Workers Reject Brash

Some commentators have mistakenly called the election ‘a swing to the right’. In fact, National managed to increase its vote at the expense of the minor right-wing parties, not at the expense of Labour. Overall, the election shows what every vote since 1993 has shown - that a majority of New Zealanders want a centre-left government that keeps some independence from the United States and intervenes in the economy to redistribute income.

Don Brash ran an aggressively right-wing campaign, calling for cuts to social spending, big tax breaks for the rich, and closer ties with the United States. Senior National leaders like John Key and Lockwood Smith enjoy very close ties to the ruling class of the United States, and a National victory would have meant the further Americanization of the economy, the swift resumption of nuclear ship visits, and more New Zealand contributions to George Bush’s War of Terror. But despite a lavish and cynical advertising campaign from National and a biased media, workers rejected Brash’s agenda.

The election also shows that Labour is still a ‘bourgeois workers party’ – a party with its roots in the working class despite its capitalist program. Labour was unable to rely on the support that the Business Round Table and American billionaires gave to National. Instead, it had to use the trade unions to do much of its campaigning work. Trade union delegates and organisers spent thousands of hours criss—crossing the working class suburbs of the major centres, knocking on doors and distributing propaganda for Labour. Unions used their access to big worksites to hold mass election meetings with their members. The Council of Trade Unions ran an advertising campaign for Labour, and a number of unions made large donations to the party.

But the weakness of the union movement and Labour’s failure to restore confidence in public services like health and education meant that Don Brash was able temporarily to tempt a section of the working class away from Labour with the promise of tax cuts, and with populist attacks on Maori, gays and ‘political correctness’. Keen to shore up its support amongst its core voters, Labour moved slightly to the left during the election campaign, promising a write-off of interest for student loans and aggressively attacking Brash’s support for the invasion of Iraq and support for the privatisation of health and education.

On election night, National’s big early lead was turned around as the votes of the ‘big battalions’ of the working class in the major centres swung in behind Labour. Labour’s support was particularly strong in the working class heartland of South Auckland, where the party took over 50% in many electorates and an incredible 71.6% of the vote in Mangere. A map of election results published in the Sunday Star-Times brought out the polarisation, showing a sea of National blue surrounding patches of Labour red covering the working class electorates in the big cities.

Greens fail to woo workers

The Green Party’s 5% share of the vote represents a failure. The party had gone into the election hoping to expand its base of support by filling the vacuum left by the Alliance’s implosion in 2002, and by Labour’s drift to the right in government. The Greens tried to add a slice of the working class to their traditional voting base of the radical petty bourgeoisie, liberal professionals, and students.

In an attempt to appeal to trade unionists, the Greens developed a new industrial relations policy which was well to the left of what Labour offered workers on the campaign trail. They touted other progressive policies for workers, like the abolition of youth rates and the raising of the minimum wage to $12 an hour. Partly as a result of these policies, a number of unions endorsed the Greens as the 'second-best option' for voters who could not support Labour.

The Greens attempted to appeal to the overwhelmingly working class Maori vote by forming a close relationship with the Maori Party and echoing the Maori Party line on issues like the seabed and foreshore. Near the end of the campaign they even received the 'second-best option' endorsement of Tariana Turia. But the Greens' attempt to expand their base looks to have been a failure. Their vote dropped from its 2002 level, and they performed poorly in both the Maori electorates and in working class strongholds like South Auckland.

The Greens' failure is a blow to its 'left' faction, which is represented in parliament by left social democrats Keith Locke and Sue Bradford. Locke and Bradford are ex-Marxists who still look toward the working class as the bedrock of left-wing politics. Both have worked hard to identify the Greens with workers' issues. By contrast, the right-wing faction led by Rod Donald finds its natural base in small business and the liberal middle class, sections of the population not usually attracted to policies like the extension of the right to strike and the lifting of the minimum wage. (A third Green faction, comprising members with a more 'fundamentalist' attitude to key environmental issues like genetic engineering, can be identified with Donald's co-leader, Jeneatte Fitzsimmons.)

Donald and his supporters are likely to push for more and more compromises on 'touchy' issues like genetic engineering, the War of Terror, and industrial relations, in an effort to get the Greens into the secure coalition with Labour which they think is necessary for political survival.

Maori Party Stumbles Rightwards

In the aftermath of the great seabed and foreshore hikoi and the by-election victory of Tariana Turia last year, many commentators predicted that the Maori Party would win all seven Maori seats. In the event, it has had to be content with four victories. The disappointment caused by the failure to achieve a clean sweep must be compounded by the low list vote the Maori Party achieved. Labour won more party votes than the Maori Party, even in the electorates that it lost to its new rival. Turia herself noted that the party was born out of a movement of 45,000 people, but a 2% party vote represents just over 40,000 voters.

The Maori Party's underachievement can be put down partly to the strategy that it has pursued since its formation. Despite its origins in the hikoi, the party has consistently counterposed vote-seeking to protest, insisting that the 'hikoi to the ballot box' is the key to advancing Maori interests.

Partly because of Tariana Turia's bitter experiences in government, and partly because of the advice of Matt McCarten, the party has tried to avoid declaring its support for the election of a Labour government, insisting that it is open to political alliances with any party. Even 'radical' candidates like Hone Harawira have insisted that the Maori Party is 'neither left nor right'.

The refusal to rule out some sort of arrangement with the parties of the right was compounded by Turia's disgraceful votes in parliament against Civil Unions and Paid Parental Leave, and the vague, almost evasive quality of much of the party's 'policy', so that many potential voters got the impression that the Maori Party was not interested in the traditional causes of the left. Harawira and co may think that categories like 'left' and 'right' are out of date, but most Maori voters do not agree with them.

Labour was able to seize on the Maori Party's equivocal attitude to National to run a very effective scare campaign in the Maori electorates. Again and again, Labour warned Maori voters that Maori Party MPs could let National into power, and thus bring on the destruction of Maori seats and cuts to funding for institutions like kohanga reo and iwi-administered health clinics. Under pressure, Turia was forced late in the campaign to hose down speculation about a coalition with National, but she continued to refuse to promise to support a Labour government on confidence and supply, even if Labour won more votes than National. Instead, Turia endorsed the Greens, a party with little following in the Maori seats, as the 'next-best option' to the Maori Party.

The Maori Party's blunders mean it will have to be content with the re-election of Turia and the scalps of the mediocre Dover Samuels, the obscure Mita Ririnui, and the discredited John Tamihere. Parekura Horomia's prized East Coast seat has escaped the new party, despite the fact that Horomia was the frontman for Labour's hated seabed and foreshore policy. The 'neither left nor right' strategy has also badly affected the building of the Maori Party, robbing the organisation of support from the trade unions and the Pakeha left, disorientating grassroots party activists, and allowing all manner of right-wingers and opportunists to campaign in the party's name.

The finely balanced result of the election is likely to tempt the Maori Party to try to continue its 'neither left nor right' strategy by attempting to play the two main party blocs off against one another, in an attempt to score some minor policy wins on narrowly 'Maori’ issues. Besides provoking a revolt from the rank and file, such an approach will only increase the uneasiness which the trade union movement, the Pakeha left, and the many Maori who still vote Labour feel towards the new party.

Lost to the left of Labour

Based on programs well to the left of Labour’s, the election campaigns of the Alliance Party and the Anti Capitalist Alliance attracted only tiny numbers of voters. The Anti Capitalists’ most successful candidate attracted only 95 votes, while the Alliance scored only 0.07% of party list votes.

A third grouping to the left of Labour, Matt McCarten’s ‘Workers Charter movement’ sat on the election sidelines, but announced its intention of becoming ‘a mass party sooner rather than later’.

Both the Anti Capitalist Alliance and McCarten claim that Labour is no longer a party with a working class base, but the election result proves otherwise. Workers were not interested in throwing away their votes when faced by the threat of the return of nuclear ships and 90s-style scorched earth neo-liberal economic policies.

The Next Step for Socialists

The unity the working class against showed Brash proves the correctness of our call for a critical vote for Labour. Critical support was necessary to keep out Brash and keep Labour in power, so that workers can learn from experience that Labour cannot serve their interests, and that a new, extra-parliamentary force capable of taking state power for the working class is necessary.

In the context of a likely Labour-led government and a weak union movement, what are the best tactics to advance the cause of workers?

We need to get the unions and working class voters that support the Labour Party to challenge the party’s policies. Labour is only in power because of the campaigning of trade unionists and the votes of workers, yet it pays more attention to the voices of business and of the US government than it does to the needs of the working class. For instance, Labour has already told its trade union supporters that its third term will not see any major change to New Zealand’s restrictive, anti-strike industrial relations legislation. The party is much more interesting in courting business and in pursuing a free trade deal with the US.

The Action Program we published a month ago is the sort of program we need to fight for in the unions to put pressure on Labour. However, the likely presence of minor parties with no base in the unions in and around a Labour-led government complicates this tactic. Labour can try to use deals with these parties as alibis to hold back on worker-friendly policies.

We have to fight to make Labour act for workers and to reject any alibi that says Labour can't act on behalf of workers because of its agreements with minor parties. Labour has to be held responsible for its betrayals, not its partners. There is plenty of common ground with the Greens and with the Maori Party that we can use to put pressure on Labour.

While the Greens don't have an official base in organised labour, they are now getting regular endorsements from the unions. Let's make them deliver to the unions rather than to small business! Like all petty bourgeois parties they should back labour if they think it is stronger than the right. If they won't then their ability to con workers is that much less. The Maori Party has a working class base, so we should force the party to listen to that base. If it doesn’t it will split along class lines sooner or later.

