Class Struggle 113 Winter 2015

Class Struggle 113 Winter 2015

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Briefs Peters wins in Northland Most of the left called for a vote for Peters as a vote against

Key. A Peters victory they said could see a Labour/NZ First Government in 2017. They think this would be a lesser evil than National/Act/United Future/Maori Party coalition

(NACTS) in 2017? We cant see much difference really. This would be the rightwing of Labour joining forces with NZ First

to take the conservative middle ground from the NACTS at the

expense of the left and the interests of most NZ workers.

Labours stunt of deferring to Peters was a clear admission that the rightwing in Labour has won. First it had to backstab

Cunliffe. Then it had to conspire with Peters and the NACTS to smash Internet/MANA and isolate the Greens in the General

Election. Labour used MMP not to unite the left but smash it.

Next was the abuse of MMP to effectively divert labour votes

to Peters in the Northland buy-election. A blatant cynical disregard for building Labour support on the left in favour of

building it in the centre.

The role of Stuart Nash illustrates this. Here is an obvious

rightwing demagogic Labour leader-in-waiting being pushed

by people like Bomber as Labours salvation. A Labour/NZ First Government in 2017 would be a defeat for workers, not a

lesser evil. Thats because they will be caught up in a right wing populism that throws us back to a reactionary national

chauvinism that attacks the underclass and migrants rather than our neo-colonial masters; a return to Muldoonism with a

nasty patriotic, anti-Treaty, racist backlash. (Winston Peters

was in the National Party with Muldoon).

Cuppa tea party crowdfunding with Shame Jones anyone?

A populist centrist Labour/NZ First Government would be

a dead end for workers because it can only appeal to the

red-neck middle class and lumpen workers by blaming

militant workers, beneficiaries and immigrants for NZs economic woes which are going to get much worse.

We can do much better than that. The left inside Labour needs

to read its history. Read Karl Marx on British capitalism and

settler colonialism would be a good start, followed by the

history of the betrayals of the Labour Party. Then it needs to

break away from rightwing populism and join forces with Mana, the left of Internet and the left from the Greens to form a

real mass Workers Party. Against the return to a reactionary

nationalism, we need to ally ourselves with the masses

struggling around the world against the common class enemy

of the 99% the giant banks and monopolies of the richest 1%.

Why workers must read Marx Chris Trotter, friend of Labour, continues his campaign to

clean up capitalism for working class consumption. He cites

Karl Marx in the Communist Manifesto that the capitalist state

is the committee for managing the affairs of the bourgeoisie. The NACTs he claims are not ruling on behalf of ALL

capitalists, only a small bunch of parasites. Does this mean that

the NACTs should read Marx and obey his dictates and rule for

the whole capitalist class or maybe thats Labours job.

Its misleading to quote a sentence from Marx writing in 1848 to critique Keys regime for falling short of managing capitalism efficiently for the whole ruling class. Since Marxs time capitalism has undergone some major changes. The ruling

class had concentrated wealth and power into a small fraction

of the capitalist class. The less efficient and small capitalists

get swallowed up. The rest are used as subcontractors.

So the state managing the interests of the international

capitalist class today acts according to its position in the global

pecking order. NZ is a tiny semi-colony that never had a war of

independence. It is somewhere in the middle of the pecking

order as a rich dependency because of its favoured history as a

British farm.

During the times of the first Labour Government, NZ was able to secure a measure of self-government and economic

protection to allow domestic capitalism to establish itself.

Labour governed in the interests of NZ domestic

manufacturers, but the other side of the deal was to allow the

City to keep control of banking and rake out its profits. Bruce

Jesson certainly recognised who had the better of the bargain

since he saw NZ as still a neo-colony of Britain.

Today, 50 years later, with the end of the post-war boom and

the onset of neoliberal globalisation, NZs ruling class no longer tries to serve two masters. Bill Sutch signalled this with

his 1970 book Takeover NZ. NZ was about to become no more

than a footnote in the accounts of the multinationals. The NZ economy was deregulated, opened up, and recolonised by

international finance capital. NZ domestic capital was gutted,

and important productive sectors were privatised and under

foreign control.

The role of the Key regime is that of comprador, the agent of

US, UK and Chinese capital, facilitating the complete takeover

of the economy. NZ has returned to its colonial role of provider

of raw materials, with its No 8 wire ICT innovation bought out

by international monopolies. Like all compradors, the NZ

ruling class gets paid off with part of the proceeds, usually for

its conspicuous consumption, not for domestic production.

So the famous quote from the 1848 Communist Manifesto

about the state being the organising committee of the ruling class needs some historical elaboration. The NACT regime today does represent the international ruling class, both the

giant monopolies and banks, and their national agents,

collaborating in the job of organising the world economy in

which various nations fill their assigned roles in the

international division of labour of accumulating profits for the

richest 1%.The capitalists dont need to read Karl Marx. It has never done them any good. The workers need to read Karl

Marx and find out how to take over and run the world economy


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sustainably and equitably. The new ruling class of the 99% will

certainly hold the state to its task of managing its common affairs.

John Key the Money Man A lot of people on the left in NZ are mystified by the

popularity of John Key. He has been caught out lying and

cheating, hiding under several hats and generally faking it. The explanation lies in his personal amorality, hypocrisy, and

boorish behaviour. These are useful personality traits for a

money trader, or more accurately the Money Man as

personification of money.

Key represents nothing but money and like money he is all

show and no substance. To discover why a national leader is

first and foremost a money man we have to trace the origins of

money in capitalist society.

Money originates as a means of exchange and measure of value

of commodities. Money may have value itself as a precious

metal like gold because of the labour congealed in it, but today

money itself is valueless and more importantly, worthless

unless it can be exchanged for a commodity of value.

Marx called the commodity a mysterious thing because it is not what it appears to be. The labour required to make value is

alienated and appears instead as a property of the commodity

itself. Money takes this upsidedownness and flaunts it. It masquerades as the source, repository and religion of value-in-

itself.

Its easy to see why famous prophets like Proudhon and Te Whiti saw money rather than capitalist exploitation as the root

of all evil. What they opposed was the upside down reality of

capitalism which defined people by money. Of course the

world has to be turned right way up by overthrowing not only

money and its political personification in Key, but the system

of labour exploitation that is the beginning and end of it all.

The world capitalist economy today is in big trouble because it

cannot produce commodities profitably. The result is that

money has become detached from the production of value and

becomes what Marx called fictitious capital.

This is the money that Key represents, the fictional, worthless, valueless character of money as a fake equivalent of value.

Because it cannot be exchanged for the real value produced by

workers, it pretends that by speculating in land and existing

commodity wealth it can artificially create value out of

panicked shoppers. But this is not value inflation. It is value

deflation by price inflation that will burst sooner or later.

But to keep the pretence going that bankers pyramid schemes

create value, the banking system needs a Money Man as

political leader to push speculation in all existing values by

printing money. He also tries to commodify everything from

state owned assets to social services as private property so that

the market can drive the price speculation that keeps pumping

up the fictitious economy. Capitalism like climate is headed for collapse. Are you ready? Boom Bang!

UK: Death of Labour overdue UK Labours defeat marks the end of social democracy in Europe. The Great Recession is still with us as global stagnation and the threat of a Great Depression. Social

Democracy founded on state redistribution cannot function in

recessions and depressions. The Fourth Labour Government in

NZ proved this rule by demonstrating that Labour governments

are the servants of capital before the servants of labour.

UK Labour followed a decade later with the Blairite years. The

Brown/Milliband Labour opposition did not break from Blair.

The result was that it failed to convince workers in Scotland

and elsewhere that it stood for the working class. It was

punished by Scots workers who jumped to the Scottish

National Party (SNP) and dumped Labour.

The underlying message of the victory of the SNP is not

nationalism, but classism. Workers in Scotland found a vehicle

in the SNP already in existence as the alternative to Scottish

Labour that had been part of the leadership of

Blairite/Brownite Labour. This allowed them to vote for the

SNP with an anti-austerity message.

