Few things better display the underlying morality of capitalism than the scale and scope of ‘offshore banking’, ‘off-balance-sheet’ accounting and parasitical speculation - thievery by most people’s definition.

The World Bank estimates that the total of ‘illicit money’ hidden from tax authorities, governments and accountants, amounts to between $1 trillion and $1.6 trillion a year.

By Steve Appleton, Socialist Party

Only one-third of it is accounted for by organised crime, and only a tiny proportion (about 3%) is taken by corrupt government officials. Most of the money, around 65%, finds its way into secret bank accounts via ‘ordinary’ international trade!

The ‘greatest’ single event of mass swindling took place following the collapse of Stalinism in Russia. Between $200 billion and $500 billion has been siphoned-off since 1990. In the main this was achieved by deliberately underpricing assets that were sold abroad - assets such as oil, gas, minerals, timber, etc.

According to an article in the New York Review of Books (3 Dec 2009): “Oil was ostensibly sold abroad for as little as $10 a metric ton, with the balance of the real (market) value paid into the European and American bank accounts of Russian Oligarchs”.

Roman Abramovich, the well known football supporting Russian oligarch, ‘earned’ some of his money by using Western-supplied loans to buy half the shareholding of the Sibneft oil company, for $100 million. He sold these shares ten years later for upward of $9,000 million.

Although official corruption is not the main component, Nigeria is singled out due to its renowned level of government venality. Around 100 million of Nigeria’s 150 million citizens subsist on less than $2 a day. However, since the 1960s around $400 billion has been stolen by corrupt government officials and ministers.

Accounting tricks

Simple accounting tricks can help corrupt managers and executives divert cash into private accounts and evade tax authorities. Consider this simplified example of how it’s done. International Klepto Corporation (IKC), in country A, makes machines at a cost to them of $1,000 each. A dummy corporation, owned by IKC, in a tax haven, then buys the machines at cost (ie for $1,000 each). Since IKC has not made any profit on this transaction, no tax is due in country A.

The dummy corporation in the tax haven then sells the machines to another IKC subsidiary in country C, for $2,000 each. Klepto Corp thereby makes $1,000 profit per machine. However, the tax paid is minimal - because that is what tax havens for.

The IKC subsidiary in country C now sells the machines on the open market for $1,500 each. This allows Klepto to claim a $500 loss for tax avoidance on each machine - which it had bought for $2,000. However, since Klepto Corporation owns each of the firms involved in these operations, IKC is actually making $500 profit on each machine!

Needless to say, most of this ‘black money’ tends to flow from poorer countries into richer ones. Since the 1990s, foreign aid to developing countries has been around $50 billion to $80 billion a year. Compare this, however, with the money stolen from these countries. This is estimated by the World Bank to be around $500 billion to $800 billion dollars. In other words, for every dollar paid in aid, $10 is stolen!

Tax havens

Tax havens now control around $6 trillion of assets. The Cayman Islands alone hold around $2 trillion in liquid assets - mainly cash and gold. (One trillion, is a thousand billion, ie 1,000,000,000,000).

Last month it was reported that Robert Gaines-Cooper may have to pay a £30 million tax bill he allegedly has been seeking to avoid.

Despite having ‘moved’ to the Seychelles, he nonetheless “owns an estate in Oxfordshire where he keeps his collection of paintings, classic cars and guns” (Financial Times - 19/2/10). The tax authorities, perhaps not unreasonably, believe that the Seychelles move may in fact have been a bit of a wheeze!

Some other unlucky businessmen may indeed get caught too as the government seeks to “get tough” on tax evasion.

But these will be the exceptions that prove the rule. It will be a cold day in hell when capitalist governments put the same effort into cracking down on tax fraud as they do into chasing the pennies of supposed benefit fraud.

An often overlooked aspect of tax thievery is that the consequential multi-billion dollar tax-gap has to be made up somehow, by someone.

Those organisations best able to evade and avoid paying taxes are most likely to be large international corporations - who can afford the tax lawyers, and who can most easily set up subsidiaries in tax havens. This means that the tab for the missing billions has to be picked up mostly by everyone else - including small and medium-sized businesses.

Under political pressure as a result of the economic crisis, politicians and academics are searching around for ways to look as though they are doing something. However, their proposals fall wildly short of what is required.

The so-called “Tobin Tax” (on international financial transfer payments - at a proposed rate of well under 0.5%) has been touted - but it is barely a fig-leaf!

It is named after James Tobin, a Nobel Prize-winning American economist who suggested it in 1972. The BBC website (7/11/09) said: “The idea has been gaining some currency in the last few months as world financial leaders look for ways of ensuring that taxpayers do not have to bear the cost of future bank bailouts. But there was no sign until today of any great sympathy for it from the British government.”

Paul Mason (economics editor on BBC TV’s Newsnight) said on his blog recently that the tax, however, “would be hard to do, and require international co-operation…”

Little will happen beyond stopping some of the worst excesses. Governments are fundamentally at the beck and call of the capitalist classes and so will only tinker with their money making scams.

A democratic socialist government, though, would make a good start by opening the books of the main culprits to see where the billions have gone. It would nationalise the main levers of the economy, under democratic and transparent control.

This would kick-off the process of bringing to justice some of these economic freebooters - and set the basis for, amongst many other things, a truly fair taxation system - and an honest, transparent morality in government!

*******

The corporate avoidance scam

Whereas tax evasion is illegal, tax avoidance by large corporations - who, for example, relocate their head offices from a higher tax country to a lower tax country - is perfectly legal.

So even though a company may conduct most of its business in for example the UK, where corporation tax is around 28%, its main office may be relocated to say Dublin, Ireland, or Geneva, Switzerland, where corporation tax rates and income tax rates are significantly lower, eg a 12.5% corporation tax rate in Ireland. (In parts of Switzerland personal income tax is only 10% compared to a new upper rate of 50% in the UK).

Companies that have recently moved from Britain to lower tax countries include advertising giant WPP, drugs group Shire, publishing company United Business Media, rented office group Regus, financial groups Henderson, Brit Insurance and Hiscox, and engineering firm Charter. Henderson for example is estimated to have saved £8.5 million a year by this move (Times online 31/08/08).

US companies who have moved their European headquarters to Switzerland include Kraft, Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, Yahoo! and Google (The Guardian, 13/7/09).

Hundredth anniversary of International Women’s Day

At its very beginning, in the early 20th century, International Women’s Day – the 8th of March - was a day of struggle for working women. Nowadays it has largely been hijacked by the capitalist establishment as a ceremonial and sometimes highly commercial affair. Much has happened over time, providing welcome proof that women’s oppression can be fought and pushed back, but despite this, the oppression rooted in society continues. Indeed, in the past years many earlier conquests for women have been lost as a result of the crisis of capitalism.

By Elin Gauffin, CWI Sweden

“We did it!” exclaimed an editorial in The Economist magazine on 2 January 2010. In some way this business journal wants to celebrate that in 2010 women will account for half the labour force in the U.S. This does mark a step forward, but since when did “we” include The Economist? The rising proportion of women in the workforce is neither the result of increased welfare spending or greater male responsibility for household work. The US has the lowest level of investment in childcare and parental leave in the western world, and the state has not even signed the UN Declaration on Women’s Rights. It is rather that the economic crisis has predominantly knocked out jobs in industries such as motor vehicles, so that male unemployment has risen to 11.2 percent while the female rate is 8.6 percent.

It is true that most of the new jobs in recent years have gone to women. In Europe, these account for six million of a total of eight million new jobs since the year 2000. But this reflects a form of increased exploitation of the working class as a whole. Most of these are insecure, part-time, temporary jobs involving unsocial working hours etc. that typically mean lower hourly rates of pay but more stress and illness. Capitalism has always made use of and had an interest in preserving sex discrimination, with low wages for women meaning more profits.

The last thing women’s rights activists around the world can do for the 2010 International Women’s Day is take a rest. The situation is very serious and the events of the last year call for an answer to the question: which way forward for women’s struggle?

For the first time ever there are now over 1 billion people suffering malnutrition in the world, one in six of the human race. Women have for a long time accounted for 70 percent of the world’s poor. The Asia-Pacific region has most of the world’s hungry; 642 million people suffer from chronic malnutrition.

Women and girls hit first by crisis

The children’s rights organisation, PLAN, identifies the following effects of the world economic crisis:

* Young women - millions of workers in the informal and export-related sectors - are the first to lose jobs. Seven out of ten workers sacked in the in the Philippines are women.
* The sums sent home by migrant workers – remittances – have fallen sharply and migration has been reduced. Women working in ‘domestic service’ abroad are returning home. The World Bank estimates that the flow of remittances to developing countries fell by 7.3 percent in 2009.
* Loan facilities from “micro-financing” and other projects, that were supposed to help women out of poverty by doing home-working, have decreased
* When the crisis hits parents’ finances it is first and foremost girls who are taken from school and thrown into housework, domestic work or factories. Over 100 million girls are already working as child labourers worldwide (ILO).
* Infant mortality rates are increasing, and this affects girls more than boys. An estimated 50,000 more African infants died last year due to the crisis.
* More women and girls are trafficked and forced into the sex trade. This was the tragic outcome for many women who lost their jobs during the Asian crisis of 1997. The first “industry” to bounce back was the sex industry. In Jakarta, two to four times more women became sex-workers in the year after the crisis. Capitalism knows no boundaries when it comes to inventing new markets for its business. Everything is turned into “commodities”, including bodies and emotions. A form of sex trafficking is the trade in brides. In some countries the drastic consequences of women’s oppression mean that part of the female population has gone “missing” due to gender selective abortions. This is the case with the so-called one-child policy in China, where 118 boys are born to every 100 girls. 50,000 women from poorer provinces or countries are sold for marriage each year in China. More than 10,000 women are sold by families living in dire poverty in Vietnam for marriage or prostitution in China (See www.pbs.org).

Whatever there is a shortage of, becomes a luxury under capitalism. Paradoxically, the phenomenon of polygamy is recurring among rich men. It happens that businessmen from Hong Kong, with constant trips to Guangdong take a second wife among that province’s poor migrant workers.

Deadly toll of climate change

Women also suffer most from another major crisis which has developed as a direct result of capitalism – the climate crisis. Atmospheric warming as a result of 150 years of industrialisation, carbon emissions and pollution, will be an important theme for this year’s 8 March demonstrations worldwide. According to the Women’s Environment and Development Organisation, women and children run a fourteen times greater risk of dying from natural disasters than men. In the Asian tsunami of 2004, 70 to 80 percent of those who perished were women. After events like earthquakes and hurricanes, with few resources, poor women have less chance of getting aid or compensation and are at greater risk of subsequent infections when caring for the elderly and children.

Already global warming is causing a significant additional burden on women in the neo-colonial countries in particular. It is they who must walk farther and farther in search of drinking water. It is they who do much of the farm work which becomes more and more onerous in the areas affected by drought or floods.

