Class Struggle 113

Winter 2015

Class Struggle 113

Briefs
Peters wins in Northland
Most of the left called for a vote for Peters as a vote against
Key. A Peters victory they said could see a Labour/NZ First
Government in 2017. They think this would be a lesser evil
than National/Act/United Future/Maori Party coalition
(NACTS) in 2017? We cant see much difference really. This
would be the rightwing of Labour joining forces with NZ First
to take the conservative middle ground from the NACTS at the
expense of the left and the interests of most NZ workers.
Labours stunt of deferring to Peters was a clear admission that
the rightwing in Labour has won. First it had to backstab
Cunliffe. Then it had to conspire with Peters and the NACTS to
smash Internet/MANA and isolate the Greens in the General
Election. Labour used MMP not to unite the left but smash it.

Winter 2015
nationalism, we need to ally ourselves with the masses
struggling around the world against the common class enemy
of the 99% the giant banks and monopolies of the richest
1%.

Why workers must read Marx

Chris Trotter, friend of Labour, continues his campaign to
clean up capitalism for working class consumption. He cites
Karl Marx in the Communist Manifesto that the capitalist state
is the committee for managing the affairs of the bourgeoisie.
The NACTs he claims are not ruling on behalf of ALL
capitalists, only a small bunch of parasites. Does this mean that
the NACTs should read Marx and obey his dictates and rule for
the whole capitalist class or maybe thats Labours job.
Its misleading to quote a sentence from Marx writing in 1848
to critique Keys regime for falling short of managing
capitalism efficiently for the whole ruling class. Since Marxs
time capitalism has undergone some major changes. The ruling
class had concentrated wealth and power into a small fraction
of the capitalist class. The less efficient and small capitalists
get swallowed up. The rest are used as subcontractors.
So the state managing the interests of the international
capitalist class today acts according to its position in the global
pecking order. NZ is a tiny semi-colony that never had a war of
independence. It is somewhere in the middle of the pecking
order as a rich dependency because of its favoured history as a
British farm.
During the times of the first Labour Government, NZ was able
to secure a measure of self-government and economic
protection to allow domestic capitalism to establish itself.
Labour governed in the interests of NZ domestic
manufacturers, but the other side of the deal was to allow the
City to keep control of banking and rake out its profits. Bruce
Jesson certainly recognised who had the better of the bargain
since he saw NZ as still a neo-colony of Britain.

Next was the abuse of MMP to effectively divert labour votes

to Peters in the Northland buy-election. A blatant cynical
disregard for building Labour support on the left in favour of
building it in the centre.
The role of Stuart Nash illustrates this. Here is an obvious
rightwing demagogic Labour leader-in-waiting being pushed
by people like Bomber as Labours salvation. A Labour/NZ
First Government in 2017 would be a defeat for workers, not a
lesser evil. Thats because they will be caught up in a right
wing populism that throws us back to a reactionary national
chauvinism that attacks the underclass and migrants rather
than our neo-colonial masters; a return to Muldoonism with a
nasty patriotic, anti-Treaty, racist backlash. (Winston Peters
was in the National Party with Muldoon).
Cuppa tea party crowdfunding with Shame Jones anyone?
A populist centrist Labour/NZ First Government would be
a dead end for workers because it can only appeal to the
red-neck middle class and lumpen workers by blaming
militant workers, beneficiaries and immigrants for NZs
economic woes which are going to get much worse.
We can do much better than that. The left inside Labour needs
to read its history. Read Karl Marx on British capitalism and
settler colonialism would be a good start, followed by the
history of the betrayals of the Labour Party. Then it needs to
break away from rightwing populism and join forces with
Mana, the left of Internet and the left from the Greens to form a
real mass Workers Party. Against the return to a reactionary

Today, 50 years later, with the end of the post-war boom and
the onset of neoliberal globalisation, NZs ruling class no
longer tries to serve two masters. Bill Sutch signalled this with
his 1970 book Takeover NZ. NZ was about to become no more
than a footnote in the accounts of the multinationals. The NZ
economy was deregulated, opened up, and recolonised by
international finance capital. NZ domestic capital was gutted,
and important productive sectors were privatised and under
foreign control.
The role of the Key regime is that of comprador, the agent of
US, UK and Chinese capital, facilitating the complete takeover
of the economy. NZ has returned to its colonial role of provider
of raw materials, with its No 8 wire ICT innovation bought out
by international monopolies. Like all compradors, the NZ
ruling class gets paid off with part of the proceeds, usually for
its conspicuous consumption, not for domestic production.
So the famous quote from the 1848 Communist Manifesto
about the state being the organising committee of the ruling
class needs some historical elaboration. The NACT regime
today does represent the international ruling class, both the
giant monopolies and banks, and their national agents,
collaborating in the job of organising the world economy in
which various nations fill their assigned roles in the
international division of labour of accumulating profits for the
richest 1%.The capitalists dont need to read Karl Marx. It has
never done them any good. The workers need to read Karl
Marx and find out how to take over and run the world economy

Class Struggle 113

sustainably and equitably. The new ruling class of the 99% will
certainly hold the state to its task of managing its common
affairs.

John Key the Money Man

A lot of people on the left in NZ are mystified by the
popularity of John Key. He has been caught out lying and
cheating, hiding under several hats and generally faking it.
The explanation lies in his personal amorality, hypocrisy, and
boorish behaviour. These are useful personality traits for a
money trader, or more accurately the Money Man as
personification of money.
Key represents nothing but money and like money he is all
show and no substance. To discover why a national leader is
first and foremost a money man we have to trace the origins of
money in capitalist society.
Money originates as a means of exchange and measure of value
of commodities. Money may have value itself as a precious
metal like gold because of the labour congealed in it, but today
money itself is valueless and more importantly, worthless
unless it can be exchanged for a commodity of value.

Winter 2015
printing money. He also tries to commodify everything from
state owned assets to social services as private property so that
the market can drive the price speculation that keeps pumping
up the fictitious economy. Capitalism like climate is headed for
collapse. Are you ready? Boom Bang!

UK: Death of Labour overdue

UK Labours defeat marks the end of social democracy in
Europe. The Great Recession is still with us as global
stagnation and the threat of a Great Depression. Social
Democracy founded on state redistribution cannot function in
recessions and depressions. The Fourth Labour Government in
NZ proved this rule by demonstrating that Labour governments
are the servants of capital before the servants of labour.
UK Labour followed a decade later with the Blairite years. The
Brown/Milliband Labour opposition did not break from Blair.
The result was that it failed to convince workers in Scotland
and elsewhere that it stood for the working class. It was
punished by Scots workers who jumped to the Scottish
National Party (SNP) and dumped Labour.
The underlying message of the victory of the SNP is not
nationalism, but classism. Workers in Scotland found a vehicle
in the SNP already in existence as the alternative to Scottish
Labour that had been part of the leadership of
Blairite/Brownite Labour. This allowed them to vote for the
SNP with an anti-austerity message.
In England and Wales, the chauvinist anti-immigrant UK
Independent Party took votes from Labour because Labour had
no policy to defend workers from wages undermined by
unemployment. Because Miliband could not deal with this
problem by backing unions and creating jobs, then workers
defaulted to the rightwing politics of blaming immigrants.

Marx called the commodity a mysterious thing because it is

not what it appears to be. The labour required to make value is
alienated and appears instead as a property of the commodity
itself. Money takes this upsidedownness and flaunts it. It
masquerades as the source, repository and religion of value-initself.
Its easy to see why famous prophets like Proudhon and Te
Whiti saw money rather than capitalist exploitation as the root
of all evil. What they opposed was the upside down reality of
capitalism which defined people by money. Of course the
world has to be turned right way up by overthrowing not only
money and its political personification in Key, but the system
of labour exploitation that is the beginning and end of it all.
The world capitalist economy today is in big trouble because it
cannot produce commodities profitably. The result is that
money has become detached from the production of value and
becomes what Marx called fictitious capital.
This is the money that Key represents, the fictional, worthless,
valueless character of money as a fake equivalent of value.
Because it cannot be exchanged for the real value produced by
workers, it pretends that by speculating in land and existing
commodity wealth it can artificially create value out of
panicked shoppers. But this is not value inflation. It is value
deflation by price inflation that will burst sooner or later.
But to keep the pretence going that bankers pyramid schemes
create value, the banking system needs a Money Man as
political leader to push speculation in all existing values by

So under Labour the replacement of class politics with

populism fails to provide answers for workers and leads to
destructive right splits. Scottish workers were driven to call for
Scotlands independence as a means of fighting austerity.
English and Welsh workers were driven into the arms of UKIP
to defend their jobs from immigrants. That leads to the
breakup not so much of Britain where finance capital rules, but
of the British working class.
The end of British Labour is part of the death of European
Social Democracy and its replacement by national populist
parties which are painted by the anti-capitalist left as
progressive. Thus by openly subordinating the workers class
interests to the middle class anti-capitalist workers are pulled
back into cross-class populist parties as we have seen in
Britain, Spain and Greece. That is why the SNP, Podemos and
Syriza which try to reconcile antagonistic classes in national
populist parties, even forming governments with open
bourgeois parties, are to the right of Social Democracy. They
are popular fronts that tie workers to reactionary bourgeois
parliaments and open them to fascist attacks.
The solution is to fight for the unity of all British and EU
workers against all the pro-austerity parties in the EU, joining
forces with the anti-austerity struggles from Greece to Spain to
form new mass workers parties. These parties would stand in
elections only to expose and defeat the misleaders who tell
workers they can vote for socialism, to win over reformist
workers to a socialist program for workers councils and
militias and a workers government capable of taking power and
planning production for need and not profit!

Class Struggle 113

Winter 2015

May Day: Workers of the World Unite!

Smash Capitalist Imperialism and stop its drive to World War 3!