In England and Wales, the chauvinist anti-immigrant UK

Independent Party took votes from Labour because Labour had

no policy to defend workers from wages undermined by

unemployment. Because Miliband could not deal with this

problem by backing unions and creating jobs, then workers

defaulted to the rightwing politics of blaming immigrants.

So under Labour the replacement of class politics with

populism fails to provide answers for workers and leads to

destructive right splits. Scottish workers were driven to call for

Scotlands independence as a means of fighting austerity. English and Welsh workers were driven into the arms of UKIP

to defend their jobs from immigrants. That leads to the

breakup not so much of Britain where finance capital rules, but

of the British working class.

The end of British Labour is part of the death of European

Social Democracy and its replacement by national populist

parties which are painted by the anti-capitalist left as progressive. Thus by openly subordinating the workers class interests to the middle class anti-capitalist workers are pulled

back into cross-class populist parties as we have seen in

Britain, Spain and Greece. That is why the SNP, Podemos and

Syriza which try to reconcile antagonistic classes in national

populist parties, even forming governments with open

bourgeois parties, are to the right of Social Democracy. They

are popular fronts that tie workers to reactionary bourgeois

parliaments and open them to fascist attacks.

The solution is to fight for the unity of all British and EU

workers against all the pro-austerity parties in the EU, joining

forces with the anti-austerity struggles from Greece to Spain to form new mass workers parties. These parties would stand in

elections only to expose and defeat the misleaders who tell

workers they can vote for socialism, to win over reformist

workers to a socialist program for workers councils and

militias and a workers government capable of taking power and

planning production for need and not profit!


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May Day: Workers of the World Unite! Smash Capitalist Imperialism and stop its drive to World War 3!

The world is in the throes of a crisis of overproduction of capital caused by the falling rate of profit. It is exacerbated by the rise of China and Russia as rival imperialist powers to the declining US led bloc. We regard the crisis as proof of the self-destruction of capitalism in its death throes. It can only get worse as it destroys masses of accumulated capital and drives down the costs of labor which in past crises has always led to imperialist wars. Today the severity of the crisis is compounded by the fast approaching capitalist-fuelled climate catastrophe and the end of the human species. This crisis can only end in the destruction of a Third World War and climate catastrophe, or as the World Socialist Revolution. To stop the drive to imperialist war, ecological collapse and the end of humanity, imperialism must die!

Imperialisms war on workers For imperialism to survive it must make the masses pay for its

crisis. This means attacking their livelihood and their lives!

This is shown by the huge downward pressure on the masses

living standards and attacks on their rights, their historic gains,

and their very existence. It

takes many forms:

(a) An expanding reserve army of unemployed from

Asia, Africa and Latin

America where most of the

working population is in the

black economy. Everywhere

casualising contracts such as

zero hours are targeting

especially black, female and

young low-paid or no-paid

workers. In Europe and the

US today up to half of youth are unemployed.

(b) Attacks on indigenous peoples struggles to survive and defend their natural resources from outright theft and plunder

as we see from the Amazon to Australia, from the Zimbabwe

diamond mines to the West Papuan independence struggle and

the US First Nation peoples stands against fracking and capitalist climate catastrophe.

(c) Rising flows of migrant workers denied basic rights to life

as in the case of African migrants deported by the ANC from

South Africa, dying by the thousands trying to reach Europe,

and trapped in concentration camps in Australia, Greece and

France. And the millions of political refugees fleeing invasions and wars.

(d) Attacks on trade unions to break them so that workers are

super-exploited and killed in unsafe conditions as in

Bangladesh and Argentina; attacks by the bureaucratic thugs of

the state, killer cops on the union ranks everywhere such as

miners of Las Heras, Argentina, and Bolivia, and the massacre

at Marikana.

(e) Vicious austerity measures imposed everywhere that

destroy state welfare support for the working class in health,

education, housing and social benefits driving workers into

poverty ridden slums, early death or suicide as in the UK and Greece, driving down wages and restoring 19th century labour

conditions.

(f) Rising fascist movements among petty bourgeois and

lumpen elements that ferment divisions in the working class

over jobs, housing, etc., that lead to ethnic, religious,

xenophobic attacks in Europe and elsewhere which prepare the masses as cannon fodder countless proxy wars from South

Sudan to Ukraine.

(g) Imperialist invasions and occupations leading to proxy wars

that pit workers of one or other nation, nationality, ethnicity or

religion, and gender to fight one

another. The proxy wars are

most extreme in Africa (South

Sudan) MENA (Syria, Iraq,

Yemen) and Eurasia (Ukraine).

They prepare the road to the

Third World War.

By driving the proletariat into

poverty and dividing it against

itself as hostile factions, and in

numerous wars, the imperialists

and their national bourgeois

agents desperately force down

the costs of labour in the hope of

restoring their profits. But so far they have not succeeded. The

resistance is kicking back everywhere.

The proletariat fights to survive

For the international proletariat, the way out of the crisis is to

resist all the imperialist attacks on every front in every country

and build a revolutionary communist international to

overthrow the rotten capitalist imperialist system. There is no

lack of will and capacity to fightback by the worlds workers. Every day makes thousands martyrs of our class.

We can see the spontaneous resistance taking many forms in

the struggle for jobs, social and economic rights and the defence of basic human rights, from opposition to cop killers

from Ferguson to Baltimore, from the fascists in the Donbas,

from the dictator al Assad and Islamic State in Aleppo, from

ANC police thugs in Marikana, and from popular front

betrayals in Brazil, South Africa and Greece.

Yet, inevitably whether this resistance is in the form of the fight against austerity, casualisation, for the rights of

indigenous, blacks, women, of migrant workers, for the rights

of unions, and opposition to proxy wars, invasions and

occupations spontaneous resistance is everywhere trapped by the false friends of the working class; the labour bureaucracy in the unions, the reformist left parties, and most treacherously

the self-proclaimed communists and fake Trotskyists who

betray the proletariat by covering for the open agents of the

bourgeoisie in the ranks of the working class itself.


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To mobilise and organise a united world proletariat, first the

working class must be freed from its treacherous bureaucratic

misleaders who suck militant workers

into fatal political alliances with the bourgeoisie under the banner of the

popular front (from the ANC in South

Africa, the PT in Brazil, the PSUV in

Venezuela, to Syriza in Greece) that

ties their hands as the crisis deepens

and the fascist gangs and

paramilitaries are unleashed by the

bosses to try to smash the

international revolutionary proletariat

and stop it carrying out its historic task of overthrowing the capitalist

system.

For a revolutionary program and party!

To bring an end to the capitalist imperialist crisis which now

threatens the destruction of humanity and nature we need a

socialist revolution. That needs a revolutionary transitional

program of demands that are raised to meet the immediate

urgent needs of workers for jobs, housing, education, health, etc., fought for by workers, for the workers

These fights bring workers up against the power of the bosses

state and its repressive forces, that denies migrants rights, kills

militant workers, bans unions, jails or kills protesters, and

incites workers to kill one another in pogroms and wars. This

proves the need for workers to build their own class power

based upon their organs independent of the bureaucracy and

bourgeoisie - councils, militias, and most of all an international

Leninist/Trotskyist party that provides the leadership to the

revolutionary proletariat.

The revolutionary party has to be everywhere that workers are resisting the

crisis, challenging all the bosses agents at every point, and helping to organise

workers into their own organs of workers

power and breaking out of the popular

front with the bourgeoisie.

Our aim must be to name, expose and

kick all these class traitors out of the

class and to create a new leadership of

class fighters who are won to the

program of permanent revolution,

capable of turning strike action into political general strikes, and then into victorious insurrections to overthrow the

capitalist state and impose a Government of the workers and

all the oppressed!

Workers of the World Unite! For a new World Party of Revolution!

For Workers Councils and Militias! For Workers Council Governments!

For a World Socialist Revolution and a Communist Future!

