Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Summer 2015-16
Summer 2015-16
Society vs Nature?
Most analyses of this predicament cast evil
capitalism against good nature. This idea is now
highlighted in the term Anthropogenic that
refers to the changes brought about in climate
(nature) as a result of industrial society. For
climate warriors society has to return to nature
to survive otherwise suffer the pain of
extinction. Marx did not agree. For him, society
and nature are one.
The
contradiction
between society and
nature is not that of
capitalism
versus
nature, but one that
runs through the heart
of capitalism.
It is the contradiction
between the class that
uses its natural labour
power to meet its
social needs - the
working class in the widest sense, and the
ruling class that exploits and owns the workers
productive output as private property destroying
all that is natural in society to increase its
wealth. This is not about the financialisation of
healthy capitalism. The whole capitalist class is
parasitic on the natural labour power it exploits.
Therefore class struggle, and class war,
expresses the contradiction between nature as
use-value and capitalism as exchange-value
that permeates the whole of capitalism as the
motive force for its historic rise and fall.
We can call this the dialectics of nature. The
Marxist concept of dialectics is not confined to
society as separate from nature. For Marx,
dialectics was a method of analysis which took as
its starting point the reality of social change as a
material process driven by humans producing to
meet their basic needs. Before the birth of
capitalism in Europe in the 16th century, human
society was seen as dominated by nature because
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rules by naked force, militarising society to
destroy all political opposition. Its weakest point
is US imperialism whose productive capacity is
now devoted to the military destruction of
humanity. The US is forced to confront its rivals
directly through invasions, occupations and
ongoing wars. In its desperation to contain its old
rivals Russia and China whose demise as
communist states and emergence as new
imperialist rivals the US turned the triumph of
global capitalism into its nemesis. This explains
why the US and its EU and Japanese allies to
contain its rivals by expanding NATO and building
economic trade blocs like the TPP and the TTIP?
The growing popular opposition to war shows why
the US use of proxies like al Qaeda and IS to
create an Islamic mortal enemy in the clash of
civilisations to divide and rule the global
working class and blame Islamic terrorism rather
than capitalist terrorism.
Capitalism has outlived its use-by date. It now
openly destroys humanity and nature by dividing
and ruling the working class globally. It has to be
overthrown by resisting its destruction at every
point. The class war is now openly being fought
everywhere by Arab and Kurd warriors resisting
military dictatorship and imperialist bombs, by
anti-austerity and anticapitalist youth, by unions
defending casualised workers, by hackers and
whistleblowers, by social mediaphiles using the
internet as a weapon, and by climate warriors
against fracking and deep sea drilling. This is a
universal class war where the arms combine
ideas, high tech, civil disobedience and military
resistance.
However, the class war will remain disorganised
and fragmented by imperialist memes of nation,
Islam, terror, violence, etc until the working
class becomes conscious of itself as the class that
represents humanity and fights for itself as
humanity. Essential to this task is the
international organisation of the working class as
a united anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist
force with a program for socialist revolution
that can counter and defeat the organisation of
the imperialist ruling classes. That program must
empower the working class in its historic mission
of restoring humanity/nature and where its
victory in the class war will open the future of
communism. The victory will be sweetest for
women
workers
who
were
the
first
representatives of humanity to be socially
oppressed.
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Social Democracy
Will any future capitalist government oppose the
TPP or have the guts to repudiate it? No. They
will say they cannot because of the terms of the
TPP which legally binds the signatories! Little has
ducked and dived over what to support and what
not to support when Labour should have
committed itself to condemning it. Why not?
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Radical Activism
Trades Unions and Social Movements that are
designed to pressure parliament are inherently
conservative. Strikes and protests are co-opted
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into
the
parliamentary
talkshop.
This
conservatism results from the ideology of
bourgeois democracy and the official leadership
of the labour movement that can only lead
workers to defeat. 30 years after the neo-liberal
counterrevolution began parliament has been
bypassed by the Bonapartist Prime Minister who
as the money man personifies financed capital.
