Election Defeat: Will the Labour Party Split?

David Shearer (L) and David Cunliffe, leaders of Right and Left factions before  the faction fight broke out into the open

Our position on the recent elections was to give critical support to the Labour Party and Internet/Mana Party to get them elected in the hope that they would collaborate on a Confidence and Supply agreement as part of a Centre Left Government. Neither would be bound by the others policies and would vote only on the basis of agreement with their program. Workers could then judge them on their own record. We did not give critical support the Greens or NZF as they do not have roots in the working class. So we opposed Labour forming any agreement beyond Confidence and Supply to form a government as that would have created a popular front allowing Labour to blame any failure to keep its promises on compromises with these petty bourgeois parties to stay in power. The purpose of the critical support tactic is not to endorse the reformist programs of Labour or Mana, but prove to workers that they will inevitably betray the interests of their class. This would help workers to break with these parties and form a mass Socialist Party. This tactic became redundant as soon as the National Party won the election with a clear majority of seats. But and in the aftermath of their defeat, debates have opened up in both Parties. The debate in Labour between Right and Left factions we think will lead, sooner or later, to a split along class lines and the formation of a new mass workers party with a socialist program.

Lessons of defeat spell victory

So the NACTs (National and ACT the two main parties in the Government since 2008)got back in power with a few more votes than 2011 and are able to govern alone. The NACTS  can complete the process of building a Bonapartist regime that concentrates ruling class power into the Executive so that Cabinet is not constrained by Parliament, the Bureaucracy or the Judiciary. This will see NZ drawn more firmly into the orbit of US hegemony trying to reverse its decline with trade protection under the TPPA, and a military alliance to fight the US war on terror designed to stop the rise of its main rivals China and Russia.

Labour’s gamble to win the ‘centre’ from National failed and it has been reduced to its core constituencies of urban blue collar workers now including  6 of the 7 Maori seats. The move to the left under Cunliffe was resisted by the ABCs ('Anyone But Cunliffe' members of Caucus) so as not to frighten the middle class. But this backfired as Key painted the Labour party as part of a left wing conspiracy run by Kim Dotcom from his mansion. We have to see this defeat as a defeat of the right-wing faction in Labour as its strategy means becoming National-lite to beat key in the battleground of the centre. As we will show later, the interests of the middle class are not that of the workers unless the working class is strong enough to win over the middle class. That means building a strong working class political movement capable of solving the problems of the middle class.

After the election the task now facing Labour members in the core working class constituencies and the unions is to continue the push left and prevent the Blairite right-wing members of Caucus from restoring its domination of the membership.

This election has served notice that a Labour party cannot serve both Capital and Labour in a period of global capitalist decline and stagnation and must sooner or later split. Those who want to die in the centrist swamp competing with NZ First, the Greens and National, should leave and let the Labour Party get on with leading workers in the struggle to break NZ from dependency on US imperialism. The Greens are a petty bourgeois party trapped between Capital and Labour because capitalism cannot be ‘Greened’ to stop climate change, conserve nature and avoid human extinction. The Greens failure to get more than 10% sends the message that it needs to turn to the working class and recognise that capitalism is the cause of catastrophic climate change. 

The biggest defeat was that of Internet Mana who lost their only MP, Hone Harawira. There will be no voices from the radical left in parliament to attack the ruling class. This hardly matters as Parliament will be even more of a rubber stamp in the next three years and Mana will without doubt continue building the protest movement that took shape in the fight against Labour’s Foreshore and Seabed betrayal. Key turned Hager’s book on Dirty Politics into a ‘left wing conspiracy’ by the opposition parties with Harawira and Kim Dotcom as its leaders. The Internet Party formed by Kim Dotcom as part of his campaign to fight for internet freedom was demonised as was its partner, Mana.