Liaison Committee of Communists May 1st 2015

ANZACs Gallipoling to the Third World War Gallipoli did not mark NZs coming of age. Colonies fight wars of independence from their imperialist motherlands, they don't go and fight wars against other countries because the motherland says GO. It was Maori who fought their war of independence against the motherland and its settlers, who in World War I resisted the draft, while those who fought on the side of the motherland were the first to enlist to prove they were equal to the master race. We need to deflate this bullshit kiwi nationalism born fighting imperialist war on the wrong side at its rotten roots before it carries us into the Third World War.

The only war that matters is Class War

It seems to us that most people critical of the ANZAC

celebrations are still throwing around analyses of World War I

that are premised on the assumption that wars are between

nations, rather than between classes. Nations are the vehicles

for rival bourgeoisies to struggle for supremacy using their

workers as cannon fodder. The whole point being that the

victorious powers then make use of their expanded empires and

put the surviving proletariat to work making more profits.

But the Great War opened up the prospect of such inter-imperialist wars turning into open class wars. This can be seen

in a number of ways. Resistance to the draft, which was often

punished by death; the famous temporary truces between the

ranks in no mans land that were also met with severe punishment; mutinies, best known that in Germany in

November, 1918; and ultimately, revolutions. The Bolshevik

Revolution was mainly the response to the war by workers and

poor peasants in Russia. The February 1917 revolution was

kicked off by women textile workers facing starvation. It was

followed by the October Revolution when the majorities in the

soviets of workers, troops and poor peasants stood for the

overthrow of the capitalist government.

The revolution in Germany began with the mutinies of troops

in 1918 and led to the formation of workers and soldiers councils and militias. A bloody civil war ensured in which the

Social Democratic party headed a new Republic unleashing the

military and fascist paramilitaries against the revolutionary


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Communists. Reacting to the new threat of the Russian

revolution spreading throughout Europe the hostile warring

states joined forces to invade Soviet Russia only to be defeated

by the Red Army.

As we know the war resistance that opened the way for a

Europe-wide (and thus a world-wide) revolution was contained

in Russia, defeated in Germany, and the coup d grace was the rise of fascism in Italy in 1919 which then spread to Spain and

Germany by the 1930s.

So the Great War resulted in a repartition of the capitalist

world but which included the rise of a new threat to the

existence of capitalism itself, the Soviet alternative to

capitalism. This led inevitably to the Second World War in the

attempt to isolate and destroy the Soviet bloc. Again while the

Allies fought the Axis their ultimate target was the Soviet

Union. Again they failed in that objective as the Soviet Second World spread to China and

Indochina and became a

beacon to revolutionaries in

the colonial world.

The end of the Cold War and

restoration of capitalism in

Russia, China, Indo-China and

Cuba, has not solved the

problems for imperialism.

Instead of being able to grab

back what was lost to them between 1917 and 1990,

Russia and China have come

back from the dead as

imperialist rivals.

So the defeat of the soviet world in the 1990s is not the victory

of the global capitalist class over the worlds workers. Rather it marks the opening up of a new struggle between the old

declining US bloc and the rising Russia-China bloc for global

supremacy. And that struggle to the death will surely create the

conditions for new revolutions. We are heading towards a new

world war between these two blocs and once again the workers

are being prepared to fight one another in the interests of their respective imperialist ruling classes.

Inevitably like the previous Great War and the Second

World War, a Third World War will be a class war. The

working class can learn from history and refuse to fight this

war on behalf of their imperialist rulers, and instead turn it

into a global class war against the imperialist ruling classes.

Resisting the Great Wrong War

The Great Wrong War, which was the title of the book by

Stevan Eldred Grigg, was caused by the rivalry of the great

powers of the time to re-divide Europe and the overseas

colonies. Workers from all these countries were sent to war to

kill one another to increase the power and wealth of the

victorious powers. The end of that war drove the defeated Germany into deep depression and prepared the ground for the

rise of fascism and the Second Wrong War.

The response by communists who did not get sucked into this

jingoism was to refuse to fight and to mobilise against their own ruling class as the enemy at home. Lenins famous slogan was to turn imperialist war into civil war. This means workers in every country refusing to shoot one another and

instead turning their guns on their own ruling classes. While

some of the ANZAC troops mutinied in France but against the

conditions they faced rather than the war itself. There was

however, strong opposition to the war at home among unions

and some Maori.

For all the enthusiast empire sabre rattling in NZ there was also

a strong resistance to the war from some Waikato Maori and

the labour movement.

The Waikato leader, Te Puea Herangi, supported those men who resisted conscription by gathering them up at Te Paina, a

p she had rebuilt at Mangatwhiri. Her stance attracted a lot of hostility from other Mori and Pkeh who accused her of being a German sympathiser. Those Waikato men who refused

to report for training when balloted in 1918 were arrested and

taken to Narrow Neck training camp at Auckland. Any who

refused to wear the army uniform were subjected to severe

military punishments, including dietary punishments (being fed only bread and water) and

being supplied with minimal

bedding. Only a handful of the

Tainui conscripts were ever put

into uniform and none were

sent overseas. By 1919 only 74

Mori conscripts had gone to camp out of a total of 552 men

called. The imposition of

conscription on the Waikato

people had long-lasting effects, and the breach it caused was

probably only restored with the

Tainui Treaty settlement in

1995.

The current celebration of

nationhood born 100 years ago by the mass slaughter of workers for profits should be resisted today as a blatant

rallying of workers to prepare to fight a Third Imperialist

war on the side of the US/NATO bloc against the rival

power of China and Russia. The workers answer to

imperialist wars is to take up arms but refuse to fight one

another for profits and when repressed by the state to turn

their guns on their own ruling classes.

Stop a Third World War!

There is really only one political response to celebrating

imperialist wars and that is refusing to fight in them unless you

are defending an oppressed country from imperialist invasion.

Even then, the working people have an interest in uniting with

workers in other countries and not following their ruling

classes which are the agents for imperialism.NZ has a great

record of resistance whose lessons should be learned today in the face of mounting US warmongering aimed at weakening

and defeating the Russia-China bloc. On ANZAC day we

should celebrate the Waikato Maori, especially Te Puea who

organised resistance to the draft targeting Waikato Maori. We

should also celebrate the opposition and resistance to the war

by the radical elements of the labour movement which in 1913

had a General Strike put down by the army under the command

of a British Governor General.

So there is nothing stopping the working people of NZ from

learning the real lessons of the ANZACS and refusing to

participate in the hype around current wars that are softening us up to march off again to another imperialist war.

Turn Imperialist Wars into Civil Wars!


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MENA: Yemen and the Arab Revolution Battle lines in the Middle East continue to be drawn between the US bloc and the rising China/Russia bloc over control of the hydrocarbon resources of the region. This has not become an open proxy war since the China, Russia bloc do not want to be drawn into a fight over oil in MENA where the stakes are so high. At stake is the fate of Iran. Iran is in the camp of Russia and China. It has the 4th largest reserves of oil and 2nd largest reserves of gas in the world. Its immediate interests are to get the sanctions lifted and its own oil flowing. It has a stake in Iraq where the Shiite led regime and militias are driving back the IS forces in the north. It is the main force that is keeping al Assad in power in Syria.

In Yemen the latest front in a

series of connected fronts has opened as the US bloc

led on the ground by Saudi

Arabia and a coalition of the

US lackey states, lines up

against the popular Houthi

rebellion that has overthrown

the US sponsored dictator

who has flown the country. While the US bloc claims

that the Houthi are armed by

Iran, Iran denies this though

the Houthi have links to

Hezbollah another Iran

proxy. Iran as part of the

China/Russia bloc is clearly

engaged in a struggle with

the US bloc for control of

MENA.

Nevertheless we advocate independent working class action

in defence of the Houthi uprising without any political

support to the bourgeois leadership or its proxy role aligned

to the Russia/China imperialist bloc.

