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Class Struggle 94 April-May 2011

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Bludgers BudgetBludgers BudgetBludgers BudgetBludgers BudgetAs we would expect from a NACT [National/ACT/Maori Party coalition government] regime backed by the Maori

Party, the 2011 Bludgers Budget marked a further attack on workers to boost profits. The main attacks were onKiwisaver, Working For Families, Accident Compensation Scheme, and plans for the partial privatisation of stateassets. Key boasted that he would create 170,000 new jobs, the same claim he made last year. Of course he wasright - he subcontracted job provision to Australia while NZ lost jobs. Key echoed Treasurys fraudulent claim thatthe NZ economy would grow at 4%, again similar claims made last year, and reached by Australia towed along byChina, while NZ had negative growth. Which country does this guy think he is in: NZ, Hawaii, China or Australia?We, however, not being NACTites or LABOURites, see this budget as reinforcing NZs role as a cheap labourcountry with its assets being primed for sale to China. Welcome to the Great South Sea Islands.

Kiwisaver cutbacks

State cuts back its

contributions, appears to putthe burden equally on workersand employers, but in factallows employers to take it offwage increases. Thus Kiwisaverbecomes like a US type workercontribution pension fund thatwill amount to workers savingfor their pension, withcompanies contributiondeducted from their wages,while at the same time thestate will cut back onGovernment Superannuation,

raise the age of entitlementetc/, thus shifting the burdenof paying for retiremententirely onto workers.

That amounts to a real wagecut and a rise in the rate ofexploitation. If Kiwisaver isprivatised then workers mayend up like US workers whohave had their corporate basedpension schemes worth billionsexpropriated to bail outcompany bankruptcies.

Privatised pensions have fineprint which says the bosses ownyour retirement as well as yourworking life! The only secureretirement for workers is toexpropriate theexpropriators, not only thepension funds but all thecorporate wealth the workerscreated through theirgenerations of labour.

Working For Families

Working for Families (WFF) was a Labour Party policy toredistribute tax (actually a tax rebate like the old rebate forchildren) to workers who had families. So its part of the

welfare system. The NACTs opposed it when it was introducedbut then left it in place until now when they have reduced

the rebates slightly for families

on higher incomes probablybecause this is middle NZ andpotentially NACT voters. And lotsof other nasty, mean cuts whereit hurts the most vulnerable.

Privatisation of state assets

NACTs propose the partialprivatisation of a number ofspecified State-ownedEnterprises namely the fourmajor power generators, SolidEnergy and Air New Zealand. In

an attempt to head off popularopposition to privatisation theNACTs propose partialprivatisation i.e. 49% privateownership 51% retained in publicownership. These are majorcorporations with good returns.

So what the NACTs are doinghere is grabbing nearly half fortheir own class, here andoverseas. They are trying tosweeten the pill by saying mumand dad investors will get

preference and this will boostkiwi ownership and the NZX.Haha, those mum and dad shareswill be gobbled up by corporatesdamn quick. CAFCA has a goodcritique form the standpoint ofNZ social democracy, that stateownership implies more publiccontrol than private foreignownership

In fact nationalisation is a form of collective capitalistownership since the state is the state of the capitalist class.What nationalisation does, however, is facilitate workerscontrol as a step towards the socialisation of capitalistproperty.

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So the answer to the NACTs part privatisation plans is tofight for nationalised property to be under workers controland for the big private corporates to be nationalised,without compensation, and under workers control.

Accident Compensation Corporation

The NACT regime will privatise Accident Compensation;

another step towards destroying the working class as the onlyforce able to stop social barbarism and human extinction. Thewhole point of privatising is to open up lucrative business tobosses and make the workers pay for it. Its an ideologicalreform sure, but its driven at every level by profits. Ideasdont exist without material roots. Bosses are looking to drivedown the costs of insuring workers on the job and paying fortheir accidents off the job, and insurance companies arelooking to make more profits from user pays. The pro-marketideology is just that. They want ACC privatised to shift thecost onto workers.

Reformist complaintsabout the ACC meetingsome noble ideal of the

community sharing thecost of accidents is anonsense for capital whichuses up the flesh andblood of workers, exhaustsnature, and driveshumanity towardsextinction, to make aprofit. Social democraticappeals to someredeeming feature ofcapitalism is merelyavoiding the calamity andweakening our ability to

stop it in time. What hasthe Labour Party got tosay about this BludgersBudget?

Labours shadowBudget

Labour opposes the cuts in the Bludgers Budget but has notcommitted itself to restoring them. It has made a point ofsaying that some cuts would still be necessary given theworsening debt situation. It has promised a small tax increasefor high income families and to introduce the EmissionsTrading Scheme on farmers in 2013 to raise $800 m over the

next four years for R&D.It committed to raising the minimumwage from $13 to $15 on hour. NACT and big business hit backwith claim that this would lose 5000 jobs unless Youth rateswere reintroduced. Labourites have countered with researchthat showed that raising the minimum wage in the US and inNZ did not see rising youth unemployment as hours worked byyouth increased (see Tapu Misa).

These research findings prove the Marxist view that risingwages are the spur to growth in economic productivity asemployers are pressured to introduce new technology andraise labour productivity to increase profits. The immensegrowth of capitalism over the last 150 years arises from thispressure. The Labour Party recognises the importance of

labour productivity growth but does not see this as increased

exploitation of labour and limits itself to strengtheningorganised labour to win a larger share of income. Yet thestatistics show that in NZ the productivity share of workershas declined to the point that even real wages have fallen.While Labours reformist perspective of maximising workersincome shares in the imperialist epoch of capitalism indecline cannot stop mass poverty, at least it is not openlycomplicit like the Maori Party in the NACTs bosses agenda ofNZ as a low-wage-asset-stripping country competing directlywith other low wage countries!

A Workers Budget

For the NACTs a workers budget is what they have toproduce at the WINZ office to prove they are not bludgersand can qualify for a benefit. Enough! The real BludgersBudget is part of the NACTs attack on workers to create acheap labour force and smash resistance to privatisation andasset sales to China. Labour has yet to take a stand on aBudget that puts workers needs before profits. The Greens 5

point alternative budgethas some immediate aimsbut spoiled by its dreamof managing capitalismas a sustainable,prosperous and faireconomy when it has tobe overthrown as aprecondition to oursurvival.

The closest we got to aWorkers Budget inParliament was whenHone Harawira of TeMana Party described theBludgers Budget as the

Key / Turia / BrashWatch me clap while mypeople get shaftedagain Budget. I haveseen GST go up, foodprices go up, petrolprices go up, houseprices go up,

unemployment go up, while the only thing to come down istaxes for the rich, and I intend to propose a radical wayforward that will: ease the plight of the poor scare theshit out of the rich and give Maori hope for a better future.

We say Enough! Tumeke! Outrage! Indignity!

Reverse the Budget cuts! Jobs for all on a living wage! Build fighting, democratic unions! Occupy the foreshore and seabed! Occupy all workplaces that close or sack workers! No privatisation of state assets, put under

workerscontrol!

Nationalise all corporate assets withoutcompensation and under workers control!

Build workers councils everywhere! For a general strike against the system that is

destroying us all in the name of profit!

For a Socialist Aotearoa in a United Socialist Statesof the Pacific!

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Brief Stuff

Quake City ResistsChristchurch continues to be the test bed of DisasterCapitalism in NZ proving the point that crises allow capital toprofit at the expense of workers. Or course crises can bemanufactured too as the sacking of ECAN shows. Dispensingwith the inconvenience and risks of the democratic process isjustified by declaring a state of emergency, especially anational emergency. This has enabled the NACT regime topass under urgency the Enabling Act to dispense with anydemocratic constraints in rebuilding Christchurch. MasseysCossacks are riding again, but atop growing herds of dairycows this time. There are fewer of them because these arecorporate farmers more often these days, some of them inthe NACT cabinet or very close to it.

The Enabling Act is a warning to the rest of NZ of what theNACT regime will impose if re-elected. The NACT cabinet ismade up of bosses who own large chunks of NZ assets. Theyare running the country like NZ Inc with the cabinet at theboard of directors. Christchurch residents are incensed at therole of Fletcher Building who will profit hugely after beingappointed by Cabinet to lead the rebuild. This is nothing new.Fletchers was founded around 1940 on the back of a massivestate contract to build army huts and state houses. JamesFletcher was seconded to become the Minister ofConstruction. Today the close relations between the NACTcabinet and big business like Fletchers vindicates Karl Marxview that: "The executive of the modern state is but acommittee for managing the common affairs of the wholebourgeoisie".

As we pointed out in Disaster Capitalism Downunder the NZruling class is seizing on the Christchurch earthquake tocreate business opportunities while at the same time makingworkers pay for their economic crisis. Over 80,000 adults andtheir families (from fall in eftpos cards used) have beenshunted around NZ to add to the floating reserve army oflabour of over 270,000 unemployed, putting downwardpressure on wages, and reinforcing NZs comparativeadvantage as a low-wage country which says Bill English is oneway to catch up to Australia. On top of that workers all overNZ have put their hands in their pockets to supportfundraising, attending concerts, supporting familiesrelocation out of Christchurch etc., contributing $73 million

to the Earthquake Appeal by May 17.