On International Women’s Day last year (2009), the militant women of the farm workers’ network ‘Via Campesina’ expressed their anger against imperialism’s deforestation and the threat to Brazil’s biodiversity. In Brasilia, hundreds of women occupied the Department of Agriculture. In Rio Grande do Sul, 700 women occupied land belonging to the paper company, Votorantim Cellulose, and eucalyptus plantations were sabotaged. In other places, mining companies, sugar cane plantations, the paper multinational, Stora Enso, and large estates were occupied. In Espirito Santo thousands of women took over the harbour in Portocel and sabotaged a large amount of pulp exports. Deforestation is responsible for 20 percent of the increase in greenhouse gas emissions globally. The forests must be given protection immediately. But the failure of world leaders at the UN summit in Copenhagen means there is not even a binding agreement on measures to stop climate change.

Life under capitalism gets worse for working and poor women

For decades, the “solution” to oppression and poverty routinely served up by the world’s politicians and economists has been more development of market-geared economies - more capitalism! If only the poor countries open their economies up to international capital, then in time they will reach the same living standards as in the West – such is the mantra of neo-liberalism. Nothing could be further from the truth.

With its crises, capitalism has condemned itself as a system. Global financial agencies such as the IMF and the World Bank, with a decisive role within the international capitalist system, have generally continued to demand deregulation and spending cuts in healthcare and education as conditions for providing loans to countries hit by the crisis. As if it was not deregulation that increased the exposure of these countries to the international financial crisis in the first place.

It is estimated that foreign investment in developing countries fell by a third last year. Similarly, continual reliance on market-based “solutions”, such as the trade in carbon emission rights has only resulted in greenhouse gas emissions continuing to rise. New attacks on already down-sized welfare systems mean that the crisis is hitting ordinary people even harder. In Ukraine, the IMF suspended its last loan payment in protest against the country’s parliament deciding to raise the minimum wage by 25 per cent. In most countries of course “the minimum wage” means women’s wages. In Latvia, the government has obeyed the dictates of the IMF and foreign creditors, with the result that the government sector wage bill has fallen by 40 percent, and half of the country’s hospitals have been closed.

The biggest question for women in many parts of the world in the immediate future will be the struggle against truly historic cuts in welfare that governments are planning. Where they exist, publicly funded health care, elderly care, childcare, pensions, parental and sickness insurance, student grants etc., have all been very important reforms that have especially benefited working class women. Unpaid domestic work has partially been taken over by society, enabling women to take employment and become less economically dependent on men. But never before have the world’s politicians been forced to adopt such massive rescue packages as last year, to save the capitalist financial system from collapse. The trillions of dollars in aid to the banks must eventually be paid back and, as long as capitalism remains, we can be sure the directors who caused the crisis will not be the ones to pay. Instead, the burden of payment will be placed on the shoulders of women, workers, the elderly, the young and the sick.

Any idea that capitalism as it develops leads to sexual equality is easily disproved by looking at the countries with 150-200 years of capitalist development. In Sweden, which ranks as one of the most equal countries and is considered to have a relatively well developed welfare sector (although this has been scaled back sharply over a period of more than two decades), women in full-time work do not earn more than 83 percent of men’s wages. The labour market is extremely gender-segregated with women mostly in the public sector, where wage growth has been slowest. Sweden has the highest proportion of notified rapes per 100,000 inhabitants in Europe, and, together with Britain, tops the league for the lowest proportion of reported rapes that are prosecuted (only 13 per cent). These are clear examples of how apparently ‘progressive’ capitalist state perpetuates women’s subordination.

Women’s oppression

The oppression of women has its origin in class society which has existed for well over 5,000 years. There was a long drawn-out change from primitive communism under which land, tools, homes, were held in common by everyone to private ownership. The ‘monogamous’ family developed as a surplus developed in society that could be appropriated. Personal wealth, however meagre at first, needed to be protected from ‘outsiders’. The family became an institution for men to control property and exercise power in society. The word “family” comes from the Latin “familia”, and means “the whole number of slaves belonging to one master.” In China, under the emperors, for example, the binding of women’s feet was a common practise among the families of the privileged. As the proverb explained, this was “not to make them as beautiful as a curved bow, but to restrain women when they leave the home.”

Capitalism is also a class society that has developed and continually adapted the oppression of women to suit its needs and the demands of modern production. In today’s family, male dominance is still manifested. Women account for the vast majority of unpaid housework. This covers emotional labour - the care of children, the old, partners – and involves arduous tasks such as cooking, cleaning, laundry. The four walls of the home are often an arena for men’s violence against women. Amnesty International has estimated that still at least one in three women worldwide are beaten, forced into sex, or exposed to abuse during their lifetime.

The dominance of the male in the home has long been used as a mechanism for instilling in women and children the idea of submission to authority. It has been challenged and changes have taken place in many countries but it still runs through much of society. Girls and boys have generally been brought up differently because of social pressure and surroundings. This even became a business idea of modern capitalism when the department store was born in the 19th century, and the bourgeois ideal of womanhood was created, with women made into objects. Fashion, beauty and advertising are mega industries that have a huge economic stake in perpetuating the idea that you are not a “real” woman without spending a considerable amount of time and money on “improving” your looks.

The male sex is still considered by most societies to be superior to the female, regardless of what anti-discrimination laws exist. A boy learns early in life to be proud of his gender, while a girl is supposed to hold herself back. A guy who is interested in typically “girly” things risks being called gay. Homosexuals understand early on that their sexual orientation can give them a lower status in society and make them vulnerable to attack. Around the world, words related to women and sex without love are used as swear words.

Sexual oppression haunts women in the world throughout their life and one of the most important requirements for women’s struggle wherever it takes place is “the right of women to their own bodies.” Rapists are driven by the idea that they are entitled to take a woman under their control. Although most men distance themselves from violent abuse, sexual harassment is something most women have experienced. When the proportion of women in the workplace falls , and when the pace of work increases, so trade unions report that sexual harassment also rises.

A woman’s right to her own body also covers the right to abortion. World-wide, 70,000 women die every year as a result of unsafe abortions. 40 percent of the world’s women live in countries where abortion rights are severely restricted. Even where abortion is legal, unsafe “backstreet” abortions continue to be carried out, for example in India, because, for many women, professional healthcare is too expensive. Free access to contraceptives and sanitary supplies are also important demands. In Uganda, many girls are forced to leave school when they reach the age of 13, because they cannot afford to buy menstrual products. Women are often held back psychologically not only by feelings such as fear of being raped, a sense of shame over their body, physical suffering during pregnancy and labour etc.. In rich and poor countries alike, they are often denied real sexual pleasure, which has an adverse effect on their health. (Genital mutilation through female circumcision, carried out in Europe, as well as Africa and elsewhere, is only the most gruesome illustration of this form of discrimination.)

Origins of International Women’s Day

The decision to hold a yearly International Women’s Day in order to strengthen the fight for all women to get the right to vote was taken in 1910. The call came from the Women’s Conference of the Socialist 2nd International in Copenhagen that year, with 170 participants from 17 countries. The initiative came from Clara Zetkin who was active in the German and international labour movement. She had already for many years been the chief editor of the Socialist Women’s Association’s journal, Die Gleichheit (Equality), with a circulation of 112,000. She tirelessly campaigned for women to organise themselves. For male party colleagues she explained, “only in conjunction with the proletarian woman will socialism be victorious”. Zetkin said that while socialists supported the bourgeois women’s demands for justice, working women must organise themselves in their own organisations along class lines. This proved to be completely right. To win women’s suffrage (the right to vote) required working class methods of struggle.

International Women’s Day was originally known as “Working Women’s Day”, and was celebrated on a different date each year in the early spring. It was not until 1921 that the Communist International, once again on Zetkin’s initiative, decided the date should be 8 March each year. This was also to pay due notice to the fact that the 1917 Russian Revolution had broken out on International Women’s Day – 8 March (but 23 February according to the old Russian calendar). On that day, 90,000 women textile workers left the factories in a spontaneous strike for bread and peace, which then grew in scale and did not subside until the Czar was overthrown. The revolution continued and in the workers’ and peasants’ seizure of power in October 1917 gave a fantastic boost to workers and women around the world. Revolutionary Russia was the first country in the world to give men and women equal rights within the family, women’s suffrage, the right to abortion, the right to civil (non-religious) marriage and divorce, the prohibition of sexual harassment, rights for LGBT people, and eight weeks maternity leave. The revolution introduced municipal childcare, laundries and public canteens even if the resources to maintain them were always too small.

Urgent struggle for socialism

The main lesson from the century that has passed since the first International Women’s Day is that the pace of change is far too slow. We cannot afford to wait another 100 years. How many millions of women will be raped, will starve, or die from natural or climate-related disasters and wars in the meantime? The most important lesson from the past year is that we cannot have any confidence in an economic system that goes into crisis at regular intervals, and where many of the gains won through struggle are constantly being wiped out. We are not impressed that more women become directors or ‘bigwigs’, if this system, based on huge class differences and a majority living in poverty, continues.

Hence the need for a socialist programme for women’s struggle, pointing in a revolutionary direction, for the overthrow of capitalism. In a democratic socialist society where ownership and control over the economy and state power is in the hands of the workers, the poor masses and the women, there would be ample resources to invest in effective measures that would transform women’s lives. Alternative economic and social relations in a socialist society would lay the basis for eradicating sexism and rendering the idea of separate gender roles out-dated as women’s oppression itself was brought to an end.

A revolution can only succeed if women are at the forefront. Last year, 2009, it was the women of Iran who were perhaps the most courageous fighters internationally. They have continued to be a large part of the mass protests against Ahmadinejad’s dictatorial regime, even uncovering their heads and marching loudly in demonstrations of both sexes. Decades of anger against oppression is boiling up in Iran and the movement is far from over, but to overthrow the regime more class-based workers’ struggle is needed.

Women make up at least half of the world’s working class, and workers everywhere need new socialist parties, fighting trade unions and combative community movements involving working class women to take the struggle forward. We must never allow sexist attitudes among men to divide and weaken the struggle.

Despite the fact that one hundred years has passed and liberation has still not been achieved for women from their double oppression, it is inspiring that the revolutionary and socialist traditions of International Women’s Day survive and continue to exercise an important influence in bringing together and strengthening those who are fighting capitalism and oppression in various parts of the world. This is needed, and is ultimately the road to victory.

SP Newsletter No.300

The Labor Government is planning to force all Australian Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to filter internet traffic and block any ‘inappropriate’ material. Under the guise of ‘protecting children’ the Government plan is set to censor thousands of internet sites.

The announcement by Senator Stephen Conroy comes only nine months after a leak of potentially censored sites was uploaded on Wikileaks, a site where whistleblowers can easily leak official documents to the public. The list brings into question the Government’s stated aim of ‘protecting children’ from Restricted Access sites.

While the list did contain some Restricted Access sites that included images of child abuse, it also included Youtube sites, Wikipedia entries and web pages that were entirely political or religious in content.