The Arab Revolution threatens both blocs

While the inter-imperialist rivalry underlies these wars in

MENA, the real threat to both blocs is the unfinished Arab Revolution. In 2012 a year into the Arab Revolution re-opened

in MENA we wrote a balance sheet in which the success of the

revolution was clearly in the armed masses fighting against

dictatorships. To the extent that uprisings were steered into

parliamentary solutions as in Tunisia and Egypt the revolutions were halted. Where these rebellions met

overwhelming armed repression as in Bahrain they were

aborted. Where they met armed repression but survived to arm

a popular resistance movement as in Libya and Syria, the

revolutions are still alive.

Most important, the Arab Revolution had to be joined up at Palestine from East, West, North and South. If the Syrian

revolution did not join up militarily with the Palestinian

struggle it would be doomed. If the Libyan and Egyptian

Revolutions remained separated they would not succeed. Thus

it was necessary for the revolution to remove the imperialist

borders imposed by Sykes Picot in 1919 and turn the

Palestinian struggle into a Pan Arab Permanent Revolution.

In those countries where the revolution succumbed to the siren

songs of bourgeois parliamentary democracy, they failed to

arm themselves and win over the ranks of the army. In Egypt

the SCAF (Supreme

Command of the Armed

Forces) sacked the Muslim

Brotherhood regime of

Morsi and continued its

historic role since Nasser as

the military Bonapartist

institution that is the

backbone of the

authoritarian state defending capitalist rule in

Egypt, not only from the

external enemy, but from

the internal enemy, the

populist Muslim

Brotherhood and the

Egyptian masses.

The most important task of

this military regime is to isolate the Egyptian masses from the

rest of the Arab states. One of the first acts of Al Sisi was to

close the border to Gaza and to the uniting of Egyptian and

Palestine revolutions. Today Al Sisi joins the Yankee coalition bombing IS in Libya and invading Yemen with Saudi planes

and tanks to smash the rebellion as they did in Bahrain.

In those countries where the resistance armed itself, civil wars

opened up against dictatorships like al Assad in Syria, al

Maliki in Iraq, and the NTC in Libya. Yet in none of these

countries has the armed resistance united across borders to join

the Palestinian struggle. But neither have they been disarmed

and destroyed. Every attempt has been made by both US and

Russia/China blocs to isolate and destroy the popular resistance

creating power vacuums in which other forces especially

Islamic jihadist were able to fill the gap. In Iraq this has meant that the non-sectarian resistance to al Maliki has been overrun

by the Sunni IS in the North while the Shiite militia from the

South have become the dominant force in pushing the IS back.

Similarly, in Syria the non-sectarian militias have become the

target of not only al Assad but of the IS and its jihadist allies

such as al Nusra. The IS has now moved against the Palestinian

revolution attempting to take over the refugee camp at

Yarmouk on the outskirts of Damascus.

Sectarian or imperialist wars?

So while the armed revolution advanced from 2011 to 2013, it

has been overtaken by counter-revolutionary forces who may

want to carve out Islamic states in much the same way that

Israel carved out its Zionist state. These are the open enemies

of the Arab Revolution. The result is that in both Syria and Iraq

the dictatorships have aligned themselves with the counter-

revolutionary Shiite forces against the Sunni masses in an


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attempt to turn what are potentially anti-imperialist and

revolutionary wars into reactionary sectarian wars. It is the

stalemate between these dictatorships and their Sunni

opposition that has created the vacuum that the Islamic State has moved to fill. Yet the fundamental fault lines of the wars in

MENA are not sectarian but imperialist.

Yemen demonstrates this exactly. Look who is driving the

ideology of the anti-Shia, anti-Iran realpolitik; Israel and

Saudia Arabia with the US providing the intelligence and

supplying the weapons.

Israel, the Zionist

reactionary state has fought

wars against Hamas and

Hezbollah. Saudi Arabia

the home of the Wahabi

Sunni sect and al Qaeda are both client states of the US

bloc armed by the US to the

teeth, and backed up by

not-so-secret Israel nuclear

weapons! But who joins in

this god squad of

mercenary states after a

bloody purge of the

leadership of the Muslim

Brotherhood, Al Sisi and

his secular Egyptian army that isolates Gaza on behalf

of Israel. Turkey even

chimes in from the sidelines fearful of a vacuum being filled on

its borders by a Kurd nation that threatens its own territory.

Look to see who is backing the opposition. The Iraqi regime

forces trained by the US are incapable of stopping the Islamic

State. In Iraq, as in Syria, it is the Shia militia led by Iranian

generals and backed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards that

are putting up the only opposition to the revolutionary

democratic militias and the Islamic State. Iran is part of a

military bloc with Russia and China. Russia has recently

committed to supply S-300 missiles which are a defence against aircraft if not an Israel nuclear missile attack. Of

course, both blocs are in the final analysis attempting to

maintain stability of the whole of MENA against the revival of

revolutionary uprisings that become linked into one united

struggle.

For a United Front with Palestine!

There is only one force that can solve the crisis of war ridden

MENA in the interests of the popular masses, those masses

themselves. Revolutionaries recognise that the Arab masses are

fighting a revolution against both imperialism and its national

dictators, bought and paid for by imperialism. We give no

support to fake anti-imperialist bourgeois war lords and jihadist

mullahs who claim religious rights to steal the land that has

been liberated by the masses struggles. If not the creations of one or other imperialist bloc, they are competing to create new

bourgeois mini-states that do deals with one or both blocs for

the franchise to pump oil or gas. Against the counter-revolution in Syria, Iraq and Libya, the popular armed militias have to

fight the dictators and their imperialist backers, and the

jihadists who hijack the revolutions to create caliphates. This

can only succeed as a common front with the Palestinians who

have carried the burden of the Arab Revolution for generations.

The key is Egypt the most powerful state in MENA that is the

pivot between the Middle East and North Africa.

As we argued from the start of the Arab Spring in Egypt the workers program against a military Bonapartism of Mubarak

(and now Al Sisi) is clear. Re-activate the unfinished

democratic revolution as the Permanent Revolution. This means building a Marxist party that can raise a transitional

program to mobilise the working class to build workers

councils and militias to

fight for the immediate

demands of workers and

poor peasants through

strike action and a

political general strike.

Such a program will challenge the Islamic

fundamentalism of the

Muslim Brotherhood

youth who have come to

the fore with the arrest of

the old Morsi generation

and who are no longer

following the road of

parliamentary reform.

Drawing the masses

behind such a program will force the hand of the

SCAF to resort to Al Assad type civil war. This will split the

ranks from the SCAF officer corps and create the conditions

for an armed insurrection.

The revival of the revolution in Egypt will draw the US and

Israel in to defend the Al Sisi dictatorship at all costs. The

loss of Egypt would allow the revolution in North Africa to

link up to the Palestinian and Syrian revolutions. It would

signal that the non-sectarian Arab forces can form a bloc

from Libya to Iraq and a potential alliance with the Kurds.

The only solution is the Permanent Revolution where the

proletariat, small traders and poor peasants led by a mass proletarian party overthrow the bourgeois state and build a

workers state. The legacy of the reactionary Stalinist parties that entered popular fronts with the secular Baathists and

Nasserites has to be replaced by the program of Permanent

Revolution of a new Leninist Trotskyist International.

The Permanent Revolution in MENA requires a transitional

program that begins with the struggle for basic democratic

rights of assembly and speech. But nowhere in MENA are such

rights possible without workers taking power. The semi-

colonial state is the agent of imperialism in extreme crisis.

Imperialism can only survive by using these client regimes to super-exploit and oppress the masses. There can be no reform

of the existing state and society. A revolutionary insurrection is

necessary based on workers, farmers, and soldiers councils

defended by popular militias from Tunisia to Yemen.

For a Revolutionary Marxist party!

For the Permanent Revolution!

For a Union of Socialist Republics of MENA!


9

Defend Immigrants: One Africa for All Africans! Who is Behind the Race Riots?