Compared with the contribution of workers, Govt is payingthe bare minimum. Govt is raising $8.5 billion in bonds forChristchurch but more than half of that goes to repaying loansfrom EQC, backing AMI and other costs so its actualcontribution to is around $4 Billion,yet it makes out that thecost of rebuilding has added greatly to the deficit justifyingmassive cuts in Kiwisaver, WWF, flog off 49% of state assets,and cuts in social spending.

This is their sob story to shift more of the cost of the crisisonto workers, in particular Christchurch workers. So theemergency payments going to unemployed have been stoppedfor most workers. The CTU says that support has been cutfrom 47,000 to around 4,000 workers. The Govt claims that

the situation is back to normal. But its clear from the factthat Westpac staff in Christchurch say they are being forcedto push loans and insurance policies on financially strugglingcustomers in the wake of the devastating Februaryearthquake that the situation is far from normal . The CTU

and its Labour Party backers wants a Worker AssistancePackage for Canterbury, including ongoing income support,job creation schemes, and skills training. So far, as we wouldexpect, there has been only a small commitment to skillstraining to fill the shortfall of labour for rebuilding.

The CERAs emergency powers allow the property rights ofindividuals and small businesses to be ridden over. Angrysmall business owners locked out of their businesses whilethey were being looted by cowboy demolition firms protested.Brownlee the CERA boss basically tells them to go to hell.Brownlie openly mocks even some larger business owners, asobstructing redevelopment in the TV coverage.

Others were not allowed to retrieve their personal property.The case of David Theobold shows what happens to peopletrying to enter property to retrieve personal property. Heentered his house as it was being demolished to retrieve avaluable computer hard-drive only after repeatedly failing toget permission. He was locked up for 2 weeks, given a mentalhealth assessment and treated like shit.

He is not the first, nor will he be the last. So while these

basic democratic rights and financial support of workers areabused and withdrawn, the NACT regime glosses over itsdisaster capitalism routine with photo-op events such as thevisits of royalty and celebrities like Prince Willie and RachelHunter.

What lessons can we learn from the way Disaster Capitalism isbeing applied in Christchurch? With so many lives in limbo andworkers dis-empowered, the least we can do is learn fromtheir experience - instructional for everyones future as thatis. While disguising the heightened rate of profit-gouging thatbusiness-as-usual could otherwise not deliver, DisasterCapitalism works most visibly at the maintenance of myth.While caring and charity wear thin with fading headlines,

gratitude is manipulated into political compliance toamorphous and obscure plans. Some prominent mythsmaintained by Disaster Capitalism are:

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1. Science understands what is happening and is here to helpyou: in fact underfunding and service cuts have long-sinceeroded the effectiveness of commercially-driven scienceresearch. Science didnt intervene to stop the collapse ofbuildings weakened by the September earthquake and savethe 182 lives lost in the February quake. Its primary role herehas become after-the-event pacification of the populacebecause panic and necessary evacuations would dent businessprofits - especially tourism and hospitality. Public goodscience is being misused for the purpose of businesscontinuity.

2. The public is involved in the reconstruction: all kinds ofelaborate ruses are in use for convincing workers that this isthe case - information talks, news and advertising media,websites and workshop engagement etc.(consultation hasbeen scrapped as too one-way) - when the actual outcome isthe removal of causes and mechanism for complaints. CERAhas carte blanche. After all, elected regional representationwas disabled by the NACT regime for the very same reason.City council and community board representatives have beenneutralised too. Appointment of community leaders ontorepresentative panels is sham democracy. Workers are being

tricked into ownership of harmful governance decisions.Exhaustion and bad roads have drastically cut back civic life,which is still prevented from accessing the city centre.

3. A level playing field exists for business to get back on itsfeet: small businesses like retailers are struggling to reopenin the wake of martial law, and their trade will go to bigretail chains and malls - benefiting big finance capital onlyand the monopoly capitalist state. Disaster Capitalism canbest be understood as accelerated monopoly capitalism.

4. Urgency means we are better off without sound planning:the Resource Management Act and every form of regulatorysafeguard have been sidelined by CERA authority over local

government, yet it was the building code - or whats left of it- that can claim first honour in saving lives. Parks andreserves are being temporarily utilised for profit-makinghousing etc services, and the city is being reshapedunilaterally by CERA. Port Lyttelton, for example, has beengiven free rein to rapidly expand export facilities by harbourin-fill.

5. You will be rehoused, paid for by insurance: everyoneaffected by the earthquakes faces large extra costs and nochance of full reimbursement. Workers housing equity isdisappearing into the state banking system - again, monopolycapitalism at work.

6. Your jobs, income and benefits are secure: yeah, right.There are frequent aftershocks, the most recent a 5.5 andthere will be more with no safety and security in sight forChristchurch workers.

The list of methods and myths by which Disaster Capitalismraises the economic rate of exploitation for monopolycapitalism - across all of working society and the environment- is still larger than this. The reaction of Christchurchworkers has been to wake up and smell the bullshit andpromote their own efforts at rebuilding the city. Workingpeople need to organise quickly to protect and extendtheir own interests through political struggle. We supportthe workers of Christchurch and the efforts of the unionsto organise them in this struggle as should all kiwi workers.

Roots of FascismIn a crisis capitalism faces the outrage of the unruly masses.This is because the capitalists want the workers to pay for thecrisis and they resist. The Arab revolution has got theimperialists worried. It is being fought for those sameostensibly Western values that have been rubbishedconstantly over the last century as imperialism has backeddictatorships in its client states. How to keep the lid on theunruly democrats? No longer can they install and removedictators without the masses appearing in Tahrir (Liberation)Squares to protest. Not only that, when dictators unleashtheir special murder squads Tahrir squares turn into thepeoples militias. In Libya and in Syria the pro-democracyuprising has become an armed struggle which opens thepotential for permanent revolution. Even to win basicdemocratic rights it will be necessary to confront and defeatthe state. Imperialism is therefore constrained to keep the lidon by posing as democratic (bombing for peace in Libya toprotect civilians) and thus converting pro-democratic

resistance to its military intervention into a threat todemocracy i.e. terrorism or crime.

Recognising this, the democrats try to be non-violent toavoid being demonised as anarchists or terrorists.Imperialism hypocritically demands pacifism from itsopposition while it indiscriminately bombs and strafes itsenemies! Capitalism criminalises political opposition usinganti-terrorist laws, torture and murder all the time claimingto be defending the values of family, society and civilisation.But in reality those values are based on exploitation andoppression. The patriarchal family is the backbone of theruling class and capitalist dictatorships. The bourgeois family

is not only the source of unpaid domestic labour, it is themain bastion of authority in the capitalist state. Men are usedto control unruly women as a matter of honour. In NZ thepatriarchal values of political leaders is notorious. Forexample, the NACT (National-ACT-Maori Party CoalitionGovernment) MP Paul Quinns slagging off of drunken womenrecently is all about shifting the blame for rape to unrulywomen. Widespread domestic violence is used to disciplinewomen and children the world over and is often taken toextremes by warlords like Gaddafi who use rape to instil fearin women and to impugn the honour of their men.

We can see historically that the patriarchal family (both in itspre-capitalist and capitalist forms) is the compost heap thatgives root to the authoritarian psychology that can bemanipulated and turned against a revolutionary working class.In Aotearoa this has a long history as petty-bourgeois andfarming families facing the disorder of the frontier, the land

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wars, and the volatility of farming have often been used (byreactionary politicians, etc) to whip up fear and repression ofboth Maori Whanau such as the Tuhoe and working classfamilies during periods of class struggle.

This is the poisonous patriarchal soil of fascist reactionagainst the militant labour movement and the threat ofsocialist revolution. Stevan Eldred-Grigg shows how NZexperienced a wave of pro-imperialist militarism before theFirst Imperialist World Warwhen middle class and gentrydressed their children in military-type unions and gangs ofmiddle class youth physically attacked socialist and anti-warmeetings (The Great Wrong War, 19-25).

But under capitalist crisis the family starts to breakdown.Poverty and unemployment, or what Marx calledimmiseration sets in. Working class families produce unrulychildren. The second line of authority is the schools and thenafter that the workplaces. These institutions use theirauthority to maintain the capitalist order. But when classstruggles break out undermining these institutions the statehas to step into the breech to politicise and criminalise thedissidents. It starts to actively repress working class

resistance to capitalist rule by ramping up the legal penaltiesfor dissent and arming the police to arrest and lock them upas in case of the Urewera 18.And it increasingly uses the timehonoured methods of sectioning or jailing dissidents.