For example a site that discussed the geo-political reasons for terrorism was on the list, as were pro-Euthanasia sites, anti-abortion pages and the pages of various fringe religions. The list even included the site of a Queensland doctor and a tour operator, a testament to the software’s inaccuracy. The leak is a strong warning of the potential for political and ideological repression.

One of the fundamental problems with the Government’s plan, aside from its imprecision, is that the transfer of illegal material like child pornography often occurs outside of internet pages – through file sharing and various other avenues. No filter, regardless of its precision, will succeed in eliminating this.

More concerning, however, are the political implications of online censorship. Some of Australia’s leading media academics have slammed the Government’s proposals stating that there are ‘very strong political motives behind this’ and have argued that filters present a major concern for the civil liberties of those that challenge Government or business policy, particularly when coupled with the Government’s draconian anti-terrorism laws.

According to some experts, previous government policy of providing free home filters to households was a far more effective approach to preventing access to sites that include child pornography. This suggests that the Government has ulterior motives.

The reality is that mandatory filtering has little to do with protecting the rights of children. The biggest supporters of the plan are the big business entertainment companies. Companies like Village Roadshow, Universal Pictures and Warner Bros are set to profit greatly from mandatory filtering as it will make it much harder for users to download music, movies and images without paying royalties.

With Labor pushing the plan it is no surprise to learn that, according to the Australian Electoral Commission website, Village Roadshow alone donated more than $1.3 million to various Labor Party branches between 1998 and 2008.

The problem with the mandatory nature of Labor’s plan is who actually decides what is acceptable content and what is not? The state should not have any role in telling people what they can and can not read or look at.

Aside from helping the big entertainment companies to maximise their profits, Conroy’s censorship plan is a major attack on civil liberties. A campaign needs to be waged against mandatory filtering because, just like the anti-terror laws, this type of censorship will be used against any groups who oppose the Government. The need to defeat this legislation is particularly urgent in the light of the looming class battles that will be brought on by the global economic crisis.

Attend the anti-censorship day of action on Saturday March 6th. Say NO to Conroy’s censorship crusade!

Brisbane

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Melbourne

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Introduction to Marxism day school in Melbourne

This day school will be of interest to anyone who is interested in the ideas of Marxism.
It will be held from 1pm – 5pm on Saturday March 27 @ Trades Hall, corner of Lygon & Victoria Streets Carlton South. The agenda for the school is as follows:

Session 1: 1.00pm – 2.00pm
The method of Marxism – An introduction to dialectics and historical materialism
Session 2: 2.30pm – 3.30pm
What would socialism look like? What is democratic socialism and how would it work?
Session 3: 4.00pm – 5.00pm
How could a revolution happen in Australia? How mass movements can effect change

For more information or to request the prior reading contact 96399111.

Other upcoming SP meetings

The Melbourne Branch of the Socialist Party meets every Wednesday 7pm at Trades Hall on the corner of Lygon & Victoria Streets Carlton South. Upcoming meetings include:

10/3 – Film night: Capitalism a love story
17/3 – Fighting for GLBTI rights
24/3 – Sri Lanka after the Presidential election
31/3 – Indonesia: Lessons from the 98 uprising

For more information or for details of meetings in other parts of Australia contact our National Office on 03 9639 9111.

News links:

Open letter to the IMT

Chile: Huge earthquake kills hundreds and many missing

Spain: Mass demonstrations against government´s attacks begin

Join the Socialist Party

If you agree with what you have read in our newsletter or on our website you should consider joining SP. The Socialist Party has branches in Melbourne, Sydney, Newcastle and Perth as well as members and supporters in all other states.

We are involved in trade union work and student work. We also run community, anti-war and environmental campaigns. But most of all we want to build a party that will fight to get rid of the capitalist system, the system that is at the root of all of these problems. We fight for socialism - a system that will bring an end to wars, poverty and environmental destruction. To join SP contact our National Office on 03 9639 9111 and we will send you a membership application form.

Subscribe to ‘The Socialist’ newspaper!

Support the Socialist Party by subscribing to our monthly newspaper ‘The Socialist’. Subscription rates are only $10 per year or $20 solidarity price. You will receive 11 copies per year delivered to your door every month. You will also receive our email newsletter every week and you will know that you are supporting an organisation that is at the fore of fighting against the capitalist system. To subscribe to ‘The Socialist’ contact our National Office on 03 9639 9111 and we will send you a subscription form.

Socialist Party contact details

Melbourne: Phone Anthony on 0396399111.
Sydney: Phone Gary on 0297287727.
Newcastle: Phone Samantha on 0249681545.
Adelaide: Phone David on 0883441474.
Perth: Phone John on 0894020728.
Rest of Australia: Phone our National Office on 0396399111.
Rest of the world: Phone our International Office on ++ 44 20 8988 8760.

The Socialist Party is the Australian section of the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI). The CWI is organised in over 40 countries across the world.

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Around 1600 workers took industrial action at Woodside’s Pluto Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) project in January over changes to their accommodation. Woodside wanted the workers to change rooms at the end of each rostered work cycle instead of getting their own permanent accommodation for the duration of the project.

By David Suter, Socialist Party Perth

Such a change would have meant that personal items would have had to be taken to and from work constantly as there would be nowhere to store belongings on site. The loss of permanent accommodation would have also destroyed the sense of community that workers enjoy. This is very important as the workers spend up to 10 months of the year away from home.

When Woodside failed to address these concerns the workers initiated strike action. After an initial two day strike and further negotiations, workers went out for another eight days defying federal court orders demanding that they return to work. The consequences of this brave stance were that the workers faced fines of up to $22,000 or jail. Their only ‘crime’ was defending hard won working conditions.

This highlights the undemocratic IR laws that are in place under the Federal Labor Government. Rudd’s ‘Fair Work’ laws mean that it is still illegal for workers to go on strike, except during ‘bargaining periods’, and even then action is heavily restricted. Just like under Howard’s IR laws, if workers take ‘unprotected’ industrial action they can face massive fines or jail. The current system means that bosses are free to attack the conditions of workers but workers cannot defend themselves.

As the effects of the economic crisis become more apparent in Australia, workers will face increasing attacks on their living standards. Increases in the cost of living such as electricity and food are already being seen and are set to continue. This is going hand in hand with bosses’ propaganda calling for wage restraint and demonising any defensive action, as has happened with the workers on the Pluto LNG project. The reality is that the much famed high wages in the resources sector have been largely based on long hours and lots of overtime.

Maritime workers at Total Marine Services recently showed that improvements in conditions can be won when workers take on a fighting strategy. In this case it was simply the threat of industrial action that secured substantial improvements in conditions. This comes amid a rising (albeit slowly) tide of industrial action in Western Australia.

Telstra workers in the north-west of WA are set to take industrial action over pay as have construction workers in Perth and workers employed at Alcoa. The tendency for workers to take industrial action will continue as more people realise that they are facing attacks on their living standards while the bosses continue to make massive profits.

The challenge for the trade union movement is to unite around a campaign for an end to all of Labor’s anti-worker laws and especially for the right to strike. The right to strike is the main weapon workers’ have to defend themselves from attacks from the bosses. It is not workers who have created the crisis of capitalism and it is not workers who should have to pay for it.

Interview with a socialist blogger in China

In January the world’s largest internet company declared it had been targeted by organised hackers from China and was therefore prepared to quit the Chinese internet market. What is at the root of this conflict and how could it develop? Chinaworker.info spoke to socialist blogger Zhao Jiangang.

Chinaworker: Is Google now seen as a force for democracy and internet freedom in China?

Many young people, especially students and office workers, have illusions in Google as a force for democracy, namely US-style bourgeois democracy. At the moment, approximately 384 million Chinese (nearly 30% of the 1.3 billion total, the world’s largest internet population) use the internet. The largest search engine is Baidu.com, which was mainly used for searching Chinese information and accounts for approximately 60% of the search market in China. It was founded by several overseas Chinese in the US and is a NASDAQ listed company. Baidu.com has a long history of being the most proactive and restrictive online censor in the search arena.

Baidu.com’s censorship team does not only use censorship for its own “commercial security”, but also regularly reports other websites and search engines’ “illegal” information to the Chinese government as a “competition method” and uses “blocking-up” for commercial purposes. In 2008 Sanlu Dairy Corporation, through a PR company, Tell International, offered Baidu.com three million RMB to filter out negative news about the melamine-poisoning milk scandal.

As the second largest search engine in China behind Baidu.com, Google.com and Google.cn have around 30% of the search engine market in China. Google.cn (the Chinese version of google.com search engine), which is especially developed for the Chinese market, has a much smaller market share, compared to google.com (mainly used for searching English information). The key issue for Google is that only persons with at least basic English skills will use it regularly; most Chinese netizens will stay with the Chinese search engine Baidu.com.

Chinaworker: Bill Gates of Microsoft, who has distanced his own business empire from Google’s stand, says censorship in China is “very limited” – is he right? How does the Chinese government police the internet, give some examples of how the “Great Fire Wall” works?

Microsoft and Bill Gates have a long-term history of cooperation with the Chinese regime, and have voluntarily offered source codes of various Windows operating systems in the past. In addition, MSN has its own search engine “Bing.com”, but only a few people use it in China. If Google.com was banned from China, it would provide a potential market, especially for English searches, for Microsoft. Bill Gates obviously looks at his company’s economic interests as far more important than “democracy”.

The Chinese government has set up a complicated censorship and monitoring system, the “Golden Shield Project”, since 1998. This project is officially operated by the Ministry of Public Security and linked with the Ministries of Industry and Information Communication, State Security, Propaganda Committee of CCP (Communist Party) and even the Military Intelligence Service. The whole project covers fields including law/regulations, technologies and manpower for censorship and monitoring. According to official figures, until 2002, total investment for the project was already over 6.4 billion RMB (nearly 1 billion USD). It is estimated that 30,000 – 50,000 professional internet police and 200,000 – 400,000 paid or voluntary internet commentators are working for the Chinese government to fight cybercrime, to conduct propaganda, censorship and monitoring and to “guide public opinion”.

The “Great Fire Wall” (GFW) is specially designed as a set of technical tools for the “Golden Shield Project”. It includes methods of IP blocking, DNS filtering and redirection, URL filtering, packet filtering and connection reset. Many global IT companies, such as US-based Cisco, Yahoo and top universities in China, such as Beijing University, are all involved in this project. In 2004, Yahoo!’s Hong Kong office provided the personal information of one of its users’ to the Chinese government on request. This led to a journalist and another writer being sentenced to 10 years in prison for spreading pro-democracy information.

To give an example, if you search “1989 64” as key words through google.com outside of China, you will get 83.2 million related results. Many of them are directly linked with information or articles on the 1989 Tiananmen Square movement; if you search the same words through google.cn, you can only get 86,600 results, some of them are still linked with the Tiananmen Square events; but if you search “1989 64” through baidu.com, you cannot find any information directly related to the movement. If you search “1989 64” through google.com in China, usually it will show “websites cannot be displayed”.