These race riots have been building since the great recession of

2008. They are symptoms of the bosses trying to solve their

crisis of falling profits at the expense of workers. By whipping

up racist attacks on foreigners, the bosses turn workers against workers and divert attention from the complicity of the

African National Congress (ANC) which oversees the rising

exploitation of South African workers on behalf of

imperialism. These racist divisions do not originate in the working class. They are a disease spread in the working class

by the capitalist ruling class. By pointing to conflict in Natal

they attempt to blame some historic antagonism between the

Zulus and Indians. But xenophobia was not made in South

Africa. It was imported from Europe. It is the legacy of

colonial exploitation begun by

the white settlers and kept alive

today by the ANC regime.

As a South African woman

posted on Facebook

Unfortunately for our brothers and sisters from the rest of the continent, the problem is not

just the king [Goodwill

Zwelithini]. It is also the ANC

which continually comes up

with new, highly publicised

schemes specifically targeting

people from the rest of Africa

for deportation. It is statements like those made recently by

Zwelinzima Vavi, who said he condemned xenophobia but the

displacement of South Africans from spaza shops was not

sustainable and above all it is white capital, which lords it over Black people in SA, with the complete endorsement of the ANC

and DA.... (ed. note, DA is the Democratic Alliance, the successor party to the white colonialist Nationalist Party of the

Apartheid era.)

And as another South African wrote on Facebook,

If South Africans were so inherently Xenophobic why have such a huge amount of foreigners been absorbed and tolerated

in our communities for so long, Many of our African brothers

have married and assimilated into local communities, we share

our schools, clinics and even our churches and mosques with

them. In most townships the poorest of the poor appreciate the

low prices and the small quantities and the long trading hours and the convenient proximity of especially Somali Spaza shops,

Criminals have exploited these vulnerable traders, but they

survive despite the constant harassment of police and

gangsters, because communities need their services.

Many are renting spaces which in most cases are the only

income for poor households, The mutually beneficial nature of

the presence of so many Somali and Bangladeshi traders inside

previously no-go zones attest to the fact that South Africans

can and have been extremely tolerant. Of course locals are

affected, when they cant compete, but have the locals been able to deliver the quality of service that these foreign owned Spaza's are able to deliver.

In the lower paid job market Foreign Nationals have taken

local jobs, and of course they are being exploited by

unscrupulous employers who dodge all the statutory

requirements to save on their wage bill. But this is a regulatory

issue, not the fault of the foreigners who are as desperate as the locals for work.

The only real beneficiaries of all this chaos is Shoprite who

can now replace the displaced spazas with USaves, and with

the elimination of their only competition they can now

comfortably raise prices and exploit township markets to their

hearts content. Remember Whitey Basson earned R600 million

rand in 2013 and his workers are the lowest paid most of whom

are sourced from labor brokers. So yes township malls creates

a few jobs, but do they really contribute to empowerment

within the township economy. Does the extensive buying power

of the informal retail sector not contribute to manufacturing

and distribution related employment, and the economy

as a whole. The minimal

profits of the small and

informal sector compared to

the gigantic profits posted by

the Corporate retail sector

clearly indicates that there are

vested interest in getting rid of

foreign traders in the

townships, I believe there are

sinister forces at work and that much of what we see right now

is not Xenophobia but

premeditated political

wrangling that diverts attention from the real issues which is

excessive Corporate profiteering off the backs of the poor and

governments failure to govern and regulate efficiently.

For Worker-immigrant Defence Guards!

The powerful South African working class, both domestic and

immigrant, needs to mobilize for its own class solutions against

xenophobic anti-immigrant racism and attacks. Racism and

xenophobia are poison to the working class! It is necessary to

build militant demonstrations in defence of foreign traders. In

regards to the ANC, workers need to demand an end of ANC

complicity with big business to deport migrant workers.

Political strikes in defence of immigrant workers would go a

long way also in fighting back against the attacks on the entire

working class by the ANC popular front government which

acts in the service of world imperialism.

Workers/immigrant defence guards need to be organized

immediately to protect small traders from these xenophobic

gang attacks. In order to organize this struggle, militant

workers need to take these demands to the unions to break

workers from the capitalist ANC/SACP/COSATU popular

front government and to build a mass workers party to adopt a

workers plan to socialise South Africa under a Workers and

Oppressed Government based on a program of One Africa for

All Africans! For a socialist Africa!

Revolutionary Workers Group of Zimbabwe (RWG-ZIM)

Email: [email protected]

Website: www.rwgzimbabwe.wordpress.com


10

Zimbabwe: Mugabe, ZANU-PF Hands 0ff Street Vendors! Hands 0ff the Street Vendors!

The Mugabe ZANU-PF regime has threatened so-called illegal

street vendors in Harare and Bulawayo with police and perhaps

also army repression beginning Monday, June 8th, 2015. The

Mugabe regime is under pressure from local and foreign

capitalists to deal with the vendors, hence the crackdown. The

Mugabe revolution has not secured national independence and has taken and survives due to its role of imposing the will

of foreign capital on the masses with total disregard for their

needs. This is the popular front trapping the masses in misery.

Around 5 million people are involved in street vending and

their unions have vowed to resist the action.

The RWG calls for strike actions across the country to foil

this attack on masses of the urban poor! In Zimbabwe,

anyone is liable to become a small vendor who is not part of

the labor aristocracy.

The ZANU-PF liberators of 1980 become the quasi-colonial

regime of today just as the Chinese degenerate workers state of

those days who backed them has become Chinese imperialism,

the main prop of the Zimbabwe regime today. This regime has

failed to bring about national liberation on every imaginable score, with a real unemployment rate of 90% or thereabouts

among the urban and even the rural working class. Thus an

attack on the street vendors amounts to an attack on the

national domestic economy itself. It is not a question of finding

a proper place for our mothers to sell their goodies (ZANU-PF Political Commissar Kasukuwere.)

The mere fact that the Joint Operations Command (JOC)

spokesperson local Government Minister Chombo could

suggest that the army could be employed in tandem with the

police to herd the vendors off the streets suggests the real

dimensions of the crisis both of the economy and the regime. It

is interesting to note that the opposition Movement for

Democratic Change (MDC), the opposition grouping favored

by Anglo-American imperialism, points to the failure of the

ZANU-PF to deliver the 2.3 million jobs it promised when it stood in the last elections. Of course the MDC has no program

for generating these jobs, nor even a desire to do so, because

full employment of the Zimbabwe working class would

immediately change the relationship of class forces to the

disadvantage of their Western imperialist sponsors.

Jobs for all! For a 30 hour workweek at 40 hours Pay! We demand a sliding scale of wages and prices and employment for all who can work; working conditions should improve for all workers! For guaranteed employment for all who are able, a guaranteed income for all!

We demand the introduction of state projects to employ all the unemployed! Workers! Force the government to stop the attack on the vendors!

Land must be distributed to all poor peasants together with a state bank to provide cheap credit to all small farmers!

Workers form action committees to lead the resistance to the growing attacks on the wages and working conditions of the poor and the livelihood of the majority poor! We call on the workers and the oppressed groups to convene a congress of delegates from the working people, peasants, urban poor, youth and soldiers to come up with a constitution that guarantees a good life for all!

Workers break with the MDC and ZANU-PF and form a workers party that truly champions the interests of the workers and the poor masses, form rank and file unions to lead action in all unions and break with the reformist trade union leadership!

No to US and Chinese imperialism! No to reformism and fake Trotskyism, build

a fighting socialist party! For workers councils and for a workers state

based upon them that defends workers and peasants against the local and foreign capitalists! For a workers and peasants government on the basis of the armed people to implement decisions that benefit the workers and the poor.

For an African socialist revolution as part of the international revolution that alone can guarantee a better life for all!

For a new world party of socialist revolution based on the Transitional Program of 1938 to lead the revolution to end capitalism and open the road to socialism!