Sectioning refers to labelling people as mentally ill andhospitalizing them under a section of the Mental Health Act.The NACT regime is about to launch a pre-emptive attack onthe unruly in the form of diverting around half of disabilityand sickness beneficiaries into the mental health system (seeFrom Welfare to Workfare in this issue). This is an attack onthe rights of beneficiaries to an income without being coercedby the state to work or accept treatment. Police inChristchurch following the earthquakes have already shown

what we can expect. They have the discretion to lock upanyone who is disorderly on the grounds of a risk of harm tothemselves or others. Christchurch police even went to thelengths of beating up an autistic youth they arrested for theftof light bulbs.

Against the powers of the capitalist state to sanction andjail any act of resistance, the working class has its ownpower as THE class that creates the wealth and which canprotect its interests by taking control of production and ofsociety. It has the capacity to replace the bourgeois familywith cooperative and collective labour. The tiny parasiticclass of capitalists then finds that its power and wealthdissolves back into the dead labour of generations of

workers which when expropriated by the working classbecomes the economic base of a socialist society.

Health ClassesThe NZ state under capitalist pressures (tendency for

fall rate of profit and periodic crises) tries variousrestructuring of healthcare to shift health costs ontoworking people; thus reducing the proportion that thestate pays. This serves the capitalist class by reducing

their taxes and propping up their otherwise fallingprofits (which the working class produced anyway). NZ

capitalism has cut health care costs in 2 main ways

cutting wages, andcutting funded services.

In mental health services trusts were created for thepurpose of providing services to clients who were no longerprovided for by public services. This occurred at the sametime as institutions - hospitals were closed. Community carehas always been on a tension with community dumping

(neglect) and the state driving down wage bills by contractingservices into private has been the underlying dynamic to this.Fortunately for the state this occurred at the same time asrising education and skill levels (% passes in education havesteadily increased). So this change may have been able to bedone without a noticeable loss in quality of care. However,

occasional media exposure of extreme cases of rest homeneglect shakes confidence in these services.

In the starting positions care giving roles health aide orcommunity support worker, the wages are near the statesminimum wage level; competitiveness for jobs, and lack ofunion organisation maintains this situation. The capitaliststate runs with an unemployed reserve army of labour, andthe Employment Contracts Act and scattered / smallness ofsites allowed employers to keep unions out of many newtrusts.

The access to fully funded free services has been made moredifficult. Health services were not funded to meet the needsof the population and so waiting lists became a typicalexperience of trying to access public funded services.Increasingly emergency departments turn away patients

sending them to private 24hr GP clinics instead. A newdefinition of an emergency is a barrier to free health care.Currently the District Health Board covering Queenstown isproposing a deal with local doctors (GP) wherebyemergency patients will have to see a primary healthpractitioner (Dr / Nurse, etc) before being passed onto theemergency service. A private health service is allowed tocharge a fee to the patient, so the states proportion ofhealth services decreases.

The policy of primary healthcare, was Labour governmentpolicy from 2000 2009. Primary is the frontline doctor theGeneral Practitioner (GP) who most people first see for a(non emergency) health need. Government had tried to shift

services from fully funded public hospital based services to GPand non-government organisation (NGO) providers. This cutcosts for the state since generally NGOs were payingfrontline workers less than the equivalent public services had.

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While the Labour government shifted some money (funding)to GPs they also tied GPs to contracts for their enrolledpatient population. Contracts forced GPs to provide after-hours medical services. GPs were grouped into largerorganisations PHOs = Primary Healthcare Organisations.This centralised and concentrated their resources into largerorganisations. PHOs had brought forward proposals to takeover some functions from the Public Health system, forexample, district nursing. Maori health was also organisedinto Maori PHOs and so a layer of Maori managers has beencreated while frontline workers remained low paid. ManyMaori organisations were able to super-exploit their workforce extolling workers into longer hours and more, while re-defining cultural values to do it for the whanau.

The working class approach to healthcare is that this is abasic human necessity and fair access for all is essential. Thecapitalist class has no interest in providing this. Organisedworkers were able to force a Labour government intoproviding public health services in 1935. This has steadilybeen undermined by the capitalist class complaining abouttheir falling profits and the costs of providing healthcare andusing the state to dismantle the welfare state. Capitalists

push user pays reforms through their governments.

The fact of private healthcare still existing in NZ, points backto a failure of the first Labour government to bring all Healthservices under public funding. Doctors or GPs were never fullyin the public system, specialists always wanted to chargetheir own rates. GPs in the poorer areas of the country raise

less money in fees from their enrolled patients, insteadrelying on government for the most part of their funding.Whereas GPs in the richer areas can charge higher fees and sorely less on government funding to provide service and takeprofits. The danger with this de-facto introduction of userpays health care is the access to services is unfair andquality of service uneven (eg. more GPs per person inRemuera than in Manurewa). Primary healthcare has alwaysbeen mainly user-pays because of privatisation of serviceproviders. It is an individualistic model of healthcare wherethe user is forced to pay.

Under crisis capitalism, the government is rewriting the rulesfor entry into health services and so keeps more services outof public health sending patients out to their GPs to pay.Each winter the District Health Boards have urged people tostay away from Hospitals emergency departments as theystruggle with staffing shortages and winter illnesses.

It is clear that capitalism will not consistently provide usableand accessible health services. Health workers (Doctors,nurses and the rest) cannot defend public health alone. Weneed to unite with the working class to fight effectively for

full public health services. The capitalist system must beburied before it buries us. The principle for organising thenew economy is, from each according to their ability to eachaccording to their need: Socialism.

Beneficiaries labelled Mentally illNational Seeks Mandate for Welfare Cuts

National plans to make the Welfare Working Groups notoriousrecommendations key election policy. The ethnic-cleansingstyle recommendations include forcing the sick and disabledinto work, long term contraception injections, compulsoryvaccinations, making single mothers with a second child goback to work when the baby is 14 weeks old and cuttingbenefits for child truancy, failing to get child health checksor refusing treatments.

A ministerial group (including Beneficiary Bashing Minister forSocial Development Paula Bennett, and Not AchievedEducation Minister Anne Tolley) will make the final decision,

and legislation is expected around September this year. WINZlooks set to be replaced by Employment and Support NewZealand (ESNZ) in July 2012, with all benefits being replacedby a single Job Seeker Allowance.

Benefits cut and no jobs

Benefits are at half their pre- 1991 levels in real termscompared to the minimum wage. A quarter of New Zealandchildren (and rising) live in poverty. Child abuse levels arethrough the roof. The Red Cross distributes food to hungrychildren in our schools. Food prices are soaring and 271,000are officially jobless. Aotearoas unemployment ratecontinues at 6.6%, up 0.5% over the year, and thats excluding

Canterbury. Anecdotally, staff at a North Shore WINZ officehave reported a rise in applicants from around 40-50 a weekto 800 a week since the recession began. Youth not in paid

work is staggeringly high at thirty five per cent.

Despite this alarming poverty and unavailability of jobs, theNational Government continues to pursue an unrelentingwork focus (Ministry of Social Development catch phrase)and plans to drastically slash the remaining benefits and toreduce considerably those on sickness and invalids benefits.

Thousands have already been taken off the invalids benefits

losing $50 per week. The Rebstock Razor gang wants toreduce spending by nearly a third from around $4.7b to $3.4bper year by 2011 (dishonestly represented as $47b and $34bwhich is the amount for the entire ten years.) It aims to cut

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100,000 people off the welfare rolls in the next decade abovethose who will get jobs with the projected economicrecovery. Overall, it hopes reduce those on a benefit from360,000 to 100,000 by 2021. It also plans to increase theproportion of beneficiaries having to seek work from 37%to77%; with possible work for the dole.

Commentator Gordon Campbell puts it this way: If theAmerican models for these reforms are anything to go by,those 100,000 people will not simply vanish they will turn upon our street corners, living out of cardboard boxes. At thesame time the Chief Executive of the Ministry of SocialDevelopment earns around $ 540,000 per year (2009 figures).Now how many ordinary wage and salary earners could liveoff that? (Radical, beneficiary activist, in Indymediadiscussion)

Not Having a Job is now Seen as a Mental Illness

In order to slash the numbers on the welfare rolls, a keytarget of the Welfare Working Group (Razor Gang) is the halfof the 145,000 sickness/invalids beneficiaries which it sayshave unmet mental health needs which prevent them fromworking. The ministry admits that it could take severalyears to turn these 72,000 mentally ill people into a sourceof profits. But we can't wait a year to start ... so we aregetting on with training people. Those people will beessential."

Professor Des Gorman, a member of the Rebstock Razor Gang,and chairman of Health Workforce NZ proposes that theGovernment trains more mental health nurses, and moregeneral practitioners totake a special interest inmental health andaddiction. He calls for ACCstyle rehabilitation to be

available, which no doubtroughly translates as workwill set you free (arbeitmacht frei).

While it is a good idea forthose making decisionsabout the lives of mentallyill beneficiaries to actuallylearn something about thesubject (as at present noneof the Regional HealthAdvisors or designated doctors working for WINZ have a clue);the new courses will undoubtedly be a vehicle for the

governments unrelenting work focus. Its likely to becomeincreasingly difficult for anyone (especially a trainee) toquestion this semi- fascistic approach whose real intent ishidden behind caring language.