In addition, in mainland China, you cannot directly visit Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Flicker, Blogger.com or many other communication websites. Needless to say, you cannot visit many specific news websites - economic or political - including chinaworker.info or even the BBC Chinese version. Frequent internet surfers in China are used to using proxy software, online proxy websites and VPN to bypass the “Great Fire Wall”.
Chinaworker: Last year, the government passed a law that all personal computers must install blocking software called “Green Dam”, much of which seems to have been stolen from a US company. And finally the use of “Green Dam” was limited to within schools. Can you tell us what happened with that?

“Green Dam Youth Escort” is pre-installed software for personal computers; its purpose is to filter pornographic pictures and articles, but it is also used to filter any politically sensitive words. According to information encoded by hackers, “Green Dam” has a list of sensitive words that total nearly 10,000 Chinese and English words. Of these, only 2,700 words are directly or even indirectly related to pornography; the others are all political words. Based on some internet surveys, 80% of internet surfers in China were against installing “Green Dam” in personal computers. Facing public pressure and protests from PC manufacturers over the costs and other problems, the government retreated from its stance that each new computer be required to install “Green Dam”, but all schools, internet cafés, libraries and other public computers are required to install this software.

Chinaworker: Will this affair result in Google withdrawing from China and if so, where will that leave the internet in China, will it mean any change?

Google withdrawing from China is more like a “political show”, just as when Hillary Clinton supposedly spoke out. It reflected trade and political i.e. power conflicts between the US and China. Recently, Google’s CEO said that they would continue operating their business in China and talking with the Chinese government on the issue of censorship. So actually, it cannot fundamentally change anything in China. As a business, Google will still put its economic interest as the priority.

Chinaworker: When the internet was blocked completely in Xinjiang, after last July’s clashes, many businesses pulled out of the province because they couldn’t operate. Doesn’t the Chinese economy lose out by the restrictions on the internet?

Yes, it has really impacted the local economy. In Xinjiang, internet access, SMS, and international phone calls were completely blocked for nearly 180 days from July to the end of December last year. It caused massive difficulties in communications, the economy, healthcare and education. In order to maintain international trade, some businessmen in Xinjiang on a regular basis took the train, bus or even airplane to neighboring provinces or countries (Kazakhstan) to get internet connection. Capitalists are against restrictions on information for business, but they support the dictatorial regime in China for keeping a “stable environment” for their commercial activities, especially preventing disruption to business by workers’ struggles and mass unrest.

By the end of last year, the Chinese government forced all websites to re-register and filter “unhealthy” information on domestic websites. As a result tens of thousands of web servers were cut off, and it probably resulted in unemployment for tens of thousands of web-based professional workers and bankruptcy for thousands of companies.

Chinaworker: Some voices in the US are urging Obama to get the WTO to act over China’s internet controls being illegal under trade liberalisation rules. Is the Google affair part of a wider conflict opening up between China and the US?

I believe that the Google affair is a part of a wider political and trade conflict between China and the US. Although Google probably will not quit from China, the issue of information censorship can turn out to be a hot topic for the US government and Congress to put pressure on China. If the US economy cannot escape from the economic crisis, such conflicts will become more and more common and serious. Recently, tension between the Obama administration and China over the Taiwan defence deal has flared up, with the Chinese government threatening sanctions against US companies that supply Taiwan’s military. This is also a part of the same conflict.

Chinaworker: What should socialist says about this? If there is a deeper conflict, whose side are we on?

Socialists explain that the working class keeps an independent stance towards all conflicts between capitalist powers and always focuses on the working class’s interests.

On the one hand, in China, we fight for democratic rights - freedom of expression, freedom of association, freedom of the media and information. We fight for the rights of the Chinese working class and other oppressed layers, and against state repression. The increasingly powerful Chinese dictatorship is challenging US capitalism’s hegemony in the world, but it is not any “evangel” for the working class in China or elsewhere. The Chinese government is actually serving the interests of its own bureaucrats and capitalists by the brutal exploitation of the working class globally. We put forward a socialist solution, to be against the CCP regime’s one-party dictatorship and its anti-working class policies.

On the other hand, we are also against US imperialism and its expansion globally. In history and now, the US government has never hesitated to cooperate with any dictatorial regime such as in Indonesia, Chile and Saudi Arabia, if they are to its taste. Internationally, US imperialism’s wars and economic exploitation have caused poverty, chaos and disasters in many other countries, especially in the neo-colonial world. And its alleged “bourgeois democratic” system has also not resolved domestic issues; the working class and young people still have to struggle against the bosses, against racism, against environmental destruction. Thus, there should be no illusions in US democracy.

International organisation and the unity of the working class are the only way to be able to create a democratic and fair socialist society for all human beings.

SBY government’s honeymoon spoiled

Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) hoped for a bit of a honeymoon after being re-elected in the Indonesian presidential election in July 2009. Instead, his government has faced a series of scandals surrounding the Corruption Eradication Commission and the bailout of the PT Bank Century. SBY won with 60.8% of the vote, while the Megawati-Prabowo ticket received 26.8%. The Jusuf Kalla-Wiranto ticket received 12.4%.

By Anthony Main, Socialist Party

There was barely any difference between the candidates who all come from one or another wing of the establishment. SBY’s vice-presidential running mate, Boediono, was Megawati’s finance minister before becoming SBY’s economy minister in 2005. SBY had been a minister in the previous Megawati government. Wiranto and Probowo were formerly armed forces commanders. Working people have no enthusiasm for SBY but, in the absence of any real alternative, voters decided to stay with the incumbent on this occasion.

The only minor disagreements were on economic policy. The US had backed the SBY ticket as the best to implement the neo-liberal reforms necessary to open up the country to foreign investment. Megawati and Kalla put forward more populist and protectionist programmes aimed at protecting local capitalists.

The issue of corruption was also a feature. Corruption is a normal part of capitalist society, but in an underdeveloped country like Indonesia it is widespread. Trillions of rupiah are spent legally and illegally every year by big business to buy political influence. SBY had pledged to fight corruption in his second term. In reality, he has no interest in attacking some of his closest backers and has done as little as possible. Unfortunately for him, corruption has been forced to the top of the agenda creating tensions within the new ruling coalition and fuelling popular anger among the poor and working class.

It has been alleged that more than $600 million of government funds were given to Bank Century, on condition that part of it was used to fund SBY’s election campaign. SBY and Boediono (the central bank governor at the time) are both implicated in the scam. Bank Century’s management had been riddled with corruption and had purchased millions of dollars worth of risky bonds. The official reason for the bailout was that, had the bank failed, the debts could have spread to other banks, the stock exchange, and could have caused severe problems for the entire Indonesian economy.

While the workers and the poor have major concerns about the economy, they were not at all happy about the government bailing out bankers while they continue to live in poverty. Public outrage started to develop, especially as the cost of the bailout rose by the day. One newspaper estimated that it was the equivalent of building more than 13,000 new schools!

These problems have been quickly followed by scandals around the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK). The KPK had been set up by SBY to deal with the graft that is so common at all levels of the bureaucracy, especially at the top. The KPK, however, has not targeted them. There have been several prosecutions, but mainly of lower-ranking officials.

But, when the KPK was forced to go after some police officers and officials in the attorney general’s office, some sections of the establishment tried to undermine its effectiveness. Among other things, the chairman of the KPK was arrested as part of investigations into an alleged murder, and it was claimed that several KPK officials had received bribes. During court proceedings, taped phone conversations have implicated several high-ranking officials, and even mentioned that the president was working to undermine the KPK. The tapes rocked the nation and have seriously undermined the government.

SBY has responded by calling for investigations into the police and the attorney general’s office but, at the same time, he has watered down the powers of the KPK. SBY is also working hard to keep the full story surrounding the Bank Century scandal and his election funding hidden.

The saga has exposed the deep-rooted corruption within Indonesia’s ruling elite. The public has started to turn against the police, public prosecutors and the government. SBY’s approval ratings are in freefall. From a high of 70% early in 2009, some polls now show that he has less than 40% support. Editorials in Indonesian newspapers have called him weak, and people have started expressing their anger in a series of protests. On 28 January, thousands took to the streets to mark the 100th day of SBY’s second term. About 10,000 people gathered across Jakarta, including at the presidential palace and parliament, where they called for a full investigation and for key ministers to resign. Facing a heavy police presence, demonstrations were also held in 20 other cities including Medan, Yogyakarta, Makassar, Surabaya, Solo and Bengkulu.

The newly-formed Indonesian People’s Opposition Front (FOR) was one of the groups which organised the presidential palace protest, using the slogan: ‘Change the regime, change the system!’ FOR is an alliance of trade unions, student unions, small farmers, women’s organisations, human rights groups and left political parties. It is planning more protests over the coming months.

SBY responded by trying to shift attention away from the crisis by warning against ‘violence’ and a ‘return to 1998’. Clearly, the spectre of 1998 and the mass protest movement which led to the downfall of the Suharto dictatorship still haunts the ruling class in Indonesia.

Things are not getting any better for SBY. While Indonesia seems to have weathered the economic storm better than most of its neighbours, the reality is that the economy rests on very weak foundations. Growth rates have fallen from 6.1% in 2008 to an expected figure of around 4% in 2010. Official unemployment stands at around 8%, but more than 70% of the labour force work in the informal sector. The economy is largely based on low wages, with the current minimum wage set between $84 and $140 a month. However, more than half of the 230 million people in the country live on less than $2 a day.

The government introduced a $7.1 billion stimulus package last year which included cash handouts, tax cuts and higher wages to more than a third of government employees. This has helped, temporarily, to offset rising prices, and has propped up consumer demand. It has also massively increased the budget deficit. The government’s own conservative estimate is that the budget will not be freed from deficit for at least the next five years. In order to reduce the deficit, savage cuts will be implemented driving people even further into poverty.

Falling oil prices have allowed the government to reduce fuel prices whereas, previously, cutbacks to state subsidies would have led to higher fuel costs, provoking protest movements such as those in 2005 and 2008. While protests and industrial action have so far been limited, such is the anger brewing that this may not last. A steady stream of job losses and price rises are adding to the social tensions. Another economic downturn or further corruption scandals could set the country alight.

Although Indonesia became an independent nation in 1945 and formal, parliamentary democracy has been in place since the fall of the Suharto regime, none of the major problems facing workers and the poor have been solved. Democratic rights are still being undermined while poverty continues to increase. Just as under Suharto, a tiny minority continue to plunder the county’s wealth and resources. If this situation is to change, it is vital that the lessons are learned from past struggles.

The movement which led to the overthrow of Suharto is one such example. The mainly student protests of 1998 led to the resignation of one of the world’s most brutal dictators. Then, as now, there was a lot of debate as to what position the developing left forces in the country should take, how best to remove the corrupt regime, eradicate poverty and introduce real democracy.

These tasks are tied up with the socialist transformation of society. A socialist system based on public ownership, planning and democratic control is best placed to use the country’s resources to provide for the masses. Democratic control and management by workers is the only way to eradicate corruption and give people a real say over their lives.