All of the demands below (and any others that become obvious) should be concretised and advanced in the union movement to pressure Labour and appeal to the best supporters of the Maori Party and the Greens.

A WORKERS’ ACTION PROGRAMME

· Jobs for all on a living wage – for 35 hour week and a 24 hour free child care!

If the pressure comes on, none of the parties of the centre-left will want to be the one that says no to full employment and 24 hour child care.·

· Tax the Rich; Tax Capital Gains!

After surviving a campaign between the greedies and the needies, which of the parties of the centre-left will want to appear as soft on the rich? A capital gains tax on all speculative gains should be common ground for all of these parties. If Labour pulls back for fear of upsetting foreign investors, or the Maori Party or the Greens want tax breaks for small business, we need to fight for tax breaks for collective ownership, and capital gains for private windfalls from speculation in land, shares etc.

· No ‘free’ trade deal with the United States!

Much of the momentum behind bad pieces of Labour legislation has come from a desire to ‘prepare’ the New Zealand economy for a ‘free’ trade deal with the US. Barriers to US investment like Maori control over resources like the seabed and foreshore or restrictions on foreign ownership of Kiwi land have to be cleared away by a Labour government desperate for a deal with Bush. Green and Maori Party leaders must not be allowed to backslide on their opposition to the Americanization of the New Zealand economy. Labour supporters who hate Brash and Bush must realise that Labour leaders share much of National's attachment to Americanization.

· Open the borders to worker migrants!

All the centre-left parties claim they want skilled worker migrants. The Maori Party’s worker base will be sympathetic if their jobs are not threatened by migration. Full employment based on reduced hours would reduce job competition. Nationalisation of key sectors of the economy under workers control would extend naturally to workers control over worker immigration.

· Re-nationalise Rail, Telecom etc. with no compensation and under workers’ control!

We should raise these demands now. These assets have become cash cows for the rich. They should be taken back without compensation under workers control. We need to extend this demand urgently to nationalisation (socialisation) in several other areas.

1) major export players like Fonterra and Carter Holt Harvey need to be nationalised. Investing the Cullen find in forests is a step in the right direction. But Carter Holt Harvey should not be compensated. Both of these core primary industries have been hugely subsidised by generations of past labour, workers and working farmers. Fonterra's producer ownership needs to be protected by public ownership like the old Dairy Board.

2) vital energy resources such as the oil refinery at Marsden Point must be nationalised. Especially in the light of the price gauging of the oil companies. We should call for bilateral trade in oil and agriculture with Venezuela!

3) the Kiwibank should be a state bank, not a State Owned Enterprise, so that the combination of state subsidy of Kiwibank and regulation of the big Australian banks can remove their stranglehold over the economy.

· Troops out of Afghanistan!

This is a concrete example of the general demand that Kiwi troops not be used in any US, NATO or UN sponsored war. The Greens and the Maori Party could be pressured by their rank and file into standing up to Labour over Afghanistan, exposing Anderton and Labour as only slightly less blatant supporters of US imperialism than Brash.

· For a Workers·’ Government!

For all of the above demands to be implemented, the development of independent working class power and ultimately workers' councils and defence committees able to launch a workers' government would be necessary. In other words a workers' government only becomes a reality when it takes power from the bourgeoisie, but along the way the class organs necessary to support this government have to be built. The occupied factories, collective farms, and neighbourhood assemblies that have appeared in recent years in South American countries like Venezuela and Argentina provide rough models for a workers' government.

See also:http://www.redrave.blogspot.com

The Third American Revolution?

The anti-war movement has been boosted by the massive anger that followed the capitalist disaster of New Orleans. Bush and his Wall St cronies have proven to a world wide audience that it is the system that is rotten whether its against Iraqi workers or workers in New Orleans.

We need to take this movement back to its class roots in the labor movement and build the upcoming nationwide Strike in the US on December the 1st into a world wide strike against US imperialism and its War Of Terror. Bush is going to use his power to fight terrorism to impose a state of emergency on the Gulf Coast following the recent crises to the compounding crises of US imperialism. This demands a revolutionary response from the working class.

Taking the lead in imposing martial law will be FEMA, the federal authority empowered to deal with 'emergencies'. At the end of this article are a set of regulations detailing the draconian powers FEMA has to control the people in a bosses' 'emergency'.

If we substitute the term 'workers' in all the FEMA regulations for 'government' we can see the task that lies ahead.

There's no movie to guide us but here's a few ideas for the plot.

Since the ruling class is responsible for these compounding disasters, only the working class can provide a solution that will NOT inevitably lead to further, and worse, disasters. The weakness of the US economy, its costly occupation of Iraq, the rising price of oil etc mean that Bush is facing a mounting class opposition at home. Like 9/11 Bush will use this crisis to impose the next level of his anti-terrorist police state to contain growing opposition.

But the horse has already bolted. The majority growing against the war, and the clear failure of the system (not just the 'free' market at some leftists are suggesting) that caused these capitalist disasters has generated a huge outrage against the rich white ruling class that is now bringing the most oppressed layers of the working class into vocal opposition to the Bush regime.

The international day of action on Saturday the 24th September showed that the New Orleans disaster is widely seen as part of the same problem as the invasion of Iraq. The bigger turnout on the marches around the world is a good sign, but it goes nowhere unless it takes root in the only place where workers have power, the workplace.

We must redouble our efforts to make sure that the union led nationwide strike on December 1 will take off and become an international strike!

Bush will use the disasters to justify using emergency regulations and existing anti-terrorist laws to try to stop the growing class resentment and class mobilisation against him; just as the anti-terror laws were used to stop the Million Worker March last October from becoming a huge event.

They will be used to identify, lock up or kill those who protest against FEMAs allocation of fuel, food, housing etc just as survivors of Katrina were shot as 'looters' for helping themselves to food from supermarkets in New Orleans.

Workers made destitute by capitalisms neglect of its reserve army of black and migrant labour have already been drafted into virtual slave labour gangs to rebuild New Orleans where labour laws have been suspended. FEMA can use its powers to extend this to draft workers into work brigades.

So how to build a workers response to this crisis against increasingly draconian state powers of repression?

The 'Government' will impose control over all of these functions via its agencies. No doubt this will include the oil refineries and outlets of the Venezuelan state company in the US that distributes oil aid offered by Chavez. But those agencies are all manned by state employees or contractors.

In fact the 'Government' in order to rule over the working class, has to pay workers to do this. The emergency services, the national guard and so on are made up of workers. So are all the services that the 'Government' will take over directly to run transport, health, education, etc. The work brigades will have to be run by mercenaries - just like the slave drivers of old.

Workers Control of Rebuilding New Orleans

What is needed is that the locals of the unions spearhead demands for community assemblies to take over the running of all of these services on the grounds that this is the only way to ensure that emergency aid and rebuilding will meet the needs of the people, and not the Halliburtons, Bechtels and Bush's other capitalist cronies.

All the agencies 'empowered' by FEMA to do these tasks must become subordinated to community assemblies backed up by armed self defence committees. Fuel and food must be controlled and allocated by workers committees. Workers should refuse to be forced to work and agree to work only if community assemblies are responsible for overseeing the work.

Under the US Constitution the provision for citizens to bear arms against tyranny will be suspended in any emergency. Workers armed defence committees should be set up to maintain law and order and prevent real looting of fuel and aid.

Where the National Guard or the army is used to disarm the self-defence committees, the community assemblies must appeal to the rank and file of the army to disobey all orders that involve repressing these local democratically constituted organisations.

When the 'Government' tries to crack down, as in Iraq, on what they designate as 'terrorism', the US labor movement, bureaucratic and compliant with the state as it is, has to be challenged by the rank and file to take strike action against Bush and his ruling class backers.

In this way organised opposition to FEMA could see the build up to a nationwide strike on December the 1 become the launching platform for a renewed mass democratic unionism and the birth of the first genuine workers party ever. At that point the strangle hold the ruling class exercises over the working class with its 'Republicrat' congress can be blown away, and the formation of a workers party rooted in workers councils and self-defence committees open the way to socialist revolution.

Tonga’s traditional society was a lineage mode of production in transition to a tributary mode. The chiefs, who ruled the whole community, were in the process of becoming a ruling class along the lines of Hawaii. The arrival of the missionaries added impetus to this process, changing the rank system in the tributary mode of production into a feudal –style monarchy with nobles acting as local agents of an international capitalist class.

International capital has a profound influence on Tonga, through the governments of Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank institutions impose imperialism in the region.

If we want to understand why the strike lasted so long, and was fought so bitterly, we must look not at the greed and recalcitrance of the King, but at the shadow of imperialism that hangs over Tonga. The fact is that, whatever the King's attitude was toward the strikers, the ability of his government to accede to their demands was and will remain severely limited, by outside control of the Tongan economy.

Australia used this year's Pacific forum to insist that future economic aid to small island states like Tonga would be tied to the 'reform' of these countries' economies. 'Reform' usually means cuts to state spending.

The Solomon Islands butchered its public services and was brought to its knees last year. The same sort of ‘reform’ is currently laying waste to Papua New Guinea's economy. The attempts of the Howard government to force IMF 'reforms' on countries like Tonga are entirely consistent with its role as the Deputy Sheriff of US imperialism in the South Pacific. US foreign policy demands the use of the IMF and the World Bank to force open markets in the developing world for Western consumer goods, while at the same time cutting the price of raw materials extracted from the developing world, and the price of labour bought there by Western multinational companies. Where necessary, this process of 'globalisation' can be enforced and protected by the armed forces of the US or US allies.