Heres an example of the Welfare Working Groups misuse oflanguage. And heres the NZ Heraldeditorial , Work helps illbeneficiaries get better, replicating the MSD stories as ifthey were true, and their solutions as if they werecommonsense: Psychological disorders, led by stress anddepression, accounted for the entire increase in sicknessbenefits and a third of the increase in invalids benefits from1996 to 2002.

The trainees could well become essential, working for lowwages, employed by private contractors or NGOs, learninghow to diagnose mental health needs in every secondsickness beneficiary and prescribing work cures and benefit

cuts for most of them. Perhaps underpaid trainees might evenrun programmes at boot camps for the sick, mentally ill anddisabled, similar to those for law breakers and unemployedalready being criticised by John Keys Science Advisor.

And where is this Mental Health money coming from? Theshort answer is-beneficiaries and the sick will pay for it withcuts to benefits and services! Unlike in Australia, where A$2.2billion extra per year for five years has been provided tohelp the mentally ill into work , nothing extra has beenprovided in Nationals Budget. So the money has to come outof existing funds for Social Development and Health, despitetalk about $1.3b having been ring fenced for the project.

The view of unemployment as a mental illness is a form ofvictim blaming. Rather than admitting the truth that thecapitalist system needs unemployment to keep wages downand profits up, this view blames the individual for theirpredicament and suffering. It promotes the delusion thattherapies and drugs for the individual can solve the problemof unemployment. The only thing that can solveunemployment is to end the system that creates it!

Co-option of Health Professionals

Robert Steenhuisen, co-chairman of the National Committeefor Addiction Treatment spoke out in support of theseproposals. With a background in compulsory addictiontreatment for offenders, he said that group sessions wouldprobably work best for beneficiaries who often had multipleproblems besides addictions. The possibility that some peopledont like working in groups is not mentioned. He went on to

say "People have to reacha certain level of awarenessthat this is how their life isand that no one is going tomake it better for them

except themselves".

In this arrogantprescription, theres nomention of the socialcauses of peoples sufferingthat are largely beyondtheir control-unemploymentrates, poverty, socialisolation, racism, sexism,beneficiary bashing,harassment, state and

family violence to name a few. Instead we need to learn thatits all our fault!

Robert Steenhuisan does say one good thing though: Workingwith people in groups helped them realise they were not theonly ones with difficulties. The possibility is always there forpeople forced together on some ESNZ programme to actuallyunite together to fight for their rights.

The New Zealand College of Nurses uncritically reprints anoutline of the Work Focused Support approach of Dr DavidBratt, Principal Health Advisor of WINZ, (described by Radicalas a simple GP in Wellington) on their website. Theydescribe it as a more integrated approach to combiningmatters of health and disability with aspects of socialwellbeing which fits well with a nursing approach. Perhaps

this support has something to do with the fact that themajority of the Regional Health Advisors employed by WINZwere intended to be nurses.

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Extraordinary Powers of Health Professionals

WINZ Regional Health Advisors (some of whom are nurses, butat least one is unqualified) and designated doctors haveextraordinary powers as no case officer untrained in healthwould dare to reject their advice. Radical, a beneficiarycampaigner, points out in a discussion in Indymedia , that allthe RHAs and designated doctors have an absolute work

focus. The designated doctors (who dont know the clientand see them for only a few minutes) are often given farmore credence by the case officer than the beneficiarys owndoctor. Radical says:

I have seen bizarre and absurd "second opinions" that weretotally contrary to (what) the normal GPs or other healthpractitioners clients see...The onus is being put onto the illperson to "prove" that she/he is really as ill as doctor'smedical certificates state. Indirectly the Ministry also treatsmedical practitioners that are not working with them as"designated doctors" as possibly not being competent enoughto make the assessments they make.

The only option WINZ provides for a beneficiary who is nothappy with the decision of a designated doctor is to take thematter to a Medical Appeal Board. The decision of thisboard is final.

As Radical points out, WINZs unrelenting work focuscompromises medical ethics. The ethics of any healthprofessional surely require the health interests of the patientto be put first, rather than the employers interests to havethem on the labour market. Indeed the horrendous treatmentthat many people with health and disability issues have faced

by WINZ has in fact CAUSED enormous mental health problemsfor some people.

One commentator put it this way on facebook: They havetheir own doctors lined up-stacked with arseholes-just likeACC...I wanted to throw up.

Compulsory Treatment

Re-casting sickness or invalids beneficiaries as mentally ill,addicts, or akin to criminals provides an excuse forcompletely stripping them of their human rights-not that theyhad too many to start with!-and exercising total control overthem.

Many beneficiaries have spoken of the soft fascist, policestate or nazi-like way they are being treated. The currentproposals for compulsory treatment of beneficiaries arereminiscent of the Soviet post Stalinist era when politicaldissidents were forced to take neuroleptics, mind numbingpsychiatric medication; or of the identical forced drugging ofsocial dissidents (eg poets, blacks, lesbians and gays) in theUSA who were unfortunate enough to be diagnosed as beingmentally ill (See Mad in America by Robert Whitaker pps 211-219).

One person reported on facebook: Compulsory treatment hasalready started. People are being forced to take medicationor lose the benefit as it is seen as not making an effort to getbetter... even if the medication makes them worse, and thereare no other options.

What needs to be done?

Many beneficiaries are finding that their lives are beingincreasingly controlled by WINZ designated doctors, regionalhealth advisors, or case officers who are ignorant of ,unsympathetic towards, or plain hostile to their real needs;-such as an adequate income, genuine connection to others,and some autonomy over their own lives. Adding a layer ofmental health trainees and intensifying pressure to look forwork, is adding insult to injury.

Under this increasing pressure, beneficiaries are fighting backspontaneously and are starting to get organised. In one case"a woman (at DSW) who was obviously stressed and desperatefor some assistance was stone walled at the counter. Shepicked up her baby, 18month old and popped her on thecounter and walked away... Suddenly, there was this hugecommotion and the tone from the dept changed. (reportedon facebook).

Individually, beneficiaries resist WINZ decisions by makingappeals, sometimes with the help of advocacy groups, andone beneficiary is challenging the legal basis of entire WINZpolicies. Some beneficiaries are joining the new Te Manamovement to try to defeat Nationals policies.

What is needed is a combined fight back of beneficiariesand paid workers, with community organisations, anti-poverty groups, advocacy groups and unions workingtogether. Unions need to include beneficiaries in theirranks. The Unite union was set up to do this, but so far hasnot done so, apart from the Waitemata Branch which issuccessfully organising at a grass roots level.

The protests in North Africa and Europe have shown thatunemployed can indeed fight back, and even leadrevolutionary movements. This is giving inspiration andhope to beneficiaries here in Aotearoa.

We need to drive National out, fight in our communitiesand workplaces, and end capitalism. Expropriate theexpropriators!

In its place we need a socialist society where people worktogether to meet real human needs, where women andchildren are at the centre and not the periphery, andwhere vulnerable members are treated with caring andrespect..

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A Living EarthBill McKibben's 2010 book, Eaarth: Making Life on a ToughNew Planet. Earth is our only home. Global warming is real.

And its not conducive to better holidays. We fight it or wedie with no time for holidays. Our enemy? Fact: 6 of the 12biggest corporates build cars or pump oil to run them. Eitherwe disable these corporates or fossil fuels will kill us. Not justa collapsing climate but all the destructive wars fought overhydrocarbons that plague us. Its only a question of what willkill us first. It looks likethe weather is alreadyhaving a go.

Unfortunately McKibbenssolutions fall short of themark. He trots out theusual sustainable

growth, of thinkingslower, smaller, local,human scale, solutions.Its a matter ofconvincing the enemy tochange course by workingclose to home. Small,not big: dispersed, notcentralised. (120) Butfirst we have to convinceourselves. So what todo?

McKibbens vision fits

well with broad Greenactivism, educatingourselves about allaspects of GlobalWarming and thendedicating ourselves tohome-grown solutions to build sustainable alternatives for oursurvival. So we have to conserve water, food supplies and findnew sources of energy.

This reads like a Hollywood dystopia movie were a fewsurvivalists start civilisation again after a doomsday event.There is no talk of challenging and overthrowing the capitalistsystem that relies on oil-driven expansion to make its profits.

What about the solutions put up by James Hansen the pioneerglobal warming advocate currently touring Aotearoa? He hasdone more than any other scientist to discover and map thefast feedback effects that may cause a sudden climatemeltdown? Hansen says the "Greenland ice sheet is losingmass at 200 km3/y (cubic kilometres a year!), the Antarcticice sheet at 100 km3." And "Last time climate was 2 degwarmer, the sea level was 25m higher". Here is a very brightguy who surely knows that such a risk means that a revolutionis needed to avoid the end of Earth and Humanity as we knowit.

Back in January, 2009, Hansen said, "We cannot now afford toput off change any longer. We have to get on a new path

within this new administration. We have only four years leftfor Obama to set an example to the rest of the world.America must take the lead."