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

Imperialisms war on workers

For imperialism to survive it must make the masses pay for its
crisis. This means attacking their livelihood and their lives!
This is shown by the huge downward pressure on the masses
living standards and attacks on their rights, their historic gains,
and their very existence. It
takes many forms:
(a) An expanding reserve
army of unemployed from
Asia, Africa and Latin
America where most of the
working population is in the
black economy. Everywhere
casualising contracts such as
zero hours are targeting
especially black, female and
young low-paid or no-paid
workers. In Europe and the
US today up to half of youth
are unemployed.
(b) Attacks on indigenous peoples struggles to survive and
defend their natural resources from outright theft and plunder
as we see from the Amazon to Australia, from the Zimbabwe
diamond mines to the West Papuan independence struggle and
the US First Nation peoples stands against fracking and
capitalist climate catastrophe.
(c) Rising flows of migrant workers denied basic rights to life
as in the case of African migrants deported by the ANC from
South Africa, dying by the thousands trying to reach Europe,
and trapped in concentration camps in Australia, Greece and
France. And the millions of political refugees fleeing invasions
and wars.
(d) Attacks on trade unions to break them so that workers are
super-exploited and killed in unsafe conditions as in
Bangladesh and Argentina; attacks by the bureaucratic thugs of
the state, killer cops on the union ranks everywhere such as
miners of Las Heras, Argentina, and Bolivia, and the massacre
at Marikana.
(e) Vicious austerity measures imposed everywhere that
destroy state welfare support for the working class in health,
education, housing and social benefits driving workers into
poverty ridden slums, early death or suicide as in the UK and
Greece, driving down wages and restoring 19th century labour
conditions.
(f) Rising fascist movements among petty bourgeois and
lumpen elements that ferment divisions in the working class

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

xenophobic attacks in Europe and elsewhere which prepare the
masses as cannon fodder countless proxy wars from South
Sudan to Ukraine.
(g) Imperialist invasions and occupations leading to proxy wars
that pit workers of one or other nation, nationality, ethnicity or
religion, and gender to fight one
another. The proxy wars are
most extreme in Africa (South
Sudan) MENA (Syria, Iraq,
Yemen) and Eurasia (Ukraine).
They prepare the road to the
Third World War.
By driving the proletariat into
poverty and dividing it against
itself as hostile factions, and in
numerous wars, the imperialists
and their national bourgeois
agents desperately force down
the costs of labour in the hope of
restoring their profits. But so far they have not succeeded. The
resistance is kicking back everywhere.

The proletariat fights to survive

For the international proletariat, the way out of the crisis is to
resist all the imperialist attacks on every front in every country
and build a revolutionary communist international to
overthrow the rotten capitalist imperialist system. There is no
lack of will and capacity to fightback by the worlds workers.
Every day makes thousands martyrs of our class.
We can see the spontaneous resistance taking many forms in
the struggle for jobs, social and economic rights and the
defence of basic human rights, from opposition to cop killers
from Ferguson to Baltimore, from the fascists in the Donbas,
from the dictator al Assad and Islamic State in Aleppo, from
ANC police thugs in Marikana, and from popular front
betrayals in Brazil, South Africa and Greece.
Yet, inevitably whether this resistance is in the form of the
fight against austerity, casualisation, for the rights of
indigenous, blacks, women, of migrant workers, for the rights
of unions, and opposition to proxy wars, invasions and
occupations spontaneous resistance is everywhere trapped by
the false friends of the working class; the labour bureaucracy
in the unions, the reformist left parties, and most treacherously
the self-proclaimed communists and fake Trotskyists who
betray the proletariat by covering for the open agents of the
bourgeoisie in the ranks of the working class itself.

Class Struggle 113

To mobilise and organise a united world proletariat, first the
working class must be freed from its treacherous bureaucratic
misleaders who suck militant workers
into fatal political alliances with the
bourgeoisie under the banner of the
popular front (from the ANC in South
Africa, the PT in Brazil, the PSUV in
Venezuela, to Syriza in Greece) that
ties their hands as the crisis deepens
and
the
fascist
gangs
and
paramilitaries are unleashed by the
bosses to try to smash the
international revolutionary proletariat
and stop it carrying out its historic
task of overthrowing the capitalist
system.

For a revolutionary program and party!

To bring an end to the capitalist imperialist crisis which now
threatens the destruction of humanity and nature we need a
socialist revolution. That needs a revolutionary transitional
program of demands that are raised to meet the immediate
urgent needs of workers for jobs, housing, education, health,
etc., fought for by workers, for the workers
These fights bring workers up against the power of the bosses
state and its repressive forces, that denies migrants rights, kills
militant workers, bans unions, jails or kills protesters, and
incites workers to kill one another in pogroms and wars. This
proves the need for workers to build their own class power
based upon their organs independent of the bureaucracy and

Winter 2015
bourgeoisie - councils, militias, and most of all an international
Leninist/Trotskyist party that provides the leadership to the
revolutionary proletariat.
The revolutionary party has to be
everywhere that workers are resisting the
crisis, challenging all the bosses agents
at every point, and helping to organise
workers into their own organs of workers
power and breaking out of the popular
front with the bourgeoisie.
Our aim must be to name, expose and
kick all these class traitors out of the
class and to create a new leadership of
class fighters who are won to the
program of permanent revolution,
capable of turning strike action into political general strikes,
and then into victorious insurrections to overthrow the
capitalist state and impose a Government of the workers and
all the oppressed!

Workers of the World Unite! For a new World Party

of Revolution!
For Workers Councils and Militias! For Workers
Council Governments!
For a World Socialist Revolution and a Communist
Future!

Liaison Committee of Communists May 1st 2015

ANZACs Gallipoling to the Third World War

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

The only war that matters is Class War

It seems to us that most people critical of the ANZAC
celebrations are still throwing around analyses of World War I
that are premised on the assumption that wars are between
nations, rather than between classes. Nations are the vehicles
for rival bourgeoisies to struggle for supremacy using their
workers as cannon fodder. The whole point being that the
victorious powers then make use of their expanded empires and
put the surviving proletariat to work making more profits.
But the Great War opened up the prospect of such interimperialist wars turning into open class wars. This can be seen
in a number of ways. Resistance to the draft, which was often
punished by death; the famous temporary truces between the
ranks in no mans land that were also met with severe
punishment; mutinies, best known that in Germany in
November, 1918; and ultimately, revolutions. The Bolshevik
Revolution was mainly the response to the war by workers and
poor peasants in Russia. The February 1917 revolution was
kicked off by women textile workers facing starvation. It was
followed by the October Revolution when the majorities in the

soviets of workers, troops and poor peasants stood for the

overthrow of the capitalist government.
The revolution in Germany began with the mutinies of troops
in 1918 and led to the formation of workers and soldiers
councils and militias. A bloody civil war ensured in which the
Social Democratic party headed a new Republic unleashing the
military and fascist paramilitaries against the revolutionary

Class Struggle 113

Winter 2015

Communists. Reacting to the new threat of the Russian

revolution spreading throughout Europe the hostile warring
states joined forces to invade Soviet Russia only to be defeated
by the Red Army.

some of the ANZAC troops mutinied in France but against the

conditions they faced rather than the war itself. There was
however, strong opposition to the war at home among unions
and some Maori.

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

Europe-wide (and thus a world-wide) revolution was contained
in Russia, defeated in Germany, and the coup d grace was the
rise of fascism in Italy in 1919 which then spread to Spain and
Germany by the 1930s.

For all the enthusiast empire sabre rattling in NZ there was also
a strong resistance to the war from some Waikato Maori and
the labour movement.

So the Great War resulted in a repartition of the capitalist

world but which included the rise of a new threat to the
existence of capitalism itself, the Soviet alternative to
capitalism. This led inevitably to the Second World War in the
attempt to isolate and destroy the Soviet bloc. Again while the
Allies fought the Axis their ultimate target was the Soviet
Union. Again they failed in that objective as the Soviet Second
World spread to China and
Indochina and became a
beacon to revolutionaries in
the colonial world.
The end of the Cold War and
restoration of capitalism in
Russia, China, Indo-China and
Cuba, has not solved the
problems for imperialism.
Instead of being able to grab
back what was lost to them
between 1917 and 1990,
Russia and China have come
back from the dead as
imperialist rivals.
So the defeat of the soviet world in the 1990s is not the victory
of the global capitalist class over the worlds workers. Rather it
marks the opening up of a new struggle between the old
declining US bloc and the rising Russia-China bloc for global
supremacy. And that struggle to the death will surely create the
conditions for new revolutions. We are heading towards a new
world war between these two blocs and once again the workers
are being prepared to fight one another in the interests of their
respective imperialist ruling classes.
Inevitably like the previous Great War and the Second
World War, a Third World War will be a class war. The
working class can learn from history and refuse to fight this
war on behalf of their imperialist rulers, and instead turn it
into a global class war against the imperialist ruling classes.

Resisting the Great Wrong War

The Great Wrong War, which was the title of the book by
Stevan Eldred Grigg, was caused by the rivalry of the great
powers of the time to re-divide Europe and the overseas
colonies. Workers from all these countries were sent to war to
kill one another to increase the power and wealth of the
victorious powers. The end of that war drove the defeated
Germany into deep depression and prepared the ground for the
rise of fascism and the Second Wrong War.
The response by communists who did not get sucked into this
jingoism was to refuse to fight and to mobilise against their
own ruling class as the enemy at home. Lenins famous
slogan was to turn imperialist war into civil war. This means
workers in every country refusing to shoot one another and
instead turning their guns on their own ruling classes. While

The Waikato leader, Te Puea Herangi, supported those men

who resisted conscription by gathering them up at Te Paina, a
p she had rebuilt at Mangatwhiri. Her stance attracted a lot of
hostility from other Mori and Pkeh who accused her of
being a German sympathiser. Those Waikato men who refused
to report for training when balloted in 1918 were arrested and
taken to Narrow Neck training camp at Auckland. Any who
refused to wear the army uniform were subjected to severe
military punishments, including dietary punishments (being
fed only bread and water) and
being supplied with minimal
bedding. Only a handful of the
Tainui conscripts were ever put
into uniform and none were
sent overseas. By 1919 only 74
Mori conscripts had gone to
camp out of a total of 552 men
called. The imposition of
conscription on the Waikato
people had long-lasting effects,
and the breach it caused was
probably only restored with the
Tainui Treaty settlement in
1995.
The current celebration of
nationhood born 100 years ago by the mass slaughter of
workers for profits should be resisted today as a blatant
rallying of workers to prepare to fight a Third Imperialist
war on the side of the US/NATO bloc against the rival
power of China and Russia. The workers answer to
imperialist wars is to take up arms but refuse to fight one
another for profits and when repressed by the state to turn
their guns on their own ruling classes.

Stop a Third World War!

There is really only one political response to celebrating
imperialist wars and that is refusing to fight in them unless you
are defending an oppressed country from imperialist invasion.
Even then, the working people have an interest in uniting with
workers in other countries and not following their ruling
classes which are the agents for imperialism.NZ has a great
record of resistance whose lessons should be learned today in
the face of mounting US warmongering aimed at weakening
and defeating the Russia-China bloc. On ANZAC day we
should celebrate the Waikato Maori, especially Te Puea who
organised resistance to the draft targeting Waikato Maori. We
should also celebrate the opposition and resistance to the war
by the radical elements of the labour movement which in 1913
had a General Strike put down by the army under the command
of a British Governor General.
So there is nothing stopping the working people of NZ from
learning the real lessons of the ANZACS and refusing to
participate in the hype around current wars that are softening us
up to march off again to another imperialist war.

Turn Imperialist Wars into Civil Wars!