Of course, the demands of the Australian government and the IMF can only collide head-on with the demands of workers in Tonga. The long-overdue pay increases strikers were demanding threaten to blow out a budget that imperialism is pushing Tonga to cut. The Australian government will not be happy about the strikers winning their demands and forcing Tonga to set a bad example. Imperialist pressure on the Tongan state will intensify.

The aggressive unilateralism in pursuit of US interests has already been felt in the Pacific region, in the form of the Australian-led and US-initiated military intervention in the Solomons. This intervention was justified by a need to 'restore order' to the Solomons, but order had only broken down because of the West's sabotage of the country's economy - under IMF 'reforms' imposed by Australia and New Zealand, a third of public sector workers had lost their jobs, with predictable consequences. The real reason for the intervention was to set an example for the Pacific, and to keep at bay US rival France, which had been making overtures to the Solomons government.

Like the United States, Australia has announced that it reserves the right to invade its neighbours 'pre-emptively', if it feels that its security is threatened. 'Security', of course, is understood in economic as much as military terms. It is not at all difficult to imagine the crisis that still threatens to develop in Tonga being resolved by a military intervention initiated by the US and Australia, and including New Zealand forces.

Solidarity with the PSA Strikers!

NZ and Australia Hands Off Tonga!

The refusal of the Tongan Public Service Association workers to accept a New Zealand-brokered deal was to be commended. The NZ and Australia governments have an interest in maintaining the control of the Monarchy over the economy so that the profits of the multinational corporations are guaranteed and protected. NZ politicians tried for a compromise between the people and the Monarchy. But compromise was only ever possible on the terms of the ruling class and would not change the system for the benefit of the people.

The workers refused to do a deal with the Monarchy that required them to accept arbitration in advance. It shows that the workers know that arbitration will leave the Monarchy all powerful and not change the real causes of the poverty of the workers.

Workers must not compromise with the Monarchy as it exists today as a ruling class that exploits the working class to enrich itself and its overseas backers.

Against the class system!

The recent pay deal is only a symptom of this class system where the Monarchy acts as the agents of international capital to profit from the privatisation of Tongan assets and to super-exploit the labour of the commoners.

This means that the wealth cannot be redistributed to the people who produce the wealth, without the Monarchy's control of the economy being taken over by the people, and the wealth being redistributed according to the people's needs.

We support the demand for a referendum to make all the MPs elected by the people, as put forward by the pro-democracy movement. However, this is a reform of the existing constitution and does not directly challenge the rule of the Monarchy over parliament.

The PSA workers have shown that the current wage crisis is a symptom of the class system in Tonga. By holding out for a 60-70-80% wage increase they were leading the challenge to replace the Monarchy's power with the power of the people.

The national strike was resolved following a proposal by politicians for political change. Clive Edwards proposed to amend the Tongan constitution, making it possible for the people to elect a 39 member parliament. From those 39 members a Prime Minister would be elected, and so would Cabinet Ministers. This is a step in the direction of democracy. But a constitutional amendment is not enough. Workers need to continue to lead the people in the demand to hold a Constituent Assembly based on universal suffrage (everyone voting) which could open up a full-scale constitutional debate and decide on a new constitution for a new Tonga, ruled by the people, for the people.

Meanwhile, the Tongan working masses must be on their guard against their leaders being bought off by the ruling elite.

The Next Step

Finau Tutone, the Chairman of the Public Servants Association, said that the next step for the Civil Servants was to form the Friendly Island Workers' Association, to be followed later with the formation of a Union of Workers for all Tongan workers.

We Agree: Workers and poor farmers can form a movement to defeat imperialism and its local capitalist agents. Then a government by and for the real people can be formed: A workers and poor farmers government.

This would not be possible to sustain without the support of workers internationally. The democratic revolution becomes permanent as part of the socialist revolution.

For a socialist pacific

www.wsws.org/articles/2005/aug2005/tong-a19.shtml

www.tongaonstrike.com

Victory to Iraq!

Only a victory to Iraq can defeat the US imperialist invasion and occupation. Industrial strike action can make this happen

The US AFL-CIO (main labour organization) recently adopted the call to ‘Bring the troops home now’. This is an important step for the official labor movement caused by pressure from rank and file antiwar groups like Million Worker March Movement. But it falls far short of what is needed.

First, it does not mean that Iraq will be liberated as the US can bring the troops home and leave a puppet regime in place.
Second, it does not raise the need to take action against the US war machine or the torture camps like Guantanamo!
Third, it makes no mention of the occupation of Afghanistan and the US military bases being used around the world in the ‘War on Terror’.
Fourth, it does not attack the fundamental capitalist economic cause of the drive to war by the US imperialist system in crisis.

The only way to free Iraq and stop the US drive to war is to build for a general strike to smash the US war machine!

US WORKERS RISE UP AND SMASH THE WAR MACHINE

Camp Casey shows the way! Pickets everywhere! Picket the US bases! Build the mutiny in the US forces! Strike action in the military industrial complex! Strike action in the workplaces and schools! Call for a strike by the rank and file of the military against the war in Iraq. Paralyze the US military machine at home!

US NATIONAL STRIKE DECEMBER 1 TO STOP THE WAR

The US Troops Out Now Coalition and other anti-war groups in the labor movement are calling for a nationwide strike against Poverty, Racism and War on December 1. http://www.troopsoutnow.org/

No school, No shopping, No work!

This strike is endorsed by the MWMM, the Black Caucus of the Teamsters and other union movements. It is good that it calls on workers and students to take strike action. But it needs to go further and raise the demand for the rank and file of the Military to go on strike.

Strike in the US military and war industry!
Form rank and file committees to break with the military command of the army of Bush, Halliburton and US imperialism!

SUPPORT THE IRAQI RESISTANCE

Missing is any call for US labor to support the Iraqi resistance. Yet the US constitution has the provision for the right of citizens to be armed to resist tyranny.

The right of Iraqis to militarily defend themselves and defeat the US occupation is a basic right that must be acknowledged by the anti-war movement. US workers have no right to impose any conditions on how the Iraqis resist the occupation. Their duty is to smash the war machine at home!

At the same time we do not condone attacks on Iraqi workers by any element of the resistance. Only an organized working class can lead the resistance to liberate Iraq.

Victory to the Iraqi resistance fighters!
Only the working class can win the liberation of Iraq!

REBUILD NEW ORLEANS UNDER WORKERS CONTROL

The nationwide strike links the war in Iraq with the destruction of New Orleans and calls for solidarity with the Katrina survivors. It demands:

The people of New Orleans and the Gulf must Control the Rebuilding, not Bush’s rich friends!
We demand an independent investigation!
A Job at a living wage, healthcare, housing and education not war and occupation!”

Meanwhile the Community Labor United has founded the Peoples Hurricane Relief Fund and Oversight Commission to ‘oversee’ FEMA and ensure that the people get the benefit of relief funds. http://www.communitylaborunited.net/

While these are important demands they don’t go far enough. Workers control of rebuilding and the demand for billions of dollars to be redirected from war to meet social needs do not seriously challenge the capitalist system. They involve a redistribution of wealth from rich to poor. But they do not raise the need for workers to take power and socialize private corporations.

Expropriate the Oil Monopolies!
Expropriate Halliburton and Bechtel and Co!
Build workers councils and workers defence committees!

WORKERS CONTROL OF VENEZUELAN OIL

Chavez and Castro have offered medical aid, food aid and cheap oil to the victims of the capitalist disaster in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

US workers must form emergency committees, and self-defence committees to distribute this aid and oil to workers in need, independently of Bush and his capitalist cronies!

Chavez has said that if the US attacks Venezuela he will stop supplying oil. But Bush attacks Iraq every day using Venezuelan oil!

Confronting the US imperialist War of Terror we are all Iraqis!

US and Venezuelan workers must unite to stop Chavez’ sale of oil to the US that is used in the war machine that kills thousands of Iraqis!

AOTEAROA WORKERS ANTIWAR SOLIDARITY

NZ workers must organize to take industrial action against NZ military involvement in the occupation of Afghanistan!

NZ workers take action against NZ collaboration with the US War of Terror and its military intelligence network!
NZ workers take action against all the banks and corporations that serve the US military industrial machine or profit from the war of terror!

SOLIDARITY STRIKE IN AOTEAROA/NZ, DECEMBER 1

WAWOT CALLS ON UNIONS IN AOTEAROA TO ORGANISE IN SOLIDARITY Stop work, Stop school, Stop shopping, Stop war!

ALL OUT ON THURSDAY DEC 1 – END THE WAR OF TERROR

Next meeting: 2-4 PM SATURDAY, 8TH OCTOBER,

GREY LYNN COMMUNITY CENTRE, 510 RICHMOND RD.

Workers Against the War Of Terror davebrownz@yahoo.com 025 280 0080

Iraq Document

Defeat the Anglo-American Occupation!

We reprint here a call to the Iraqi people and all its patriotic forces for the formation of the Iraqi National Front for Liberation and Democratic reconstruction (INFLD). Our position is that revolutionaries must participate in this anti-imperialist front to take the lead from the national bourgeoisie and fight to turn the national revolution into a socialist revolution.

The armed and political struggle of our people is intensifying against the occupiers’ vile schemes, including their attempts to “Iraqinize” the occupation through divisive political structures based on ethnic and sectarian quotas that aim to shatter the unity of our people and homeland.