For radical activism to advance it has to get out
of the parliamentary dead end and organised the
power of labour to strike, occupy, and build a
genuine working class party that mobilises
outside parliament to build mass working class
support for a Workers Government.
There is potential in the unions and the anti-TPP
resistance to take on the state by organising the
working class majority in NZ. For example,
Doctors for Healthy Trade have broken with
their conservative profession to speak up about
the impact of the TPP on the cost of drugs. The
PSA in the health sector in Auckland are fighting
cuts in their penal rates from double time to
time-and-a-half. Right across the social spectrum
the cuts in social spending and attacks on labour
relations of the NACTs will become much worse
under the TPP. The job of the unions is to step
up their opposition to political strike action that
breaks the ERA legal limits to strikes and exposes
the political leaders who stand in the way of
strike action. The advocacy for jobs, wages,
health, education, housing, social welfare etc.,
needs to build towards one big union and a
national strike coordinated with national strikes
in other countries as an international strike to
defeat the TPP.
Marxists argue that the limit to the radical
activism of trade unions and protest movements
is the ideology of bourgeois democracy. They are
trapped in the fetishized forms of capitalism that
blames crises on the abuse of power by the 1%.
Reforming this abuse is the objective of
whistleblowers and hacktivists like Assange and
Snowden. But this abuse is not an aberration. It
is endemic in capitalism struggling to survive. All
the evidence is piling up that capitalism is driven
by the worsening global crisis to attack and
destroy all the historic gains won by workers over
centuries and to the point of also destroying the
ecosphere. Radicals must be convinced that
capitalism can no longer be reformed but must
be overthrown to save humanity and nature!
This means proving to radicals that the only way
to fight the TPP is social revolution. The TPP is
designed to abolish all national barriers to US
monopoly capital. Logically, capital without
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Marxist Revolution
To recap, liberals are opposed to the working
class joining forces with workers in other
countries. They belong to a middle class that
benefits from defending the nation state on
behalf of capitalism. Radicals have to break out
of this liberal trap and return to their historic
militancy in staunchly resisting the bosses
attacks. In fact the workers biggest fights in NZ
history were international fights. In the period
between the 1880s and the 1920s the struggle to
unionise and to strike for basic gains were led by
internationalists. The 1891 Maritime Strike was in
solidarity with Australian workers. The Red Fed
was led by recent migrants and many workers
who shifted between jobs in NZ, Australia and
the US, and were inspired by the IWW (Wobblies)
militant struggles. Opposition to the war was led
by those who united NZ workers with foreign
workers to oppose an imperialist war that divided
workers along national lines to kill one another
for the profits of the bosses.
But working class opposition to world war was
drowned in blood. The radicals and socialists
did not rise up en masse and mutiny against their
imperialist bosses who drove them to the
slaughter of the trenches to defend their profits.
The Russian Bolsheviks overthrew the ruling class
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but elsewhere there were no mass Marxist parties
capable of giving revolutionary leadership to the
armed masses. Without a Marxist international to
organise and guide their militancy, the radical
masses remained trapped by reactionary
bourgeois governments led by treacherous social
democrats. Today, to avoid being dragged into
World War 3 the spontaneous mass resistance
that is breaking out around the world desperately
needs a Marxist internationalist party and
program
that
is
capable of leading the
masses to take power,
to
put
Workers
Governments in place,
and build a world
socialist society.
Like Greece today,
there is no electoral
way to stop NZs neocolonial fate. We can
no more legislate to
stop the dominance of
US and Chinese capital
in NZ than we can stop the war in Syria. That
rests in the hands of its working people backed
by internationalist workers. The global recession
we are in will soon become a depression and the
trade wars between the US and Russia/China
block of imperialist powers are becoming hot
wars. Workers of Aotearoa must unite their tiny
forces with the massive forces of China, the US
and the rest of the world.