Revolutionary Workers Group of Zimbabwe

(RWG-ZIM)

Email: [email protected]

Website: www.rwgzimbabwe.wordpress.com

Subscribe to Revolutionary Worker (Paper of RWG-

Zimbabwe)


11

The USA became imperialist, what about Canada? In Part One of this article we asked if the European Settler Colonies can break the rule and make the transition from dependent colonies or semi-colonies to imperialist powers. That rule is that capitalist semi-colonies cannot make this transition because they cannot accumulate enough surplus value to become economically independent of existing imperialist powers. We have shown in a number of articles that the emergence of Russia and China as imperialist powers is an exception to the rule because they had national revolutions that overthrew their bourgeoisies and became economically independent of imperialism. We stated however, that there was one category of colonies, European Settler colonies, that appears to be the exception to this rule. There was no question that the USA became imperialist, but what of Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, Australia and Israel? Unlike the US, none of these won wars of independence so how would it be possible to achieve economic independence from Britain and the US? While we argued that NZ, Australia and South Africa failed to become sufficiently economically independent to become minor imperialist powers, we left open the question of Canada. We will come back to the question of Israel future article.

Is Canada imperialist?

The situation in Canada is less clear cut and the ongoing debate

over whether or not Canada is imperialist between economic

nationalists and internationalists is more vigorous than that in Australia. In many ways Canada is similar to Australia.

Originating as a British colony after defeating the French and

then holding off the Americans the settlers occupied lands inhabited by

First Nation peoples and started built a new capitalist

society. Like Australia,

Canada had many of the

features of a settler colony

that created the conditions

for capitalist development

and it too had no war of

independence.

However, unlike Australia,

Canadas developed under conditions which, in the

absence of a war of independence, allowed a national

bourgeoisie to emerge capable of becoming economically

independent of the colonial power. The unique factor that

explains this seems to have been the proximity of the American

Revolution that threatened to spread into Canada. US

revolutionaries made incursions into Canada and there was

widespread support for the revolution on the part of a majority

of settlers coming into Canada. The British state had to build a

strong national capitalist regime in Canada to defend it from the revolutionary advances from the South. In doing so, this

colonial regime kept firm control on the settlers and put down

two rebellions by small farmers and an uprising by Metis

(mixed race) in the mid 19th century.

Canadian historians generally agree on these colonial origins

but differ on what happened next. Most argue that Canada

ceased to be a colony controlled by Britain in the late 19th

century but could not achieve economic independence as it fell

under the dominance of the US as it embarked on its own

imperialist expansion. The dependency school of thought explains this as the result of a Canadian ruling class pre-occupation with trade and commerce so that the banks played a

weak role in investing in domestic industry which had to rely

on US investment. Investment of US finance capital in Canadian industry therefore established a division of labour in

which Canada was a producer of staples or raw materials, while its branch plant industry was dominated by the US. The

result was that Canada became an economic dependency of the

US rather than a developed industrial capitalist state or

imperialist power.

Yet contrary to the

dependency theory, there is a rival school of thought

that argues that Canada is

imperialist. For example, Bill Burgess in the 2006

article, Canada, Imperialist or

Imperialized (CIOI) argues that the evidence

today points to an

independent finance

capitalist class in Canada:

Statistics Canada reports that the 25 largest

enterprises in Canada in 1988 controlled 41% of the assets of

all corporations in the country. As reported in Figure 1, the rate of Canadian control over the assets of this highly strategic

group was an impressive 95%... When the top 25 ranking by assets is added to the ranking by revenues, 36 of the top 44 enterprises are Canadian-controlled. 90.2% of the revenues in

this group are Canadian-controlled; only 8.8% are US

controlled. The 44 enterprises account for 50% of the revenues

of the largest 763 enterprises in Canada, and 42% of their

assets. In other words, within the core group of corporate

power in Canada, Canadians capitalist control is seven or eight

or nine times greater than US capitalist control, and this does

even include other important points of support like Canadian government policy. [Emphasis in original]

However, proving that Canadian finance capital exists does not

explain the why and how this finance capital emerged, a

question which is not settled as we show below. A minority

like Bill Burgess trace the formation of finance capital as the

result of Canadas early development. The majority including Todd Gordon in Imperialist Canada, see the rise of Canadian

imperialism as occurring after WW2. Within the majority some


12

like Jerome Klassen see it as a new imperialism that emerged as part of the neo-liberal free trade era of CAFTA, NAFTA etc,

and picked up speed in the period since 9/11. Nevertheless,

both minority and majority agree that whatever its origins Canadian imperialism is deeply integrated into US imperialist hegemony and plays the role of a secondary imperialist power.

Origins of Canadas Finance Capital In terms of the theory that we advance about the rise of

imperialist powers, we take the minority view on the emergence of finance capital. We argue that Canada could not

have become imperialist unless the conditions for this had been

established before WW1 and the redivision of the world into

the spheres of influence by rival capitalist powers. Did these

conditions exist in Canada? The general rule that a colony must

wage a war of independence to win its economic independence

from imperialism did not apply in this case. The opposite was

true. Canada won its political independence from Britain as the

result of its counter-revolutionary role on the side of the British

against the American Revolution. In order for the British to

prevent the American Revolution spreading to its colony it had

to create a strong national bourgeoisie as a bulwark. But why would this lead to that classes economic independence from both the British and then the US empires?

As we have seen the dependency theorists argue that Canada

didnt win its economic independence from Britain and the resulting weakness of the Canadian bourgeoisie reflected its

comprador role as the mercantile agent class of the British

Empire. Such a weak bourgeoisie could not claim more than a

merchant bankers share of the surplus-value produced in Canada. The lions share of super profits would be shipped off to Britain. The Canadian comprador state defeated settlers

uprisings for independence on behalf of the British and without tariff protection industrial development remained backward. When Canada gained self-governing status its comprador class then looked to US industrial capital investment in branch plants. This is widely known as the Naylor-Clement thesis after those who developed this idea within the dependency camp.

And yet the evidence shows that these features of

dependency, while significant, were a subordinate aspect of Canadas economic development. Canadian banks invested heavily in the transport and energy infrastructure necessary for

capitalist production. This proved that there was no split in the

capitalist class between merchant bankers and industrialists. In fact, the big majority of Canadian capital was what Lenin later

called finance capital the fusion of banking capital with industrial capital in large increasingly monopolistic enterprises.

The rise of this finance capitalist class in Canada therefore

occurred at the same time as in all the other imperialist

powers. [Burgess, 142; CIOI, 2006]

How to explain the rise of finance capital?

What this proves, against both dependency theorists, and new imperialist theorists, is that Canada was already imperialist by World War I. What is doesnt demonstrate is the specific circumstances that allowed a comprador class to

transform itself into a class of finance capitalists. Burgess

suggest an explanation lurking in the Naylor-Clement thesis of a weak, divided bourgeoisie that proved in reality to be the

opposite, a strong and united national bourgeoisie:

Naylor and Clement argued that, first, there is an atypical division and rivalry between sectors of Canadian capital

dating back into the 19th century. Second, they claimed that

financial capital in Canada chose a continental alliance with

US capital over a national alliance with indigenous industrial

capital. [Burgess, Thesis, 147]

As Burgess and others have explained, the Naylor/Clement

thesis is based on the misunderstanding that merchant capital

invested in building railways and canals was not industrial

capital. Yet Canadian merchant banks which served Britain in

Canada, employing British capital, were not merely building

railways and canals to transport commodities to the British

market, they were doing much more than that. They were

laying down the infrastructure necessary for capitalist

agriculture, forestry, and more important, manufacturing. The

capital invested in this infrastructure was not merchant capital

but bank and state monopoly finance capital. That is why the

large family and state enterprises that were created at the time fused banking and industrial capital to concentrate investment

and as a result became highly monopolised, giving rise to the

finance capital typical of imperialism. [Burgess, Thesis, 142]

So perhaps the explanation we are looking for runs like this:

the Canadian settler colony converted British merchant capital

into industrial capital by extending the circuit of industrial

capital from Britain to the colony and at the same time creating

the conditions for capitalist production in Canada. The

foundations for the rise of Canadian finance capital were laid

by the states policy of developing domestic industry, contributing to the solution of Britains crisis of falling profits, and at the same time accumulating surplus-value in its own

right. But how was this possible without a national revolution

to win economic independence?