The widening struggle calls for the formation of a broad National Front that is capable of leading the country to freedom and democratic reconstruction. It is crucial at this stage to focus on ensuring the basic requirements for building this front, rather than its detailed programs, tactics and organization. Hence the call is all inclusive.

The requirements for establishing the National Front for Liberation and Democratic reconstruction, starting with addressing the obstacles in its way, were discussed at a seminar of Iraqi intellectuals and politicians, some of whom representing the main patriotic movements in Iraq, and others as independent Iraqi activists. [1]

Following a frank, energetic and constructive debate the participants agreed that:

“We aspire to a front that is inclusive of all the patriotic, Islamic and Leftist movements, groups, and individuals in their full spectrum; a front that covers the whole of Iraq’s territory: north, centre and south; a front that represents all the strata and components of our people: Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen, and minorities, and aims to guarantee their legitimate aspirations.

In spite of the perceived differences in doctrines and practices; the patriotic forces share wide common grounds, and are increasingly coordinating their work. It is through the development of such coordination that we hope to eventually attain the creation of the desired National Front for Liberation and Democratic reconstruction.

A foremost prerequisite for the formation of the front is resolving antagonisms between the patriotic forces through a bold process of criticism and self-criticism with respect to the mistakes of the past. We need to take steps that lead to developing the national struggle along democratic principles. This self criticism, combined with reevaluation of past practices, should be exercised by all political factions that played a central role in the political sphere in Iraq since the revolution of July 14, 1958, through July 17, 1968 and up to the present time.

Such a process will form the basis for reconciliation amongst all patriotic forces, allowing them to turn a new leaf based on the spirit of forgiveness and common struggle. That in itself is the main defense against international and regional intrigues to fragment our country and people.

A serious and comprehensive review of the past and the desire for rectification will not be achieved by a mere political deal, neither will it be accomplished by a declaration of yet another document of 'promises and undertakings'. The required challenging process is an intellectual, political as well as a moral struggle that involves both individuals and groups. It is long term struggle, but should, nonetheless, be immediately initiated.

We strive for the unity of our people's patriotic factions, both in content and methods of struggle. Some patriotic forces have resorted to armed struggle, and some others to non-violent and public resistance methods but do, nonetheless, support the armed resistance against the occupation.

Therefore, it should be acknowledged that the two strands of the struggle, the armed and the political, do complement and strengthen each other, and do need each other. An atmosphere of mutual understanding, and coordination between both types of resistance should prevail. At a later stage, we should aim for a single front for liberation, construction and democratization, encompassing all.

We also believe that the unity of our people mandates extending the dialogue to include factions and personalities whose positions have not yet solidified behind the resistance. We need to bring them closer to actively oppose the occupation and to support the armed resistance.

The rallying call for unity requires daily and continuous effort by leaders of political parties, religious movements and by the intellectuals to guide and educate the rank and file. Such guidance is a means of foiling the attempts to fragment and divide our country. The conditions for the establishment of the National Front are maturing. We should, therefore, enhance this trend through further dialogues, joint activities and coordination among the active participants.

Agreement was reached by all participants who attended this meeting, whether representing their respective parties or independents, to form a Dialogue Committee tasked with accelerating the formulation requirements of the broad National Front.

We hail the patriotic forces that are leading the valiant armed resistance to the occupation, and are hoisting the banner of Iraq high and its soul intact. We hail, too, the other patriotic forces that daily confront one of the most brutal occupiers known in history and are sparing no blood or sacrifice in this historic confrontation.”

Salute to the glorious martyrs of Iraq.

Freedom to Iraqi political detainees and prisoners.

Defeat the Anglo-American occupation.

Victory to our fighting people.

Beirut 29.7.2005

[1] This seminar was convened at the conclusion of ‘The Future of Iraq' symposium that was held in Beirut, Lebanon during July 25-28. 2005. The symposium was arranged and hosted by the Center of Arab Unity Studies (CAUS), whose participants paid for their travel expenses. (The symposium discussed and finalized documents that may aid the Iraqi government after liberation, including the Constitution, Election laws, Reconstruction, Rebuilding of the Iraqi Army, Oil policy and the Kurdish Autonomy. The list of attendance and the documents are available on the CAUS website http://www.caus.org.lb/arabic/nadwa1.asp in Arabic)

Taxes of productive workers (productive because they produce surplus value in the form of goods and services sold on the market) are in two forms.

(1)PAYE on workers income is paid by bosses from the same source as their own taxation surplus value, and never touches workers back pocket.

Therefore tax cuts to productive workers are tax cuts for the bosses!

Notice that National wants to cut income taxes across the board. All of these are tax cuts for the bosses.

(2) Consumption taxes like GST paid by workers on everything they consume. Its paid by everyone of course represents a heavier load on workers than bosses. It represents a substantial real wage cut that comes off the workers wage rather than the bosses surplus value.

Over the last 20 years the burden of taxation has shifted towards consumption taxes which are very regressive i.e. everyone pays the same rate but this is proportionately more of the total take home pay of workers than of the rich.

Notice that no-one is cutting consumption taxes. They continue to rise rapidly. Soon we will be paying road tolls - another regressive tax.

Note the question of the taxation of unproductive workers i.e. those who do not produce surplus value but are necessary for the system to run e.g. domestic workers, is a bit more complicated but follows the same set of principles. They are also paid out of the gross surplus expropriated from productive workers. This does not make them beneficiaries of the exploitation of productive workers however, as they are also subject to the same low wages (or no wages) and indirect taxation.

So how do Marxists respond to the current political circus around taxation?

We say tax the rich to the max!

This is a transitional demand - a demand that we raise now to meet the immediate needs workers but which cannot be conceded by the bosses. This forces us to face up to the fact that workers cannot meet their needs by the redistribution of income, only by redistribution of property!)

(1) Steeply graduated income tax (like Marx called for in the Communist Manifesto). What this amounts to is the demand to return a larger slice of the surplus expropriated from productive labour to the state. The question then is how to redistribute this back to those who produced it.

Of course the bosses resist this because it is deducted from the surplus they take off us and therefore their bottom line. National says taxes are disincentives. Too right, they cut into profits. Labour's targetted tax relief has nothing to do with social justice. It is designed to make sure that the social wage is enough for workers to live on so that they can be trained and disciplined to work hard to make more profits.

Putting this demand on Labour exposes the fact that they are socially engineering the workforce for maximum profits. Hence Labour has lifted the income level and targetted middle income workers and students (and migrants) to use them as a skilled labour force in the knowledge economy (increases the rate of exploitation and of profit for the bosses).

(2) Capital gains tax is another way of targetting the income share of the rich that is ripped off by expropriating surplus in the form of capital gains. Such as raising company profits before distribution, 'profits' from speculation in land, housing etc.

This the basis of the demand to renationalise privatised state assets, and expropriation of bosses property, without compensation, and under workers control. The windfall capital gains from privatisation should be all taken back by socialising all accumulated surplus!

It appears that both of these taxes are attacks on the bosses profits as a share of national income. Resistance to these taxes relies on arguments about the right to bosses to retain profits as their fair share of the national wealth - rewards for entrepreneurship, savings etc.

To break through this ideological barrier we have to raise the demand for these taxes and at the same time explain why the bosses will not pay them. Neither National nor Labour has any interest in redistributing back the surplus that is expropriated from productive workers. Nothing to do with fair shares but everything to do with the expropriation of surplus-value.

That's why our program calls on workers to build an independent labour movement that fights for every right and need outside parliament. Nothing happens in parliament without the demands of the bosses or workers outside parliament. And ultimately parliament is nothing but the front for the bosses state power which is used to smash workers struggles.

We fight for jobs for all, even though every job is exploitative. Workers must live and in the process organise on the job to take control of production, occupying and expropriating capitalist property. That's called socialising the means of production.

We fight for bosses to pay for this in the form of fewer hours and more pay. We fight to get back the surplus by taxing it to the max. We deny the right of the bosses to retain any of the profits they expropriate. That's called socialising the means of distribution!

All of this can only happen if workers take power and create a workers state that will socialise the means of exchange, the money supply and the banks. This is called socialising the means of exchange.

Taxing the rich is therefore an integral part to a transitional program for socialism.

Labour gone awol.

First, the IBT says that workers no longer have illusions in Labour as a party that represents their class interests. It is therefore no longer a bourgeois-workers party. Its program hasn’t changed but it ha lost its historic roots in the labour movement. This is the result of a rightward move of the Labour Government since 1984 and the defeats suffered by workers over that period. The Labour Party no longer embodies a class contradiction between its bourgeois program and an organised labour base.

Is it true that class contradiction no longer exists? Has there been a qualitative change in the Labour Party? The moderate unions formed the Labour Party in 1916 as a reformist alternative to the Red Fed and IWW program of expropriation. While it’s program talked about the ‘socialisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange etc’ this was no more than the nationalisation of some key industries like coal, transport like rail, telecom and a central bank plus some income redistribution. The ‘welfare state’ made huge subsidies to private capital reducing their risk and boosting their profits in the period of the formation of the New Zealand capitalist economy.

Thus the historic class compromise of 1930s Keynesian policies of state intervention from the 1930s onwards partially suppressed the contradiction between the bosses program and Labour’s working class supporters for another generation. Where necessary Labour could back up these reforms with emergency legislation to break strikes and lock up dissidents. Despite periodic outbreaks of dissent, economic insulation created relatively full employment and a generous welfare state to keep workers loyal to Labour right up to 1984.