Joining in the vilification were the rest of the Centre Left parties who tried to distance themselves from Kim Dotcom for fear of alienating the ‘centre’. As well as posing a question for Mana about its political alliance with the Internet Party, this becomes another question for the Labour Party membership. A real Labour Party that fights for workers must make common cause with a party based on the workers like Mana and agree on a socialist program.

Before discussing the prospects for a mass working class party with a socialist program, we need to look at NZ’s working class, assess the damage done to it by neo-liberalism, and the debunk those who argue that the working class is dead or dying so that there is no longer any traditional Labour constituency forcing it to turn instead to sections of the middle class. 

Neo-liberalism: a defeat for workers

Neo-liberalism was capitalism's response to the onset of the crisis of falling profits in the 1970s. Since 1984 the electorate has re-aligned behind the neo-liberal consensus. The backbone of neo-liberalism is deregulation and privatisation to free up the market, and a monetary and fiscal policy of balancing the budget and tax cuts to the rich. National under Bolger and Shipley continued to implement monetarist policies, and the Clark government from 1999 to 2008 adapted the right-wing social democratic ‘Third way’ program associated with Tony Blair leader of the UK Labour Party after 1997. Blair defined the ‘Third Way’ as that between ‘neo-liberalism’ and ‘socialism’. Its class base was the rising middle class or the 'political centre'.

Between 1984 and 2008 both National and Labour competed for the political ‘centre’ made up of a growing middle class whose political fortunes were linked to rising incomes. The middle class is made up of several components; salaried, managerial and supervision jobs in public and private sector; farmers and self-employed ‘tradies’; contract workers; small family businesses; most of whom identify as ‘independent’ of, or not members of, the working class.

The result of this centrist convergence around neo-liberalism of Labour, Greens and NZ First was the disenfranchisement of the blue-collar working class – mainly low paid manufacturing, service and clerical workers - except for the 1989 split from the Labour which created the small New Labour Party and its development into the Alliance that became part of the Labour lead coalition between 1999 and 2002.

Political disenfranchisement of workers went hand in hand with de-unionisation from around 50% of workers in 1984 to less than 15% today. This explains the weakness of organised labour facing the centrist development of the Labour Party under Helen Clark. In fact the union leadership largely went along with the “Third Way” as that of balancing the power of employers and unions by state regulation and sharing increases in labour productivity. The growing inequality that resulted between the traditional working class constituency and the middle class ‘centre’ is the widening class division that runs through the Labour Party and explains the split between ‘right’ and ‘left’. It is the basis of the fight between the unions and working class membership to pull the party back to its traditional working class constituency from its middle class constituency.

The problem for the Labour Party however, is that the political centre is also the hunting ground of the Centre Right parties, in particular the National Party. Under conditions when the economy is expanding the middle class sharing in this growth, National prevails. Yet, even when the economy slumps and the middle class gets squeezed, it doesn’t follow that it will swing towards Labour. The global conditions for the rise of the middle class are changing. The first Labour Government enabled workers incomes to rise behind a protectionist economic policy. As long as the profits of  NZ manufacturers were protected from international finance capital, workers living standards benefited.

Today, 30 years after Rogernomics, manufacturing is integrated into the global economy only if it is competitive. This has deregulated and casualised the working class and made the middle class dependent on the global marketplace. The latter is fickle and only respects power and wealth. This is the legacy of Rogernomics and so long as Labour does not break with neo-liberalism it cannot serve the interests of the embattled, impoverished, working class. Neither can it win over those sections of the middle class whose incomes are being squeezed and now find themselves sinking back down into the working class.

Towards Socialism

We must use this defeat as an opportunity. The membership must reject the resurgence of the Right faction seeking revenge for the electoral loss. It was the Right that made it impossible for Cunliffe to take a consistent left line during the election. Cunliffe has responded to the Caucus majority's attempt to replace him without triggering a primary by resigning and nominating himself to set the primary process in motion. This is a victory for party democracy against Caucus domination of the party.