Burgess suggests that the policy of land settlement may have

played an important role in the formation of industrial

capitalism in Canada, but that more work needs to be done to

prove this point. [Burgess, Thesis, 27-28] In the next section

we put forward our interpretation of the importance of the land

question in the settler colonies.

The Land Question

British imperialism in the early to mid 19th century was facing

a crisis of falling profits at home caused by the high cost of raw

materials due to the lack of capital investment in agriculture.

The resulting stagnation, unemployment and poverty led to

famines, epidemics and widespread social unrest. The political

economist E.G. Wakefield promoted his systematic colonisation as a solution. It would put a sufficient price on the sale of land in the colonies to prevent settlers from occupying free land and at the same time use the proceeds of land sales to fund free immigration. It would solve the social problems in

Britain as well as the underlying profitability crisis, by opening

up new lands for capitalist agriculture to provide cheaper raw

materials for industry at home, simultaneously creating a class

of wage labourers. As a form of primitive accumulation, indigenous lands were expropriated by the state and sold to

petty capitalist farmers, while denying migrant workers free

access to land, forcing them to perform wage labor for a living.

In short the denial of free land was necessary to ensure the separation of labor from the land to create free labor and capitalist development in the settler colonies.

Marx critiqued this policy as implemented by the Wakefield

Scheme. In Australia and NZ the plan failed when workers

escaped free labor for free land proving that capital and land cannot create value without labor power. In Canada, the

colonial state controlled crown land directly, or indirectly

through groups of wealthy families after 1812, and then


13

through the Canada Company from 1825, all of which sold

land at a relatively high price. So there was no free land to allow migrants to escape wage labour unless they crossed the

border to adopt the American way. Of course the labor market was replenished by constant flows of migrants.

So while the Colonial government did not officially apply

Wakefields systematic colonisation they achieved its main purpose. By creating the conditions for capitalist production,

freehold land, free labour, and capital, the colonial elite became

a national bourgeoisie in which banking capital and industrial

capital could merge as finance capital. In completing this

process by World War I, Canada was already joining the

imperialist powers, large and small, that entered that war in the

interests of increasing its own sphere of interest rather than that

of either Britain or the USA.

Critique of New Imperialism The most common view of Canadian imperialism today is that

it emerged in the post-World War 2 period. We argue that such

a theory ignores Marx and Lenin in settling the question of the

origins of finance capital. If Canada was not already imperialist

by World War I on what basis could it emerge thereafter? Like

the left in Australia that speaks of a small, secondary, or sub-imperialist Australia, the method used to arrive at this

conclusion is empiricist. It argues that Canada during the

epoch of imperialism can make the transition from a

dependent or semi-colonial country and emerge as imperialist in a world already divided and fought over by imperialist

powers in two Imperialist wars. In other words existing

imperialist powers can step outside the laws which govern

monopoly state capitalism to donate super-profits to dependent

countries so they can accumulate some of these super-profits

on their own account and even redistribute them as a socialist policy as the ANC claims in South Africa.

This view of imperialism as bad policy is the inverse of the dependency theorists who claim that Canadas deep integration in the US security state disqualifies its imperialist status. For example Gowans argues that Canada cannot be

imperialist because it doesnt have its own military independent of the US. Klassen rebuts this view but opts for

the term secondary imperialist, to acknowledge that Canada, like many other imperialist powers (for example Japan) is

subordinated to hegemonic US imperialism. Yet Klassen

cannot explain how the US has allowed Canada to escape a

semi-colonial fate since World War 2 other than by voluntarily

subsidising Canadian imperialism with US super-profits. Here is empiricism in all of its glory: selecting facts to fit a

preordained political position without reference to the origins

of finance capital in Canada before World War I.

Are we empiricists? No. Imperialism arose from the crises of

overproduction and exported capital to restore the rate of profit.

Before the epoch of imperialism proper began in the late 19th

century, British imperialism as the dominant power by the mid-

19th century had a colonial policy of state monopoly capitalism

that prefigured global imperialism. State monopoly capitalism

is parasitic and destructive in extracting surplus-value and

resorts to war to partition the global market. We argue that British imperialism retained finance capital control of its

colonies and semi-colonies except in the case of Canada where

an independent capitalist class arose out of the counter-

revolution against the American Revolution. In the epoch of

imperialism, no capitalist colony or semi-colony has been able

to make the transition from semi-colony to imperialist power

since the redivision of the world economy by the imperialist

powers in 1918. There are states like Israel and South Korea

where modern industry has developed large multinational firms

in the aftermath of World War 2 in 1945, but this would not

have been possible were it not for their status as heavily

subsidised special security states defending the interests of US imperialism.

Canada born of the first imperialist crisis?

We have argued here that the how and why of Canadian Imperialism can only be understood by applying the theory of

Lenin on imperialism. Lenins theory of imperialism means that after World War 1, when existing imperialist powers re-partitioned the world into their respective spheres of influence,

no new imperialist powers could emerge. The export of capital

from the imperialist countries created dependent colonies or

semi-colonies which could only escape colonial super-

exploitation and oppression by permanent revolution. We argue

that attempts to find new imperialisms, such as that of the British settler colonies such as Australia reject Lenin for social imperialism. This is the prevailing view of the post-World War 2 Mensheviks who think that imperialism is the bad policy of imperialist ruling classes that can be reformed

without overthrowing capitalism.

In Part One of this article we argued that New Zealand and South Africa are clearly semi-colonies in terms of the dominant

share of super-profits expropriated by the major imperialist

powers. Australia is less clear cut combining both rich semi-

colonial and imperialist aspects. We have gone back to our

original position on the balance of the evidence showing that

Australias dependence on the US and China makes it a semi-colony. However this analysis has shortcomings because we

have not gone back to Lenin to explain how and why Australia failed to qualify as imperialist by World War I. In

that sense we weree still arguing on the empiricists terrain.

In the case of Canada we started with Lenins theory as necessary to explain Canadian imperialism today. This means

extrapolating back from the early 20th century to the early 19th

century to look for the origins of Canadian finance capital.

Canada as a British colony developed an industrial economy as

part of the solution to Britains crisis of overproduction as the industrial workshop of the world. Britains export of capital to Canada was still merchant capital in the early 19th century,

but became industrial capital when invested in the capitalist

production of commodities in Canada. The Canadian ruling

class oversaw the development of domestic capitalism and

monopolised ownership and control of means of production,

accumulating and concentrating banking and industrial capital as finance capital in its big banks and enterprises. That is why

we think that it is possible to show that Canada was imperialist

by World War I and so eliminate both the dependency theories and the new imperialist theories of the post-World War 2 period.

If this analysis is correct it strengthens our argument that we

can extrapolate the character of monopoly capital back in time

in the British settler states, and show why and how the US and

Canada, though taking very different paths, became imperialist

while the other settler colonies did not. It also gives us more

confidence that we are correct in developing Lenin and Trotsky to explain the exceptional emergence of Russia and

China, which won their economic independence by

overthrowing the imperialist and national bourgeoisies, and

despite the counter-revolutionary restoration of capitalism,

inherited the conditions that made it necessary for their belated

capitalist development to become imperialism. END


14

Polemic: Russia, China and the Unfinished Permanent Revolution Facing a chronic global crisis of capitalism and intensifying inter-imperialist rivalry between the US and China

blocs, the most urgent task facing revolutionaries today is to provide program for a new Trotskyist international

that can lead workers in the struggle to defeat nationalism and imperialism and to the victorious socialist

revolution. At a public meeting in London on 11 April 2015 the question of Russia and China as imperialist

powers is being debated by the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International (LCFI) and the Revolutionary

Communist International Tendency (RCIT). We of the Liaison Committee of Communists (LCC) argue that the

centrist method of both tendencies cannot provide the answers workers need. We argue that both the LCFI and

RCIT revise Lenin on imperialism and nationalism. In summary, both turn Trotskys theory of permanent revolution into a petty bourgeois program adapting to bourgeois democracy.