Class Struggle 113

Winter 2015

MENA: Yemen and the Arab Revolution

Battle lines in the Middle East continue to be drawn between the US bloc and the rising China/Russia bloc
over control of the hydrocarbon resources of the region. This has not become an open proxy war since the
China, Russia bloc do not want to be drawn into a fight over oil in MENA where the stakes are so high. At
stake is the fate of Iran. Iran is in the camp of Russia and China. It has the 4th largest reserves of oil and
2nd largest reserves of gas in the world. Its immediate interests are to get the sanctions lifted and its own
oil flowing. It has a stake in Iraq where the Shiite led regime and militias are driving back the IS forces in
the north. It is the main force that is keeping al Assad in power in Syria.
In Yemen the latest front in a
series of connected fronts
has opened as the US bloc
led on the ground by Saudi
Arabia and a coalition of the
US lackey states, lines up
against the popular Houthi
rebellion that has overthrown
the US sponsored dictator
who has flown the country.
While the US bloc claims
that the Houthi are armed by
Iran, Iran denies this though
the Houthi have links to
Hezbollah
another
Iran
proxy. Iran as part of the
China/Russia bloc is clearly
engaged in a struggle with
the US bloc for control of
MENA.
Nevertheless we advocate independent working class action
in defence of the Houthi uprising without any political
support to the bourgeois leadership or its proxy role aligned
to the Russia/China imperialist bloc.

The Arab Revolution threatens both blocs

While the inter-imperialist rivalry underlies these wars in
MENA, the real threat to both blocs is the unfinished Arab
Revolution. In 2012 a year into the Arab Revolution re-opened
in MENA we wrote a balance sheet in which the success of the
revolution was clearly in the armed masses fighting against
dictatorships. To the extent that uprisings were steered into
parliamentary solutions as in Tunisia and Egypt the
revolutions were halted. Where these rebellions met
overwhelming armed repression as in Bahrain they were
aborted. Where they met armed repression but survived to arm
a popular resistance movement as in Libya and Syria, the
revolutions are still alive.
Most important, the Arab Revolution had to be joined up at
Palestine from East, West, North and South. If the Syrian
revolution did not join up militarily with the Palestinian
struggle it would be doomed. If the Libyan and Egyptian
Revolutions remained separated they would not succeed. Thus
it was necessary for the revolution to remove the imperialist
borders imposed by Sykes Picot in 1919 and turn the
Palestinian struggle into a Pan Arab Permanent Revolution.
In those countries where the revolution succumbed to the siren
songs of bourgeois parliamentary democracy, they failed to
arm themselves and win over the ranks of the army. In Egypt

the
SCAF
(Supreme
Command of the Armed
Forces) sacked the Muslim
Brotherhood regime of
Morsi and continued its
historic role since Nasser as
the military Bonapartist
institution that is the
backbone
of
the
authoritarian
state
defending capitalist rule in
Egypt, not only from the
external enemy, but from
the internal enemy, the
populist
Muslim
Brotherhood
and
the
Egyptian masses.
The most important task of
this military regime is to isolate the Egyptian masses from the
rest of the Arab states. One of the first acts of Al Sisi was to
close the border to Gaza and to the uniting of Egyptian and
Palestine revolutions. Today Al Sisi joins the Yankee coalition
bombing IS in Libya and invading Yemen with Saudi planes
and tanks to smash the rebellion as they did in Bahrain.
In those countries where the resistance armed itself, civil wars
opened up against dictatorships like al Assad in Syria, al
Maliki in Iraq, and the NTC in Libya. Yet in none of these
countries has the armed resistance united across borders to join
the Palestinian struggle. But neither have they been disarmed
and destroyed. Every attempt has been made by both US and
Russia/China blocs to isolate and destroy the popular resistance
creating power vacuums in which other forces especially
Islamic jihadist were able to fill the gap. In Iraq this has meant
that the non-sectarian resistance to al Maliki has been overrun
by the Sunni IS in the North while the Shiite militia from the
South have become the dominant force in pushing the IS back.
Similarly, in Syria the non-sectarian militias have become the
target of not only al Assad but of the IS and its jihadist allies
such as al Nusra. The IS has now moved against the Palestinian
revolution attempting to take over the refugee camp at
Yarmouk on the outskirts of Damascus.

Sectarian or imperialist wars?

So while the armed revolution advanced from 2011 to 2013, it
has been overtaken by counter-revolutionary forces who may
want to carve out Islamic states in much the same way that
Israel carved out its Zionist state. These are the open enemies
of the Arab Revolution. The result is that in both Syria and Iraq
the dictatorships have aligned themselves with the counterrevolutionary Shiite forces against the Sunni masses in an

Class Struggle 113

attempt to turn what are potentially anti-imperialist and
revolutionary wars into reactionary sectarian wars. It is the
stalemate between these dictatorships and their Sunni
opposition that has created the vacuum that the Islamic State
has moved to fill. Yet the fundamental fault lines of the wars in
MENA are not sectarian but imperialist.
Yemen demonstrates this exactly. Look who is driving the
ideology of the anti-Shia, anti-Iran realpolitik; Israel and
Saudia Arabia with the US providing the intelligence and
supplying the weapons.
Israel,
the
Zionist
reactionary state has fought
wars against Hamas and
Hezbollah. Saudi Arabia
the home of the Wahabi
Sunni sect and al Qaeda are
both client states of the US
bloc armed by the US to the
teeth, and backed up by
not-so-secret Israel nuclear
weapons! But who joins in
this
god
squad
of
mercenary states after a
bloody purge of the
leadership of the Muslim
Brotherhood, Al Sisi and
his secular Egyptian army
that isolates Gaza on behalf
of Israel. Turkey even
chimes in from the sidelines fearful of a vacuum being filled on
its borders by a Kurd nation that threatens its own territory.
Look to see who is backing the opposition. The Iraqi regime
forces trained by the US are incapable of stopping the Islamic
State. In Iraq, as in Syria, it is the Shia militia led by Iranian
generals and backed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards that
are putting up the only opposition to the revolutionary
democratic militias and the Islamic State. Iran is part of a
military bloc with Russia and China. Russia has recently
committed to supply S-300 missiles which are a defence
against aircraft if not an Israel nuclear missile attack. Of
course, both blocs are in the final analysis attempting to
maintain stability of the whole of MENA against the revival of
revolutionary uprisings that become linked into one united
struggle.

For a United Front with Palestine!

There is only one force that can solve the crisis of war ridden
MENA in the interests of the popular masses, those masses
themselves. Revolutionaries recognise that the Arab masses are
fighting a revolution against both imperialism and its national
dictators, bought and paid for by imperialism. We give no
support to fake anti-imperialist bourgeois war lords and jihadist
mullahs who claim religious rights to steal the land that has
been liberated by the masses struggles. If not the creations of
one or other imperialist bloc, they are competing to create new
bourgeois mini-states that do deals with one or both blocs for
the franchise to pump oil or gas. Against the counter-revolution
in Syria, Iraq and Libya, the popular armed militias have to
fight the dictators and their imperialist backers, and the
jihadists who hijack the revolutions to create caliphates. This
can only succeed as a common front with the Palestinians who

Winter 2015
have carried the burden of the Arab Revolution for generations.
The key is Egypt the most powerful state in MENA that is the
pivot between the Middle East and North Africa.
As we argued from the start of the Arab Spring in Egypt the
workers program against a military Bonapartism of Mubarak
(and now Al Sisi) is clear. Re-activate the unfinished
democratic revolution as the Permanent Revolution. This
means building a Marxist party that can raise a transitional
program to mobilise the working class to build workers
councils and militias to
fight for the immediate
demands of workers and
poor peasants through
strike action and a
political general strike.
Such a program will
challenge the Islamic
fundamentalism of the
Muslim
Brotherhood
youth who have come to
the fore with the arrest of
the old Morsi generation
and who are no longer
following the road of
parliamentary
reform.
Drawing
the
masses
behind such a program
will force the hand of the
SCAF to resort to Al Assad type civil war. This will split the
ranks from the SCAF officer corps and create the conditions
for an armed insurrection.
The revival of the revolution in Egypt will draw the US and
Israel in to defend the Al Sisi dictatorship at all costs. The
loss of Egypt would allow the revolution in North Africa to
link up to the Palestinian and Syrian revolutions. It would
signal that the non-sectarian Arab forces can form a bloc
from Libya to Iraq and a potential alliance with the Kurds.
The only solution is the Permanent Revolution where the
proletariat, small traders and poor peasants led by a mass
proletarian party overthrow the bourgeois state and build a
workers state. The legacy of the reactionary Stalinist parties
that entered popular fronts with the secular Baathists and
Nasserites has to be replaced by the program of Permanent
Revolution of a new Leninist Trotskyist International.
The Permanent Revolution in MENA requires a transitional
program that begins with the struggle for basic democratic
rights of assembly and speech. But nowhere in MENA are such
rights possible without workers taking power. The semicolonial state is the agent of imperialism in extreme crisis.
Imperialism can only survive by using these client regimes to
super-exploit and oppress the masses. There can be no reform
of the existing state and society. A revolutionary insurrection is
necessary based on workers, farmers, and soldiers councils
defended by popular militias from Tunisia to Yemen.

For a Revolutionary Marxist party!

For the Permanent Revolution!
For a Union of Socialist Republics of MENA!

Class Struggle 113

Winter 2015

Defend Immigrants: One Africa for All Africans!

Who is Behind the Race Riots?
These race riots have been building since the great recession of
2008. They are symptoms of the bosses trying to solve their
crisis of falling profits at the expense of workers. By whipping
up racist attacks on foreigners, the bosses turn workers
against workers and divert attention from the complicity of the
African National Congress (ANC) which oversees the rising
exploitation of South African workers on behalf of
imperialism. These racist divisions do not originate in the
working class. They are a disease spread in the working class
by the capitalist ruling class. By pointing to conflict in Natal
they attempt to blame some historic antagonism between the
Zulus and Indians. But xenophobia was not made in South
Africa. It was imported from Europe. It is the legacy of
colonial exploitation begun by
the white settlers and kept alive
today by the ANC regime.
As a South African woman
posted
on
Facebook
Unfortunately for our brothers
and sisters from the rest of the
continent, the problem is not
just
the
king [Goodwill
Zwelithini]. It is also the ANC
which continually comes up
with new, highly publicised
schemes specifically targeting
people from the rest of Africa
for deportation. It is statements like those made recently by
Zwelinzima Vavi, who said he condemned xenophobia but the
displacement of South Africans from spaza shops was not
sustainable and above all it is white capital, which lords it over
Black people in SA, with the complete endorsement of the ANC
and DA.... (ed. note, DA is the Democratic Alliance, the
successor party to the white colonialist Nationalist Party of the
Apartheid era.)
And as another South African wrote on Facebook,
If South Africans were so inherently Xenophobic why have
such a huge amount of foreigners been absorbed and tolerated
in our communities for so long, Many of our African brothers
have married and assimilated into local communities, we share
our schools, clinics and even our churches and mosques with
them. In most townships the poorest of the poor appreciate the
low prices and the small quantities and the long trading hours
and the convenient proximity of especially Somali Spaza shops,
Criminals have exploited these vulnerable traders, but they
survive despite the constant harassment of police and
gangsters, because communities need their services.
Many are renting spaces which in most cases are the only
income for poor households, The mutually beneficial nature of
the presence of so many Somali and Bangladeshi traders inside
previously no-go zones attest to the fact that South Africans
can and have been extremely tolerant. Of course locals are
affected, when they cant compete, but have the locals been
able to deliver the quality of service that these foreign owned
Spaza's are able to deliver.
In the lower paid job market Foreign Nationals have taken
local jobs, and of course they are being exploited by

unscrupulous employers who dodge all the statutory

requirements to save on their wage bill. But this is a regulatory
issue, not the fault of the foreigners who are as desperate as
the locals for work.
The only real beneficiaries of all this chaos is Shoprite who
can now replace the displaced spazas with USaves, and with
the elimination of their only competition they can now
comfortably raise prices and exploit township markets to their
hearts content. Remember Whitey Basson earned R600 million
rand in 2013 and his workers are the lowest paid most of whom
are sourced from labor brokers. So yes township malls creates
a few jobs, but do they really contribute to empowerment
within the township economy. Does the extensive buying power
of the informal retail sector not contribute to manufacturing
and
distribution
related
employment, and the economy
as a whole. The minimal
profits of the small and
informal sector compared to
the gigantic profits posted by
the Corporate retail sector
clearly indicates that there are
vested interest in getting rid of
foreign
traders
in
the
townships, I believe there are
sinister forces at work and that
much of what we see right now
is not Xenophobia but
premeditated
political
wrangling that diverts attention from the real issues which is
excessive Corporate profiteering off the backs of the poor and
governments failure to govern and regulate efficiently.