In 1984 the Fourth Labour government abandoned this compromise as the bosses demanded deregulation and restructuring to open the economy to the global market. This ‘revolution’ was necessary to overcome the barriers to profitability resulting from a limited domestic market. Cutting costs to become competitive on the world market meant cutting jobs and wages. While National continued these attacks in the 1990s it fell short in its attempts to complete the new right agenda and fully open the country to free trade and foreign capital investment.

Since 1999 Labour has reforged a new Blairite class compromise to suppress the basic contradiction once again. Labour uses state intervention to steer away from a ‘quarry’ economy where MNCs rip out unprocessed commodities for the global market in favour of increased productivity in a ‘knowledge’ economy. The state picks ‘winners’ by subsidising high tech industries to ‘add value’ to exports. Of course this extra productivity is due to the rising rate of exploitation of skilled workers, as well as the deteriorating wages and labour conditions of casualised workers.

Under Labour profits and CEO incomes have continued to rise rapidly. Skilled workers in the EPMU, the PSA and education unions, and the SFWU, have been able to claw back a small part of the extra surplus value they produce. Low paid or casualised workers, and long term unemployed, have their falling incomes partially made up by income transfers and Working for Families. While this Blairite compromise continues to suppress the class contradiction, critical support for Labour is necessary to put it in power in order to activate the class contradiction.

The question of the popular front

The second IBT criticism is that critical support for Labour under MMP is not permissible because Labour (assuming it were a bourgeois workers party) must enter a popular front with bourgeois parties like the Greens or NZ First. The reason we call these parties bourgeois parties like National, is that they were not formed out of the labour movement and have no claim to represent the interests of workers. Even the Greens who try to squeeze out of monopoly capital policies that favour small business is still a bourgeois party because the tendency of small business is to become big business at the expense of workers.

The IBT correctly opposes popular fronts because bourgeois workers parties can shift the blame for failing to implement a workers’ program onto their bourgeois partners and thus still suppress the class contradiction.

Since we do say that Labour is still a bourgeois-workers party, should we refuse it critical support because it may have to form a popular front? No, we call on it to govern without bourgeois partners. Obviously Labour would need bourgeois or petty-bourgeois partners if it failed to get a majority of seats itself. That’s why we called for the maximum working class vote for Labour, and at the same time oppose workers votes for any of the minor bourgeois parties.

We did not do what the left political ‘commentator’ Matt McCarten did, which was to assume that Labour could not get a majority itself and call for votes for minor bourgeois parties like the Greens, Maori Party and NZ First to provide Labour with coalition partners. (He even called for a vote for the National Candidate in Eden to stop ACT from winning seats and increasing National’s ability to form a government).

In the event that Labour does form a government with bourgeois partners we make this fact a fundamental criticism of the Labour Party to expose the class collaboration of the popular front and condemn its betrayal of the class interests of workers. In other words, we do not run in terror from the prospect of a popular front but try to block it in advance, and failing that, to oppose it in practice to explode the suppressed class contradiction.

Why does the IBT make these criticisms?

The IBT criticizes the Anti-Capitalist Alliance failure to offer transitional demands or means of moving from the most basic democratic or immediate demands to the seizure of power and a socialist republic. Yet the IBT then falls foul of the logic of its own critique when it is applied to critical support for Labour. Rather than follow Lenin’s method from the 1920s – that of communist workers entering a united front with reformist workers – the IBT fixates on superficial ‘facts’ that workers do not ‘see’ Labour as their party, because Labour’s attacks on workers have exposed it as an open bourgeois party.

Yes, the world situation is very different today from 1920. In 1920 a revolutionary situation existed in Europe. The majority of workers had not joined the communist party and despite being much further left than today, still had illusions in the Labour Party. Lenin argued that it was necessary for the mass communist party to vote the Labour party into government to expose it in practice and split reformist workers away from its bourgeois leadership and program. The tactic of critical support was a special form of united front in which the revolutionary movement would demand that the Labour bureaucracy and the Labour Party leadership implement a revolutionary workers program. When it failed to do so, its program and leadership would be exposed and detached from its working class body of support like a “rope supports a hanged man” so that these workers would then join the Communist Party.

Critical support and democratic counter-revolution

Today no such revolutionary situation exists, and there is no revolutionary party to put pressure on Labour parties to explode the suppressed contradiction. Since 1989, global capitalism has entered a period of democratic counter-revolution. This means that its attacks on workers are typically made under the cover of bourgeois democracy. In the former degenerated workers states workers voted for capitalist restoration. Capitalism has used right-wing social democratic parties to solve its crisis at the expense of their working class base. The large majority of workers who retain any trade union consciousness still vote for social democracy to defend their fundamental gains because they are caught up in a defensive reliance on bourgeois democracy. As yet there is revolutionary situation to put pressure on social democracy, and explode the class contradiction.

However, if the world economy enters a new period of depression and the isolated revolutionary upsurges today are generalised into new revolutionary period, we can expect pressure from below to split the Labour Party. Rather than write off Labour as already bourgeois it is necessary to prepare for its revival as a barrier to rising workers’ expectations. To both activate and to take advantage of a coming revolutionary upturn it is necessary for communists to maintain the united front tactic with social democracy to split its working class base from its bosses program.

The failure to understand this, and to argue that Labour Parties have become open bourgeois parties in the last two decades is an ultra left response to the democratic counter-revolution. It rejects social democracy as necessarily counter-revolutionary when in fact it still plays the critical role of suppressing the class contradiction. It is this contradiction that will be activated first by the renewal of revolutionary movements and to ignore it is to abstain from revolutionary politics. It is a sectarian fear of becoming tainted by the almost universal opportunism, that today paints democratic imperialism as a progressive force. Instead of contesting opportunism and bourgeois democracy inside the gigantic malls where workers consume. the sectarians preach to passing workers from their boutique shop front about the picture of the revolutionary party in the window.

As we argue in our original article, workers will not break from social democracy until a revolutionary upsurge and a revolutionary program exposes the open treachery of the social democratic program and leadership, and the formation of independent working class dual power organs are in place capable of taking and holding onto power.

Caregivers Stopwork

600 careworkers across the country recently took action and attended unpaid stop work meetings. Class Struggle checked out the Auckland meeting, there were one hundred workers there. They were open minded and prepared to discus the issues with us, in good spirits, singing songs (like they sing to the old folks). It was good to see that ordinary union members spoke to the meeting.

Jill Ovens from the SFWU described the industry trends: Outright capitalist international groups investing in the sector and buying out social service oriented groups like church run rest homes. Churches used to run retirement villages for the social good, now these are seen as an easy buy / ripe investment for business, with a guaranteed income from government.

The weaknesses arising out of the stopwork were the lack of effective future plans for the struggle.

Unfortunately the workers are broken up into their different sites / different employers for negotiations. A larger collective agreement that included all the sectors workers would stop employers pinning wages down and can give workers more opportunity to act together.

Darien Fenton was another SFWU speaker to address the meeting. She is moving down to Wellington on the Labour Party list. Because she hadn’t gained the rise in women’s wages that she hoped to deliver these workers yet, her future plan is to try well worn (by union bureaucrats) parliamentary road to promise the same. Again the Labour party and union bureaucracy are leading workers into parliament to search for a legal road to equality.

Still these leaders want to try to reform capitalism to benefit workers. For workers to benefit, they will first have to organise an active rank and file, unite their struggles into common agreements, and remove the layer of labour bureaucrats before they can remove the capitalism system that exploits workers.

Victoria VC goes on attack

Pat Walsh, Victoria University Vice Chancellor (CEO) is threatening to put up student fees by 10% and has tried to stop students from making this public by banning publication of these plans in the student newspaper Salient.

Raising the fees by so much right now is cynical in the extreme. It comes just after University staff have ratified a deal with the VCs until next April, allowing the VCs, Government and the Union heads to engage in tripartite talks about tertiary funding in Wellington. Their grounds for settling short of our demands for 10% wage increases and a national MECA were that we owed the VCs in 'good faith' to test their intentions to jointly lobby government for more money for the tertiary sector. The expectation was that more money for the Tertiary sector would keep fees down.

So what happens? Before this Tripe Committee can even meet, VC Walsh (as you would expect for someone who built a career studying the labour movement) whacks on a massive fee increase. Expect the other VCs to do the same and hide behind the Tripe Committee while they do it.

This cynical move should prove to all those University staff who have illusions in Tripartite talks that they were suckered by the VCs and their own union heads.

Instead of divide and rule we need to unite staff and students to fighbackt!

Make the Govt tax the rich to pay for free education!

Put the Universities under the control of its staff and students!

The Oil Crisis is Capitalism’s Crisis

Oil is a key input into industry and necessary for the survival of capitalism. No substitute is capable of stepping into the role oil plays without a huge jump in the cost of production. Therefore the imperialist countries driven by Big Oil will pursue increasingly aggressive policies to get control of this diminishing supply. We face a future of rapid decent into wars and destruction of whole populations such as Iraq (and on a smaller scale working class New Orleans) unless we challenge the ownership and control of capitalism.

The future alternative to capitalism is socialism. But it is unlikely to come in one sudden rush. We need to look for ways to make the transition to socialism by first regulating and controlling the market, and then moving progressively toward the nationalization and socialization of the major resources, industries and banks under the ownership and control of workers’ governments.