In the late 1990s, however, many on the left maintained that the movement had to limit itself to purely democratic demands. They argued that, given the fact that Indonesia was an underdeveloped country, a period of ‘capitalist development’ was needed before there could be any talk about introducing socialism.

This led many on the left to support so-called ‘progressive’ bourgeois candidates in the elections, including Megawati Sukarnoputri herself, who were seen as lesser evils. Yet, after twelve years of ‘capitalist development’, poverty and social inequality have only worsened. Many of these alleged progressives have proven themselves to be loyal servants of big business and just as corrupt as Suharto, particularly Megawati.

In a period of renewed economic crisis, capitalism can only continue in Indonesia by demanding more and more sacrifices from the working class and poor. Therefore, the struggle against corruption and for genuine democracy is inevitably linked to the struggle for an end to capitalism. Calls for reforms without highlighting the need for socialism will only sow illusions in the already discredited capitalist system. That is why, while being the best campaigners against corruption, the left today needs to take an independent class position and outline a clear socialist programme based on the interests of workers and the poor.

Neither SBY nor any of the establishment parties have a programme that is capable of taking things forward. The only way to lift the majority of people out of poverty and to eliminate corruption is on the basis of democratic socialism. Workers and the poor need to reject all of the capitalist parties and fight for a system that puts their interests first. The tensions that are developing in Indonesian society are bound to sharpen in the period ahead. Through the course of struggles, more and more people will see the need to build a party that fights for democratic socialism and is unashamedly based on the idea that working people are best situated to implement lasting change.

When Kevin Rudd came to office in 2007 many hoped that we would start to see some progressive change in Australia. Unfortunately Rudd has proved himself to be little different to Howard.

For example, Workchoices has been merely rebadged while draconian laws against construction workers remain fully in tact. At the same time OH&S laws are beginning to be undermined by the Labor government.

Refugees continue to be locked up and despite the apology to Indigenous people, the Northern Territory Intervention has been stepped up.

Next to nothing has been done to address climate change and the failure at the Copenhagen Summit shows that capitalist governments cannot act in an effective and united way to deal with the dangers of global warming.

Hopes that Obama’s victory in the US would create a renewed push for reconciliation and peace in the Middle East have been shattered. The situation in Palestine/Israel is worse than it has been for years. While Iraq remains a quagmire for the US and a horror for its citizens - Afghanistan is even worse.

While CEOs and bankers continue to receive millions in payouts, ordinary people are being asked to pay the cost of the economic crisis. More job losses and cuts to services will be in store during 2010. While the rich get richer millions of poor people die annually from preventable diseases.

No wonder more and more people are beginning to see the need for radical change and an ending of the undemocratic and unplanned system of capitalism. The Socialist Party offers not only ideas but a strategy and tactics to overthrow this system and build a rational and democratic socialist society.

We appeal to both students and workers to join us in this task. Capitalism has proved it can not take humanity forward. Only a struggle to unite the international working class around genuine socialist ideas offers a way out.

If you want to be part of a real international movement for change – join the Socialist Party today!

‘O-Week’ meeting: Why capitalism is a system of crisis

Environmental destruction, war, poverty, oppression and exploitation. A public meeting explaining why the system is to blame.

It’s Orientation Week at most universities in Melbourne this week. The Socialist Party will be active at several campuses including Monash Clayton, La Trobe Bundoora, RMIT City and Melbourne Uni. We will be holding information stalls and recruiting to our student clubs.

We are also building for a public meeting titled ‘Why capitalism is a system of crisis’. Come along at 3pm this Saturday Feb 27th @ Trades Hall, corner of Lygon & Victoria Streets Carlton South.

For more info or to join one of our clubs phone 9639 9111. Also sign up to our student email list here.

Upcoming SP meetings

The Melbourne Branch of the Socialist Party meets every Wednesday 7pm at Trades Hall on the corner of Lygon & Victoria Streets Carlton South. Upcoming meetings include:

3/3 – Immigration: Is Australia full?
10/3 – Film night: Capitalism a love story
17/3 – Fighting for GLBTI rights
24/3 – Sri Lanka after the Presidential election

For more information or for details of meetings in other parts of Australia contact our National Office on 03 9639 9111.

News links:

Palestine: ElJidar Lazem Inhar – ‘The Wall Must Fall!’
http://socialistworld.net/eng/2010/02/2302.html

Netherlands: Afghanistan military role triggers collapse of Dutch coalition government
http://socialistworld.net/eng/2010/02/2201.html

US: Fighting to protect education and public services
http://socialistworld.net/eng/2010/02/2001.html

Join the Socialist Party

If you agree with what you have read in our newsletter or on our website you should consider joining SP. The Socialist Party has branches in Melbourne, Sydney, Newcastle and Perth as well as members and supporters in all other states.

We are involved in trade union work and student work. We also run community, anti-war and environmental campaigns. But most of all we want to build a party that will fight to get rid of the capitalist system, the system that is at the root of all of these problems. We fight for socialism - a system that will bring an end to wars, poverty and environmental destruction. To join SP contact our National Office on 03 9639 9111 and we will send you a membership application form.

Subscribe to ‘The Socialist’ newspaper!

Support the Socialist Party by subscribing to our monthly newspaper ‘The Socialist’. Subscription rates are only $10 per year or $20 solidarity price. You will receive 11 copies per year delivered to your door every month. You will also receive our email newsletter every week and you will know that you are supporting an organisation that is at the fore of fighting against the capitalist system. To subscribe to ‘The Socialist’ contact our National Office on 03 9639 9111 and we will send you a subscription form.

Socialist Party contact details

Melbourne: Phone Anthony on 0396399111.
Sydney: Phone Gary on 0297287727.
Newcastle: Phone Samantha on 0249681545.
Adelaide: Phone David on 0883441474.
Perth: Phone John on 0894020728.
Rest of Australia: Phone our National Office on 0396399111.
Rest of the world: Phone our International Office on ++ 44 20 8988 8760.

The Socialist Party is the Australian section of the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI). The CWI is organised in over 40 countries across the world.

http://www.sp.org.au
http://www.socialistworld.net
http://www.myspace.com/socialistpartyaustralia
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=20461960776

Student meeting this Saturday!

Environmental destruction, war, poverty, oppression and exploitation. A public meeting explaining why the system is to blame.

It’s Orientation Week at most universities in Melbourne this week. The Socialist Party will be active at several campuses including Monash Clayton, La Trobe Bundoora, RMIT City and Melbourne Uni. We will be holding information stalls and recruiting to our student clubs.

We are also building for a public meeting titled ‘Why capitalism is a system of crisis’. Come along at 3pm this Saturday Feb 27th @ Trades Hall, corner of Lygon & Victoria Streets Carlton South.

For more info or to join one of our clubs phone 9639 9111.

Also sign up to our student email list here.

Introduction to new Urdu edition of ‘Permanent Revolution’ by Leon Trotsky

We publish below a new introduction by Peter Taaffe to Leon Trotsky’s ‘Permanent Revolution’, which our comrades in the Socialist Movement Pakistan (CWI) are publishing in Urdu.

What relevance does Trotsky’s Theory of the Permanent Revolution have to the problems of the workers’ cause or the peasants’ (small farmers) movement today? After all, it was formulated more than 100 years ago during the first Russian revolution of 1905-07.

The same kind of question could be posed – and it is – regarding the ideas of Marx and Engels, Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg. But no matter how ‘old’ is an idea – a method of analysis upon which mass action is based – if it more accurately describes the situation today than ‘new’ theories, it retains all its relevance in the modern era. This is particularly the case for the masses in the neo-colonial world – and especially today in the vital country of Pakistan with more than 200 million inhabitants – confronted as they are with all the terrible problems flowing from the incomplete capitalist-democratic revolution.

A similar situation as exists in Pakistan today confronted Russia also in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Russia had not completed the capitalist-democratic revolution: thoroughgoing land reform, purging of the countryside of feudal and semi-feudal remnants, unification of the country, the solution of the national question, and freedom from the domination of foreign imperialism. At the same time there was no democracy – the right to vote for a democratic parliament, a free press, trade union rights, etc. This system was crowned by the brutal, autocratic, age-old tsarist state. How to solve the capitalist-democratic revolution? This was the question of questions posed before the young Russian workers’ movement. The different theories exploring this issue were tested out in practice in the three Russian revolutions of 1905-1907, the February revolution of 1917 and the October 1917 revolution itself. The latter, for the first time in history, brought the working class to power and it remains to this day the most important single event in human history.

The bourgeois revolution

Both Lenin and Trotsky differed fundamentally from the Mensheviks (the original minority in the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party) who believed the task of the working class in economically undeveloped countries such as Russia at that stage was to tail-end, give ‘critical support’, to the liberal capitalists in completing ‘their’ revolution. This was because they considered the liberal capitalists to be the main agents of the capitalist-democratic revolution. However, the belated development as a class of the capitalists – already revealed in 1848 by the German capitalists, who did not press through the German revolution at that stage – meant that they were incapable of completing this historic task.

Firstly, the capitalists invested in land and the landlords invested in industry and both were united, particularly in the modern era, to bank capital. Therefore any thoroughgoing bourgeois-democratic revolution would come up against the opposition not just of the landlords but also the capitalists themselves and their political representatives, the liberal capitalist parties. Above all, they were afraid that the masses, the main agency of change in all revolutions, including capitalist ones, inevitably pressed forward with their own demands, thereby challenging the position of the capitalists themselves. Even in the bourgeois French revolution of the eighteenth century, the plebeian sans-culottes (literally ‘without trousers’) were the main agency in clearing French society of all feudal rubbish. But they then went on to demand in 1793-94 measures in their own interests such as ‘maximum wages’ and ‘direct democracy’ which the newly empowered representatives of the bourgeoisie correctly understood as a threat. The sans-culottes were suppressed, first of all by the Directory and then by Bonaparte himself.

A similar, although even more pronounced, fear of the rising bourgeoisie in Germany occurred in the 1848 revolution. Then, the fear of the masses trumped the desire of the bourgeois to establish their own untrammelled political rule. Hence the compromise of the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties with feudalism and its representative, the monarchy. In the case of Germany, it took the intervention of Bismarck, basing himself on the Junkers – the former representatives of landlord-feudal reaction – to carry through belatedly the capitalist-democratic revolution ‘from above’ in the late nineteenth century. Even then, it was not fully completed and only the 1918 working-class revolution in passing following the First World War completed this process.