This is the time for the membership to mobilise the Party branches and the ranks of the unions and prevent Caucus insiders from gerrymandering the leadership vote. The revival of Labour as a party that professes loyalty to the working class would start with the Labour Left winning outright control of the party. Whether this is possible without a split depends on what happens to the Right faction. If Cunliffe wins then they should resign to form another party that better reflects their interests as part of the middle class campaigning for support in the 'centre ground'.

Labour has to turn its back on the neo-liberal consensus that has dominated politics since 1984. It has to put up an alternative program that the majority of workers in Aotearoa can support including the missing million voters. It would be a program to socialise the strategic industries, the banks and energy and resources. The Reserve Bank would manage the money supply by printing money backed by state owned assets to fund state spending on public works, infrastructure, housing, health, education and welfare. Resistance by the NZ ruling class and their US and Chinese imperialist backers would spur organised labour to build their own social institutions culminating in a Workers' Government.

A revived Labour Party would be based on workers democracy in community councils that unite the union ranks and local neighbourhoods along with activists from the Greens and Mana, and mobilising to fight the NACT dirty politics and attacks on labour rights; spying; fighting against climate change; providing decent health, housing, welfare and education. Strikes, occupations, self-help, bans, are the working class methods for collectively defending and demanding the labour rights, wages and conditions that we need. This would prove that it is possible to activate the disenfranchised and stop the stupid electoral rivalry that divides the left and allows the ruling class to rule. Workers democracy would ensure that workers interests were not high-jacked by bureaucrats, and that the Corporate Media was rendered powerless by workers own media and social media. A revitalised working class political culture would emerge based on speaking the truth and acting on the truth because it would incorporate the values of Labour against Capital.

Capitalism lives by Dirty Politics

Dirty Politics: a must read for every man and woman

The publication of Nicky Hager’s book Dirty Politics a few weeks before the election was a big factor in the election outcome. While it accused the National Party of leaking secret information to right wing Bloggers to feed to the Corporate Media and discredit the opposition, the result was a backlash that lifted the National Party to an outright victory. After some weeks of being on the defensive  Prime Minister Key was able to turn the tables and use Dirty Politics to blame the left especially Kim Dotcom and the Internet/Mana Party of a ‘left wing conspiracy’ to defeat National in the polls.

What this reveals is a concentration of power in the state engaged in mass surveillance and covert propaganda which can be deployed to prevent any serious challenge to this power through the parliamentary system. Is this an anomaly of ‘abnormal’ power, a one party state, or rogue state that can be fought and corrected by a democratic opposition, or is it the ‘new normal’ form that the capitalist state takes when economic crisis begins to threaten its legitimacy? We argue that ‘Dirty Politics’ is normal in what we call the Bonapartist state.

The states subversion of parliament

The victory of National in the election was not due a democratic process that gave National a fair majority over the opposition parties, but the intervention of a Bonapartist state. We will demonstrate that ‘dirty politics’, mass surveillance, corruption, abuse of power etc are only symptoms of such a state. First we define Bonapartism then we look at the conditions that give rise to Bonapartism.

We go back to the Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky to define Bonapartism. He described this form of state supplanting parliamentary democracy during the crisis of capitalism in the 1930s as a concentration of state power in the hands of a "Bonaparte" figurehead projecting himself as standing above the class struggle, in order to hold back the rise of the revolutionary proletariat. If this failed to stem the revolution the ruling class was then forced to resort to fascism. Trotsky defined fascism as the last resort of the bourgeoisie to smash the revolution. The bourgeoisie provoked the angry petty bourgeoisie threatened with bankruptcy by the crisis to organise a fascist movement on the streets to fight and smash the working class.

So Bonapartism as the attempt to hold the fort and keep the people at bay requires a new state regime that subverts democracy and subordinates parliament, the bureaucracy, the judiciary and all the repressive and ideological apparatuses (such as the GCSB, police, media, schools etc) to the Chief Executive, (President, Military leader, or Prime Minister) concentrating power into the hands of figurehead that ‘stands above the classes’ and appears to personify the unitary state.