The only answer to the TPP as with all imperialist
policy that reduces its "partners" to no more than
flunkeys (Japan and Australia included) is the
rebellion of the workers in these countries,
united with the workers in the US and Japan, to
throw out all capitalist governments and replace
them with governments that represent the
interests of the working masses to prevent the
destruction of civilisation and nature.
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willing to overthrow the Shia aligned regimes in
Iraq and Syria. But Daesh was not prepared to act
merely as a proxy for the US bloc, its origins in
the former Baathist Iraqi regime meant it wanted
to rewrite the old imperialist borders and exploit
its Sunni backing to build an Islamic State.
All of this proves that all the lying rhetoric
coming out of both imperialist blocs about a war
on terror is bullshit to mask their own rotten
role in screwing over MENA for at least a century.
Their power-grab today when the global crisis is
pushing the US to aggressively challenge both
Russia and China means that neither of which will
back down if their strategic interests are
involved. Daesh threatens the strategic interests
of both blocs because its rhetoric directly
Survival Socialism!
How do we want to die? Ground down by a
terminal crisis of global capitalism? In one or
other of the proxy wars that fosters national,
religious or tribal divisions which slaughter
100,000s of workers to smash their democratic or
socialist revolutions? Surveilled and executed in
our streets in a mayhem of global terror? Or will
we survive all these only to face a slow death by
climate or nuclear meltdown? Of course these
are all in the last analysis manifestations of the
decline and collapse of global capitalism.
Economic crisis makes wars necessary and the
massive waste and destruction of war-torn
capitalism makes climate collapse more certain. I
should by now be obvious that capitalism has to
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was a revolutionary party able to defeat the
treacherous social imperialist leaders that acted
as the agents of the ruling classes. In Russia a
Bolshevik Party emerged and the revolution
succeeded. Elsewhere social democracy prevailed
and the revolutions were defeated and the epoch
of fascism began.
Today it is the lessons of that period that are
most important. They are summarised in the
1938 Transitional Program of Trotsky and the
Fourth International. It is
necessary to build a new
World Party of Socialism
that can lead workers
united fronts to defend
the interests of workers
and expose and replace
the treacherous leaders
of the unions and social
democracy that are the
agents of the capitalists
in the working class, with
millions of revolutionary
leaders. This is the
revolutionary road to socialism, the only answer
that humanity has to the evils of economic,
military and climate destruction.
While the capitalist ruling class and its apologists
defend the worst excesses of capitalism in the
name of 'democracy', we have to say that
bourgeois democracy is a sham reserved only for
those who can buy it. Parliaments are talkshops
that divert us from the world of the workshops in
which the working billions create the world's
wealth. We are forced to work for a wage
because we have no other means to survive. Now
that our survival itself is threatened by the
capitalist system facing a terminal crisis and
ecological collapse it is time for the working
class to take control of the global economy and
get rid of the system that exploits both workers
and nature.
Clay Claiborns critique of Patrick Cockburn
http://linkis.com/blogspot.com/j7jkl
Pepe Escobar http://atimes.com/2015/10/asyriaberliner-ensemble-escobar/
John Pilger interviewed on RT
http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/john-pilgeron-paris-isis-and-media-propaganda/
Redrave
http://redrave.blogspot.co.nz/2015/11/why-isrussia-in-syria.html
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On the Marxist model, Chinas real GDP depends
on production of value by its working class. But
this is subject to exploiting labour sufficiently to
make a profit. When workers resist, profits fall,
production slows down or stagnates, and excess
money that leaves production enters speculation
in existing commodities causing price inflation
and money devaluation. So while crises begin
with falling profits they usually blow up when
asset bubbles burst.
Rather than printing money that leads to
stagflation, the capitalist solution to the crisis
must be depression the devaluing of existing
capital, machines, raw materials and wages, to
the point where investment in production is
profitable again. But depression comes up against
the resistance of the workers that produce the
raw materials in Chinas trading partners
including NZ, as well as Chinese workers
producing finished products. The more-market
solution is a declaration of open class war inside
China and in all its trading partners. The Marxist
response is to say bring it on to workers in all
these countries. The workers united will never be
defeated!