In Latin America we can see a level of resistance to capitalist globalization and its destruction that points the way towards this alternative socialist future. In Argentina in 2001 the population rebelled against neo-liberal austerity and threw out the government forcing a default on the national debt. In Bolivia the masses are in a state of almost permanent revolt against oil companies exploiting the gas resources. In Brazil the government of Lula is in crisis because it has not met its promises to its worker supporters. In Chile there has been mass resistance to the FTA with the US.

Venezuela creates an opportunity

Most significant, in Venezuela there is a left populist government able to use its oil wealth to force through some changes to the global oil market. Chavez has introduced cheap oil for the Caribbean and other Latin American countries, and done a bilateral deal with China. He has also made some of the oil companies change their contracts and enter joint ventures on terms more favorable to Venezuela.

While these are important steps in the attempt to find alternatives to the dominance of the oil majors, they are as yet small steps. The states concerned are not directly challenging the fundamental interests of the oil companies –their ability to set the prices and profits of the oil industry even though they may not technically own the oil fields. That is, Venezuela’s oil may be nationalized but it is not yet socialized in the hands of the masses of workers and peasants of that country.

Nationalization is not Socialization

Nationalized property remains the property of the capitalist state and the capitalist class as a whole. That’s why nationalization often acts to subsidize private profits against workers interests. This can be seen from the fact that Chavez continues to supply oil to the US which can use it for its military machine in Iraq. Chavez has also recently offered oil to make up the loss of production resulting from a strike by Ecuadorian state oil workers, drawing a rebuke from Venezuelan state oil workers. And in order to guarantee production Chavez backs no-strike legislation against state workers in Argentina and at home. Similarly, Iraq’s oil remains nationalized, but that does not stop the oil majors from raking off massive profits through controlling the production and marketing of Iraqi oil, and of running the oil fields under military occupation.

The goal in Venezuela (and Bolivia, Brazil, Iraq etc) must be to support the nationalization of oil and an increase in the share of oil wealth being retained for distribution to meet the peoples’ needs, as a platform for the fight for the socialization of oil under the control of the workers and peasants’ organisations and revolutionary governments. This cannot happen in one country alone. An alternative common market made up of all countries exploited and oppressed by imperialism has to be built so that there is an economic base for the construction of a world socialist movement to carry the struggle to its completion. This means in each country we need to work out a series of steps to further this international strategy.

Solving New Zealand’s oil crisis

New Zealand’s oil crisis results from a lack of its own oil and dependence on Big Oil. We need to start first by removing petrol taxes and shifting the tax burden onto business which gains most from subsidized roading. Then we need to nationalize the oil industry under workers’ control and import oil from Venezuela in exchange for agricultural commodities and technology. We can repeat this with other countries breaking free from the dictates of the global market. For example, gas under the control of Bolivian workers and peasants could be shipped to NZ in exchange for agricultural expertise to convert coca to some other economic crop. To do this we (and of course our trading partners) would have to repudiate all Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) and WTO agreements that limit the actions of the sovereign national state to ‘expropriate’ foreign investments, as well as the punitive financial regimes of the IMF and World Bank.

Instead of signing an FTA with the ‘Blairite’ Lagos government in Chile which gives multinational capital freedom to trade and invest with few national constraints, NZ could target its expertise to develop agriculture in exchange for industrial goods like copper. Or in Brazil provide technical advice to develop agriculture resulting from land reform. To make this possible aggressive multinationals such as Fonterra which (with its partner Nestle) plans to dominate the Latin American dairy industry, would become a joint venture between its farmer owners and the NZ state to cooperate in the development of this industry in partnership with the peasant owners in similar cooperative/state ventures.

No capitalist party in NZ would be willing to take these steps so it is necessary to build a socialist movement in NZ that can join in the international struggle to make sure that expropriations are put under workers control and socialized as the basis of a planned global socialist economy and society. But as a first step along this road we must raise the demand now for the nationalization of the oil industry and for barter trade with Venezuela!

NATIONALISE THE OIL INDUSTRY!

TRADE OIL FOR FOOD WITH VENEZUELA!

SMASH THE FTAs, WTO, IMF AND WORLD BANK!

FOR A UNITED SOCIALIST STATES OF THE PACIFIC!

While Chávez was in Argentina, [see article below] the "16th World Festival of Youth and Students" was opened in Venezuela. It was organized by the World Social Forum. One of the guest ‘stars’ was Evo Morales of Bolivia. This was no coincidence. In this festival Evo Morales was held up as the next president of Bolivia. At the same time the ‘power ring’ [i.e. the economic, political and military containment of the Bolivian revolution] was strengthened.

Thus the WSF used its Youth and Student Festival to organize its continental politics of strangling the Bolivian revolution. At the same time, it instructed its ‘left wing’ –the liquidators of Trotskyism – to hold another ‘encounter’ in La Paz on 12-14 August, so that it could collaborate with the Lula labor bureaucracy of the CUT of Brazil, and Solares (Castroite leader of the COB –union central - in Bolivia) etc, to add its weight to the containment of the Bolivian revolution.

In the La Paz meeting, held in secret and behind the backs of the masses of the revolutionary workers vanguard of El Alto, (working class city adjoining La Paz) this collection of treacherous fake Trotskyists and bureaucrats resolved to put up a reformist workers party under the name of the “political Instrument of the Workers” to participate in the elections of December.

They buried the resolutions of the 8 June of the COR (regional COB) El Alto; aborted the reconvening of the national congress of delegates of the Originary Popular Assembly (Indigenous and Popular Assembly) and tried to isolate and confuse the vanguard that fights for workers and peasants soviets and centralised militias. In effect, this ‘encounter’ backed Morales’ truce with President Rodriguez and the bourgeois regime.

While some of their delegates went to the encounter in Bolivia, at the Festival in Venezuela were the currents of Alan Woods, the MST of Argentina and other groups of the UIT-CI, among others. There, not surprisingly, they put themselves under the authority of Chávez and Fidel Castro, the Castroite bureaucracy, and the imposter Celia Hart Santamaria of the supposed ‘Trotskyist wing’ of the Cuban Communist Party. Just as Stalinism in the ‘80s organized the ‘Coffee Brigades’ to support the policy of the Castroism and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, today the renegades of Trotskyism take the lead in organizing support for Chávez.

Celia Hart, on May 1st 2005, in its article called ‘A ghost crosses America’, called for the “unity of revolutionaries”, to found a “continental communist organization” combining “sectarian” groups and “socialist or ant capitalist organizations” into an “organization of organizations”. In other words, she called on the left including the liquidators of Trotskyism, to unite under the control of the Cuban Communist Party, as the "left wing" of the World Social Forum.

The WSF needs a class collaborationist ‘left wing’ to play the leading role in containing the masses because the original promoters of the WSF are today increasingly discredited. They are implicated directly in pro-imperialist governments and bourgeois regimes attacking the masses, like Lula in Brazil, Tabaré Vázquez in Uruguay, Lagos in Chile; or open supporters of these regimes like the CTA (state workers union) and Castroism which backs Kirchner in Argentina; or getting ready to play this role in government, like Evo Morales in Bolivia. Moreover, the WSF has already lost its "poster boy", Colonel Gutiérrez, at hands of the masses in Ecuador. [see article on Ecuador]

In the case of Chávez, they need him so they can maintain the bourgeois state behind the painting of the ‘Bolivarian revolution’. And in the case of the Castroite bureaucracy, they need the ‘left wing’ to hide their betrayals of the Latin American revolution and its policy of capitalist restoration in Cuba.

So today, in the Festival of Youth in Venezuela, the task of coordinating and centralising the ‘left’ road block stopping the revolution is being carried out by the traitors to Trotskyism. Celia Hart Santamaría could not come to the Festival, so her role was filled by her lieutenant and official guest, Alan Woods of the ‘Trotskyist’ International Marxist Tendency. Next to him appeared Ricardo Alarcón, president of the National Assembly of Cuba; Shafik Handal of the FMLN of El Salvador and Daniel Ortega of the FSLN of Nicaragua - the main leaders, after Fidel Castro, of the Central American revolution in the ' 80s -, as well as Evo Morales, Felipe Quispe and other ‘personalities’ of the Bolivian ‘left wing’.

The Argentinean MST-UIT newspaper Socialist Alternative N° 409, in an article signed by its Youth, recognises cynically that the Festival “does not take in any sense a class perspective”, and yet endorses its purpose. It then states that “the most important aspect of the festival is the political space that is going to unfold. With the arrival of Lula’s government [for which their current in Brazil called for a vote while in a popular front with bourgeois parties! Editor] and the acceleration of the experience of the Latin American masses with the centre-left governments, has created the most important reformist space in recent last years: the Forum of Porto Alegre. In this way it opens a space so that the revolutionary organizations can engage in a dialogue with sections of the masses no longer bound to the centre-left parties, and allows us to influence and advance their politics.”

On this basis, they support, under the suggestive subtitle "To advance without sectarianism", participation in the Festival for "achieving much more unity among all those that fight against imperialism and who think that the capitalist model is exhausted completely. Knowing that the task of confronting this system will not happen unless led by Trotskyists, it is more important that ever to arrive at clear agreements on as many points as possible, among organizations, groups and personalities on various aspects of world politics."

They finish by saying that they will take this proposal from the Festival in Venezuela to the international level: “to create an anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist international coordination, that can arrive at points of agreement and to make united political campaigns in support of the workers and popular sectors in struggle”. Likewise, Alan Woods dedicated himself to the concrete task of creating that "continental organization" with Celia Hart.