The pre-conditions for Bonapartism are then: first, the global economy facing a structural crisis of falling profits and a huge slump in which the main imperialist powers have to resort to war to survive. Today, we can see that the global capitalist crisis is a structural crisis that threatens its existence. The major imperialist powers are coming up against the limits of peak energy and climate change and facing rising mass resistance. The global economy faces stagnation and slump along with climate catastrophe.

Moreover, the competition over diminishing economic returns is taking the form of a dangerous rivalry between the declining US power bloc and that of the rising China Russia bloc expressed in proxy wars and US/NATO containment of Russia and China. The game is up when the IMF is calling on state aid for crippled capitalism and the OECD projections for capitalism over next 50 years is a long decline exacerbated by climate change.

Climate change and economic stagnation

This comes as no surprise to Marxists as capitalism has exhausted its potential to play any progressive role in developing humanity and must give way to either socialism or barbarism. All of this should be enough to prove that capitalism is doomed, posing the question whether we as a species are doomed with it. Is there hope? According to Paul Mason “The OECD has a clear message for the world: for the rich countries, the best of capitalism is over. For the poor ones – now experiencing the glitter and haze of industrialisation – it will be over by 2060...The OECD’s prescription – more globalisation, more privatisation, more austerity, more migration and a wealth tax if you can pull it off – will carry weight. But not with everybody. The ultimate lesson from the report is that, sooner or later, an alternative programme to “more of the same” will emerge. Because populations armed with smartphones, and an increased sense of their human rights, will not accept a future of high inequality and low growth.”

Second, Aotearoa/NZ cannot escape this fate. Capitalism faces the twin crises of a declining economy and climate collapse. To survive, it must exploit nature to death and bring about human extinction. For humans to survive we must destroy capitalism and save nature. Capital in NZ is also battering down the hatches for a showdown. As a declining semi-colony (some would say de facto state) of the US, with its economy dependent on China, there is a rat-race to grab NZ's resources before they are destroyed by profiteers or expropriated by the impoverished worker/peasants. NZ's semi-raw commodity exports are subject to collapsing prices, while capital exports to the Aussie banks and US and China corporate soar. This leads inexorably to a mounting national debt that must be paid for by the working class. As living standards plummet expect rising social protests challenging the legitimacy of the NACT Bonapartist regime.

Fighting Bonapartism

As we saw demonstrated in the recent election in New Zealand, the trampling of democracy, corruption, ‘dirty politics’, media capture and so on, are all symptoms of this Bonapartism of the state. So in the light of this, it is defence of democratic freedoms that are the key political question right now. Bonapartism leading to fascism can have only one response from any party that claims to represent the poor and oppressed and that is active defence of these freedoms as a precondition for any social justice.

None of the Left except Internet/Mana picked up on this and brought the fight for democracy (internet freedom) together with  social justice (feed the children). Only Internet/Mana kept the pressure on Key by staging 'The Moment of Truth' event where Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange appeared by live link alongside the crusading journalist Glenn Greenwald live on stage to claim that the NZ spy agency GCSB was engaged in mass spying on NZ via its partnership with the NSA. While this forced Key to admit that this was "possible" neither Hager’s book nor Dotcom’s evidence was the ‘smoking gun’ that the Right and Corporate Media demanded as proof that Key was spying and lying.

Key could protest his innocence only by virtue of state secrecy as the chief executive of a Bonapartist state where Cabinet dominates all branches of government and the so-called Fourth Estate, the Corporate Media. What we have here then are revelations about how the NZ state operates today to spy and lie to the people in order to maintain social order and control over the economy, yet that state has the power to prevent these revelations from destabilising its regime.