Yet Hansen is an activist only in the sense of calling for theCourts to charge fossil fuelcorporates or Congress tooutlaw coal mining - thoughhe has been arrestedprotesting open cast coalmining. But none of this hasthe urgency or the potentialto avoid his famous tippingpoint. Obamas four years

will soon be up and CO2emissions will continue tobuild up at alarming rates.

Clearly the solutions put upby global warming publicistsand activists are no waynear what is needed to stopa meltdown. The solutionmust be the overthrow ofthe social system that hascreated the problem -production for profit and notneed.

Our big need is to survive,but that is not profitable. Sowe have to eliminate profitsto survive. Capitalism must

die or we die. Climate change activists have to be anti-capitalists.

Fortunately a new generation has made the connections. Lookto the Arab revolution and the educated youth coming upagainst the moribund profit system that starves and repressesthem. They revolt for freedom and form democratic organsto fight for it. Dictators shoot down unarmed protestors, yetthe revolution strengthens. They have nothing to lose but alost generation and a lost planet.

Capitalist barbarism has finally met its match. The educated,unemployed youth rise up against total system dysfunctionand breakdown. This is the only road to human survival. Themasses mobilise across borders to form regional, continentaland ultimately global socialist society in which allocation ofresources to meet basic needs are met.

The necessary by-product of this social revolution will be theliving Earth.

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MayMayMayMay DayDayDayDay OutrageOutrageOutrageOutrageMayday 2011 marks a major step forward for workers internationally in its struggle against the imperialist rulingclasses. It is the year of the Arab Spring that may soon become a European and Asian summer. Today capitalist

imperialism is experiencing a major structural crisis that can turn out to be a terminal crisis if the workers of theworld advance towards the socialist revolution. Here is our balance sheet of the state of class struggle.

The crisis is one of falling profits as the extraction of valuefrom workers fails to keep up with investment. This leads tothe vast build-up of surplus capital that cannot be investedprofitably in production that is then forced to speculate inexisting values of commodities including food and fuel,driving up their prices. The great recession that began in WallSt in late 2007 was a crisis of collapsing housing debt asworkers could no longer pay their overpriced mortgages. Theeffect nearly caused the breakdown of the capitalist system.The ruling classes only survived because they forced throughstate bailouts to pay for enough bad debts to allow the major

banks and corporates to survive. Private debt was turned intopublic debt so that the cost of paying for this debt became aterrible austerity forced on workers everywhere as wages,jobs and social services are cut back to allow tax cuts for thecapitalists. The near collapse of the markets was a massiveloss of legitimacy for capitalism. The Empire had no clothes.Workers have now shown that they will not pay for thebosses crisis; enough is enough say the outraged lostgeneration of youth, who are rising up and fighting for an endto rising prices, austerity,dictatorship, corruption and warimposed by imperialism. We are notcommodities to be bought and sold bythe banks.

New Zealand semi-colony

Will NZ become part of the ArabSpring? Will there be a South Pacificwinter? In the imperialist epoch(which is the final stage of capitalismthat began around the beginning ofthe 20th century) a few imperialistpowers have grown stronger and nowmonopolise the world economydominating smaller countries as neo-colonies. The US is No 1 imperialist butit is being challenged by China as arapidly rising imperialist power.

Capitalist crises in this epoch lead towars between the imperialist powersto grab part of the globe off oneanother. Since the 70s capitalism has experience a long crisiswhich has had ups and downs but which today threatens to gofrom global recession to global depression.

For NZ, a neo-colony dominated by the US and Australia, andincreasingly China, its fate is to be fought over by theseimperialist countries for cheap labour and cheap resourcesand assets. Most big business in NZ is owned by Australia andthe US but China is making a late run under the FTA with NZto buy up land and assets in the agricultural sector. The US iscountering with a TPAA to try to buy up cheap assets in new

technology and services. As NZs economic standing has fallenin the period since the 80s 100s of thousands of workers havemoved to Australia. Economically speaking the biggest

influence on the NZ economy is the fact that the NZ economyis integrated into the Australian economy and increasinglyinto the Chinese economy. That is why it helps to start bythinking of NZ as Australias Eastern Territory (because the NZstate will soon have about as much sovereign autonomy as theNorthern Territory) or Chinas Great South Islands, in itssphere of influence like much of the South Pacific. One couldadd that NZ bosses have outsourced our cultural readentertainment sphere to Hollywood so that if the TPAAcomes into effect, our creative ideas will become theintellectual property of Hollywood hence the capital being

renamed appropriately Wellywood. The only question iswhether workers will remain passive and see NZ slotted into aGreater Pacific division of labour where Labour and Capitalmobility is unrestrained, or whether workers wake up and riseup to join the uprising elsewhere to demand basic democraticrights a living wage, and then find out that they have a socialrevolution to make these possible.

Arab Spring

At the moment the Arab revolution ispinned down by NATO in the West andIsrael to the North East and Saudi tothe West. In Libya NATO's interventionhas co-opted the revolutionary fightersbehind the TNC. Israel is preparing forits worst nightmare, that the Egyptianmasses split the army and join forceswith the Palestinians. So it is preparingthe ground for a new invasion of Gaza.Alarmed, Fatah and Hamas factions aretrying to quickly do a 2 state deal tokeep the lid on a new intifada. Tobreak the stalemate, the Egyptianrevolutionaries have to open theborders between Egypt and Libya andEgypt and Gaza. This would bring tobear the most populous Arab masses indirect confrontation with US/NATO and

its chief gendarme in the Middle East,the Zionist state of Israel, and theSaudis.

But to do this the revolutionaries in Egypt have to renew theirrevolution, mobilise the working class in a general strike, splitthe army, win over its ranks, remove the dictatorship of theMubarak high command, and create a popular militia that canjoin forces with the Libyan revolutionaries in the West andopen the gates to Gaza and unite with the Palestinians againstthe Zionist regime. The advance of the revolution in this waywould be met by a massive armed intervention by NATO thatwould bring the world's workers onto centre stage againsttheir imperialist ruling classes to defend that revolution.

Revolutionary Trotskyists must seize the time to expose anddefeat the bureaucratic reformist misleaders of the workers.

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Cuba

Cuba is on the brink of capitalist restoration. Can it bestopped? One could say that Cuba has dressed up restorationin the same language as that used for the Chinese model of'market socialism' e.g. actually existing state capitalism. Itconverges with the much vaunted Chavista '21st centurysocialism'. This would explain why Cuba is about to complete

a historic counter-revolution by the Chinese method of manydefeats and repressions of workers over the decades and thensealing the historic defeat by containing the Latin Americanworkers behind the Bolivarian popular front with Chineseimperialism. We cannot stress this enough. Chavez and Castroare part of an 'anti-imperialist' bloc with China and semi-colonial semi-fascists like Gaddafi and Assad to stop the newwave of workers uprisings against the global crisis which canplay the critical role of breaking up the popular fronts and thefake 'market socialism' that ultimately serves imperialism.(see article on Cuba).

So will the Cuban bureaucracy succeed in completing therestoration process before the world revolution destroys theStalinist/fake Trotskyist barrier and brings a politicalrevolution to Cuba? It depends on whether the Arab revolutiondeepens and spreads into the rest of Africa, into Europe, Asiaand Latin America, to break the strangle hold of theStalinist/Menshevik popular front which ties the workers toimperialism is destroyed. Only if the worlds workers breakwith the popular fronts, with social democracy, and advancethe international revolution, will Cuban workers win thesupport they need to overthrow the Castroite bureaucracyand take political power to defend workers property.

Aotearoa Election Year

The crisis of the NZ semi-colonial economy is one ofrestructuring labour and capital assets (see the analysis of

restructuring in Disaster Capitalism Downunder) too meet theneeds of international capital. This means driving down wagesfurther and offering state assets cheap to internationalcapitalism. In NZ the international sector of capitalrepresented by Alan Gibbs and members of the BusinessRoundable has grown impatient with the slow pace of marketreforms to create opportunities for profitable investment.MMP created parties of the centre-right and centre-left thathad to build coalitions that tended towards the centre.Parties on the left and right moderated their agendas so asnot to lose the centre. That middle NZ was the middle classof self-employed, small business and better paid workers. Butsomething has changed. ACTs right wing coup is now matchedby the emergence of the Te Mana Party on the left which sees

a return to the open politics of class struggle.

As we have seen since 2008 the global economic crisis haspolarised the capitalist ruling class efforts to solve the crisisat the expense of the masses of ordinary people, and thosepeople who are getting angrier and starting to put up a fight.NZ is not isolated from this growing global class antagonism.So the centre no longer holds as Brash on the right is boostingACTs claim to urgent policy reforms that can restore capitalistprofits by a return to Rogernomics Mk 2, smashing unionpower, flogging off state assets, tax cuts for the rich, lowwages, non-existent welfare etc.

