When Bolivian President Evo Morales formally opened his country’s Constituent Assembly on August 6, 2006,

Russian Bolshevik leader V.I Lenin, in 1919

he highlighted the aspirations of Bolivia’s indigenous majority as the central challenge before the gathering. The convening of the Assembly, he said, represented a “historic moment to refound our dearly beloved homeland Bolivia.” When Bolivia was created, in 1825-26, “the originary indigenous movements” who had fought for independence “were excluded,” and subsequently were discriminated against and looked down upon. But the “great day has arrived today … for the originary indigenous peoples.” (http://boliviarising.blogspot.com/1, Aug. 14, 2006)

During the preceding weeks, indigenous organizations had proposed sweeping measures to assure their rights, including guarantees for their languages, autonomy for indigenous regions, and respect for indigenous culture and political traditions.

This movement extends far beyond Bolivia. Massive struggles based on indigenous peoples have shaken Ecuador and Peru, and the reverberations are felt across the Western Hemisphere. Measures to empower indigenous minorities are among the most prestigious achievements of the Bolivarian movement in Venezuela.

At first glance, these indigenous struggles bear characteristic features of national movements, aimed at combating oppression, securing control of national communities, and protecting national culture. Yet indigenous peoples in Bolivia and elsewhere may not meet many of the objective criteria Marxists have often used to define a nation, such as a common language and a national territory, and they are not demanding a separate state. The response of Marxist currents to the national aspects of Latin America’s indigenous struggles has been varied, ranging from enthusiasm to a studied silence. Yet an ability to address the complexities of such struggles is surely the acid test of Marxism’s understanding of the national question today.

Such disarray among Marxists is all the more costly in today’s context of rising struggles for national freedom across Latin America and the Middle East today. The challenge is also posed in the imperialist heartlands, where we see a rise of struggles by oppressed minorities that bear more than a trace of national consciousness. For example, in 2006 the United States witnessed the strongest upsurge of working-class struggle in 60 years in the form of demonstrations and strikes for immigrant rights that were also, in part, an assertion of Latino identity. And the oppression of non-white and Muslim minorities in France has given birth to the provocatively named “Mouvement des Indigènes de la République.” (www.indigenes-republique.org/2)

The Marxist position on the national question was forged around well-documented debates on the independence movement of long-constituted nations such as Ireland and Poland. But the writings of Lenin and his contemporaries before 1917 have little to say about nationalities in emergence, that is, peoples in struggle who lack as yet many characteristic features of a nation. But precisely this type of struggle played a central role in the 1917 Russian revolution and the early years of the Soviet republic. In the course of their encounter with such movements, the Bolshevik Party’s policies toward national minorities evolved considerably. Sweeping practical measures were taken to assure the rights of national minorities whose existence was barely acknowledged prior to 1917.

The Bolsheviks’ policies do not indicate what course to adopt toward national struggles today, each of which has a specific character and set of complexities. Nonetheless, the Bolshevik experience is a useful reference point.

Pre-1917 Positions

The initial position of Russian Marxists on the national question was clear and sweeping. In 1903 the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), adopted a program specifying the right of all nations in the Russian state to self-determination. The program also advocated regional self-rule based on the composition of the population and the right of the population to receive education in its own language and to use that language on the basis of equality in all local social and governmental institutions. (Jeremy Smith, The Bolsheviks and the National Question, 1917-23, London: Univ. of London, n.d., p. 14.)

In the decade that followed, the Bolshevik wing of the RSDLP became the first Marxist current internationally to recognize the importance of the liberation struggles then taking shape across the colonial world. Lenin wrote in 1913, “Hundreds of millions of people are awakening to life, light and freedom” in a movement that will “liberate both the peoples of Europe and the peoples of Asia.” (V.I. Lenin. Collected Works. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1960-71. Vol. 19, pp. 99-100. Most quotations in this study can also be located by Internet search.)

Lenin also insisted on the distinction between the advanced capitalist countries, where “progressive bourgeois national movements came to an end long ago,” and the oppressed nations of Eastern Europe and the semi-colonial and colonial world. (CW 22:150-52) In the latter case, he called for defense of the right to self-determination and support of national liberation movements, in order to create a political foundation for unification in struggle of working people of all nationalities.

Limitations

In the test of the Russian revolution, these and many other aspects of the Bolshevik’s pre-1917 positions proved to be a reliable guide. Some positions expressed before 1917, however, required modification.