Instead of taking Key head-on over his subversion of parliamentary democracy, the rest of the Left including Labour fell for the narrative of the Bonapartist state of sacrificing democracy (denial of Dirty Politics and whitewash inquiries after the election) for the sake of business as usual (stagnation and trickledown) and joined in demonising Internet/Mana on the basis of the Right whipping up public envy, racism and chauvinism. Labour and the Greens instead of fighting the election on Dirty Politics blamed it for their failure to get their policies heard.

As the global crisis deepens and as the class gap widens Labour will split and out of its ashes will come the working class party or parties that are needed to defend workers and oppressed people from the destruction of economic and climate collapse caused by the historic decline of capitalism. Revolutionaries fight to further this process by raising a Transitional Program in the parties of the working class to defend democracy and raise immediate demands for decent jobs, pay, health, education, housing and a healthy environment. As a result of coming up against a Bonapartist state, and being faced with the prospect of a fascist movement, it becomes clear they must build workers councils and self-defence against the regime's thugs, and fight for a Workers' Government that is capable of expropriating the capitalists and creating a planned economy.

Climate Change: The Workers Revolutionary Socialist Solution or a Class Peace Planetary Suicide Pact?

   Climate Change: The Workers Revolutionary Socialist Solution or a Class Peace Planetary Suicide Pact?

From Palestine to Ferguson

 

Conjunctural Thesis on the Class Struggle

1) The brutal bombardment of Gaza by the illegitimate colonial-settler state of Israel has been authorized by U.S. imperialism and in particular by the Democratic Party leadership in order to prevent the Palestinian masses from launching the next intifada. Such an uprising is both the logical and a pragmatic step by the Arab masses toward uniting the workers and oppressed across MENA in struggle. Inevitably the struggle to accomplish the unfinished tasks of the national democratic Arab revolution come up against the restraints of the imperialist order and the emerging proxy war that traps the toiling masses between the dominant USA/EU imperialist bloc and the emergent China/Russia bloc. The Arab Spring, the Syrian revolution, the spread of the counterrevolutionary ISIL across Syria and Iraq and the massive mobilizations today in Pakistan are products of the unresolved contradictions of imperialist domination of the Near East. 

The US is facing defeats on all fronts abroad because of the unpopularity of these failed adventures in the military occupation and oppression of the masses abroad to solve the US crisis of overproduction. This proves that imperialism cannot project the class war with impunity abroad without exacerbating the class contradiction at home.The militarisation of US imperialism is now being used to subdue its domestic population. The police in Ferguson are outfitted with army surplus gear and its high command is trained in Israel. Zionist Israel is the child of its imperialist master and its existential crisis foreshadows that of its master. The defeat of Israel is political, as its democracy is run by the military and war resisters are thrown in jail. Its legitimacy as a capitalist democracy is blown apart with the bodies of the children of Gaza. It is no accident that the global refrain “we are all Palestinians” is now one of the chants of the mass protests in Ferguson. Just as the Palestinians refuse to negotiate their submission to a colonial settler state, the black working class masses in the US are not prepared to submit to curfews and executions.

2) Long ago pacifist leader Martin Luther King observed that the USA could not maintain a militarist foreign policy without that same violence coming home and exploding in the cities of the USA. Today the unresolved and unfinished tasks of the American democratic revolution are exploding in Ferguson and the internationalist connection is not lost on the youth, on the African-American community, on the Palestine solidarity movement and even on foreign governments (even the brutal Egyptian dictatorship weighs in against the American racist brutality-obviously to cover for its own murderous suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood.) We see the international economic crisis exploding in brutal police repression of marginalized and disenfranchised communities of black and brown people across the United States. The Malcolm X grass roots movement has taken the lead in cataloging and popularizing the fact that every 28 hours American Police kill a black or brown person somewhere in the “home of the free”! This level of special oppression is required by the capitalists to keep the black and brown population in check. Every objective analysis of the conditions of the oppressed in the ghettos, in the devastated urban centers like Detroit, and increasingly in the suburbs where affordable housing can be found, catalog the predictable results of decades of declining educational opportunities, pauperization, de-industrialization, criminalization of entire populations (including immigrant children and families), the profitable growth of the private prison industry populated by victims of the capitalist crisis and fed via an attack on public education and unionization both in public and private industry. 