Te Mana Party

On the left, the split in the Maori Party along class lines hasseen the launch of Te Mana. Maori Party is left with the rump

of the anti-worker iwi elites and their patronage system ofhangers on. Te Mana will attract a healthy minority of thoseMaori and non-Maori workers who are starting to stand up andfight the right wing assault on living standards, jobs, thewelfare state, the unions and ownership and control of stateassets. ACT will pull National to the right while Te Mana willpull Labour to the left. But both will stay firmly committed tothe global capitalist class and its profit system. Nationalbecause it represents the NZ capitalists whose profits dependon further attacks on workers. Labour because its existence isdevoted to promising to extract more productivity fromworkers.

So those who genuinely fight to defend the working class in TeMana will soon realise that parliament is a bosses talk shopthat masks a state machine dedicated to suppress workers.They will organise outside parliament to build strong,democratic fighting unions to take on the bosses where ithurts most, the workplace, by striking, occupying and takingcontrol of the productive system to produce for need and notprofit. In this they will not be alone as all around the workersare standing up like the Egyptians, fight back like thePalestinians, Libyans and Syrians, and opening the

revolutionary road. This creates the opportunity forrevolutionaries to convince the masses that the only road tofreedom is the road to socialism and that there is no half-way house of bourgeois parliament on that road.

Revolutionary Party

While the Arab revolution is the reawakening of the nationalrevolution, lots of Western Trotskyists have not woken up andtail the Stalinists and semi-colonial regimes calling forConstituent Assemblies as democratic half-way houses onthe road to socialism. This is to follow the Stalinist stagetheory of national roads to socialism and the anti-imperialistunited front with the national capitalists. This so-called left

backs progressive national capitalist leaders because it hasno faith in the working class as the revolutionary class. Itactively blocks the revolutionary independence of the workingclass by locking it into popular fronts with the bourgeoisie.This is true of the Chavez Bolivarian popular front that tiesthe hands of the Latin American masses behind the Chineseimperialists in the name of 21st century socialism. Nowonder that Chavistas and the Castroites regard the dictatorsKaddafi, Assad and Ahmadinejad as their allies. They are allbourgeois autocrats who start off as fake socialist leaders ofpatriotic fronts only to become more and more open servantsof imperialism.

Marxists begin with the revolutionary class, the working class,

and have a program to advance its struggle. A revolutionaryprogram needs a revolutionary party to implement it inpractice. An international program needs an internationalparty to unite the struggles of workers all over the world. Aparty is only as good as its program. The program is tested inthe hot points of the struggle. That is why we are for thePermanent Revolution in North Africa and the Middle Eastwhich wins national liberation only by a workers revolutionand workers government in power; for the political revolutionin Cuba and North Korea that overthrows the Stalinistbureaucracy to stop it becoming a new capitalist class; andfor socialist revolution in all the imperialist countries,including China, to expropriate the tiny dictatorships of thebourgeoisie and replaces it with the dictatorship of the mass

working class. We stand by this program and are confident itwill stand the critical test in the hands of the revolutionaryproletariat.

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Te Mana PartyThe Mana Party is the brainchild of the reformist left that sees the time is ripe to challenge Labour and mobiliseagainst the New Right. Leading players include leader Hone Harawira, Chairman Matt McCarten, Maori lawyer

Annette Sykes, pakeha radical Sue Bradford and pakeha activist John Minto. They are all democratic socialists orreformists who see social change being won through trade union and parliamentary struggle. They see that thereis a rising tide of opposition to the NACTs but no Labour Party fightback. There is a danger that young workers,especially Maori youth who face terrible unemployment, family breakdown, alienation and self-destruction, willbear the brunt of the rabid extreme rightwing agenda that another NACT government will unleash on the workingclass.The Mana party is the ideal vehicle to rally workers bothMaori and non-Maori against these anti-worker attacks.Harawiras mana with Maori workers survives despite histaking his grassroots activism into parliament. Harawiraorganised the 2004 Foreshore & Seabed (F&S) Hikoi. It was agreat move but instead of staying on the streets it headed forparliament. It got co-opted by Turia who resigned fromLabour and was used her by-election victory to launch the

Maori Party (MP) to join forces with National to defeatLabour's F&S Act. At the time we argued that instead of goingto parliament Harawira should have taken his fight intooccupations of the F&Sthat could be supported byMaori and non-Maoriworkers thus advancing theunity and strength of thelabour movement. Afternearly 3 years of sitting inthe anti-worker/ anti-Maori NACT/MP govtHarawira finally reachedbreaking point and

resigned. His break withthe MP and forming TeMana to force a Te TaiTokerau by-election,created the opportunityfor leftwing reformists toact.

Harawira has a history of activism as a Maori nationalist. Thisled him into the Maori party where Maori nationalism was theuniting force. But Te Mana has appeal to non-Maori youth andother activists too. Has Harawira realised that Maoridom isdivided along class lines that he must represent Maori workersagainst the MP representation of iwi capitalism? Perhaps he

now agrees that only a united working class can advance theinterests of Maori workers. This realisation would sit well withthat of Matt McCarten, the Maori President of Unite union,and Mike Treen, the pakeha National Secretary of Unite.Unite under their leadership has recruited around 8000 younglowpaid workers in the last 5 years many of them young Maoriand Pasifika as well as recent immigrants.

Te Mana is the ideal vehicle to project Unites politics intoparliament. McCarten is a tried and true politician who tookthe Alliance into a decade of parliamentary dead end dealsbut still has huge mana with political activists. Mike Treen, along-time supporter of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, arguesthat Te Mana is a progressive step towards the overthrow ofNZ capitalism. He offers a more hard left alternative to thedominant parliamentary focus of Mana seeing socialistrevolution as the ultimate goal of its program. Treentherefore offers to young activists turning left the scenario

that paints Mana as a radical breakthrough in NZ politics.

Te Mana has already got several strong political demandsincluding the (re) nationalising of power, water and housing;an end to asset sales; and end to the 90 Day Fire at Will Act;and a Hone Heke tax (sometimes called financial transactionstax) that would replace GST. On the face of it these are anti-neoliberal demands. They are more against the new rights

market politics than against the capitalist system itself. Theyare similar to 'anti-capitalist' demands that try to make themarket serve socialism. Many of today's left reformists look to

Chinas brand of marketsocialism as analternative to capitalism.For example the Castrobrothers and HugoChavez are seen asbuilding marketsocialism influenced byChina, though Chavezcalls it 21st centurysocialism and the Castro

brothers see it asdefending Cuba's 20thcentury 'socialism'.

The problem is that thisperspective is unreal asChinas marketsocialism has nothing to

do with socialism. The re-introduction of the market to Chinaled to the restoration of capitalism. China is now a statecapitalist and imperialist country. In Cuba the re-introductionof the market is at the point of restoring capitalism. Only amajor upsurge of Latin American workers can stop this andthe defeat of the Cuban revolution. The common theme of

'market socialists' is that it can be introduced from 'above' bya bureaucratic or bourgeois leadership rather than anindependent working class from 'below'. So long as Mana Partyis led by left reformists, its focus will be on returning activistslike Harawira, Bradford and Minto as MPs to pressure Labourand the Greens to the left, rather than a working classmovement that challenges capitalism from below.

What is progressive about Te Mana is that its program willappeal to many angry workers, especially youth like those wesee rising up in North Africa, the Middle East and Europe.They will see it as a forum and movement that can defend theworking class against the right wing attacks of National andAct parties. But they will find that so long as Te Mana limitsitself to putting pressure on parliament that it cannot win anymajor gains, or be able to defend what gains have been wonin the past by strikes and protests. All those historic victorieswere forced on parliament by struggles outside parliament.

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To get a living wage and benefit and to create jobs for all TeMana will have to build a party that is capable of taking thefight to the capitalist class directly by rebuilding the unions asfighting, democratic organs capable of strikes, occupations,and defence committees, and ultimately capable of creatinga workers government and planned socialist economy.

We will participate in Te Mana Party so long as we are free topromote our revolutionary program and argue for thefollowing proposals within the democratic norms of theConstitution.

Propose that the Te Mana Party Constitution statesits purpose is anti-capitalist and pro-socialist andthat its objective is a society in which production iscooperative and for need and not profit.

Propose that the Te Mana Party develops as ademocratic, activist party whose main base is in theMaori and non-Maori working class. Members ofParliament act as the representatives of the Partyand not its executive.

Propose that internal democracy is based on anannual Congress where decisions including elections

of leaders are based on votes delegatedproportionately to representatives of recognisedconstituent groups such as Maori, migrants, youth,women, unions, etc

Cuba for SaleCuba is on the final throes of capitalist restoration. The 6th Cuban Communist Party Congress held in April 2011resolved to make major changes for the Cuban economy to overcome its stagnation. They represent a wholesaleembrace of the capitalist market. No longer limited to the international sector where foreign corporates havemade joint ventures with state corporates for years, but for the whole economy. Cubans are now beingencouraged to adopt market practices such as buying state property as private property and employing wageworkers. Thus the capitalist market will replace state allocation of resources as the main mechanism of theeconomy. Marxists analyze this as a shift from state planning to the law of value, and hence a shift from aWorkers State, albeit deformed from its birth in 1959, to a Capitalist State.