For Worker-immigrant Defence Guards!

The powerful South African working class, both domestic and
immigrant, needs to mobilize for its own class solutions against
xenophobic anti-immigrant racism and attacks. Racism and
xenophobia are poison to the working class! It is necessary to
build militant demonstrations in defence of foreign traders. In
regards to the ANC, workers need to demand an end of ANC
complicity with big business to deport migrant workers.
Political strikes in defence of immigrant workers would go a
long way also in fighting back against the attacks on the entire
working class by the ANC popular front government which
acts in the service of world imperialism.
Workers/immigrant defence guards need to be organized
immediately to protect small traders from these xenophobic
gang attacks. In order to organize this struggle, militant
workers need to take these demands to the unions to break
workers from the capitalist ANC/SACP/COSATU popular
front government and to build a mass workers party to adopt a
workers plan to socialise South Africa under a Workers and
Oppressed Government based on a program of One Africa for
All Africans! For a socialist Africa!
Revolutionary Workers Group of Zimbabwe (RWG-ZIM)
Email: rwg.zimbabwe@gmail.com
Website: www.rwgzimbabwe.wordpress.com

Class Struggle 113

Winter 2015

Zimbabwe:
Mugabe, ZANU-PF Hands 0ff Street Vendors!
Hands 0ff the Street Vendors!
The Mugabe ZANU-PF regime has threatened so-called illegal
street vendors in Harare and Bulawayo with police and perhaps
also army repression beginning Monday, June 8th, 2015. The
Mugabe regime is under pressure from local and foreign
capitalists to deal with the vendors, hence the crackdown. The
Mugabe revolution has not secured national independence
and has taken and survives due to its role of imposing the will
of foreign capital on the masses with total disregard for their
needs. This is the popular front trapping the masses in misery.
Around 5 million people are involved in street vending and
their unions have vowed to resist the action.
The RWG calls for strike actions across the country to foil
this attack on masses of the urban poor! In Zimbabwe,
anyone is liable to become a small vendor who is not part of
the labor aristocracy.
The ZANU-PF liberators of 1980 become the quasi-colonial
regime of today just as the Chinese degenerate workers state of
those days who backed them has become Chinese imperialism,
the main prop of the Zimbabwe regime today. This regime has
failed to bring about national liberation on every imaginable
score, with a real unemployment rate of 90% or thereabouts
among the urban and even the rural working class. Thus an
attack on the street vendors amounts to an attack on the
national domestic economy itself. It is not a question of finding
a proper place for our mothers to sell their goodies
(ZANU-PF Political Commissar Kasukuwere.)
The mere fact that the Joint Operations Command (JOC)
spokesperson local Government Minister Chombo could
suggest that the army could be employed in tandem with the
police to herd the vendors off the streets suggests the real
dimensions of the crisis both of the economy and the regime. It
is interesting to note that the opposition Movement for
Democratic Change (MDC), the opposition grouping favored
by Anglo-American imperialism, points to the failure of the
ZANU-PF to deliver the 2.3 million jobs it promised when it
stood in the last elections. Of course the MDC has no program
for generating these jobs, nor even a desire to do so, because
full employment of the Zimbabwe working class would
immediately change the relationship of class forces to the
disadvantage of their Western imperialist sponsors.

Jobs for all! For a 30 hour workweek at 40

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

We demand the introduction of state

projects to employ all the unemployed!
Workers! Force the government to stop the
attack on the vendors!
Land must be distributed to all poor
peasants together with a state bank to
provide cheap credit to all small farmers!
Workers form action committees to lead the
resistance to the growing attacks on the
wages and working conditions of the poor
and the livelihood of the majority poor! We
call on the workers and the oppressed
groups to convene a congress of delegates
from the working people, peasants, urban
poor, youth and soldiers to come up with a
constitution that guarantees a good life for
all!
Workers break with the MDC and ZANU-PF
and form a workers party that truly
champions the interests of the workers and
the poor masses, form rank and file unions
to lead action in all unions and break with
the reformist trade union leadership!
No to US and Chinese imperialism!
No to reformism and fake Trotskyism, build
a fighting socialist party!
For workers councils and for a workers state
based upon them that defends workers and
peasants against the local and foreign
capitalists! For a workers and peasants
government on the basis of the armed
people to implement decisions that benefit
the workers and the poor.
For an African socialist revolution as part of
the international revolution that alone can
guarantee a better life for all!
For a new world party of socialist revolution
based on the Transitional Program of 1938 to
lead the revolution to end capitalism and
open the road to socialism!

Revolutionary Workers Group of Zimbabwe

(RWG-ZIM)
Email: rwg.zimbabwe@gmail.com
Website: www.rwgzimbabwe.wordpress.com
Subscribe to Revolutionary Worker (Paper of RWGZimbabwe)

10

Class Struggle 113

Winter 2015

The USA became imperialist, what about Canada?

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

Is Canada imperialist?
The situation in Canada is less clear cut and the ongoing debate
over whether or not Canada is imperialist between economic
nationalists and internationalists is more vigorous than that in
Australia. In many ways Canada is similar to Australia.
Originating as a British colony after defeating the French and
then holding off the
Americans the settlers
occupied lands inhabited by
First Nation peoples and
started built a new capitalist
society. Like Australia,
Canada had many of the
features of a settler colony
that created the conditions
for capitalist development
and it too had no war of
independence.
However, unlike Australia,
Canadas developed under
conditions which, in the
absence of a war of independence, allowed a national
bourgeoisie to emerge capable of becoming economically
independent of the colonial power. The unique factor that
explains this seems to have been the proximity of the American
Revolution that threatened to spread into Canada. US
revolutionaries made incursions into Canada and there was
widespread support for the revolution on the part of a majority
of settlers coming into Canada. The British state had to build a
strong national capitalist regime in Canada to defend it from
the revolutionary advances from the South. In doing so, this
colonial regime kept firm control on the settlers and put down
two rebellions by small farmers and an uprising by Metis
(mixed race) in the mid 19th century.
Canadian historians generally agree on these colonial origins
but differ on what happened next. Most argue that Canada
ceased to be a colony controlled by Britain in the late 19 th
century but could not achieve economic independence as it fell
under the dominance of the US as it embarked on its own
imperialist expansion. The dependency school of thought
explains this as the result of a Canadian ruling class preoccupation with trade and commerce so that the banks played a
weak role in investing in domestic industry which had to rely

on US investment. Investment of US finance capital in

Canadian industry therefore established a division of labour in
which Canada was a producer of staples or raw materials,
while its branch plant industry was dominated by the US. The
result was that Canada became an economic dependency of the
US rather than a developed industrial capitalist state or
imperialist power.
Yet contrary to the
dependency theory, there
is a rival school of thought
that argues that Canada is
imperialist. For example,
Bill Burgess in the 2006
article,
Canada,
Imperialist
or
Imperialized
(CIOI)
argues that the evidence
today points to an
independent
finance
capitalist class in Canada:
Statistics Canada reports
that the 25 largest
enterprises in Canada in 1988 controlled 41% of the assets of
all corporations in the country. As reported in Figure 1, the rate
of Canadian control over the assets of this highly strategic
group was an impressive 95%... When the top 25 ranking by
assets is added to the ranking by revenues, 36 of the top 44
enterprises are Canadian-controlled. 90.2% of the revenues in
this group are Canadian-controlled; only 8.8% are US
controlled. The 44 enterprises account for 50% of the revenues
of the largest 763 enterprises in Canada, and 42% of their
assets. In other words, within the core group of corporate
power in Canada, Canadians capitalist control is seven or eight
or nine times greater than US capitalist control, and this does
even include other important points of support like Canadian
government policy. [Emphasis in original]
However, proving that Canadian finance capital exists does not
explain the why and how this finance capital emerged, a
question which is not settled as we show below. A minority
like Bill Burgess trace the formation of finance capital as the
result of Canadas early development. The majority including
Todd Gordon in Imperialist Canada, see the rise of Canadian
imperialism as occurring after WW2. Within the majority some

11

Class Struggle 113

like Jerome Klassen see it as a new imperialism that emerged
as part of the neo-liberal free trade era of CAFTA, NAFTA etc,
and picked up speed in the period since 9/11. Nevertheless,
both minority and majority agree that whatever its origins
Canadian imperialism is deeply integrated into US imperialist
hegemony and plays the role of a secondary imperialist
power.

Origins of Canadas Finance Capital

In terms of the theory that we advance about the rise of
imperialist powers, we take the minority view on the
emergence of finance capital. We argue that Canada could not
have become imperialist unless the conditions for this had been
established before WW1 and the redivision of the world into
the spheres of influence by rival capitalist powers. Did these
conditions exist in Canada? The general rule that a colony must
wage a war of independence to win its economic independence
from imperialism did not apply in this case. The opposite was
true. Canada won its political independence from Britain as the
result of its counter-revolutionary role on the side of the British
against the American Revolution. In order for the British to
prevent the American Revolution spreading to its colony it had
to create a strong national bourgeoisie as a bulwark. But why
would this lead to that classes economic independence from
both the British and then the US empires?
As we have seen the dependency theorists argue that Canada
didnt win its economic independence from Britain and the
resulting weakness of the Canadian bourgeoisie reflected its
comprador role as the mercantile agent class of the British
Empire. Such a weak bourgeoisie could not claim more than a
merchant bankers share of the surplus-value produced in
Canada. The lions share of super profits would be shipped off
to Britain. The Canadian comprador state defeated settlers
uprisings for independence on behalf of the British and without
tariff protection industrial development remained backward.
When Canada gained self-governing status its comprador
class then looked to US industrial capital investment in branch
plants. This is widely known as the Naylor-Clement thesis
after those who developed this idea within the dependency
camp.
And yet the evidence shows that these features of
dependency, while significant, were a subordinate aspect of
Canadas economic development. Canadian banks invested
heavily in the transport and energy infrastructure necessary for
capitalist production. This proved that there was no split in the
capitalist class between merchant bankers and industrialists. In
fact, the big majority of Canadian capital was what Lenin later
called finance capital the fusion of banking capital with
industrial capital in large increasingly monopolistic enterprises.
The rise of this finance capitalist class in Canada therefore
occurred at the same time as in all the other imperialist
powers. [Burgess, 142; CIOI, 2006]

How to explain the rise of finance capital?