It is no surprise that Ferguson has exploded!   The ruling class had their warning after Oscar Grant’s murder at the Fruitvale BART Station. The political class and their police skated by after the response to the murder of Trayvon Martin was pacified by time and a Teflon racist criminal justice system tied to the corporate media and acting as an integral tool in the ruling class system of defusing public outrage while slandering the victims and violating their human rights by regularly portraying the victim as a criminal and protecting and excusing the armed thugs of the state. So in the immediate aftermath of the police murder of Michael Brown a police-edited videotape was broadcast on all major corporate media purporting to show Michael Brown robbing a convenience store. The Purpose of this racist hatchet job was as always to taint all possible jury pools in favor of the police lies, thereby making impossible the bringing of murder charges against any cop by any Grand Jury. This is an old police trick dating from before the electronic age.

After the Occupy Movement of 2011/2012 and the response to Trayvon Martin in 2013 we witnessed the enhanced proliferation of military hardware, moving from the stockpiles of Iraq to the inner cities in the USA. This is nothing less than a Bonapartist preparation to suppress the righteous uprisings of the masses and we watch them spread from Fallujah to Aleppo, to Gaza, and now to Ferguson.

3) The ruling class long ago understood that in order to delegitimize the claims to, and righteous demands for social-economic justice and equality for the black and brown community, black and brown leaders would need to be “whitewashed” and turned into their imperialist puppets and tools. The “Post Racial” America had to be declared and feted just a little more quickly than the “Post Misogynist” America in order to maintain the status quo in the face of what was about to unfold in the economic realm. For ruling class media, political elites and even among left and “culturalist” academics the “class question” was put to rest as the “End of History” was feted in 1989. Yet with the black and brown population still oppressed and drowning at the bottom end of the economy and with economic collapse on the not so “distant” horizon (as the “irrational exuberance” and reified Ayn Randism was collapsed by the concrete reality of the crisis of overproduction of capital and the implications of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.) A heavy hand would be required by imperialism both at home and abroad to smash the uprisings of the workers and oppressed. The capitalist class saw the writing on the wall.   Their most astute observers knew economic crisis would quickly deflate the speculative party and Obama was elevated mid stream over Hillary. Post Racialism became the order of the day! And today in “post racial” America the class contradictions are exploding in what look like revolution and counter-revolution in the “show me” state! We remember Dred Scott! We remember John Brown! We have no illusions in the fake post racial America. We know it is a construction of the ruling class and another one of their myriad tools of pacification.

4) The ruling class has known for decades the day of the black President would be necessary. The black “true patriot” (imperialist Colin Powell) and “black conservative justice” (misogynist Clarence Thomas) were elevated in the post- 60’s backlash period both as a counter to the legacy of former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and the anti-imperialism of the Black Panthers, Brown Berets, League of Revolutionary Black Workers, and the various “movement” and working class anti-imperialists. Clarence Thomas was elevated to their top court to further denigrate and disempower the women’s liberation movement (and in particular to attack it where it overlapped with the working class and Black movements). But the elevation of model conservative black politicians to positions of power did not change the actual material conditions. The Clinton administration brought about the “end of welfare as we know it” and the brutal attack on the condition of poor and black and brown women with the odious (and sometimes even fatal) requirements of the “welfare to work” programs. Millions of black and brown men were relegated to prison labor for pennies an hour, increasingly for private prison-industrial complexes, one of this depression’s few growth industries. Meanwhile black and brown women were chased off welfare into poverty and menial work in order to qualify for the minimally available social assistance.   All the while, the class of model ’Negroes’, those trained to talk standard corporate dialect and endorse and abide the parameters of the capitalist rule, those referred to by pre-eminent black intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois as the Black Bourgeoisie, were prepared and elevated to catch the flack and defuse the situation when the inevitable fightback hit the streets.