The Cuban bureaucracy hasruled in place of workers,and thus deformed thecharacter of the workersstate since the revolution. Ithas played a counter-revolutionary role in theclass struggle since itbecame dependent on theSoviet Union in the early1960s. Cuba modelled itselfon that StalinistDegenerated Workers Stateand its theory of socialism

in one country cutting itselfoff from the workers in therest of Latin America and Africa where it consistently backedthe national bourgeois leaderships against popular anti-imperialist struggles.

To cite one glaring example, Castro visited Chile to backAllendes parliamentary road to socialism against theindependent armed struggle of the organized workers. ThePinochet coup was the result. Despite its loyalty to the SovietUnion the parasite bureaucrats of the Cuban CP learned thelesson from its collapse that workers property could nolonger allow it to extract its privileges from workers labor.But to avoid the fate of the USSR which opened itself up tocapitalism by means of rapid shock treatment, Cuba lookedtowards Chinas gradual restoration of capitalism. It began toopen a sector of the economy to foreign private investment

and found that the newmarket relations withimperialism were much morelucrative for the bureaucracythan trying to defend theplanned economy. So it nowseeks to complete theprocess and turn itself into anew bourgeois class. TheApril Cuban CP Congressmarks a decisive break fromthe revolution and thesealing of the capitalistcounter-revolution as a world

historic defeat of theinternational working class.

Following Chinas capitalist road

The Cuban bureaucracy, desperate to become a newbourgeoisie has sold capitalist restoration using the samelanguage as that used by the Chinese CP to cover itsrestoration of capitalism - 'market socialism'. Chinaunderwent a deformed workers revolution in 1949 where thebourgeoisie were overthrown and expropriated, but where thebureaucracy usurped the working class to rule CommunistChina as a privileged caste living off workers labor. But the

planned economy underwent long term stagnation due to itsisolation from the world economy and its failure to developthe forces of production.

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A faction of the bureaucracy the capitalist roaders tookpower and opened up the economy to the capitalist market.Resistance to restoration was decisively suppressed atTiananmen in 1989. In 1992 at the 14th Chinese CP Congressand at the political committee meeting that immediatelyfollowed the Chinese bureaucracy formally took the decisionto restore capitalism and the law of value to organize theeconomy in place of the state plan. The CCP sold thisfateful decision as market socialism to disguise the end ofthe Deformed Workers State and the emergence of a newcapitalist state.

Since that time China has reintroduced capitalism in thewhole of the economy. It encouraged imperialist powers toplay a central role in revolutionizing production in the exportsectors, rapidly accumulated capital in the state sector andadopted new technology. Today China is an emergingimperialist economy now recognized not only as an economicrival to the US and EU imperialist powers, but also a politicalrival that has become a model for many semi-colonialcountries to break away from the domination of US and EUpowers. This is clearly the case in Cuba where the Castoite CP

since the demise of the Soviet Union has looked to China asthe socialist alternative to US imperialism, and thus asuccessful model for Cuba to follow along its own capitalistroad.

Chavista Popular Front

Cubas capitalist road converges with the much vauntedChavista '21st century socialism'. This is the key to the defeatof Latin American workers which is necessary to allow Cuba tocomplete its historic counter-revolution. Chavez Bolivarianrevolution in Venezuela (and which leads the ALBA countriesincluding Bolivia and Ecuador) has trapped Latin Americanworkers behind a popular front with China. Chavez famously

talks of walking hand in hand with China towards 21st centurysocialism. It is the counter-revolutionary role of the Chavistapopular front in Latin America that allows Cuba to complete ahistoric counter-revolution by the Chinese method of manydefeats and repressions of workers over the decades and thento complete that historic defeat. It follows that if the Cubancounter-revolution is to be defeated before it is altogethervictorious, it is necessary to smash the Bolivarian popularfront. We cannot stress this enough. Chavez and Castro arepart of an 'anti-imperialist' bloc with China and semi-colonialsemi-fascists like Gaddafi and Assad to stop the new wave ofworkers uprisings against the global crisis-uprising which canplay the critical role of breaking up the popular fronts and thefake 'market socialism' that ultimately serves imperialism.

So will the Cuban bureaucracy succeed in completing therestoration process before the world revolution destroys theStalinist/fake Trotskyist barrier to socialist revolution in LatinAmerica and brings a political revolution to Cuba? It dependson whether the Arab revolution deepens and spreads into therest of Africa, into Europe, Asia and Latin America, where thestrangle hold of the Stalinist/Menshevik popular front whichties the workers to imperialism is destroyed, and theinternational revolution advances to victory. Of course thismeans first and foremost a program for political revolutioneven at this late stage in Cuba.

Transitional Program (continued)

Reality is complex and Marxists know that simplifying itunnecessarily results in tragic outcomes for the toilingmasses. We are not 'objectivists.' We do not believe the 1938program of Political Revolution against the usurpers of theworkers' political power, the Stalinist parasite bureaucracy,will suffice in the Cuban case to produce a healthy workersstate on the developmental path to socialism andcommunism. Methodologically speaking the "TransitionalProgram" prepared us to analyze whatever situation wouldcome the workers' way. But this is not at all to say that itgave us an exhaustive catalogue of historical possibilities, assome sectarians would have us believe.

As the capitalist restoration has been underway for some timeand has now, with the firing of a half million workers, it hasgathered speed and force, increasingly the TransitionalDemands of the program for socialist revolution areobjectively called for. As the Castroite bureaucracy goesabout transforming itself into a Chinese-model 'red'bourgeoisie, the Cuban working class must see in itself its ownbest hope for reversing this historic defeat by overthrowingthe usurpers of the workers' political power and 'expropriating

the expropriators' of the social wealth, of the labor of therevolutionary generations. Today combined tasks of thepolitical revolution (against the bureaucracy) and socialrevolution (to defend social property, seize capitalistproperty, and put it under workers control) are on theagenda. To accomplish these tasks moreover, they need morethan hope; they need a vanguard internationalist workersparty of their own making, a new International, a World Partyof Socialism, based on the 1938 Transitional Program, onewhich never subordinates their well being or future to alienclass interests.

The Cuban working class remains the best hope in reversingthis historic defeat by overthrowing the Castroist bureaucracywhich is on the point of transforming itself into a copy of the

Chinese red bourgeoisie. Armed with a revolutionaryworkers' internationalist program, the Cuban workers need tomobilize and rally behind them the Latin American massescurrently fenced in behind the Chavista Popular Front. Herewe have a program for socialist revolution that must breakfrom the popular front, exposing its leaders as bourgeoisBonapartists who while posing left in the anti-imperialistfight, are actually the agents of imperialism. No betterweapon to explode the Chavista popular front is the exposureof its complicity in defending the dictatorships in North Africaand the Middle East. Why does Chavez defend Gaddafi andAssad the two most murderous dictatorships posing associalist? Because Chavez recognises in their bloodysuppression of the masses, precisely what steps he will have

to take to repress the masses when it becomes clear to themthat he too is the agent of the imperialist bourgeoisie!

The role of revolutionaries today then is to awaken the youthvanguard who are leading the revolution in North Africa andthe Middle East, with our program for Permanent Revolution,and to fight for the unity of this vanguard with the workersorganized in the base of the unions, to fight for socialistrevolution, defeating by armed struggle not only thedictatorships imposed by imperialism, and the facade ofdemocratic imperialism represented by social democracy inthe imperialist countries, but also and most critically, thedeath trap of the Chavista popular front that ties the hands ofthe vanguard of the revolution behind Bonapartists whose role

is to prepare for the full on fascist reaction when it becomesclear to imperialism that it faces a revolutionary challenge toits class rule.

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Zionism: A roadmap to unending conflictZionism: A roadmap to unending conflictZionism: A roadmap to unending conflictZionism: A roadmap to unending conflict

A Zionist Youth

Having been raised in a Zionist household, going to Hebrew

school, buying memorial trees in Israel as a youth forgrandparents as they passed away, being taught that thewhole world hates us and that Israel is our only safe refuge,being hated as a Jew-boy by my Catholic home town co-youthfor "killing their lord", being finally accepted in 1967 whenIsrael showed it "had some balls" (meaning mine must also behanging to the floor). I have experience with anti-Semitism inthe concrete form of boots in the ribs and a metal lunch boxsmashed against this "faggot-Jew-boy's" face, so theZionist claim that Israel wasour last refuge and that theworld hates us was myexperience as a youth

growing up in 1960sAmerican suburbia. Sincethen I have seen and foughtwith American flag waving,swastika tattooed,jackbooted wearing Nazithugs in the streets of SanFrancisco, Walnut Creek,Boston and Berkeley so Iknow in a way only bruisedknuckles and the taste ofblood can teach one of what Ispeak.

A seminal part of my trainingas a Zionist youth was thatIsrael was "a land withoutpeople-for a people without land" we could point to MarkTwain who visited the area and reported that it was empty,barren, desolate and uninhabited. So why shouldn't it be ours?