What this proves, against both dependency theorists, and
new imperialist theorists, is that Canada was already
imperialist by World War I. What is doesnt demonstrate is the
specific circumstances that allowed a comprador class to
transform itself into a class of finance capitalists. Burgess
suggest an explanation lurking in the Naylor-Clement thesis
of a weak, divided bourgeoisie that proved in reality to be the
opposite, a strong and united national bourgeoisie:
Naylor and Clement argued that, first, there is an atypical
division and rivalry between sectors of Canadian capital

Winter 2015
dating back into the 19th century. Second, they claimed that
financial capital in Canada chose a continental alliance with
US capital over a national alliance with indigenous industrial
capital. [Burgess, Thesis, 147]
As Burgess and others have explained, the Naylor/Clement
thesis is based on the misunderstanding that merchant capital
invested in building railways and canals was not industrial
capital. Yet Canadian merchant banks which served Britain in
Canada, employing British capital, were not merely building
railways and canals to transport commodities to the British
market, they were doing much more than that. They were
laying down the infrastructure necessary for capitalist
agriculture, forestry, and more important, manufacturing. The
capital invested in this infrastructure was not merchant capital
but bank and state monopoly finance capital. That is why the
large family and state enterprises that were created at the time
fused banking and industrial capital to concentrate investment
and as a result became highly monopolised, giving rise to the
finance capital typical of imperialism. [Burgess, Thesis, 142]
So perhaps the explanation we are looking for runs like this:
the Canadian settler colony converted British merchant capital
into industrial capital by extending the circuit of industrial
capital from Britain to the colony and at the same time creating
the conditions for capitalist production in Canada. The
foundations for the rise of Canadian finance capital were laid
by the states policy of developing domestic industry,
contributing to the solution of Britains crisis of falling profits,
and at the same time accumulating surplus-value in its own
right. But how was this possible without a national revolution
to win economic independence?
Burgess suggests that the policy of land settlement may have
played an important role in the formation of industrial
capitalism in Canada, but that more work needs to be done to
prove this point. [Burgess, Thesis, 27-28] In the next section
we put forward our interpretation of the importance of the land
question in the settler colonies.

The Land Question

British imperialism in the early to mid 19th century was facing
a crisis of falling profits at home caused by the high cost of raw
materials due to the lack of capital investment in agriculture.
The resulting stagnation, unemployment and poverty led to
famines, epidemics and widespread social unrest. The political
economist E.G. Wakefield promoted his systematic
colonisation as a solution. It would put a sufficient price on the
sale of land in the colonies to prevent settlers from occupying
free land and at the same time use the proceeds of land sales
to fund free immigration. It would solve the social problems in
Britain as well as the underlying profitability crisis, by opening
up new lands for capitalist agriculture to provide cheaper raw
materials for industry at home, simultaneously creating a class
of wage labourers. As a form of primitive accumulation,
indigenous lands were expropriated by the state and sold to
petty capitalist farmers, while denying migrant workers free
access to land, forcing them to perform wage labor for a living.
In short the denial of free land was necessary to ensure the
separation of labor from the land to create free labor and
capitalist development in the settler colonies.
Marx critiqued this policy as implemented by the Wakefield
Scheme. In Australia and NZ the plan failed when workers
escaped free labor for free land proving that capital and
land cannot create value without labor power. In Canada, the
colonial state controlled crown land directly, or indirectly
through groups of wealthy families after 1812, and then

12

Class Struggle 113

Winter 2015

through the Canada Company from 1825, all of which sold

land at a relatively high price. So there was no free land to
allow migrants to escape wage labour unless they crossed the
border to adopt the American way. Of course the labor
market was replenished by constant flows of migrants.

where modern industry has developed large multinational firms

in the aftermath of World War 2 in 1945, but this would not
have been possible were it not for their status as heavily
subsidised special security states defending the interests of US
imperialism.

So while the Colonial government did not officially apply

Wakefields systematic colonisation they achieved its main
purpose. By creating the conditions for capitalist production,
freehold land, free labour, and capital, the colonial elite became
a national bourgeoisie in which banking capital and industrial
capital could merge as finance capital. In completing this
process by World War I, Canada was already joining the
imperialist powers, large and small, that entered that war in the
interests of increasing its own sphere of interest rather than that
of either Britain or the USA.

Canada born of the first imperialist crisis?

Critique of New Imperialism

The most common view of Canadian imperialism today is that
it emerged in the post-World War 2 period. We argue that such
a theory ignores Marx and Lenin in settling the question of the
origins of finance capital. If Canada was not already imperialist
by World War I on what basis could it emerge thereafter? Like
the left in Australia that speaks of a small, secondary, or subimperialist Australia, the method used to arrive at this
conclusion is empiricist. It argues that Canada during the
epoch of imperialism can make the transition from a
dependent or semi-colonial country and emerge as imperialist
in a world already divided and fought over by imperialist
powers in two Imperialist wars. In other words existing
imperialist powers can step outside the laws which govern
monopoly state capitalism to donate super-profits to dependent
countries so they can accumulate some of these super-profits
on their own account and even redistribute them as a socialist
policy as the ANC claims in South Africa.
This view of imperialism as bad policy is the inverse of the
dependency theorists who claim that Canadas deep
integration in the US security state disqualifies its imperialist
status. For example Gowans argues that Canada cannot be
imperialist because it doesnt have its own military
independent of the US. Klassen rebuts this view but opts for
the term secondary imperialist, to acknowledge that Canada,
like many other imperialist powers (for example Japan) is
subordinated to hegemonic US imperialism. Yet Klassen
cannot explain how the US has allowed Canada to escape a
semi-colonial fate since World War 2 other than by voluntarily
subsidising Canadian imperialism with US super-profits. Here
is empiricism in all of its glory: selecting facts to fit a
preordained political position without reference to the origins
of finance capital in Canada before World War I.
Are we empiricists? No. Imperialism arose from the crises of
overproduction and exported capital to restore the rate of profit.
Before the epoch of imperialism proper began in the late 19 th
century, British imperialism as the dominant power by the mid19th century had a colonial policy of state monopoly capitalism
that prefigured global imperialism. State monopoly capitalism
is parasitic and destructive in extracting surplus-value and
resorts to war to partition the global market. We argue that
British imperialism retained finance capital control of its
colonies and semi-colonies except in the case of Canada where
an independent capitalist class arose out of the counterrevolution against the American Revolution. In the epoch of
imperialism, no capitalist colony or semi-colony has been able
to make the transition from semi-colony to imperialist power
since the redivision of the world economy by the imperialist
powers in 1918. There are states like Israel and South Korea

We have argued here that the how and why of Canadian

Imperialism can only be understood by applying the theory of
Lenin on imperialism. Lenins theory of imperialism means
that after World War 1, when existing imperialist powers repartitioned the world into their respective spheres of influence,
no new imperialist powers could emerge. The export of capital
from the imperialist countries created dependent colonies or
semi-colonies which could only escape colonial superexploitation and oppression by permanent revolution. We argue
that attempts to find new imperialisms, such as that of the
British settler colonies such as Australia reject Lenin for social
imperialism. This is the prevailing view of the post-World
War 2 Mensheviks who think that imperialism is the bad
policy of imperialist ruling classes that can be reformed
without overthrowing capitalism.
In Part One of this article we argued that New Zealand and
South Africa are clearly semi-colonies in terms of the dominant
share of super-profits expropriated by the major imperialist
powers. Australia is less clear cut combining both rich semicolonial and imperialist aspects. We have gone back to our
original position on the balance of the evidence showing that
Australias dependence on the US and China makes it a semicolony. However this analysis has shortcomings because we
have not gone back to Lenin to explain how and why
Australia failed to qualify as imperialist by World War I. In
that sense we weree still arguing on the empiricists terrain.
In the case of Canada we started with Lenins theory as
necessary to explain Canadian imperialism today. This means
extrapolating back from the early 20th century to the early 19th
century to look for the origins of Canadian finance capital.
Canada as a British colony developed an industrial economy as
part of the solution to Britains crisis of overproduction as the
industrial workshop of the world. Britains export of capital
to Canada was still merchant capital in the early 19 th century,
but became industrial capital when invested in the capitalist
production of commodities in Canada. The Canadian ruling
class oversaw the development of domestic capitalism and
monopolised ownership and control of means of production,
accumulating and concentrating banking and industrial capital
as finance capital in its big banks and enterprises. That is why
we think that it is possible to show that Canada was imperialist
by World War I and so eliminate both the dependency
theories and the new imperialist theories of the post-World
War 2 period.
If this analysis is correct it strengthens our argument that we
can extrapolate the character of monopoly capital back in time
in the British settler states, and show why and how the US and
Canada, though taking very different paths, became imperialist
while the other settler colonies did not. It also gives us more
confidence that we are correct in developing Lenin and
Trotsky to explain the exceptional emergence of Russia and
China, which won their economic independence by
overthrowing the imperialist and national bourgeoisies, and
despite the counter-revolutionary restoration of capitalism,
inherited the conditions that made it necessary for their belated
capitalist development to become imperialism. END

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Class Struggle 113

Winter 2015

Polemic: Russia, China and the Unfinished Permanent Revolution

Facing a chronic global crisis of capitalism and intensifying inter-imperialist rivalry between the US and China
blocs, the most urgent task facing revolutionaries today is to provide program for a new Trotskyist international
that can lead workers in the struggle to defeat nationalism and imperialism and to the victorious socialist
revolution. At a public meeting in London on 11 April 2015 the question of Russia and China as imperialist
powers is being debated by the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International (LCFI) and the Revolutionary
Communist International Tendency (RCIT). We of the Liaison Committee of Communists (LCC) argue that the
centrist method of both tendencies cannot provide the answers workers need. We argue that both the LCFI and
RCIT revise Lenin on imperialism and nationalism. In summary, both turn Trotskys theory of permanent
revolution into a petty bourgeois program adapting to bourgeois democracy.