Lenin’s idea of the ‘Democratic Dictatorship’

Therefore, Lenin and Trotsky opposed the Menshevik idea that the liberal capitalists could carry though their own revolution in Russia. The capitalists had come onto the scene too late and were afraid of the masses. Arising from this, Lenin formulated his idea of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’. ‘Dictatorship’ for Lenin – as with Marx – meant the rule of a definite class. ‘Dictatorship of the working class’ meant the democratic rule of the working masses and not military rule or bonapartist ‘dictatorship’ over the masses, as opponents of Marxism argue. Because Stalinism – a one-party dictatorship of a bureaucratic elite resting on a planned economy – blighted the understanding of the masses, Marxism today does not use the term ‘dictatorship’. The phrase ‘workers’ democracy’ explains better Marx and Lenin’s idea today. Lenin’s idea was, in effect, a proposed democratic alliance of the working class and the peasantry as the main forces in a mass movement to complete the capitalist-democratic revolution. Trotsky agreed with Lenin that these were the only forces that could complete the process.

However, the weakness of Lenin’s formula was who would be the dominant force in such an alliance: the working class or the peasantry? Trotsky pointed out that history attests to the fact that the peasantry had never played an independent role. Scattered in the countryside with scarce access to the culture of the towns – with their literature, theatres, large collected populations – the peasants were always destined to seek for a leader in the urban areas. They could support the bourgeois, which would mean ultimately the betrayal of their own interests. This flowed from the foregoing fact that the capitalists could not complete thoroughgoing land reform benefiting the mass of the peasants. Or they could find a leader in the working class.

Lenin, in effect, left open which class would dominate in the alliance between the working class and the peasantry. His formula was an ‘algebraic formula’ and he left history to give it a concrete form. Trotsky went further than Lenin in his famous ‘Theory of the Permanent Revolution’. It was Karl Marx himself who first spoke about the ‘permanent’ character of the revolution drawing lessons from the 1848 revolutions. He wrote in 1850: “It is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions.” But Trotsky went further and concluded that once having drawn the mass of the peasantry behind its banner and taken power, the working class would be compelled to go over to the socialist tasks, both on a national and an international scale.

This brilliantly anticipated the October 1917 revolution. The working class took power in Petrograd, the seat of the revolutionary upheavals of the time, and Moscow. They then made an appeal to the rural masses, initiated ‘land to the tillers’, which won over the peasantry. But the dispossessed landlords joined hands with the capitalists, both the ‘liberal’ and reactionary wings, in an attempt to try to snuff out the Russian revolution. The peasantry through the travails of the three-year civil war rallied behind the workers and their party, the Bolsheviks, because they came to understand in action that they were the only ones who would give them the land. Even the intervention of 21 imperialist armies, which reduced the revolution at one stage to the old province of Muscovy, around Petrograd and Moscow, could not stop the revolution triumphing.

Another feature of the theory is the idea of ‘combined and uneven development’, particularly as applied to underdeveloped countries even today. Russia itself prior to 1917 illustrated this phenomenon very clearly. It combined extreme backwardness in relations on the land – feudal, semi-feudal, etc – with the latest word in technique in industry, achieved largely through massive imperialist intervention by French and British capital. The consequences in Russia were the development of a young and dynamic working class organised in big factories alongside archaic economic and cultural forms. A similar development has taken place in other countries in the neo-colonial world since.

Attacks on the theory of permanent revolution

Therefore, the permanent revolution has been borne out, not just in the theory formulated over 100 years ago, but also in the triumphant action itself of the Russian revolution. But this has not prevented continued attacks both on the author of this idea and the idea itself. The bureaucracy that arose in Russia, following the isolation of the Russian revolution and personified by the figure of Stalin, launched an attack on this theory. In effect, they borrowed the Menshevik idea of ‘stages’. First, so this theory argues, must come the capitalist stage, followed some time in the future by the ‘socialist’ stage. In the first stage, the workers’ parties are compelled to give ‘critical support’ to the capitalist parties, particularly the liberals, up to and including support for and even participation in bourgeois liberal governments. This idea, when put into practice by Stalinist parties, without exception has led to unmitigated disasters, particularly in the neo-colonial world.

The Chinese revolution of 1925-27 had a greater possibility of victory under the banner of the working class and the young Chinese Communist Party than in Russia itself less than 10 years earlier. A working class super-exploited, kept at the level of pack animals, rose in one of the most magnificent movements in history, created a mass Communist Party and drew behind it the majority of the peasants in a war against landlordism and capitalism. Even though the masses had barely-formed trade unions, they also attempted to create soviets, workers and peasants’ councils, as the organ of the revolution in a movement which sought to emulate the Russian revolution. Unfortunately, the rising Stalinist bureaucracy in Russia itself determined that the rhythm of the Chinese revolution could continue only under the Menshevik baton, this time wielded by Stalin himself. The consequence of this led to support for the ‘radical’ Kuo Min-Tang of Chiang Kai-shek, including recognising it as a sympathising section of the Communist International. This ended in disaster. The revolution was drowned in blood and on its bones rose the monstrous dictatorship of Chiang Kai-shek.

This, by the way, gave a vision of what would have happened in Russia if the Mensheviks’ ideas had been followed in the revolution. It would have led, as in other situations, to an aborted revolution. General Kornilov, who was defeated in September 1917 (or a similar military figure) would have imposed a bloody dictatorship on the bones of the Russian revolution itself. This was prevented by the intervention of the Bolshevik party led by Lenin and Trotsky and their ideas. The disasters in the neo-colonial world, of Indonesia, of the setbacks in Vietnam following the Second World War and many others resulted from the Menshevik policy of ‘stages’ in the revolution, implemented by the Stalinists, in place of Trotsky’s clear ideas which were shared by Lenin in October 1917.

Yet despite this, there are some ‘Marxists’, who professed adherence in the past to the ideas of Trotsky, who now attack his theory of the permanent revolution. Others even support the idea of the ‘permanent revolution’ but in practice put forward a Menshevik position, supporting workers’ organisations participating in coalition governments with capitalist parties. In the first category of those who reject Trotsky are the two wings – which are separate organisations – of the now-disbanded Democratic Socialist Party (DSP) in Australia. They have gone to great lengths to attack Trotsky’s idea of the permanent revolution. In the process of attacking our pamphlet written in the 1970s, one of their leaders, Doug Lorimer, counterposed Lenin’s ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’ to Trotsky’s idea of the permanent revolution. To achieve this admittedly difficult task, he engaged in a policy of deception, consistent misquotation, half quotations of Trotsky’s ideas and innuendo which sought to counterpose to Trotsky Lenin’s ‘more correct’ idea of the ‘democratic dictatorship’.

He was not at all original in his endeavours as Karl Radek, once a leading member of the ‘Trotskyist’ Russian Left Opposition, after he capitulated and made his peace with Stalin, had also earlier attacked the theory of the permanent revolution. In answering him, Trotsky pointed out the Radek “did not pick up a single new argument against the theory of the permanent revolution”. He was, said Trotsky, an “epigone” (a slavish unthinking adherent) of the Stalinists. Lorimer acted in the same way. Speaking about the 1905 Russian revolution, Lorimer argued: “Lenin argued that the completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution by an alliance of the workers and peasants, led by the Marxist party, would then enable the working class, in alliance with the poor, semi-proletarian majority of the peasantry, to pass uninterruptedly to the socialist revolution.”

But Lenin only occasionally mentioned about moving “uninterruptedly” towards the socialist revolution when he adhered to his “democratic dictatorship” idea. This idea of “uninterrupted” or “permanent” revolution had first been put forward by Trotsky in the book ‘Results and Prospects’. Lenin’s main idea was that the bourgeois-democratic revolution could have led to, could “stimulate” the revolution in western Europe, which would then come to the aid of the workers and peasants in Russia, and only then place ‘socialism’ on the agenda. If Lenin had consistently advanced the idea, as some like Lorimer have suggested, there would have been no fundamental differences between him and Trotsky on the revolution. But clearly Lenin envisaged a period of time, a development of society and the working class between the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” and their coming to power and socialism. There is nothing “uninterrupted” in this.

Role of the peasantry

Another legend perpetuated by the Stalinists and by some like the former DSP is that Trotsky “underestimated the peasantry”, believing that the working class alone could carry through the revolution in Russia. He was therefore against a real alliance of the peasantry with the working class. On the attempts to find a fundamental difference with Lenin, Trotsky wrote: “The devil can quote scripture to his purpose.” He admitted there were “gaps” in his original theory of the permanent revolution, published, it must be understood, in 1906. History, particularly the great experience of the February and October revolutions of 1917, filled in these “gaps” but in no way did they falsify Trotsky’s general idea but rather reinforced and strengthened it.

Look at the honesty with which Trotsky deals with the evolution of his ideas against the shameful misrepresentation of them by Stalin, later by Radek and other latter-day critics. He wrote in answer to Radek: “I do not at all want to say that my conception of the revolution follows, in all my writings, one and the same unswerving line…There are articles [of Trotsky] in which the episodic circumstances and even the episodic polemical exaggerations inevitable in struggle protrude into the foreground in violation of the strategic line. Thus, for example, articles can be found in which I express doubts about the future revolutionary role of the peasantry as a whole… and in connection with this refused to designate, especially during the imperialist war, the future Russian Revolution as ‘national,’ for I felt this designation to be ambiguous.” He goes on: “Let me also remark that Lenin – who never for a moment lost historical sight of the peasant question in all its gigantic historical magnitude and from whom we all learnt this – considered it uncertain even after the February revolution whether we should succeed in tearing the peasantry away from the bourgeois and drawing it after the proletariat.”

Lorimer said much in the past about Trotsky, in his early writings, looking towards an alliance between the working class and the poor peasants rather than the “peasantry as a whole”. Lenin himself sometimes spoke in the manner that Trotsky did of the proletariat linking up with the poorer layers in the villages, etc. But in 1917 the working class in the revolution led the peasantry to complete the bourgeois-democratic revolution but did not stop there. It then passed in an “uninterrupted” fashion to begin the socialist tasks in Russia and to spreads the revolution internationally.

Fantastical schemas have been worked up by the opponents of this theory that the October revolution was not a socialist revolution but represented the victory of the bourgeois-democratic revolution through the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry”. This was separated as the “first stage” (in accordance with the ‘two-stage’ theory) from the socialist revolution which was only carried through in the summer and autumn of 1918. This is a false, mechanistic idea which seeks to artificially separate the completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution from socialist tasks. It is completely inaccurate when applied to October 1917. Moreover, it would be absolutely fatal if, as in the past, it was applied to the current situation existing in many of the countries in the neo-colonial world, including Pakistan.

China and Cuba

Some, like the former DSP, even argue that the Chinese and Cuban revolutions are a vindication of the original position of Lenin of the ‘democratic revolution’, of “first the democratic phase and then the socialist”. On the contrary, these revolutions were an affirmation of the correctness of Trotsky’s permanent revolution although in a caricatured form. A social revolution did indeed take place in China and Cuba (see ‘Cuba: Socialism and Democracy’ by Peter Taaffe) but not with the soviets and workers’ democracy of the 1917 Russian revolution. In China, a Maoist/Stalinist one-party regime was established from the outset, albeit with a planned economy. In Cuba, it is true that the revolution saw elements of workers’ control but not the full workers’ democracy of Russia. This limited the attraction of both revolutions – particularly to the working class internationally – which was not the same as the mesmeric effect of the Bolshevik revolution in the ‘Ten Days that Shook the World’.