Centrism and Social Imperialism

Centrism as we understand it is a tendency on the revolutionary

left that vacillates between the Marxist program and

opportunist adaptation to the bourgeoisie. It functions to divert

workers from revolutionary consciousness and action. In our view the material roots of post-war centrism in the Trotskyist

movement are the petty bourgeoisie of the imperialist

countries. This is what we define as social imperialism. While

it originates in the imperialist countries, it becomes expressed

in the semi-colonies as national Trotskyism. Social Imperialism

is fundamentally the political program of the imperialist labour

aristocracy adapting to imperialism on the material basis of

relatively privileged living standards. National Trotskyism is

the reverse side of this coin, the political program of the semi-

colonial petty bourgeoisie who

adapt to bourgeois nationalism on the basis of material rewards

flowing from the defence of the

popular front regimes.

As Trotsky lamented in the years

just before his death, the crisis of

Marxism was reflected in the

abandonment of dialectics, and

its substitution by empiricism and

pragmatism. These latter are

idealist philosophies that reflect

the surface reality of capitalism, the alienated exchange relations which in the imperialist

countries are expressed as relatively high living standards.

Both the LCFI and RCIT originated in tendencies that broke

from Trotskys dialectic method as a result of their materialist roots in the imperialist petty bourgeoisie. Neither tendency has

recognised nor completely broken with these historic roots as

we will show.

In the case of Socialist Fight, its roots are in the International

Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) under Healy. In

reacting against Pabloism which liquidated the party into

Stalinism, Healy liquidated the proletarian party into social

democracy in the imperialist countries, and the radical parties of the national bourgeoisie in the semi-colonies. While the

Pabloites adapted to the labour bureaucracy oriented to the

Soviet Union, the Healyites adapted to the anti-communist

Labour Parties and anti-communist Third World populist leaders.

Below we show that Socialist Fights program today represents this particular brand of social imperialism, adapting to

Bonapartist dictators such as Gaddafi, Assad and Putin as the

enemies of US imperialism. It subordinates workers to Anti-

imperialist United Fronts (AIUF) with bourgeois leaders in

league with imperialism. It is even worse when it regards

Russia and China as oppressed states (semi-colonies or sub-

imperialist) and calls for an AIUF against US imperialism!

This for us explains why the LCIF social imperialist method

continues to reinforce national Trotskyism upon the Latin

American members of the LCFI and the Parity Committee so

that popular front regimes like that of the PT in Brazil are

defended as part of an AIUF with Russia and China against US

imperialism.

In the case of the Austrian Revolutionary Communist

Organisation for Liberation (RKOB) the mother section of the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT), its

historical roots were in a factional split from the state capitalist

Cliffite tendency in Britain in 1975. In summary, our position

is that the factional split with the Cliffites in 1975 which led to

the formation of the LRCI in

1989 was an incomplete break

with Cliffism. Its programmatic

statement on the workers states

The Degenerated Revolution in

1982 defined degenerated

workers states as a dual state with workers property relations

in contradiction with bourgeois

norms of distribution which

were the basis of the

bureaucracys privileges.

This meant that when put to the

test by Yeltsin in 1991, the League for the Revolutionary

Communist International (LRCI) backed bourgeois democracy

represented by Yeltsin against the Stalinist dictatorship

opposed to Yeltsin. According to The Degenerated Revolution,

political revolution was a struggle against the bureaucracys defence of bourgeois distribution relations leading to overthrow of workers production relations. Under the pressure

of imperialist public opinion against the Stalinist bureaucracy

the LRCI blocked with the pro-imperialist restorationist Yeltsin

against the Stalinist military command instead of blocking with

workers in the defence of workers property against both

Yeltsin and the military.

While coming from different traditions, in breaking from

Trotskyism and the transitional (or dialectic) method, both

tendencies, in adapting to social imperialism, end up in the

camp of imperialism. This is evident because the revolutionary

agency of the working class is always subordinated to the petty bourgeois program. It is always conditioned by the mechanistic

or schematic method of the popular front in which sections of

the petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie guide

workers through the struggles for bourgeois democracy, in

particular national self-determination. For both tendencies

national self-determination as a bourgeois democratic right is


15

always progressive even if it is a counter-revolutionary democratic dictatorship of imperialism.

National Self-Determination

We see social imperialist adaptation as a fundamental break

from permanent revolution which states that in the epoch of

imperialism bourgeois democratic rights can only be won and

defended by proletarian revolution - that is by workers democracy. In other words the democratic revolution in the epoch of imperialism can no longer be spoken of as the

bourgeois national democratic revolution. The formation of new capitalist nation states can only serve the interests of

bourgeois imperialism and the unfinished tasks of that

revolution cannot be realised other than by the proletarian

revolution.

So the LCFI regarded Gaddafis rule in Libya as a genuine expression of self-determination against imperialism despite

Gaddafis role in serving US imperialism and emerging Chinese imperialism. The LCFI denied the agency of the rebels

fighting Gaddafi as an agent of imperialism by painting them

as CIA agents or jihadists. Today the rebels are fighting both

the US puppet Hefter and the newly branded Islamic State (IS)

in Libya. The logic of this has escaped the LCFI because it cannot imagine that Arab and other masses in Middle East and

North Africa (MENA) are capable of carrying through

permanent revolution against both imperialism and against the

reactionary Islamic jihadists who are the agents of imperialism.

One key aspect of social imperialism is its Eurocentrism,

expressed today as Islamophobia.

The RCIT was on the right side in Libya in supporting the

revolutionary agency of the rebels. They called for the defense

of Gaddafi from NATO, like the LCFI, but did not call for the

rebels to form an AIUF with Gaddafi against NATO, unlike the

LCFI, since Gaddafi was attacking the revolution. Only the revolutionary brigades can open the permanent revolution

against both imperialism and its national dictator. Like the

LCC they called for the revolution to fight on two fronts,

against Gaddafi, and against NATO and its stooge the National

Transitional Council. The permanent revolution has since

stalled in Libya but so has imperialism which is unable to

defeat the resistance and find a new bourgeois regime that can

replace Gaddafi. This stalemate can only be overcome and the

permanent revolution completed in Libya with the revival of

the Arab revolution led by the workers and poor peasants armed resistance in Syria and Palestine, supported by

internationalist workers.

However, the RCITs slavish application of the bourgeois democratic schema as progressive can be seen in Egypt when

the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces (SCAF)

dismissed the Muslim Brotherhood, elected to power on a

reactionary constitution that defended the military regime. The

Muslim Brotherhood was a weak Islamic bourgeoisie of the

bazaar seeking to replace the dominant military fraction. The

RCIT called this dispute between two fractions of the

bourgeoisie a coup against bourgeois democracy and an historic defeat for the working class when the election of the Muslim Brotherhood did nothing to advance the interests of the working class. This was proven by the millions of workers who

marched against it. Such bourgeois democracy was in reality a reactionary bourgeois regime seeking to appease imperialism

and imposing a theocratic barrier to revolution. Its removal

meant that the SCAF was now seen openly as the power base

behind the Mubarak regime and that it had always been the

dominant fraction of the national bourgeoisie.

What the national revolution in MENA proves beyond question

is that democratic rights are only in the interest of the working

class if they actually advance the struggle for proletarian

revolution. In the current crisis of imperialism there is no bourgeois democratic halfway house that workers must defend

since the very act of doing so is to take the side of the counter-

revolution. The same applies to the semi-colonial struggles

elsewhere in the world. We will concentrate here on the

struggles in Latin America since in this continent, in our view,

Trotskyism is in a much stronger position against Stalinism and

Social Democracy than in Asia and Africa. The barrier to

revolution on this continent is renegade Trotskyism!

Latin America

In Latin America the permanent revolution was subordinated to

national self-determination. The fate of permanent revolution

can be captured in one word - populism. The impact of the

social imperialism on the 4th International after Trotskys death was to abandon permanent revolution and lock national Trotskyism into the left wing of the popular front. The IEC sent SWP member Sherry Mangan to Argentina in 1941 to

unify the d

Class Struggle 113 Winter 2015

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Transcript of Class Struggle 113 Winter 2015