Centrism and Social Imperialism

Centrism as we understand it is a tendency on the revolutionary
left that vacillates between the Marxist program and
opportunist adaptation to the bourgeoisie. It functions to divert
workers from revolutionary consciousness and action. In our
view the material roots of post-war centrism in the Trotskyist
movement are the petty bourgeoisie of the imperialist
countries. This is what we define as social imperialism. While
it originates in the imperialist countries, it becomes expressed
in the semi-colonies as national Trotskyism. Social Imperialism
is fundamentally the political program of the imperialist labour
aristocracy adapting to imperialism on the material basis of
relatively privileged living standards. National Trotskyism is
the reverse side of this coin, the political program of the semicolonial petty bourgeoisie who
adapt to bourgeois nationalism on
the basis of material rewards
flowing from the defence of the
popular front regimes.
As Trotsky lamented in the years
just before his death, the crisis of
Marxism was reflected in the
abandonment of dialectics, and
its substitution by empiricism and
pragmatism. These latter are
idealist philosophies that reflect
the surface reality of capitalism,
the alienated exchange relations which in the imperialist
countries are expressed as relatively high living standards.
Both the LCFI and RCIT originated in tendencies that broke
from Trotskys dialectic method as a result of their materialist
roots in the imperialist petty bourgeoisie. Neither tendency has
recognised nor completely broken with these historic roots as
we will show.
In the case of Socialist Fight, its roots are in the International
Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) under Healy. In
reacting against Pabloism which liquidated the party into
Stalinism, Healy liquidated the proletarian party into social
democracy in the imperialist countries, and the radical parties
of the national bourgeoisie in the semi-colonies. While the
Pabloites adapted to the labour bureaucracy oriented to the
Soviet Union, the Healyites adapted to the anti-communist
Labour Parties and anti-communist Third World populist
leaders.
Below we show that Socialist Fights program today represents
this particular brand of social imperialism, adapting to
Bonapartist dictators such as Gaddafi, Assad and Putin as the
enemies of US imperialism. It subordinates workers to Antiimperialist United Fronts (AIUF) with bourgeois leaders in
league with imperialism. It is even worse when it regards

Russia and China as oppressed states (semi-colonies or subimperialist) and calls for an AIUF against US imperialism!
This for us explains why the LCIF social imperialist method
continues to reinforce national Trotskyism upon the Latin
American members of the LCFI and the Parity Committee so
that popular front regimes like that of the PT in Brazil are
defended as part of an AIUF with Russia and China against US
imperialism.
In the case of the Austrian Revolutionary Communist
Organisation for Liberation (RKOB) the mother section of the
Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT), its
historical roots were in a factional split from the state capitalist
Cliffite tendency in Britain in 1975. In summary, our position
is that the factional split with the Cliffites in 1975 which led to
the formation of the LRCI in
1989 was an incomplete break
with Cliffism. Its programmatic
statement on the workers states
The Degenerated Revolution in
1982
defined
degenerated
workers states as a dual state
with workers property relations
in contradiction with bourgeois
norms of distribution which
were the basis of the
bureaucracys privileges.
This meant that when put to the
test by Yeltsin in 1991, the League for the Revolutionary
Communist International (LRCI) backed bourgeois democracy
represented by Yeltsin against the Stalinist dictatorship
opposed to Yeltsin. According to The Degenerated Revolution,
political revolution was a struggle against the bureaucracys
defence of bourgeois distribution relations leading to
overthrow of workers production relations. Under the pressure
of imperialist public opinion against the Stalinist bureaucracy
the LRCI blocked with the pro-imperialist restorationist Yeltsin
against the Stalinist military command instead of blocking with
workers in the defence of workers property against both
Yeltsin and the military.
While coming from different traditions, in breaking from
Trotskyism and the transitional (or dialectic) method, both
tendencies, in adapting to social imperialism, end up in the
camp of imperialism. This is evident because the revolutionary
agency of the working class is always subordinated to the petty
bourgeois program. It is always conditioned by the mechanistic
or schematic method of the popular front in which sections of
the petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie guide
workers through the struggles for bourgeois democracy, in
particular national self-determination. For both tendencies
national self-determination as a bourgeois democratic right is

14

Class Struggle 113

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

National Self-Determination
We see social imperialist adaptation as a fundamental break
from permanent revolution which states that in the epoch of
imperialism bourgeois democratic rights can only be won and
defended by proletarian revolution - that is by workers
democracy. In other words the democratic revolution in the
epoch of imperialism can no longer be spoken of as the
bourgeois national democratic revolution. The formation of
new capitalist nation states can only serve the interests of
bourgeois imperialism and the unfinished tasks of that
revolution cannot be realised other than by the proletarian
revolution.
So the LCFI regarded Gaddafis rule in Libya as a genuine
expression of self-determination against imperialism despite
Gaddafis role in serving US imperialism and emerging
Chinese imperialism. The LCFI denied the agency of the rebels
fighting Gaddafi as an agent of imperialism by painting them
as CIA agents or jihadists. Today the rebels are fighting both
the US puppet Hefter and the newly branded Islamic State (IS)
in Libya. The logic of this has escaped the LCFI because it
cannot imagine that Arab and other masses in Middle East and
North Africa (MENA) are capable of carrying through
permanent revolution against both imperialism and against the
reactionary Islamic jihadists who are the agents of imperialism.
One key aspect of social imperialism is its Eurocentrism,
expressed today as Islamophobia.
The RCIT was on the right side in Libya in supporting the
revolutionary agency of the rebels. They called for the defense
of Gaddafi from NATO, like the LCFI, but did not call for the
rebels to form an AIUF with Gaddafi against NATO, unlike the
LCFI, since Gaddafi was attacking the revolution. Only the
revolutionary brigades can open the permanent revolution
against both imperialism and its national dictator. Like the
LCC they called for the revolution to fight on two fronts,
against Gaddafi, and against NATO and its stooge the National
Transitional Council. The permanent revolution has since
stalled in Libya but so has imperialism which is unable to
defeat the resistance and find a new bourgeois regime that can
replace Gaddafi. This stalemate can only be overcome and the
permanent revolution completed in Libya with the revival of
the Arab revolution led by the workers and poor peasants
armed resistance in Syria and Palestine, supported by
internationalist workers.
However, the RCITs slavish application of the bourgeois
democratic schema as progressive can be seen in Egypt when
the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces (SCAF)
dismissed the Muslim Brotherhood, elected to power on a
reactionary constitution that defended the military regime. The
Muslim Brotherhood was a weak Islamic bourgeoisie of the
bazaar seeking to replace the dominant military fraction. The
RCIT called this dispute between two fractions of the
bourgeoisie a coup against bourgeois democracy and an
historic defeat for the working class when the election of the
Muslim Brotherhood did nothing to advance the interests of the
working class. This was proven by the millions of workers who
marched against it. Such bourgeois democracy was in reality
a reactionary bourgeois regime seeking to appease imperialism
and imposing a theocratic barrier to revolution. Its removal
meant that the SCAF was now seen openly as the power base
behind the Mubarak regime and that it had always been the
dominant fraction of the national bourgeoisie.

Winter 2015
What the national revolution in MENA proves beyond question
is that democratic rights are only in the interest of the working
class if they actually advance the struggle for proletarian
revolution. In the current crisis of imperialism there is no
bourgeois democratic halfway house that workers must defend
since the very act of doing so is to take the side of the counterrevolution. The same applies to the semi-colonial struggles
elsewhere in the world. We will concentrate here on the
struggles in Latin America since in this continent, in our view,
Trotskyism is in a much stronger position against Stalinism and
Social Democracy than in Asia and Africa. The barrier to
revolution on this continent is renegade Trotskyism!

Latin America
In Latin America the permanent revolution was subordinated to
national self-determination. The fate of permanent revolution
can be captured in one word - populism. The impact of the
social imperialism on the 4th International after Trotskys
death was to abandon permanent revolution and lock national
Trotskyism into the left wing of the popular front. The IEC
sent SWP member Sherry Mangan to Argentina in 1941 to
unify the different Trotskyists groups. He succeeded in creating
a united organisation but his eclectic method of downplaying
national oppression as a secondary question only confused
the understanding of the program of permanent revolution. The
Argentine Trotskyists continued to be split between those
reducing the national question to socialist revolution, and those
succumbing to national Trotskyism and joining popular fronts
with bourgeois nationalists like Peron.[iv] This explains why
most Latin American Trotskyists put the national struggle
against US imperialism before class politics. In one country
after another, the working class has entered popular fronts with
alien classes to fight imperialism, inevitably facing defeat at
the hands of military, usually inspired or backed by the US.
The Trotskyist program of the working class leading the
struggle for national independence requires class independence
from those classes that are in alliance with imperialism.
Most of the Latin American tendencies remain more or less
trapped in national Trotskyism insofar as the main enemy is not
capitalism but the United States. We discovered this first hand
in the internal fight we had in the Fraccion Leninista Trotskista
Internacional (FLTI) in 2009-10 over the question of Chinese
imperialism. While we proved that China was accumulating
capital despite its semi-colonial exploitation by the established
imperialist powers we could not convince the FLTI that it was
possible for an ex-workers state to become imperialist. We put
this down to the incomplete break of the FLTI in its founding
section the Democracia Obrera (LOI-CI) of Argentina with the
national Trotskyism of Moreno. This was the inverted social
imperialism of US pseudo Trotskyism which presents a
unipolar world in which US hegemony is an insuperable barrier
to semi-colonies emerging as rival imperialist powers.
We can see why it is easy for the LCFI to form a Liaison
Committee with groups that see the world as dominated by
only one imperialist power, and are blinded to the huge impact
that Russian and Chinese imperialism is having on Latin
America, in particular the restoration of capitalism in Cuba.
The LCFI continues the tradition of social imperialism in
colonising Latin American groups that adapt the semiPabloite version of the AIUF in which a section of the semicolonial national bourgeoisie is defended as the lesser evil
against US imperialism. Permanent Revolution for these
groups means an alliance with the progressive bourgeoisie
and running left cover for the popular front.