Thus, the delegations, the Venezuelan CMR, the Communist Party of Venezuela, Felipe Quispe of Bolivia, the M-28 and Fogata of Venezuela, the Front of University Students and the front of Colombian Secondary Students, the MRTA of Peru, the "Continental Current Bolivariana" CCB) etc., all agree with the politics of Celia Hart Santamaría. And not by chance: as Allan Woods of the IMT, the UIT-CI and its section MST of Argentina are all part of this third batch of Menshevism and as the betrayers of Trotskyism form the ‘left wing’ of the World Social Forum, a true counter-revolutionary international.

Abridged from Workers Democracy 19 August 2005

On 11 of August, the president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, visited Argentina to sign the agreement for the construction of two oil tankers at the River Santiago Shipyard (ARS), giving a boost to the government campaign of Kirchner and Solá (State Governor) for the creation of a thousand new jobs. In a speech to the workers Chávez called on them to support the government of Kirchner which he praised saying "They have changed things in this country since this man arrived at the Pink House (Presidential Palace)".

Like a demagogue he also praised the ARS as a "shipyard with dignity" because "imperialism did not own it" because the workers had “resisted the neo-liberal aggression". But that sweet talk did not last long, because immediately afterwards he told the workers that they must "finish the ships quickly” so they could get more work.

It seems that Chávez did not come to the ARS because he is a good employer sharing the interests of the Argentine workers. He came because he could get cheap manual labor where the wages are constantly reduced by inflation. For Chávez it is excellent business building the ships in the ARS because the wages are on average $1100 (US$380) instead of $2000 to $3000 dollars a month in Spanish shipyards.

And like all bosses, Chavez wants to shorten the time of production to the maximum, because he knows that the faster the ships are built, the faster he will be able to export Venezuela’s oil. The chavista bourgeoisie wants sell more oil to Bush and US imperialism at $70 dollars a barrel, even though this allows the US to keep its military machine operating in Iraq and the Middle East.

And to guarantee that the workers will work harder and not go on strike, the Provincial governor Sola has passed a law to limit the right of strike. This is nothing new. It copies the law proposed by Chavez that workers in state companies, such as the PdVSA, [state oil] who go on strike can be sent to jail for years.

No strike laws are to prevent any problem or delay in the expansion of the oil industry. For those workers who protest: jail! Chávez wants to enslave manual labor in the ARS, and he imposes tough conditions of work so that workers do not have the right to complain, let alone ask for better conditions!

Chávez and Solá get their way in the ARS through the efforts of the collaboration of the union bureaucracy of Ate-cta. The same bureaucrats who have isolated the striking health workers at Garrahan [see article below] organised the meeting with Chavez at ARS so that nobody dared to ‘boo’ Chavez during his speech.

In order to police the meeting the bureaucrats brought some "pro-government piqueteros" of the FTV-CTA and Barrios de Pie who threatened physical violence against ARS workers. They make sure that the workers accept the bosses’ terms so they can be better exploited.

Shamefully, the internal commission of the ARS (combined unions) to which the PTS, PCR and the MST [centrist Trotskyist groups) belong, kept quite during the visit of Chavez and Sola, and the actions of the ATE-CTA bureaucracy. Although it is not a member of the internal commission of the ARS, the PO limited its criticisms to demanding that the 1000 jobs to be created be under the control of the organizations of unemployed people.

None of these currents, who call themselves revolutionaries called on the ARS workers to challenge Chávez’ deception, or alerted them to the plans of Sola and Kirchner to make them work like Chinese laborers. Or point out that if they strike for better wages they will be jailed or beaten up by the thugs of the FTV and Barrios de Pie – as they have done in Tucumán and Rosario – with the excuse that the ships being built for Chavez and his "Bolivarian revolution" cannot be delayed.

We know that the workers of the ARS want to work. We understand their joy and enthusiasm to know that the construction of the Venezuelan ships will guarantee work for them for some years. But we warn them that Chavez is a bourgeois employer who with Solá prepares the workers for super exploitation. In order to oppose this it is necessary to unite with the thousands of unemployed workers of the Berisso and Cove region (30% unemployed) and tell the employer's association of Chávez, Kirchner and Sola:

“If you want these ships faster, there is no problem. It is necessary to employ more workers to produce, to distribute the working hours between all the workers available, reducing the working day and with a basic wage of $1,800 a month!”

The solution is to unite with the workers of the Garrahan (Hospital workers on strike) who are in a struggle for a basic wage of $1,800 for all state employees. It is necessary to call on the TIES and the CTA to launch a national strike until our demands are met.

But in all this there is still a big problem. The oil tankers that are being built for Venezuela, may be used to transport the oil used to fuel the US military machine that massacres the Iraqi workers who are our class brothers and sisters. We cannot allow it!

The workers of the ARS have the duty to call on the Venezuelan workers to fight to prevent any oil being shipped for use in imperialist wars. And simultaneously to call them to fight together to stop the oil monopolies like Repsol or Texaco (which Chávez granted the oil rights to the Orinoco river basin) from plundering the hydrocarbons of our Bolivian class brothers and sisters!

Workers Democracy Argentina No 9 July 2005.

Imperialism has contained the struggles for now

Imperialism and the pro-imperialist bourgeoisies of Latin America have won a breathing space. The working masses and farmers who only months ago, overthrew with their revolutionary action Mesa in Bolivia and Gutiérrez in Ecuador, have been contained momentarily.

In Bolivia, the World Social Forum led by Chávez and Castro, Evo Morales, Solares, Quispe, and the liquidators of Trotskyism that today play the role once played by the old Communist Parties of Latin America, have forced a truce with the government of Rodriguez and the Bolivian bosses’ regime. By this means they prevented the creation of a dual power organ of the workers and farmers and of a centralized militia, and blocked the recalling of the national congress of delegates of the Original Popular Assembly.

By this means they legitimated the illegitimate government of Rodriguez and the puppet parliament of the mine owners. They reversed everything that the masses had done in 16 days of heroic struggle, and made a truce until the elections in December. For that reason, in El Alto and La Paz, there are appearing graffiti saying “Solares you sold out” and “Robert De La Cruz we will hang you" (a reference to the Castroite labor leader Solares, and Roberto de la Cruz, a leader of the COR of El Alto).

All of them, as a continental bloc, supported Palacios - the successor of Gutiérrez- in Ecuador. The result: today Palacios sent the army to ruthlessly repress the masses that rose up in Amazonia, taking 200 oil wells, confronting the Western Yankee monopoly (Oxy) that robs petroleum from them, paying $12 a barrel which it then sells for almost $70! More than 60 were injured and the army remains occupying Amazonia: [See Venezuelan oil workers statement above] This is the result of the suppression of the revolution in Bolivia and the fight of the Ecuadorian masses!

The new treachery that the workers in Latin America face has important consequences. For the Central American workers, the region has been transformed by the US under CAFTA into an enormous assembly plant with the complicity of Ortega (leader of Nicaraguan Sandinistas), Shafik Handal (leader of the Salvadoran FMLN) and all the old "commanders" living today as yuppies, servants of the restorationist Castro bureaucracy.

For the Chilean workers, it means the slavery and the flexibilisation of work under the TLC. This is the "anti-neoliberal model" of Lula, Kirchner, Chávez, Tabaré Vázquez and other servants of imperialism, and the one supported by the reformist left of WSF that back these agents of imperialism! For that reason, imperialism and the national bourgeoisies can breathe freely again.

In Argentina the struggle has been strangled

In Argentina, the big wave of workers fights for higher wages, that began last December, including the Telephone, Subway, rail, education, public sector and metal workers, was strangled by keeping the disputes divided, with separate contracts, and inflation destroying any wage gains. Meanwhile, with poverty line pensions and Work Plans [work for the dole] and with public sector workers wages frozen, with the health and education budgets the lowest ever, the bosses are raking off a huge fiscal surplus to pay the IMF external debt on time.

Thanks to this treachery of the union bureaucracy of the CGT and the CTA, which once more could count on the collaboration of the reformist left (that was thrust into the leadership by the workers in those fights), today the bourgeoisie breathes easier and admits that it " continues to do good business"

Under these conditions, the struggle of the workers of the Garrahan is at the head of the fightback and faces the concerned attack of the employer's association, the government and the union bureaucracy.

The reformist left met this attack by opposing all independent class actions opposed to the hated regime of the social pact. It destroyed, as soon as it was born, the Intersyndical, an attempt to link all sectors in struggle such as the Subway workers, because it challenged the bureaucracy to break the wage freeze imposed by the employer's association and backed by the union bureaucracy. . .

The World Social Forum promotes ‘democratic’ imperialism

It is the left of the World Social Forum, that made the truce with Palacios in Ecuador and Rodriguez in Bolivia; that is now led by the supposedly "nationalistic" Colonel Chávez, who supplies Venezuelan oil to the US despite the US massacre in Iraq, and who has not threatened the interests of the rich 31 families in Venezuela or the imperialist monopolies that control the Venezuelan economy.

It is the same left of the WSF that trusts the Parliamentary Commissions for "investigating" the class traitor Lula, the greatest servant of the Brazilian bourgeoisie and of imperialism in Latin America. The same left which with Tabaré Vázquez and the Communist Party of Uruguay, is ready to pardon the genocidal military in that country today, as Menem did in Argentina yesterday.

Thus, this policy of continental class collaboration tries to throw water on the fire of revolution to defeat the masses, so that the multinational companies and finance capital can retain in control of the hydrocarbons, and other resources and super-exploit the masses of our continent and oppress our nations.

