’s government it would have been banned and its author charged with sedition and sentenced to years of hard labour.

The demand for wool and meat to clothe and feed the armies at the front meant the after the initial dislocation of world trade farmers and merchants prospered greatly during the war.

Although wages also nominally also rose, the inflation caused by government requisitions and borrowing and its printing of money far exceeded wage rises, and the families of unskilled workers and disabled returned soldiers suffered considerable hardship. The government financed its war effort by internal and external borrowing from the middle class. It is a measure of the magnitude of the surplus extracted from the working class that it was able to do so. The effect of this policy was to place a burden on the working class for years to come.

According to Eldred-Grigg, before the war a large and increasing share of NZ’s wool exports were going to Germany and German shipping lines were poised to enter the trade with NZ.  But for the war NZ could have become a global trader sixty years before the UK joined the EEC. Instead it became totally dependent on the British market and at the mercy of the British shipping monopoly.

Other aspects of the war that Eldred-Grigg covers comprehensively are the connections of the 'elite' with the UK, the class composition of the officer corps, the annexation of Samoa and Nauru ,the persecution of “aliens” and  the transformation of women’s role from domestic to industrial worker. Also the global influenza epidemic that was incubated in the front lines of the Western Front and devastated NZ and its newly acquired colonies.

Far from forging New Zealand's nationhood WW1 intensified New Zealand’s colonial dependency both economically and psychologically. Far from being a war to defend freedom and democracy it was an aggressive war of imperialist expansion which extended the territories coming under the colonial yoke, and New Zealanders were active in the conquest. Far from being the source of pride New Zealanders’ participation in the war should be a source of profound regret, insofar as which it was coerced, and of deep shame insofar as it was voluntary.

Eldred is to be congratulated for a book which so effectively demolishes the pervasive and longstanding myths about New Zealand’s participation in Great Imperialist War.

Aotearoa: No TPPA! Break down imperialist borders!

Already NZ, Singapore, Chile have set up and signed off what they called the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA). Now the USA has moved to join and fast-track this agreement. John Key is overjoyed with the promise of blood for butter. What is behind the US deals with these Pacific nations, and what of the opposition to the TPPA? How do we organise a working class solution to US imperialist trade war?

It is significant that the USA is joining in the discussion. As the world's largest economy the US needs to protect its interests. We predict that the USA would try to use the TPPA to contain the expanding imperialist force that is China. Since China has emerged from the cold-war and used party control of workers property to control development. China has harnessed foreign capitalist investment and kept enough capitalist profit in China, to emerge as an imperialist power. That is China is now investing its own capital internationally. The resources of the Pacific region are of interest to imperialist powers, as US investments wane China emerges.

Already the largest export destination of Australia's exports is now China (from previously being the US).

US imperialism wants to limit China's trade and investments, and protect its own. The US will push its own military and security agenda. NZ govt is following US agenda with Security laws going through parliament.

The TPPA is an economic tool to push "free trade" agreements, similar to other FTAs but under today's imperialist conditions. Similar, since all "free trade" within capitalism means that imperialist will super-exploit the colonies/semi-colonies for cheap labour and raw materials. Under today's conditions the rate of profit for capitalism continues to fall, as shown in the 'financial crisis', which was a symptom of the falling rate of profit in capitalist production. The TPPA looks to open new opportunities for capitalist expansion and to restore their profits e.g. to force govt privatisations and allow monopoly firms to strip resources.

NZ and Australian economies have not been hit by the capitalists' crisis as much as European and US economies because of expanding China has created a huge demand for raw material exports to China. China has passed the US as Australia's biggest trading partner. NZs recent FTA with China has continued to open up trade between NZ and China to which NZ supplies raw materials - wood, steel, coal, milk powder, wool, etc.

The NZ state is openly subordinated to Australian, US and Chinese imperialism and becomes a mere manager for foreign investment, and the force for social control - defending capitalist property and imperialist interests.

The Trades Union bureaucracy won’t stop the TPPA

Who will stop the TPPA? Not the trade union bureaucracy! The so-called TU mobilisation against the TPPA is not about fighting imperialism but dragging workers into the bosses’ agenda of exploiting the economic nationalism that links the ruling class from right to liberal left and the union bureaucracy to negotiate best terms with US and China.

Where has there been any discussion in the unions over what position to take on the TPPA? The CTU leadership is simply taking the longstanding position of economic protectionism to protect NZ jobs and of course the top union officials’ jobs. This is an ‘economic nationalism’ that claims that each nation should retain its economic sovereignty and thus to ensure that all classes benefit as a result. It is a strictly a utopian reformist program. It fits well with the national populist program of the left bureaucracy in the unions which sees China as a progressive force allied to the Bolivarian regimes in Latin America, much as the Green Left in Australia does.

It ignores the reality that NZ is a weak and declining semi-colony, subordinated to Australia and the US and increasingly China. The race to the bottom won't be stopped by joining forces with nationalist organisations that promote reforms to protect NZ’s so-called sovereignty in the face of global capitalist crisis. Despite and because of nationalist policies endorsed by the union bureaucracy, no political party can impose this through parliament.