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Class Struggle 113

LCFI in Latin America

The LCFI has recently formed a Parity Committee (PACO)
with a number of left groups in Brazil. The LCFI plays the
leading role as its positions on Libya, Syria, Ukraine, etc., are
adopted by the PACO. We are proposing here that the social
imperialism of the LCFI is finding a corresponding echo in the
incomplete break with national Trotskyism of these groups. Let
us quote the Coletivo Lenin (CL) on the members of the PACO
who are now producing a common journal. We will then run
through the positions on the important questions that relate to
permanent revolution vs national Trotskyism.
The FDT, Press organ until
then the comrades of the
Communist League, comes to 22
and five years of existence, it is
now journal Joint Committee,
an international alliance of
organizations and militant
communist workers, composed
of the Communist League, Lenin
Collective,
Resistance
Revolutionary People, Marxist
space and also by the Liaison
Committee for the Fourth
International, which comprises the Socialist Fight (Socialist
Struggle), the UK, and the Militant Tendency Bolshevik,
Argentina.
The Communist League is a founding member with Socialist
Fight of the LCFI. It leads the PACO in Latin America. The
statement put out by the PACO on the mobilisation of the
March 15th pro-coup demonstration against the PT states:
As signaled since 2014, there is a coup movement in all Latin
American countries that make up commercial and political
alliance with the Russian-Chinese bloc. The Yankee and
European imperialism are on the offensive over the resumption
of spheres of influence and territory lost in the 2008-2009
crisis to the Eurasian block; and to resume its market positions
and prevent the political and economic rise of China, has been
focusing on manufacturing coup dtats and civil wars, as seen
in Ukraine, Middle East, Paraguay and Honduras. In this
context, the coup in Brazil would be a way to resume the
geopolitical space in Latin America.
We can see here clearly that the PACO is endorsing the line of
the LCFI that Russia and China are sub-imperialist states, yet
at the same time the US and EU is prepared to unleash coup
dtats to regain spheres of interest and territory lost ...to the
Eurasian bloc. With the current threats of coups in Venezuela
and Brazil we can see how easily the default position of social
imperialism and national Trotskyism pressures workers back
into supporting the popular front.
But how does imperialism lose spheres of interest to the
Eurasian bloc without Russia and China emerging as
imperialist rivals.
The short answer from the LCFI seems to be that the threat to
the US is not coming from newly emerging imperialist states,
but a global anti-imperialist bloc of states commonly referred
to as the BRICS but clearly centred on the Eurasian Bloc of
Russia and China. The US is determined to impose its
hegemony totally in the spheres where this bloc has some
influence. Politically, since the leading BRICS are subimperialist they must be defended against the US bloc. This
leads to a position of defense of Russia and China in wars with
the US the basic LCFI line.

Winter 2015
This global AIUF leads to a return to national Trotskyist
popular front politics nationally as a lesser evil to US
imperialism. This is confirmed by the Joint Statement of the
Communist League (LCFI) and Coletivo Lenin (PACO) calling
for a vote for the PT in the second round of the Presidential
Elections. The LCFI justified this position in a recent article
about the defection of one of its members, Laurence
Humphries, to the RCIT:
Laurences final complaint is that the Liga Comunista and the
Coletivo Lenin (whom he does not mention) advocated a vote
for Dilma Rousseff, the Workers Party leader, against Acio
Neves in the Presidential election
and the RCIT man in Brazil
wanted us to cast a null vote.
Considering that the masses
would have faced a direct agent
of US imperialism if Neves had
won as opposed to a victory for
Dilma which maintained at least
a
measure
of
national
independence and defence of
workers rights (as in the Yeltsin,
Putin dichotomy above) it is
criminally irresponsible not to
take
the
principled
antiimperialist united front stance that they did.
Furthermore, on the question of the threatened coup dtat, the
PACO statement calling for mobilising on the streets on March
13th (against March 15th) says the power of workers in the
streets is necessary because the PT and PCdoB Government do
not have the power to resist further austerity or to defeat a
coup. There is no statement that in this united front against a
coup dtat revolutionaries have a duty to condemn the popular
front for trapping workers in parliament and preparing the way
for fascism. For example it accuses the fake left of Unified
Socialist Workers Party (PSTU), Socialism and Freedom Party
(PSOL,) etc. for a political error in its third way policy of
abstaining from the March 13th protest against the coup. Yet in
protesting the coup threat it fails to call on those with illusions
in the PT to demand that it break from the popular front. It is
waiting for the conditions to mature for those with illusions
in the bourgeois and manipulative policies of the government
to break from the PT. The danger is that mature conditions
may not arrive before the popular front death trap springs on
the workers. Thus the popular front is depicted as the lesser
evil and not a trap that must be sprung by the proletariat
before it can be snap shut by a fascist coup dtat.
How is it that other groups have joined the LCFI in the PACO
around this line which adapts to the popular front? Lets take
the example of the Coletivo Lenin which began its life in 2007
with the Manifesto of the Collective Luiza Mahim. It became
the Coletivo Lenin in 2009 when it produced a program under
the influence of the IBT.[v] The Coletivo Lenins new program
(2011 to today) reflects a break from the IBTs ultra-left
position on the national question but runs the risk of an
opportunist swing back to national Trotskyism. As we have
seen the concept of sub-imperialism extended from Brazil,
India, etc., to Russia and China by the LCFI means calls for
revolutionary defence of the BRICS in wars with US
imperialism.
This leads to an adaptation to the popular front at home in
defence of BRICS and/or Bolivarian socialism. Thus as noted
above, the Coletivo Lenin advocated a vote for the PT in the
second round because it was the lesser evil to the Brazilian

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Class Struggle 113

right backed by the US against the BRICS and Bolivarian bloc.
We conclude that because Coletivo Lenin refuses to accept the
reality that Russia and China are, or can be, imperialist rivals to
the US led bloc, the LCFI is continuing to colonise Latin
American comrades as national Trotskyists today in a
worldwide popular front with the BRICS bloc against US
imperialist hegemony. The LCC began its existence in a split
with the FLTI precisely over this question in 2009/10 and we
have continued to argue that unless Latin American comrades
recognise Russia and China as imperialist, they will remain
trapped in national Trotskyism as the subordinate inversion of
pseudo Trotskyist social imperialism.

RCIT in Latin America

In Latin America what we see is the method of the LRCI/LFI
inherited by the RCIT. We argued above that this semi-Cliffite
method fetishises bourgeois democracy so that the concept of
permanent revolution becomes stageist in practice. It defends
popular front parties against military dictatorship in Egypt and
Thailand. The workers must go through the democratic stage in
preparation for the socialist stage. The Workers States still
have a dual state state form of bourgeois distribution relations
on top of workers property! Therefore political revolution in
defence of workers property requires the overthrow of
Stalinism by bourgeois democracy! The LRCI held that the
counter-revolution was not complete in the Moribund
workers states until workers property was replaced by capitalist
market relations. Imperialism bombs Yugoslavia and creates
new nation states in Bosnia and Kosovo!
This is social imperialism. The workers lead the fight against
feudalism and imperialism but they do so by reproducing the
fetishised social relations of bourgeois democracy as a
precondition for socialist revolution.
We define democracy today as concerned only with workers
democracy. Lenin talked of the epoch of the bourgeois
national democratic revolution as the formation of states
unifying national markets. In the epoch of imperialism where
monopoly capital dominates, nations and the ideology of
nationalism are reactionary forces that divide the international
proletariat. National oppression in the imperialist epoch has
only one historic solution, the socialist republic within a worldwide union of socialist republics. This was the goal of the
Bolsheviks before the Russian Revolution was isolated and
bureaucratised. It was the program of the healthy Fourth
International while Trotsky lived. Unconditional defence of the
Soviet Union as part of the world revolution would usher in the
epoch of the international proletarian revolution.
In Latin America the RCIT method is for the AIUF against the
US bloc and the Russia/China bloc against the default national
Trotskyists position of a continental popular front with the
Bolivarians and the BRICS against US imperialism. However,
because of its social imperialist method of fetishising bourgeois
democracy, the RCIT is pressured to adapt to the national
Trotskyist popular front. So in its recent statement on the
threatened coup dtat the RCIT Brazilian section did not call
for opposition to the coup to defend bourgeois democracy to
advance workers democracy.
Revolutionaries had to call for workers to mobilise against the
coup, and against the popular front government. The clarion
call of Trotsky in the Transitional Program was break with the
bourgeoisie! The only way for workers to take advantage of
bourgeois parliament in the epoch of imperialism is to use it as
a revolutionary forum to break reformist workers from
bourgeois parliament. This cannot be done while reformist

Winter 2015
parties are part of popular fronts with the bourgeoisie. There is
no way to smash fascism without breaking workers from the
popular front that strangles the workers struggle against
fascism. This cannot be done in stages, first defending
bourgeois democracy against the coup, and then second,
smashing the popular front.
According to the RCIT:
For workers, what is of least importance is the supposedly
democratic formality; but what is essential for them is the
political struggle and the class interests hiding behind
appearances. From this perspective, what is at stake here and
now is the replacement of a reformist Popular Front
government with a government of bourgeois sectors most
directly linked to the US and European imperialism. Thus,
these sectors are, by their very nature, freer to abrogate more
workers rights than the PT could possibly do. Among the
objectives of the more right-wing sector are to: increase the
profits from surplus value; lower workers pensions; privatize
the only still partially state-owned banks (Bank of Brazil and
Caixa Economica); lower the measly minimum wage of just
300 dollars; increase privatization of oil reserves in Pr-Sal
Petrleo and consequently fully privatize Petrobras; deepen
the anti-worker reforms of social security; cancel the majorand medium-importance rights achieved by organized labor
(such as abolishing or decreasing the thirteenth salary paid in
December as a Christmas bonus, unemployment insurance,
maternity leave, etc.).[Our Emphasis]
While the RCIT calls for independent workers mobilisation
without giving any political support to the Government or
appealing to the institutions of the state it does not insist that
workers break from the popular front to build their independent
struggle. It states that workers cannot remain neutral in a fight
between the popular front and a right wing coup on the basis
that the popular front is the lesser evil because the program of
the rightwing coup would be much worse than that of the
austerity attacks of the Government on workers. Workers
therefore must form a united front within an AIUF (actually
popular front of the Bolivarians and BRICS against US
imperialism) against a coup before they can free themselves
from the PT bloc and break with the bourgeoisie!
This position breaks with Trotskys permanent revolution
where workers fight independently to defeat both imperialism
and the treacherous national bourgeoisie that acts as its agent.
The weapons of workers facing an imperialist backed coup are
the workers councils, militias, the general strike and the
insurrection. A military bloc with a popular front government
against a right wing coup such as the Provisional Government
in Russia 1917 must be based on the armed independence of
the soviets only for the purpose of breaking the popular front
because it was a death trap not merely a lesser evil.
Thus at the same time it is adapting to the practical defence of
a reformist popular front, the RCIT tries to theoretically
break the popular front by convincing Latin American
comrades that Russia and China are imperialist powers. This is
difficult, as the almost universal objection is that Russia and
China are not, and cannot become, imperialist. Following
Lenin they say that in the epoch of imperialism, no semicolony can become imperialist. Today they now generalise that
position in a non-Leninist fashion to include former workers
states which have been defeated and restored as capitalist semicolonies, or have perhaps become sub-imperialist at most.
In a recent exchange with the Corriente Socialista
Revolucionaria - El Topo Obrero -CSR (Venezuela) and