But to successfully put out the fire, they need the renegade Trotskyists and their parties – that for decades in Latin American led the combative proletariat – to be used like “squeezed lemons” to sell to the most militant workers this bosses’ politics of oppression and plunder.

We are thus witnessing in Latin America the cynical and treacherous politics of class collaboration promoted by the Castro bureaucracy and all the liquidators of the Trotskyists Fourth International who have gone into the popular struggles armed with their collaborationist programs to contain the proletarian revolution.

The Resistance Continues!

But, just as in Iraq, the heroic resistance continues. The laws of history are stronger than any political apparatus, and will not leave unpunished the currents that in the name of the proletariat have gone over to prop up the citadels of power of the enemy, their states and regimes, promoting the "peaceful road to socialism", calling to fight for "what is possible", and supporting "from the left" all the collaborationist union bureaucracies of the continent, hated by the masses.

At the same time, a picket has been set up in front of the ranch of Bush in Texas, United States. There, hundreds of demonstrators spend days and nights, next to the mother of a soldier who died in Iraq, who blames Bush for his death and demands the immediate return of the troops. It is a symbol, a symptom of the awakening of the North American working class. In this awakening, which can bring about –along with the heroic resistance of the Iraqi masses – a new defeat of its own imperialistic bourgeoisie, which as in Vietnam, and open up the way out for the working class and the exploited people of Latin America.

They confront and resist the deceptions, the traps and the frauds of the treacherous leaders of the workers organisations, showing the way for the revolutionary movement. It is the Trotskyists, refounding the [Trotskyist] Fourth International that will rub the tinder to create the spark that sets the prairie on fire. . . .

Garrahan is the rallying call of the workers!

"They are too left", "they follow political objectives", "They cause too much discord", "are politicized", "they will not enter dialogue", "they are terrorists", are the way the bosses’ politicians try to discredit and isolate the heroic fight of the Garrahan workers and to the militant piquetero movement [unemployed], in order to defeat these workers in struggle. Cynical gangsters!

These are the people who are going to bring to Argentina in November, the greatest terrorist in the world, the genocidal Bush, while every day they serve him in the super-exploitation of the oppressed nation! This is the government and the employer's association that "are radicalized" against workers who request a miserable basic wage to be able to scratch a living from the family shopping basket while they work all their lives in the Hospital!

They are those who "are radicalized", paying to the IMF thousands of million dollars a year, and favoring the businesses of the slave driving employer's association! They are campaigning in the election "making politics" against the workers to boost their profits! And the workers have no right to fight politically for a living wage! No more begging! No more asking for permission to strike! No more any obligation to explain ourselves! . . .

The working class must win Garrahan!

The victory of Garrahan must be the victory of the whole working class. What this heroic fight and all the others underway need is a true and authentic class politics that opposes the regime and the government of the exploiters and its policy of wage slavery and sacking. It is a political fight in defense of public health and public education whose budgets have been plundered to pay to the IMF. For that reason, to win sufficient spending on health and education, wages, work, etc., it is necessary to confront and defeat the economic plan of the government, the employer's association and the IMF, uniting the struggles of the Garrahan with those of the teachers and university students who mobilized themselves in their tens of thousands in Cordoba and which are conducting militant campaigns in Mendoza and other provinces.

· All to the Garrahan to coordinate now!

· Enough! Out with all the bosses and the traitors!

Yesterday, thousands of workers in Brazil marched against the treacherous Lula to the shout of "the workers speak: out with all the bosses and the traitors!".

This is the shout that we must raise today in the militant vanguard of the Argentine working class, and this is the commitment of the international Trotskyists of Workers Democracy.

· Living wages and real work for all!

· For a basic wage of $1800 and month and real jobs for all!

· For a national committee of struggle to defeat the union bureaucracy!

· For a Plan of Action and a National Strike!

Article Condensed from:

WORKERS DEMOCRACY Nº 9 9^th August 2005

_{We fight for
Socialist Revolution!}

We fight to overthrow Capitalism

Historically, capitalism expanded world-wide to free much of humanity from the bonds of feudal or tribal society, and developed the economy, society and culture to a new higher level. But it could only do this by exploiting the labour of the productive classes to make its profits. To survive, capitalism became increasingly destructive of "nature" and humanity. In the early 20^th century it entered the epoch of imperialism in which successive crises unleashed wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions. Today we fight to end capitalism’s wars, famine, oppression and injustice, by mobilising workers to overthrow their own ruling classes and bring to an end the rotten, exploitative and oppressive society that has exceeded its use-by date.

We fight for Socialism.

By the 20th century, capitalism had created the pre-conditions for socialism –a world-wide working class and modern industry capable of meeting all our basic needs. The potential to eliminate poverty, starvation, disease and war has long existed. The October Revolution proved this to be true, bringing peace, bread and land to millions. But it became the victim of the combined assault of imperialism and Stalinism. After 1924 the USSR, along with its deformed offspring in Europe, degenerated back towards capitalism. In the absence of a workers political revolution, capitalism was restored between 1990 and 1992. Vietnam and China then followed. In the 21sst century only Cuba and North Korea survive as degenerate workers states. We unconditionally defend these states against capitalism and fight for political revolution to overthrow the bureaucracy as part of world socialism.

We fight to defend Marxism

While the economic conditions for socialism exist today, standing between the working class and socialism are political, social and cultural barriers. They are the capitalist state and bourgeois ideology and its agents. These agents claim that Marxism is dead and capitalism need not be exploitative. We say that Marxism is a living science that explains both capitalism’s continued exploitation and its attempts to hide class exploitation behind the appearance of individual "freedom" and "equality". It reveals how and why the reformist, Stalinist and centrist misleaders of the working class tie workers to bourgeois ideas of nationalism, racism, sexism and equality. Such false beliefs will be exploded when the struggle against the inequality, injustice, anarchy and barbarism of capitalism in crisis, led by a revolutionary Marxist party, produces a revolutionary class-consciousness.

We fight for a Revolutionary Party

The bourgeois and its agents condemn the Marxist party as totalitarian. We say that without a democratic and a centrally organised party there can be no revolution. We base our beliefs on the revolutionary tradition of Bolshevism and Trotskyism. Such a party, armed with a transitional program, forms a bridge that joins the daily fight to defend all the past and present gains won from capitalism, to the victorious socialist revolution. Defensive struggles for bourgeois rights and freedoms, for decent wages and conditions, will link up the struggles of workers of all nationalities, genders, ethnicities and sexual orientations, bringing about movements for workers control, political strikes and the arming of the working class, as necessary steps to workers' power and the smashing of the bourgeois state. Along the way, workers will learn that each new step is one of many in a long march to revolutionise every barrier put in the path to the victorious revolution.

We fight for Communism.

Communism stands for the creation of a classless, stateless society beyond socialism that is capable of meeting all human needs. Against the ruling class lies that capitalism can be made "fair" for all; that nature can be "conserved"; that socialism and communism are "dead"; we raise the red flag of communism to keep alive the revolutionary tradition of the' Communist Manifesto of 1848, the Bolshevik-led October Revolution; the Third Communist International until 1924, the revolutionary Fourth International up to 1940 before its collapse into centrism. We fight to build a new, Fifth, Communist International, as a world party of socialism capable of leading workers to a victorious struggle for socialism.

Class Struggle is the Bi-Monthly of the Communist Workers’ Group of Aotearoa/New Zealand.

CWG has fraternal relations with the members of the Liaison Committee for an International Conference of Principled Trotskyists and Revolutionary International Workers Organisations

Its members are: Workers’ Democracy (Argentina), Workers Revolutionary Party (Argentina); Workers Internationalist Group (Chile); Trotskyist Workers Nucleus (Chile); Trotskyist Fraction –TCI (Brazil); Workers’ Opposition (Brazil); Marxist Workers’ Party (Brazil); Marxist Trench (Brazil); Revolutionary Communist Collective (Brazil); International Trotskyist Fraction of Peru and Bolivia.

For a socialist pacific

Victory to Iraq!

The question of the popular front

STOP PRESS

Solving New Zealand’s oil crisis

Latin America

Garrahan fights for all Latin America

Imperialism has contained the struggles for now

In Argentina the struggle has been strangled

WORKERS DEMOCRACY Nº 9 9^th August 2005

_{We fight for
Socialist Revolution!}

Class Struggle is the Bi-Monthly of the Communist Workers’ Group of Aotearoa/New Zealand.

CWG has fraternal relations with the members of the Liaison Committee for an International Conference of Principled Trotskyists and Revolutionary International Workers Organisations

Mail address: PO Box 6595, Auckland, New Zealand.

Email cwganz@yahoo.com

http://www.geocities.com/communistworker/

http://www.redrave.blogspot.com

For a socialist pacific

Victory to Iraq!

The question of the popular front

STOP PRESS

Solving New Zealand’s oil crisis

Latin America

Garrahan fights for all Latin America

Imperialism has contained the struggles for now

In Argentina the struggle has been strangled

WORKERS DEMOCRACY Nº 9 9th August 2005

We fight for Socialist Revolution!

Class Struggle is the Bi-Monthly of the Communist Workers’ Group of Aotearoa/New Zealand.

CWG has fraternal relations with the members of the Liaison Committee for an International Conference of Principled Trotskyists and Revolutionary International Workers Organisations

Mail address: PO Box 6595, Auckland, New Zealand.

Email cwganz@yahoo.com

http://www.geocities.com/communistworker/

http://www.redrave.blogspot.com

WORKERS DEMOCRACY Nº 9 9^th August 2005

_{We fight for
Socialist Revolution!}