For example, consider the definition of a nation provided in 1913 by Joseph Stalin: “A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.” (J.V. Stalin. Works, Moscow: FLPH, 1954. Vol. 2, p. 307) Stalin’s article was written in collaboration with Lenin and was viewed at the time as an expression of the Bolshevik position. His objective criteria are a good starting point for analysis, but they have sometimes been misused to justify denying national rights to indigenous and other peoples that appear not to pass the test.

In addition, Lenin stressed that his support for national self-determination “implies exclusively the right to independence in the political sense.” (CW 22:146) In 1913, he stated, “Fight against all national oppression? Yes, certainly. Fight for any kind of national development, for ‘national culture’ in general? Certainly not.” (CW 20:35) Lenin is sometimes quoted as being opposed to federalism as a form of state, although he also endorsed federation as a stepping stone to democratic integration of nations. (CW 22:146)

Such pre-1917 positions are sometimes applied today in order to justify opposition to the demands of national liberation movements. But they should be interpreted in the light of the way the Bolshevik position was applied in the decisive test of revolution.

The indigenous peoples of tsarist Russia

The oppressed peoples that made up the majority of the pre-1917 tsarist empire can be broadly divided into two categories.

On the western and southern margins of the empire lived many peoples—among them the Finns, Poles, Ukrainians, and Armenians—that met all of Stalin’s objective criteria of nationality. As nations, they possessed clearly defined historical and cultural traditions. It was these peoples that the pre-1917 Bolsheviks had chiefly in mind when they discussed the national question.

But there were also many peoples in Russia—in the Crimea, on the Volga, in the Caucasus, and in central and northeast Asia—that had been subjected to settler-based colonization similar to that experienced by the Palestinians, the Blacks of South Africa, and—in much more extreme form—the indigenous peoples of the Americas. These subjects of the Russian tsar, whom the Bolsheviks often spoke of as Russia’s “Eastern peoples,” had seen their lands seized, their livelihood destroyed, and their language and culture suppressed. They had suffered discrimination and exclusion from the dominant society.

When revolution broke out in 1917, these peoples, although varying widely in their level of social development, had not yet emerged as nationalities. The evolution of written national languages, cultures, and consciousness as distinct peoples was at an early stage. Most identified themselves primarily as Muslims. Assessed by Stalin’s criteria for nationhood, they did not make the grade. But in the crucible of revolution, national consciousness began to assert itself, provoking and stimulating demands for cultural autonomy, self-rule, and even national independence.

This fact itself is worth pondering. A revolution is, in Lenin’s phrase, a festival of the oppressed. Peoples long ground down into inarticulateness suddenly find inspiration, assert their identity, and cry out their grievances. We cannot predict the shape of freedom struggles that will emerge in a revolutionary upsurge.

Next month, in the second part of this article, the author looks at the taking of soviet power, promotion of national culture, the Baku Congress, and the way in which gains of the Soviet government were reversed.

This is obviously a big subject, which could be approached in a number of ways.  In the small time we have this morning, my aim will be to introduce basic points and hopefully arouse some ongoing interest.

There are various contending definitions of ‘Marxism”. The one I’m tempted to offer today is that Marxism is a set of sharp political tools, which New Zealand leftists tend to leave in the box. Later on in this talk I’ll consider why that has been so frequently the case.

As a more general definition to introduce Marxism, I’ll add that it’s a theory named for its main architect and can be understood as the theory of dialectical materialism based on communist practice. The expression ‘dialectical materialism’ has a forbidding sound and is not common currency in the day-to-day life of most people. Here I see a huge contradiction, because dialectical materialism is a thoroughly practical method of understanding human society and the universe in which we’re placed. Dialectical materialism is also a philosophy which by its nature takes sides with the oppressed.

MATERIALISM

Take the more familiar word first. Marxism is materialist because it’s a philosophy which recognises the primacy of matter.  As Marx’s collaborator Fredrick Engels put it: “The great basic question of all philosophy, especially of more recent philosophy, is that concerning the relation of thinking and being…. The answers which the philosophers gave to this question split them into two great camps. Those who asserted the primacy of spirit to nature… comprised the camp of idealism. The others, who regarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools of materialism.”

As a materialist philosophy, Marxism regards the production of the necessities of life as the basis on which human ideas arise. That includes the origin and development of religious ideas. This scientific viewpoint is relatively recent. As New Zealand communist Ray Nunes noted: “Up to the mid-nineteenth century the religious – and most of the secular – authorities propagated the idea that the bible, both the old and the new testaments, were the founts of all knowledge. The age of the earth was held to be about six thousand years. The nature of the wider universe was unknown. Today an immense array of factual evidence has been accumulated by the physical sciences – particularly astronomy, geology, chemistry and physics, conclusively proving that the age of the earth is in the vicinity of 4.5 thousand million years, while the age of the universe is approximately 15 thousand million years. Our own solar system with its sun and planets is a tiny part of the Milky Way galaxy, with its two hundred billion stars, and there are at least two billion galaxies in the cosmos, many much vaster than our own. The simplest forms of life on earth originated about three billion years ago, evolving eventually into modern man (homo sapiens) somewhere between one hundred thousand and forty thousand years ago, a mere trifle in geological time.”