5) This layer contains the most commercial spokespersons, the most renowned moralists, as well as countless preachers, poverty-agency operatives and hack politicians who know how to ride a wave. Today they are tasked with defusing Ferguson. At the executive level arch-hypocrite Obama says we will go to any lengths to bring to justice anyone who kills Americans, yet the Ferguson police department escorted Michael Brown’s murderer out of town to a safe undisclosed hideout. We watch what looks like an occupying army standing in formation with guns aimed at masses of unarmed civilians, many with arms in the air. No doubt ‘whitewashed’ black commentators will accuse some outside agitators of using them as human shields while they created mayhem!   The governor stepped in and sent the state police with a black chief spokesperson, but his credibility faded quickly…..then the National Guard was sent in but they were not tasked with protecting the people, but only with protecting the police command headquarters.   We call upon all worker militants on the scene to fraternize with the National Guard enlisted ranks to convince them not to follow any orders to commit state violence and to revolt should they be given. Back to the barracks and home!

Then the FBI showed up with all the authority of the Obama White House, but contrary to all logic the fact of 6 bullet wounds, two to the head, has not resulted in the immediate arrest of the murdering cop. So the FBI stands around with no real role other than to be the token serious Federal interest in the case, and the protests just get bigger naturally enough. So now Attorney General Holder is sent in to promise a “thorough and independent investigation.” We would like to know how there can be an independent state investigation of the state. The bench is getting thin and folks can see through it. The bourgeoisie increasingly sees no way out except crushing the suburban uprising. Crushing this uprising before it becomes a St. Louis uprising or even the Mississippi River uprising.   Even the black President cannot put Humpty Dumpty together again. So the “Post Racial” era comes to an end. We knew it had never been initiated, that there were clues along the way (every 28 hours!) but now the brave youth of Ferguson have stood up and say NO MORE! The Communist Workers Group stands with them!

6) While it is clear to revolutionary Marxism that the daily slaughter of workers and oppressed is the consequence and cost of decaying capitalism, that the systemic problem is not the fault of any one individual or group of individuals who can be identified and replaced, and that the open defenders of this decaying class system are little more than puppets acting with limited independence from their puppet masters to enforce the right of the 0.1% to own and control the wealth of the planet, there are layers of enforcers among the communities of the oppressed and working classes that are more insidious than the likes of Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas, Barack Obama and Eric Holder.   There are those who evoke Martin Luther King and tell us to back down and turn the other cheek. But we put our arms in the air and they shoot at us. What do you expect? We have black state police officers who admonish the youth for provoking violence with looting and Molotov cocktails, conveniently forgetting that only a week ago “Big Mike” was shot down, unarmed with his arms in the air! The political class, the moralists, the pacifists, all want to gather you inside the church and get you back off the street and back into the bourgeois political process in order to make good the deal with Hillary that she would be next in 2016, under the threat of an even worse Republican boogey man. 

Among this layer of operatives, moralists and pacifists are the very “socialists” who help to maintain the rule of the capitalist class by elevating the capitalist Democratic Party to the level of the essential and only pragmatic solution and road forward and away from reaction in every election cycle. The Communist Party, the Democratic Socialists of America, through and alongside the Trade Union bureaucracies, construct the American popular front in which the political independence of the working class and oppressed is subordinated to imperialism with a promise of a seat at the table. Thus we see the International Socialist Organization calling upon all workers in their orbit to follow the Reverend Al Sharpton and the New York Labor bureaucracy in a “We Will Not Go Back March” exactly to canalize and dam up worker frustration with murderous police tactics. Irrespective of the nominal intentions of Messrs. “Socialists”, Sharpton and the bureaucrats are stone Democrats and identify their interests with bourgeois class rule. Where workers live in the lower-rent suburbs the “seat at the table” is in the last row of the waiting room at the unemployment office!