The pathetically weak ‘centre-left’ Labour Party, and the rightward moving Greens are all in sucking up to the weak NZ bourgeoisie to negotiate the terms of 'our' national sovereignty which barely exists. There are already virtually no limits to Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in NZ, capital flows in and out without any borders. Attempts to stop FDI appeals to national chauvinism as the recent opposition to Chinese buying farmland showed, and in the racism and discrimination directed at migrant workers. The real danger is that this nationalism and racism morphs into fascism and becomes the basis of uniting rightwing workers with a bankrupt middle class behind the NACTs wars against Islamic ‘terror’ (already happening in Afghanistan) and Chinese ‘communism’.

So the only way to stop the attacks which the TPPA means for workers is to reject any campaign based on the program of the nationalist bosses which is to rally the unions, labourites and left academics like Kelsey into a cross-class, legalistic, ultimately parliamentary opposition. That's a popular front and makes workers servile to a weak fraction of the national bourgeoisie which barely exists.

Class Struggle to stop the TPPA

Rather we fight FTAs by working class methods, we oppose privatisation by calling for nationalisation by mobilising union fight backs, occupations etc i.e. ‘socialisation’! That's what we mean by a workers united front.

That means that the content of what is 'national' is not defined by the bosses or their agents, but by the working class. Of course most of the working class are infused with nationalism and in a semi-colony like NZ much of that is directed at imperialist countries that profit from our labour.

But 'nationalism' is a barrier to uniting workers across borders in a proletarian ‘internationalism’. The defence of 'nationalism' that is based on resentment towards foreign ownership has to be put on a class footing otherwise it becomes the basis for fascism. So nationalisation of a company for example must always be done not the basis of 'nationalism' to defend NZ jobs etc., but an internationalism that recognises that most firms are already multinational and that defence of workers’ rights and living standards demands the expropriation of imperialist and national companies without compensation and under workers control. So we must demand the socialisation of multinational firms by building a campaign among workers in all countries where this firm operates.

The approach of the rank and file in the unions should be to mount industrial action to get rid of this NACT government and to put demands on Labour to adopt policies that meet the needs of workers. Our purpose is to expose the failure of reformist social democracy to fulfil those demands. We do not support new reformist parties on the left putting pressure on Labour. We support rank and file unionists putting up candidates on a program to deliver what workers want. Not just minimal demands for jobs, wages, houses etc paid for by a transaction tax, or even the Greens’ capital gains tax. Parliament cannot meet these demands.

A new Workers’ Party would use parliament only as ‘sounding board’ to expose its bankruptcy and to mobilise workers to organise independently of parliament and the state. Instead of locking workers into parliamentary legislation for minimum wages, etc., workers need to revive the unions as democratic, fighting unions to impose their demands in the workplace. To do this, it is necessary for strikes, occupations of workplaces facing closure and sackings, occupations of vacant state houses, the occupation of state SOEs under threat of privatisation, and the expropriation of the banks and formation of one state bank, all under workers control. That is, a new Workers’ Party must raise not just a minimum program for immediate reforms, but a transitional program which maps out the road to socialism.

Within the unions it is the job of revolutionaries to raise these demands in a transitional form and explain that to get them we have to take power and what that means and how to do it. The first principle of a transitional program is that it must be international and geared to the current world situation. Isolated actions (even on a pan Pacific basis) around FTAs are part of a much bigger struggle against a global capitalist crisis and mounting inter-imperialist rivalry. The TPPA is really about the US reclaiming the Pacific to prevent China from making further inroads.

So what is behind the TPPA is the growing rivalry between the US and China. NZ workers have to reject NZ nationalism as nothing more than pulling workers into a reactionary nationalism to go to war as an ally of the US in the coming fight with China. Workers have to refuse to fight in such wars and reject the NZ national bourgeoisie and its subservience to the US (all the current political parties), break from their agents in the unions (the bureaucracy), and join forces internationally with workers in all of the Pacific countries and in particular, China and the US.

The real issue for workers is not to oppose free trade as such, (or FDI which already exists since capital doesn’t recognise borders, or even against privatisation by ‘foreign’ firms), on the basis of protection of NZ jobs and living standards, but rather the fight for class independence and proletarian internationalism. Opposing the TPPA then has to be by working class methods, mobilising the unions to stop privatisation, resisting all of the NACTs attacks on workers, defeating the NACTs, putting demands on Labour to expose it by raising a working class program, reviving the unions, building strike actions and strike committees and defense committees to prepare for a general strike and for a Workers’ Government.
 
Therefore revolutionaries in the unions should be opposed to the TPPA as one of many measures sucking NZ workers into a national alliance with the US to fight China. We put forward a workers international program to defend jobs, wages and rights, and to advance workers organisations to do it, in particular to break from their own bourgeoisies and their agents, everywhere in the Pacific without borders, especially China and the USA. 

For a Socialist Federation of Pacific Republics!