And just last weekend as we listened to and discussed thePrime Ministers tongue lashing of Obama for stepping out ofline on the 1967 boarders issue ,my father reminded me ofTwain's observations in Innocents Abroad. But what is rarelymentioned about Mark Twains trip is: Palestines arableland is only 17% of its total area, that Mark Twain visited inthe middle of the hot Mediterranean summer, and thatMark Twains visit was brief by all accounts, and onlyencompassed the areas that were cited in the Bible. IndeedTwains comments about Greece were quite similar to thoseabout the Holy Land; one could get an impression that Greecealso was abandoned to the ghosts of Zeus and Hera.

The Israeli hero in 1967 was General Moshe Dayan a man ofimpeccable Zionist credentials. Lets hear what he has to sayabout how Israel was settled. Jewish villages were built inthe place of Arab villages. You do not even know the namesof these Arab villages, and I do not blame you becausegeography books no longer exist, not only do the books notexist, the Arab villages are not there either.

Well that contradicts the rhetoric (and the Zionist youth

training received at Hebrew school and Hebrew summer campwhere we sang the Hatikva); so there were people there? Whothe hell were they and what were they doing there? How did

we get rid of them? Could this be true? Not possible, we arethe dispossessed coming home not them. So I found the bookRighteous Victims by Benny Morris a highly regarded Zionist

historian.

Morris draws his own subjective pro-Israel conclusions but hisbook is full of powerful historic observations:"Most of the settlers who came in the First and Second Aliyotlived, at least for a time, as illegal residents. They entered astourists or pilgrims and overstayed their permits, or theyentered illegally." (p. 41 Morris)

"A land without people for apeople without a land" was theZionist slogan-originating,curiously, not with Herzl or oneof the forebears, but in LordShaftesbury's memoirs, in 1854,

and recycled by the Zionistwriter Israel Zangwill in anarticle in 1901. Ahad Ha'Am, aleading Eastern Europeanessayist, opened many Jewisheyes when he wrote in 1891,after a three month visit toPalestine: "We abroad are usedto believing that Eretz Yisraelis now almost totally desolate,a desert that is notsowed....But in truth that isnot the case. Throughout thecountry it is difficult to findfields that are not sowed. Onlysand dunes and stonymountains...are not

cultivated." (p. 42 ibid)

But the arriving Jews had multiple problems as the Zionistproject commenced. Yitzhak Epstein a Palestinian Jew cameto Basel to address a Zionist gathering in 1905: "He had beentroubled by the eviction of the Druze tenant farmers atMedulla in 1896. For the time, he said, there was no "Arabmovement in the national or political sense in Palestine," but,he implied, one might develop in the not-so-distant future:"Among the difficult questions connected to the idea of therenaissance of our people on its soil there is one which isequal to all others: the question of our relations with the

Arabs... We have forgotten one small matter: There is in ourbeloved land an entire nation, which has occupied it forhundreds of years and has never thought to leave it"" (p. 57ibid.)

How did the newly arriving Jews (the olim) see the localpopulation? "...as primitive, dishonest, fatalistic, lazy,savage-much as European colonists viewed the nativeselsewhere in Asia or Africa." (pg. 43 ibid.)

Not to belabor the point but even today's historians of Zionismcannot deny the primary source documentation. The foundingof Israel was based on a lie sold to Jews across Europe whowere being persecuted and the land of milk and honey

sounded like heaven in the face of pogroms of the East andthe Nazi onslaught and genocide that would follow; even ifthe concept of a land of milk and honey contradicts the

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concept of a barren, desolate untended expanse.

Were there people there? Yes. The McCarthy (Columbia U.press 1990 The Population of Palestine) showed the NonJewish population in 1877 to have been 426,908 or 97% of thepopulation at the time 13,942 or 3% were Jewish by 1946, 60some odd years after the Zionist project began there were1,339,763 Non-Jewish Palestinians or 69% of the populationand 602,586 or 31% were Jews. In the post 1949 era theJewish population in the area swelled immediatelyoutnumbering the Palestinian.

Who owned the land?

At first the Jewish National fund bought up land from theOttoman land lords from whom the local Palestinians rentedeking out a serf like existence. Of course some land waswholly owned by the locals. But we know that land ownershipis really just a question of power relations over propertydistribution. The Ottoman Empire had no more right to theland of the local people whomthey controlled than say the Tsar

had to the land on which theserfs worked or the SouthernSlave Plantation owners had to"their" land. Those working theland and dispossessed are thefountain from which thedemocratic revolution for landredistribution springs, just as itupset the ancien regime acrossEurope the land question is thenational question and it had yetto be resolved in the land whichthe Zionists were buying fromthe landlord empire which (if itwere to remain) would havefaced the wrath of the rising Arab national revolution. Insteadthe Jewish National Fund bought the problem of theunresolved tasks of the democratic revolution in the Palestinewhich would ultimately be directed at who ever got leftholding the bag, the Ottoman were defeated, the Englishknew when it was time to release the hot potato and theZionist project outpaced the advance of the nationalistconsciousness and organization of the Arabs. Thus thejuggernaut!

Remember Epstein at the Basel meeting in 1905, he "...tookthe Zionists severely to task for purchasing land from effendisand then pushing out the poor tenants, and he asserted,provocatively , that Palestine in fact belonged to both

peoples: "We are making a great psychological error withregard to a great, assertive and jealous people. While we feela deep love for the land and our forefathers, we forget thatthe nation who lives in it today has a sensitive heart and aloving soul. The Arab, like every man, is tied to his nativeland with strong bonds. (Morris, p. 57)

Either this was a "land without people - for a people withoutland" or as the numbers and the land transfer records show,the land was colonized by many illegal immigrants who thenfound a way to bring in their families and friends buying upland from the landlord class of a dying and soon to bevanquished empire, you can't have it both ways.

The record will show that in the early years the Jewishimmigrants were not fit or capable of doing the strenuouswork in the land they came to own. Even on the early socialist

kibbutz much of the manual work would be done by hiring thevery Arab workers who had lost their land. Has it occurred tothe Zionist that the modern conflict between the Jew and theArab in historic Palestine/Erez Yisrael has a material basis inthe dispossession of the land, first by purchase then by drivinga people off their land? Of course not, it is impossible for onewho derives the benefit of an oppressive act of annexationand subjugation to see it as anything other than justified.

What the Zionists did not want to see is the universal truththat when an entire people progressively lose their land, arechanged from a self sustaining farming people into a class ofworkers for hire with nothing to sell but their labor power,when their families are driven apart and half are forced intorefugee status for generations, human beings will resist, fightback and will continue to do so until they are treated justly oryou can terrorize them into total submission. These are theobjective facts, one can go into subjective apoplexy readingthis but all rational people agree on what the historic recordis. Over sixty years ago some 600-700,000 Palestinians, by nofault of their own, became refugees when they lost their

land, and as General Dayanreminded us, their villages were

bulldozed right off the map.Historic maps with demarcatedJewish and Palestinian Territoriesare exactly what Dayan wantedto erase from history. I guaranteeif you went to Hebrew school likeI did you were never shown mapslike these.

The question of theoccupied territory

For Zionists like my father thereare no Palestinians, the land was

empty when "we" arrived; there is already a Palestinian Statewhich is Jordan; the early Jewish fighters were not illegalimmigrants and terrorists illegally attacking the Britishmandate, they were freedom fighters; if there are refugees itis the fault of the other Arab nations for goading the refugeesinto voluntarily fleeing; we bought the land fair and squareand when they attacked us we created defensive boarders (itjust happens that we control the water, and have cut up thePalestinian contiguous areas into Bantustans); the wall isnecessary and when they stop sending over bombers therewill be no need for it and all the defensive border checks,road blocks and such. That these population controlmechanisms take place all over the West Bank cannot bedenied yet the true Zionist denies that this is an occupation.

So the question is who is actually terrorizing whom, what arethe real consequences of the armed conflict between theoccupied and the occupier.

Looking at statistics on the death of civilians the numbersfrom B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights group and RememberThese Children, examining fatal violence between thePalestinians and the Israelis has shown it has beendisproportionate. Since Sept 29, 2000 until Oct 2010 at least6,430 Palestinians and 1,084 Israelis have been killed. Amongchildren 124 killed were Israeli while 1,452 were Palestinian.Of the civilians killed 731 are Israeli while 3,535+ are thecited as Palestinian dead. Where did the people die? 54.1% of

the Israelis killed were killed on their own territory while98.9% of the Palestinians killed were killed in their own area,the occupied territories. Conversely 45.9% of the Israelis who

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were killed were killed on others' land while 1.1% of thePalestinians killed were killed on others' land. These numbersare revealing of the nature of the conflict and the brutalityunder which the Palestinian people suffer and other innocentssuffer. Until the rights of the Palestinian people are attainedthere can be no peace. You cannot dispossess a people andkeep them in refugee camps on your borders, oppressed,exploited, and expect there to be peace.

After saying all this to close without pointing to a solutionwould be disrespectful to the reader. So although that is amajor discussion in and of itself what follows is the shortversion.

What is to be Done?There can be no peace while historic Palestine is occupiedand the refu

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