Some even argue that there can be ‘independent’ peasant parties which can come together in a coalition government with the ‘workers’ parties’ to carry through the bourgeois revolution. Some even drag in isolated quotes from Lenin in which he suggests this: “A provisional revolutionary government is necessary… [The RSDLP] emphatically declares that it is permissible in principle for Social-Democrats to participate in a provisional revolutionary government (during the period of a democratic revolution, the period of struggle for a republic).” [V.I. Lenin, Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, Chapter 2.]

Commenting on this, Trotsky conceded that Lenin did indeed formulate an idea like this. But Trotsky described this as “incredible” and, moreover, contradicting everything that Lenin stood for subsequently, including in the period of the February revolution right up to the October revolution. Lenin in his ‘Letters from Afar” condemned even the slightest ‘critical’ support for the Provisional Government and demanded total class independence, both of the Bolshevik party and the working class. Moreover, the arguments of many such as Radek in his latter-day imitators like the DSP, the very history of Russia, attests to the fact that prior to 1917 there was no stable independent peasant party or parties.

It has been suggested that the Social Revolutionaries fell into this category of independent peasant parties. But all of these organisations claiming to represent the peasantry “as a whole” and existing in relatively stable periods then flew apart, divided along class lines – the upper layers looking towards the bourgeoisie, the lower layers merging and acting with the working class – in periods of social crisis. The Social Revolutionaries in 1917 reflected this. After February 1917 they were a prop of the bourgeois coalition together with the Mensheviks and opposed giving land to the peasants. In action, they were repudiated by the majority of the peasants. The Left Social Revolutionaries who split from the SRs, it is true, shared power for a short period with the Bolsheviks after the October revolution. They occupied a minority position compared to the Bolsheviks, which was not clearly envisaged in Lenin’s original idea of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. Trotsky, from the beginning, in his theory argued that the working class would dominate and lead the peasantry. Subsequently, the Left SRs separated from the government, which itself was a reflection of the growing class conflict at their base amongst the peasantry as well as an indication of their inchoate, middle-class character.

Pakistan and the permanent revolution today

What is the relevance of this to Pakistan and the neo-colonial world today? Firstly, where the mistaken ideas of Menshevism – the two-stage theory of the revolution – have been put into practice, it has resulted in catastrophe for every mass movement fighting for power. Secondly, the bourgeois-democratic revolution remains to be completed in Pakistan. The fact that feudal and semi-feudal relations dominate the countryside and, in a sense, the whole of society is something that is almost taken for granted by the working masses of Pakistan. There is no other country – even in the neo-colonial world – which demonstrates more the intractability, the impossibility, of the bourgeois solving the accumulated problems of their regime. Very few other countries have such a concentration of wealth in the hands of a feudal/semi-feudal ruling class of landlords and capitalists as does Pakistan. Twenty families, as is commonly understood by the mass of the Pakistani population, dominate society. The main political parties, the Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP) led by Asif Zardari, the Pakistan Muslim League (PML) of Nawaz Sharif, the army and the state machine, the overwhelming majority of large industrial and commercial combines and companies: all are dominated by this very narrow super-rich ruling class.

However, an additional special feature of feudal and semi-feudal Pakistan is the domination of the army, which has held a controlling hand right from the state’s inception over 60 years ago. It is an extreme example of the corrupt ‘crony capitalism’ which blights the ruling classes in the neo-colonial world and increasingly in the ‘developed’ world too. In 2007, a book demonstrating the colossal private business interests of the Pakistani military, ‘Military Incorporated’, was written by Dr Ayesha Siddiqua. She claimed that this internal military ‘empire’ could be worth as much as £10 billion. Officers run secret industrial conglomerates, manufacturing everything from corn flakes to cement and actually own 12 million acres of public land. The generals have ruled Pakistan directly for more than 30 of the 62 years since independence in 1947. They still control the government, despite the existence of ‘civilian rule’ in the last three years. There has not been one day of ‘peace’ in the country since then, highlighted by the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the leader of the PPP, the catastrophe of Swat Valley – hard on the heels of the ‘Talibanisation’ of parts of Pakistan – and now the monstrous ‘suicide bombings’, which plague not just Afghanistan but Pakistan as well, even affecting the urban centres such as Lahore.

There is a false impression – particularly from abroad – that Pakistan, following Afghanistan, is in the unstoppable grip of the right-wing Islamic fundamentalists. Yet, as the Socialist Movement Pakistan (SMP) has pointed out, the fundamentalists have never had mass support up to now. Moreover, the mass, indiscriminate bombing campaign of the Taliban and other murderous terrorists is calculated to alienate the masses even further. At the same time, the indiscriminate counter-terrorism of sections of the Pakistani state and American imperialism armed with its ‘drones’ raining death from the sky can enrage the population and could drive them, at least temporarily, into the arms of the Taliban. However, the Taliban’s murderous rule in Swat, after the Pakistani state had negotiated a truce and withdrawn, was so vicious that the local population rose up against them. They had met with terrible repression from the Taliban. This led to the intervention of the army and a new pacification campaign against the Taliban, which in effect ripped up their previous agreement, signed only a matter of months before. This underlines the highly unstable, catastrophic position that is developing in Pakistan. In fact, so linked together is Afghanistan with Pakistan that they are now referred to as ‘AfPak’ by observers.

One thing is clear; the Pakistani army tops will never tamely adhere to imperialism’s plans in Afghanistan so long as there is no agreement between India and Pakistan, involving the issue of Kashmir. The Pakistani military considers Kashmir as part of its ‘hinterland’, a source of pressure on and a ‘buffer’ against India. Commenting on this, David Gardner wrote in the Financial Times: “Notwithstanding the offensive against the Pakistan Taliban in South Waziristan, the Pakistani military’s mindset has not fundamentally changed. They do not simply regard the jihadis as a greater security threat than India.” He goes on: “The army would need at least three times the troop strength it has deployed to take and hold South Waziristan. This operation looks more like an attempt to punish the Pakistan Taliban for straying off the reservation”! Compelled by its increased effectiveness, the army has recently been forced to go after the Pakistani Taliban, whereas it previously tolerated the Punjabi jihadis, Laskhar-i-Janghvi. Moreover it still supports and uses against India the original Kashmiri-orientated jihadi group, Laskhar-i-Taiba, thought to be behind November 2008’s bloody assault on Mumbai. Again, Gardner states: “The group’s mastermind, Hafiz Saeed, has a revolving door relationship with Pakistani jails.”

Pakistan, in effect, holds down half a million Indian troops in the valley of Kashmir with just a few thousand jihadis. Its support for the Afghan jihadis is based on the same reasoning, as a counter-weight – amongst other things – against India. India, for its part, is suspected of abetting insurgents in Pakistani Baluchistan. A top general commented: “Definitely we want Afghanistan to be the strategic depth of Pakistan.”

The national question in Pakistan

At the same time, the military has not given up hope of stepping in and once more openly seizing the reins of power in Pakistan. To this end, it has conducted a systematic unauthorised campaign of intervention in the political and judicial processes. Moreover, it has brutally repressed and ‘disappeared’ hundreds of its opponents in the rebellious state of Baluchistan. As Khalid Bhatti pointed out on the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI) website in November 2009, the uprising in Baluchistan is more serious than that in the tribal areas. Although in the latter the Pakistani state has lost control to the Taliban, there is not a national opposition as such to the Pakistani state. Things stand differently in Baluchistan, which only adhered to the Pakistani ‘federation’ in 1969. As Khalid pointed out: “The majority of the people do not have any positive feelings towards the state. More and more young Baluchi people are taking up the armed struggle. The nationalist insurgency not only continues, but is expanding into more areas of the province.”

There are now numerous Baluchi armed insurgent groups fighting the Pakistani army. Unfortunately, ‘targeted killings’ have also taken place against non-Baluchis with three thousand non-Baluchi people losing their lives with thousands fleeing the province for fear of meeting a similar fate. By one estimate, 50,000 non-Baluchi families have so far emigrated from Baluchistan and thousands more have applied for transfers out of the region. The university remained closed for more than three months, there is growing sentiment for separation from Pakistan, with Baluchi nationalists claiming: “We want an independent Baluchistan as it was before 1948, when it was annexed by Pakistan through military force.” These sentiments are particularly strong amongst youth, with university students in the lead, and, as a symptom of the depth of the movement, with women playing a prominent role.

The Pakistan regime, however, is prepared to wade through as much blood as is necessary to hold onto this strategically important province. It is important not just for Pakistan but for all the regional powers, with the jockeying for influence by the US, China, Iran and Afghanistan with even the ‘footprint’ of India present in the area. It is important for its rich natural resources of energy, natural gas and minerals, for its fishing and also for the strategic importance of Gawadar, the newly-built port overlooking the Straits of Hormuz, at the entrance to the Persian Gulf and, therefore, a vital stopping-off point for naval vessels in the area. China, in particular, sees this facility as vital for its interests and is the reason why it contributed the lion’s share of the capital and labour to build the port.

Yet Baluchistan is just the most extreme expression of the brewing national discontent in the non-Punjabi provinces which make up the ‘federation’. Even in Sind, resentment at ‘Punjabi domination’ – in effect, the control exercised by the landlord-capitalists of the Punjab, especially in the army – is fuelled by the grinding and growing poverty throughout Sind and Pakistan as a whole. The national question forms a crucial aspect of Trotsky’s theory of the permanent revolution. Without Lenin’s position on the national question – defended and added to by Trotsky’s analysis of this issue in many countries and many situations – the Russian revolution would have been impossible. That is a thousand times more the case today, especially in the neo-colonial world and particularly given the multinational character of Pakistan.

Yet, unbelievably, the basic demand for the right of self-determination of the oppressed nationalities of Pakistan is, in practice, rejected by the alleged ‘Trotskyists’ in the present crisis-riven ‘Class Struggle’ tendency in Pakistan. Only the SMP has pursued a consistent, principled and sensitive position on this issue. It stands, as Lenin and Trotsky did, for the rights of all oppressed peoples, for equality and against discrimination on racial, ethnic, religious or national lines. This does not mean advocating the right of self-determination, including the right to secede, without taking into account the mood of the masses. It is the right of peoples in the distinct national areas of Pakistan outside of Punjab, and even in Punjab itself, to choose their own path.

The ideal position from the standpoint of the workers’ movement in Pakistan would be a socialist confederation. This would provide full rights of autonomy, allow all legitimate national rights, down to the elimination of the slightest expression of nationalism or national superiority of one ethnic or national group over another. However, if oppressed nationalities wished to separate from even a democratic workers’ state, then the workers’ movement must accept that, as Lenin consistently argued and, in effect, carried out in the case of Finland in 1918. ‘Class Struggle’, led up to now internationally by the Alan Woods group, has consistently opposed such a policy in Pakistan. This has alienated them from some of the best fighters and leaders of the oppressed workers and peasants in the non-Punjabi parts of the country, many of whom have consequently gravitated in the direction of the SMP.