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Class Struggle 113

Partido de la Causa Obrera PCO (Argentina) the RCIT argued
the evidence that Russia and China were imperialist, and that
there was no universal law against capitalist semi-colonies
becoming imperialist. There were special conditions under
which Russia and China were able to make a transition from
former workers states to new imperialist state, but this was
nothing exceptional. We commented on the RCIT letter:
...the argument loses clarity and force when you try to show
that any country under special circumstances can become
imperialist. This has the effect of over-riding the lawful
necessity that a country must be independent from
imperialism to emerge as a new imperialist country. Of course
independence must mean economic independence from
semi-colonial exploitation. This is the sticking point for the LA
[Ed.: Latin American] comrades who see that Japan was
always independent and the other countries who were not, like
the US had to fight wars of national liberation, or emerged like
Norway and Czechoslovakia as small imperialists as fallout
from the re-partition of the imperialist world then under way.
But since WW1 no oppressed country has become imperialist
except via the sui generis route of Russia and China.
The LA [Ed.: Latin American]
comrades
are
correct
therefore to say that with the
onset of the imperialist epoch
when the world is divided that
countries without economic
independence
can
only
become so via permanent
revolution. And this is our
strongest argument. Since in
both Russia and China the
bourgeoisie was overthrown
and
independence
from
imperialism won (albeit that
was
not
the
Maoists
intention) and this independence was not sacrificed by the
capitalist counter-revolution. [Personal communication]
In other words the Leninist theoretical objection of the
comrades of the CSR and PCO (and also of the FLTI who
made the same argument against us in 2009) is correct, that
once the world economy is divided between imperialist
powers, there is no prospect that any colony or semi-colony
can break out of its dependent status except through permanent
revolution. The last time any new imperialist powers emerged
was during WW1 as the result of the military re-partitioning of
the world. Japan was already imperialist before the war and
increased its sphere of interest as a result of the war while
Czechoslovakia declared its independence from the AustroHungarian Empire, both as allies of the victorious imperialist
powers.
The RCIT is therefore wrong to deduce that new imperialist
powers could emerge since WW1 on the basis of:
an important shift in the production of capitalist value from
the old imperialist countries of the North to the South. We have
seen the economic as well as political and military decline of
the leading imperialist power, the US, as well as that of Japan
and the EU. Under such conditions, is it so surprising that new
imperialist powers emerge and fill the void?
This is fundamentally wrong on two counts. First, the shift in
value production from North to South in the post WW2 period
is a totally non-Marxist and non-Leninist conception of the
world economy. This ignores that from the onset of the

Winter 2015
imperialist epoch value production in the South was and still
is largely owned by the finance capital of the old imperialist
powers of the North. Second, with the concentration and
centralisation of capital in this epoch, it does not follow that the
decline of some existing imperialist powers must call forth new
ones. The imperialist powers will contest one another and the
pecking order will change during and after wars, but no new
imperialist powers have made the transition from capitalist
semi-colony since WW1. We have argued this is the reason
that the so-called sub-imperialist powers in the BRICS such
as India, Brazil and South Africa can never be more than
privileged semi-colonies.
The point being missed here is that imperialism sets up
relations between oppressor and oppressed states and that the
extraction of super-profits does not allow the oppressed states
to accumulate sufficient value to conduct anti-imperialist wars
to assert their economic independence from the oppressor
states except by means of permanent revolution.
Therefore, the rise of China and Russia as new imperialist
powers does not break the rule of permanent revolution it
proves the rule! It is consistent with what Lenin and Trotsky
wrote about both imperialism
and workers states. Thus the
Latin American comrades (not
only them!) will only be
convinced of this if they can be
shown that Russia and China
have become imperialist powers
precisely because they opened
the
permanent
revolution,
through wars of independence
from imperialism, and the
overthrow of the national
bourgeoisie to become workers
states, albeit with incomplete
permanent revolutions. The
degeneration of the Russian revolution and the creation of
bureaucratically degenerated states at birth after WW2 halted
the permanent revolution, preventing it from completing its
task of building healthy workers states. The failure to complete
the permanent revolution led directly to the counterrevolutionary restoration of capitalism.

Russian and Chinese imperialism

The position of the LCFI on Russia and China is that they are
sub-imperialist and must be defended against the US
imperialist bloc. If you read the article by Socialist Fight on
Russia its clear that it falls back on empirical evidence of who
owns the flows of surplus value in and out of Russia. Its
argument is that Russia (and by extension China) has not
accumulated sufficient capital to require massive export of
capital because US finance capital dominates these economies.
This is a bald reference to Lenins theory where export of
capital is the key feature of imperialism. On the other hand for
the RCIT, Russia and China are imperialist on the same
criteria, because Russian and Chinese state capitalism
dominates the economy, not US finance capital. And,
moreover, there is nothing stopping other states from following
Russia and China providing the necessary conditions are
present.
By the same token there is nothing in the LCFI method to
prevent Russia and China becoming imperialist if the facts of
ownership of surplus value change. It seems that the LCFI
shares a similar analysis with the RCIT despite disagreeing
over the results. Nations can become imperialist if conditions

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Class Struggle 113

allow an over-accumulation and export of capital. The fact that
they disagree on their conclusions come down to which
empirical facts they select as critical in the outcome. This
empiricist method is a feature of petty bourgeois Marxism and
ignores the deeper dialectic and transitional method of Marx,
Lenin and Trotsky.
Most importantly they are empiricist readings of Lenins theory
of imperialism. We will show here how Lenins theory,
correctly understood, allows us to claim that new imperialist
countries cannot arise unless they have been able to escape the
semi-colonial oppression of the existing imperialist countries to
become economically independent. We will then prove that it
is consistent with Lenins theory that only countries that have
been able to meet those conditions since the First Imperialist
War (WW1) are those that went through permanent revolution
to become workers states.
In his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin
drew heavily on Marx to theorise the transition from
competitive capitalism to the epoch of imperialism in which
the major developed capitalist economies were forced to
counter the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (TRPF) by
exporting capital to the colonial and semi-colonial world. This
created a new form of state monopoly capitalism or
imperialism that was parasitic upon the world economy
growing at the expense of other nations, creating relations of
dominance between oppressor and oppressed states, and
ultimately acting to destroy the forces of production in
depressions and wars.
This was the iron law of Capitals unwritten volumes on
international relations and the world market as summarised as a
popular outline 50 years later by Lenin. By this point,
imperialism could only cannibalise itself through economic and
military wars so that the oppressor states grew more centralised
and concentrated and the oppressed states grew relatively
weaker and deprived. The question of whether oppressed states
could become imperialist therefore did not arise. The divided
capitalist world could be re-divided but only among the strong,
never the weak. The exceptions were permanent revolutions
that forced the redivision of the capitalist world by the
creation of a socialist sphere of influence.
As we know, victorious socialist revolutions did overthrow the
national bourgeoisies and break from imperialist economic
control though not from imperialist political and economic
encirclement and warfare. Isolated from the world market and
the law of value, the workers states developed the forces of
production beyond that possible for capitalist semi-colonies.
However, because the workers states were forced to rely on
their own resources and the resulting bureaucratic caste failed
to plan efficiently, they did not develop the forces of
production to the level possible with workers control of the
socialist plans. Economic stagnation forced the parasitic caste
to reintroduce the market and restore capitalism. But
conversion of the bureaucracy into a state capitalist class did
not allow Western imperialism to overturn all the gains of the
workers state. Despite opening up to imperialist finance capital
the red bourgeoisie retained control over the economy and
took advantage of investment and new technology to launch
domestic capitalist production.
Thus there was no re-colonisation of the ex-Workers States to
force them back to semi-colonial status. Not because like
Russia they were never colonies, or were imperialist before the
revolution, or like both Russia and China inherited strong
centralised states and dominated former soviet republics or
internal colonies, or because of the decline of the US, and so

Winter 2015
on. None of these conditions (or all of them together) is
sufficient to allow new imperialist powers to emerge. They
could equally have created the perfect conditions for the
parasitic re-colonisation and breaking up of the former workers
states by the existing imperialist powers! This indeed was the
imperialists goal in numerous wars, hot and cold, to defeat the
workers states from the 1917 Revolution until their collapse in
the 1990s. And they succeeded with a vengeance in the former
Yugoslavia.
No. The necessary condition was and is the unfinished
permanent revolution that broke from imperialism to create a
socialist sphere of interest but which could not prevent the
bureaucracy from staging a counter-revolution and turning
itself into a class of state capitalists to exploit the developed
forces of production (raw materials, technology, labour, etc.,)
under the law of value and compete successfully in the world
market. Now functioning as independent capitalist countries
the accumulation of capital unleashed the laws of capitalist
development including the over-accumulation of capital that
required capital export and the emergence of new imperialist
powers.

Conclusion
It is our view that the conditions that led to the emergence of
Russia and China as new imperialist powers in the last two
decades are consistent with Lenins analysis of imperialism
100 years ago. Lenins method was that of Marxs Capital,
completing the unfinished volumes made concrete in the heat
of the First Imperialist War. Second, it is consistent with the
fact that the Russian Revolution opened the revolutionary 20th
century, repartitioning the world economy by opening the
permanent revolution, and creating a Soviet sphere of
influence. The economic independence of the workers states
that followed during the 20th century allowed them to survive
the counter-revolutionary defeat of capitalist restoration so that
the new bourgeoisies were able to transform Russia and China
into new imperialist powers forming a counter-hegemonic bloc
to the US hegemonic bloc. To repeat, not as a bloc of semicolonies and sub-imperialist states that are a progressive
alternative to US imperialism, but a rival imperialist bloc that
in challenging US hegemony, conditions the course of
revolution and counter-revolutionary struggles today.
The unfinished permanent revolution that succumbed to
capitalist counter-revolution must be reopened on the basis of
the historic gains that were not destroyed. In the workers states
the forces of production leapt beyond those of capitalist semicolonies before being halted by bureaucratically planned
stagnation and the capitalist counter-revolution. The gains of
the new forces of production have been forced back into the
shell of the old decrepit capitalist relations driving an explosive
contradiction today manifested in the heating up of the global
rivalry between the two major imperialist blocs.
Permanent revolution against imperialism today must be led by
the international proletariat capable of making the revolution to
smash the imperialist powers and create a united states of
socialist republics of the world. In the process our most
important task is the formation of a new Leninist Trotskyist
international that revives the dialectic method and program of
Marx, Lenin and Trotsky and eliminates the barriers of social
imperialism and national Trotskyism and so advances to the
victorious socialist revolution! Back to dialectics! Break with
social imperialism and national Trotskyism!
March,

2015

Liaison

Committee

of

Communists

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Class Struggle 113

Winter 2015

What We Fight For

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

Fight for Socialism

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

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 individual "freedom" and

"equality". It reveals how and why the reformist,

Stalinist and centrist misleaders of the working class tie
workers to bourgeois ideas of nationalism, racism,
sexism and equality. Such false beliefs will be exploded
when the struggle against the inequality, injustice,
anarchy and barbarism of capitalism in crisis, led by a
revolutionary Marxist party, produces a revolutionary
class-consciousness.

For a Revolutionary Party

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

Fight for Communism

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

Class Struggle is the bi-Monthly 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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