7) The leaderships that hide the workers’ historic program for socialism from the masses do the work of the ruling class. What the uprising in Ferguson shows us is that decaying capitalist imperialism will have to take up arms against the oppressed not only in Fallujah, Rio de Janeiro, Gaza, Aleppo and Donetsk, but that not even the USA can resolve the crisis at home without unleashing class war. The leaders of the workers movement who talk socialism and workers power and Black Nationalism and women’s liberation on Sunday and on Holidays, on the morrow tell you not to organize your fighting workers/labor party, not to organize your own community assemblies, not to organize your own collective self-defense, and not to organize class struggle caucuses to revive your unions! No, they tell you to elect a new crop of ‘white washed’ progressive Democrats. Take Seattle, Washington where fake socialist Kshama Sawant tells workers that the police are workers too and endorses the new police chief as a progressive! Take Richmond, California where fake socialist mayoral candidate Mike Parker withdraws from the campaign, telling workers they have no need for political independence and should vote for the capitalist Democratic “progressive” candidate Tom Butt. There are already many preachers out on the street trying to contain the masses and bring them back to the fold, but that system is broken. Occupy may have withered away from misleadership, but the contradiction of decaying capitalism drives the masses into the streets out of sheer necessity.

8) The solution that is missing is the coalescence of a multi-racial, multi-ethnic revolutionary workers’ party that charts a course for independent working class political action, which forms up the popular democracy in every workplace, community and school and which will develop and assert the workers’ historic program through mobilizations, strikes, occupations, and direct challenges for power, as the power of the capitalists to rule effectively becomes increasingly less tenable and more and more dependent on the overt violence of the state.

  

9) So while the world is in flames and the CWG comrades participate in their trade unions and community organizations, they have marched on the Ports of Oakland against the Zionist slaughter, they organize against those in the union who deny workers their independent party, they have mobilized in the anti-fascist and anti-Klan actions, they have stood with the workers and oppressed of Brazil, Korea, the Ukraine, Syria and Egypt as they have had to rise up against the imperialists over the last year. And again today in the USA we take our program of political independence and working class labor-black-brown self defense to the beleaguered and oppressed communities who daily suffer the violence of the state. We say there can be no end to police brutality under capitalism. Thus we oppose the advocacy of civilian police review boards; they are not a solution. When, in the 1960’s, these review boards were demanded by the Black Panther Party and SDS, this represented for them a break to the left away from liberalism, although not a qualitative one as is usual with the ultra-left. Today, after the experience the working class had with such “independent” review boards such as John Lindsay’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, the raising of this demand by the Freedom Socialist Party, the Chicago Socialist Campaign, and Sawant’s Socialist Alternative, amount to a sop to liberalism and an assurance to the bourgeoisie of the utterly pacifist intentions of these groupings. The bourgeois state killers in blue cannot be made accountable to any other class but the capitalists. To think otherwise is to invite bloodshed on our side of the class line, until pacifist illusions can no longer be held.

We oppose the police unions being considered part of the labor movement; police are not workers and we do not defend them or welcome them as any part of the solution. We explain the police “protect and serve” big capital at your expense. They do not arrest Chevron for poisoning your air, they do not arrest BP for spoiling the Gulf and killing workers, they do not arrest the fossil fuel industry or the bankers who are poisoning the planet and they certainly do not arrest their own for killing you! In fact to end the rule of the capitalist class, the police and national security state must be arrested and only the mobilized masses of the workers and oppressed can do that.

Drop the charges against arrested protestors! We know who the real criminals are! 

300 dead black and brown workers a year and no cops arrested and punished. This capitalist system has no intention of seeking justice. We do demand the arrest of killer cops, However this is a transitional demand, because only popular tribunals of the workers and oppressed which organize their own defense guards can “Jail Killer Cops” and bring justice to the workers and oppressed.   

No faith in the bosses’ courts! Build organizations of labor and the oppressed to enforce justice!

08/20/2014

Communist Workers Group/USA.