Crisis in the International Marxist Tendency

At the same time, they have a totally false position of sticking to the so-called ‘traditional organisations of the working class’ – without taking into account the concrete circumstances as to whether these organisations still represent the working masses. This policy now lies in ruins as a big split has developed in the Woods ‘International’, the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), on the consequences of this amongst other issues. It has had disastrous consequences for their organisation in Pakistan, as shown by the voluminous documentation detailing the bureaucratic methods of the Woods group, which split from the CWI in 1991.

Very few class-conscious workers now entertain any illusions that the PPP – led by ‘Mr Fifty Per Cent’ Asif Zardari – remotely represents in practice the working masses and the poor farmers of Pakistan. It is flooded out with the influence of the feudals, both in the towns and the rural areas. It is a party which has opposed strikes, called for and tried to organise strike-breaking, of the telecoms workers, for instance. The position of the PPP from what it was under its founder Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a ‘populist’ party capable of responding to the demands of the masses, has long gone. Therefore the same task is posed in Pakistan, as in other countries throughout the world, the development of a new mass party of the Pakistani workers and peasants, which the SMP has consistently argued for. The Woods group – which its leaders boasted was immune from the processes of ‘splits’ that allegedly condemned other organisations to ‘marginal’ influence in the workers’ movement – is seriously divided.

Ironically, it is on the very issues which formed the main ‘political’ reasons for their break from the CWI in 1992. Then it was the alleged existence of a ‘clique’ at the ‘top of the CWI’. This was rejected by 93% of the members of the British organisation and also by a majority of the CWI. Yet this is the same charge, in effect, now levelled against Alan Woods and his circle. There was absolutely no substance in this charge made by Woods and Co in 1992 about the CWI and its internal methods. The proof of this lies in the subsequent development of the national sections of the CWI with independent and thinking leaderships, capable of responding to the concrete circumstances in each country, which collaborates internationally but acts without waiting for ‘instructions’ from an international centre. The CWI operates on the basis of democratic centralism with full rights for all its members and sections with, in fact, a greater emphasis at this stage on the need for discussion and debate rather than the formal aspects of centralism.

The present split in the IMT has been kept under wraps – hidden from some of their members – up to the present time of writing. Yet all the political disputes in the CWI on a number of issues in the 1990s and the ‘noughties’ were public discussions, and documents were made public while the discussion was going on. Current debates are publically aired, for instance, in our journal ‘Socialism Today’ on such issues as China. This is done in order to allow all workers to see and, if needs be, to participate in the discussion of vital issues. Nothing like these democratic discussions takes place in the IMT.

An opposite picture is presented of the IMT, its internal life, its ideas and especially of its leadership in the incredible documents emanating from Pakistan, Spain and others who have fallen out with Woods and his closest circle. The Pakistani ‘dissidents’ around Manzoor Khan – the former PPP MP – paint a tragic picture of where Ted Grant and Alan Woods’s false position on the dogmatic insistence on undeviating work in the PPP and the ex-workers’ parties can lead. Manzoor justifies his opposition – on behalf of the PPP leadership – to strikes in Pakistan by wanting to remain in the PPP “at all costs”. Woods objected to this and promptly expelled Manzoor and his supporters. But a similar approach to that of Manzoor in Pakistan was adopted by Grant and Woods in Britain over our Militant MPs’ stand against the poll tax in 1991-92. We, the leadership and overwhelming majority of Militant (now the Socialist Party), stated that Terry Fields and Dave Nellist (our two MPs) could not pay the poll tax. This was because they and we had successfully urged millions of workers not to pay it and, faced with a similar situation, we declared they should take a similar principled stand. Grant and Woods argued that the MPs should pay as a means of staying inside the Labour Party!

Socialists were ‘dead’ outside of this ‘traditional organisation’, they argued, much as they had miseducated Manzoor and others in ‘Class Struggle’ in continued work in the PPP. We would have been ‘politically dead’ if the MPs and we had followed their advice. The Labour Party has since degenerated like the PPP into a bourgeois formation. Grant and Co were trapped in a false outmoded perception: that all political life of the working class was restricted to the Labour Party; to go outside meant ‘going over a cliff’. What is the result of this? They are insignificant in Britain while the Socialist Party has grown in numbers and influence. The same applies on an international scale with the IMT losing influence in many countries with Woods increasingly reduced to the role of a ‘benevolent advisor’ to Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. They reacted to the opportunist and indefensible actions of Manzoor – which was but the logical conclusion of their own ossified position on the ‘traditional organisations – by expelling him!

There are still sincere Marxists and Trotskyists within its ranks that we hope will cut through the thicket of lies and misrepresentations that have been particularly levelled by Alan Woods and his leading organising group against the CWI, its organisations, its leadership and its policies. A conscientious examination of the ideas of the CWI will, it is hoped, lead the best of these comrades to re-examine their past policies, and those of the CWI’s, and hopefully find a path back to a consistent Trotskyist position.

Socialist Movement Pakistan and the way forward for the masses

Genuine Trotskyism is destined to play a key role in the forthcoming battles of the Pakistani working class. And a vital aspect in the political armoury of the forces that will develop is the ideas and methods of Leon Trotsky, particularly his brilliant anticipation of the character of the revolution in the neo-colonial world, represented by the ideas of the permanent revolution, as outlined in this tremendous book. Despite the terrorism, the nationalism and ethnic divisions, the potential power of the Pakistani working class has also been visible in the number of strikes, mass demonstrations – including those in Baluchistan, of workers of all ethnic backgrounds and all religions – who march together in defence of workers’ organisations and their rights. The future of Pakistan is not in the hands of the mindless right-wing jihadis nor of American imperialism, nor of sectarian groupings but the mighty force of the Pakistani working class organised on socialist lines. The best hope for achieving this is in the ideas and methods of Leon Trotsky married to the contemporary analysis and programme of the Socialist Movement Pakistan.

The capitalist press speculates about another attempt of the military to seize power from the discredited ‘democratic’ politicians. But the alternative of Nawaz Sharif to that of the Zardari-dominated PPP is no real alternative at all. Nor is a coup – perhaps this time led by ‘colonels’ coming from a fundamentalist background – capable of offering a solution to the problems of Pakistan and the region. On the contrary, it conjures up a nightmare scenario of a fundamentalist or fundamentalist-backed regime, armed this time with nuclear weapons. This development, if it was to come about, would in no way represent the people of Pakistan because the fundamentalists have never received more than 10-15% of the vote in elections. Only a democratic and socialist road offers liberation from the nightmare of landlordism and capitalism for the long-suffering Pakistani masses. This book can help lay the basis for the emergence of a force that can lead them in this direction.

SP Newsletter No.298

The closure of the Tote Hotel in January shocked music fans across Melbourne. For more than 20 years the pub has been at the centre of Melbourne’s live music scene.

Since then the Arthouse has announced it will close this year and several other venues have complained that they can no longer afford to host live shows. On every occasion licensees have blamed higher operating costs due to the State Government’s new liquor licensing conditions.

Many pubs that host live music have been characterised as ‘high risk’ alongside trouble spots like those on King Street. This means that they face an increase in liquor licensing fees and a requirement to provide extra security guards as well as CCTV cameras in the venue.

The Labor Government’s ‘one size fits all’ approach to liquor licensing is damaging live music. While failing to give any support to the live music scene, they roll out the red carpet for the likes of the Crown Casino who have just been allowed to open up another 150 gaming tables!

The new liquor laws, and the government’s claims to be cracking down on violence, have more to do with chasing votes in the outer suburbs than they do with reality. There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that live music and violence are linked. Trouble free venues should be immediately removed from the ‘high risk’ category.

The Labor Party has already been taken aback by the mass outpour of support for live music. In an election year, they are trying to minimise the loss of votes in their inner city seats. Hypocritically, several MPs are now pretending to be supporters of live music. This is despite the fact that they are the ones who introduced the laws!

The Greens are also opportunistically jumping on the bandwagon. Green MPs have supported Labor’s liquor laws on every occasion in Parliament, but now, in an attempt to win votes they have since changed their tune.

The Socialist Party recognises the important role that live music venues play. We want to see more venues, not less. This is just one reason why we are campaigning for the Fitzroy Town Hall to be opened as a venue for music and the arts. We are also keen to work with others in the scene to campaign for the re-establishment of the Brunswick Street Festival which can be used to promote live music in Yarra.

If nothing else the closure of the Tote raises broader questions about how to best promote music and the arts. We firmly believe that the market system is incapable of developing a vibrant live music scene. More needs to be done to provide bands with venues that are not governed by the law of making profits.

What music fans have already shown is that mass action can get results. In the lead up to the election we need to step up the campaign and force Labor, the Liberals and the Greens to give live music the respect and support it deserves.

Attend the Save Live Australian Music (SLAM) rally. Meet at 4pm on Tuesday February 23 outside the State Library, corner of Swanston and Latrobe Streets City. March to Parliament House. See: http://www.slamrally.org/

Upcoming SP meetings

The Melbourne Branch of the Socialist Party meets every Wednesday 7pm at Trades Hall on the corner of Lygon & Victoria Streets Carlton South. Upcoming meetings include:

24/2 – Perspectives for class struggle in Indonesia
3/3 – Immigration: Is Australia full?
10/3 – Film night: Capitalism a love story
17/3 – Fighting for GLBTI rights
24/3 – Sri Lanka after the Presidential election

For more information or for details of meetings in other parts of Australia contact our National Office on 03 9639 9111.

News links:

Germany: IG Metall union threatens combative left activists with expulsion
http://socialistworld.net/eng/2010/02/1701.html

Britain: Trotskyism on trial
http://socialistworld.net/eng/2010/02/1601.html

Burma: Military dictatorship fears new round of struggle
http://socialistworld.net/eng/2010/02/1502.html

Join the Socialist Party

If you agree with what you have read in our newsletter or on our website you should consider joining SP. The Socialist Party has branches in Melbourne, Sydney, Newcastle and Perth as well as members and supporters in all other states.

We are involved in trade union work and student work. We also run community, anti-war and environmental campaigns. But most of all we want to build a party that will fight to get rid of the capitalist system, the system that is at the root of all of these problems. We fight for socialism - a system that will bring an end to wars, poverty and environmental destruction. To join SP contact our National Office on 03 9639 9111 and we will send you a membership application form.

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Socialist Party contact details

Melbourne: Phone Anthony on 0396399111.
Sydney: Phone Gary on 0297287727.
Newcastle: Phone Samantha on 0249681545.
Adelaide: Phone David on 0883441474.
Perth: Phone John on 0894020728.
Rest of Australia: Phone our National Office on 0396399111.
Rest of the world: Phone our International Office on ++ 44 20 8988 8760.

The Socialist Party is the Australian section of the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI). The CWI is organised in over 40 countries across the world.

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http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=20461960776