Meanwhile, the growing antagonism between
Russia/China bloc and the US bloc sparked by
trade and finance sanctions on Russia has
escalated the rivalry between the blocs and
ramped up economic and military confrontations.
Russia may spark the crash by defaulting on its
debt to its Western creditors before a China
meltdown can happen. The proxy wars in Ukraine
and Syria may blow up into regional wars.
Whatever the timing of such events, there is
nothing that can prevent the China slowdown
becoming a meltdown sooner or later. Whenever
it happens a new global crash will pose the
question: is this the last crash before human
extinction?
https://livingmarxism.wordpress.com/2014/06/25/wh
y-are-russia-and-china-imperialist-powers-and-notcapitalist-semi-colonies/
http://redrave.blogspot.co.nz/2015/09/is-chinameltdown-end-of-capitalism_16.html
https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2015/10/18/
debt-demand-and-depression/
https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2015/09/17/
china-a-weird-beast/
http://thedailyblog.co.nz/2015/10/23/guest-blogcomrade-dave-brownz-economic-crashahead/#sthash.3HvOnOcK.dpuf
http://redrave.blogspot.co.nz/2015/12/economiccrash-ahead.html
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rejection of the LOV accounts for his focus on
money rather than value. Marx shows how the
LOV contains the contradiction between usevalue and exchange-value that leads to the
Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (TRPF).
Workers resistance to increased exploitation
(because the exchange value of their labour
power will not allow them to buy and consume
enough use-values to survive) forces the
capitalists to continually replace their labour
with better machines. However machines do not
create value they merely pass on the labour
value already contained in them as they are used
up in production. This means that capitalists
have to continually increase the rate of
exploitation of those still in work to produce
enough surplus value to return a profit on the
rising investment in machines. When workers
succeed in resisting a rising rate of exploitation
to pay for increasingly expensive machines, the
TRPF causes a fall in profits.
At this point crisis sets in and rising debt
represents capital that is not productively
employed which must then speculate in existing
assets driving up their price well beyond their
value. Such investments are called fictitious
because they cannot be exchanged for value. As
speculative bubbles grow banks create more
money to fuel the boom. Thus excessive credit is
an effect of the TRPF. So neither Keynes solution
of pumping up demand to induce capitalists to
invest to meet new demand, nor Keens solution
of using state regulation to stop banksters
creating mountains of debt, can prevent crises
because they are both effects of the fundamental
cause, the LOV and the TRPF which is inherent in
the social relations of capital.
If as Marxists claim the LOV means that crises
occur because capitalists cannot extract enough
surplus value from wage labour to make a
sufficient profit, then capital is to blame for
crises not labour. If you reject the LOV you
cannot explain why reforms do not work. You
resort to genes (human nature) or dreams
(Corbynomics). Without Marx and the LOV there
is no scientific theory that explains why crises
cannot be resolved except at the expense of
workers, which is why the proletariat has to rise
up and overthrow the capitalist class that
exploits them. Anything less brings us closer to
the
inevitable
crash
into
social
and
environmental oblivion. For the proletariat to
live capitalism must die!
http://redrave.blogspot.co.nz/2015/12/marxand-lov-law-of-value.html
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Defend Marxism
While the economic conditions for socialism exist
today, standing between the working class and
socialism are political, social and cultural barriers.
They are the capitalist state and bourgeois ideology
and its agents. These agents claim that Marxism is
dead and capitalism need not be exploitative. We say
that Marxism is a living science that explains both
capitalisms continued exploitation and its attempts
to hide class exploitation behind the appearance of
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Class Struggle is the bi-Monthly paper of the Communist Workers Group of New Zealand/Aotearoa, in a
Liaison Committee of Communists with Communist Workers Group (USA) and Revolutionary
Workers Group (Zimbabwe)
Class Struggle and most articles are online at http://redrave.blogspot.com
Phone +64 0272800080 Email cwg2007@hotmail.com
Archive of publications before 2006 http://communistworker.blogspot.com/
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