DIALECTICS

So, these days, a materialist philosophical outlook is not so uncommon. However, the prevailing materialist mode of thought is more limited than the outlook developed by Marx. What passes for ‘ordinary’  ’sensible’ thinking is usually a descendant of the formal logic developed by Aristotle. The basic idea of formal logic is that something is either the case or not the case, for example, the cat is or is not sitting on the mat. But, as British socialist John Molyneux put it: “As soon as you take movement and change into account, ( formal logic) ceases to be adequate. A cat moving goes through a moment when it is in the process of passing onto the mat or in the process of passing off it- when it is both on and off the mat. Dialectics is in advance of formal logic because it enables us to grasp this contradiction.”

Dialectics is a method of reasoning aiming to understand things concretely in all their movement, change and interconnection. It is the logic of change, of contradiction, of evolution and development. It’s starting point is the idea – and the fact- that everything changes and is involved in an ongoing process of coming into being and ceasing to be. As Russian revolutionary Trotsky put it: “Dialectical thinking is related to vulgar thinking in the same way that a motion picture is related to a still photograph. The motion picture does not outlaw the still photograph but combines a series of them according to the laws of motion. Dialectics does not deny the syllogism” (formal logic), “but teaches us to combine syllogisms in such a way as to bring our understanding closer to the eternally changing reality.” “Normal” methods of thought tend to take things at their surface appearance value.

Dialectics go beneath the appearance of things to understand their essence, recognising that any thing can only really be understood concretely and in relation to its past, present and future states. Every flower was once a seed and must become dust. Dialectics is not only applicable to nature, but to the ideas of humankind. For example, take the concept of “freedom”. There can be no concept of freedom without its opposite, (constraint, slavery or subordination).

The great rallying cry of human freedom is commonly automatically presented as if it were an eternal truth. In fact, the idea of social freedom is a relatively recently evolved human concept. The concept of freedom could only begin to arise in the human mind with the advent of its opposite, enslavement. Many thousands of years of human existence took place before productivity had developed to an extent where a slave owning class could arise and be sustained. The oppression and resistance of slaves was the precursor to the idea of freedom.

The notion of freedom for all citizens on the planet is even more recent, and subject to all sorts of philosophical confusion. For example, the New Zealand anarchist collective Thr@ll mission statement declares: “We want the maximum possible freedom for each individual, but not at the expense of others. We recognise that because humans are social beings, freedom for all (social equality) is the necessary condition for the freedom of each.” That statement sounds impressive, but on close examination, its meaning disintegrates. If all humans somehow become and remain equally free, then the concept of freedom loses all meaning, and, other than in the form of a dusty historical footnote, ‘freedom’ itself completely disappears.

The more practical problem with Thr@ll’s proposition is its complete abstraction from life. Detached from the actually existing struggle of human social relationships, demanding freedom for each and all has no substantial meaning. In today’s world capitalists want freedom to run their business; workers want freedom from exploitation. Both freedoms cannot happily coexist. As opposed to abstract idealism, dialectics insists on taking as its starting point the concrete analysis of actually existing concrete conditions. Modern dialectics is itself a product of intense real life struggle.

FRENCH REVOLUTION

The modern development of dialectics was profoundly influenced by one of history’s most significant social upheavals. The innovative German dialectical philosopher Hegel was much moved by the unprecedented explosion of the French Revolution. This overturning of what had been previously seen as the natural order of divinely appointed kings and its radical demands for liberty and equality shook Europe to the core. The ruling classes were seized with terror, idealistic young people were enthralled.

Back in the 1700′s, the French revolution was Venezuela, Nepal, Greece and the Philippines all rolled into one. In 1790, one year after the storming of the Bastille, the 19-year old poet Wordsworth went to France, where he talked to participants in the struggle, joined protests and reveled in what he called the spectacle of “human nature being born again” As Wordsworth later put it in his famous autobiographical work The Prelude: ” [...] ‘Twas in truth an hour of universal ferment; mildest men were agitated; and commotions, strife of passion and opinion, filled the walls of peaceful houses with unique sounds. The soil of common life, was, at that time, too hot to tread upon.” (The Prelude, ix, 163-9)

John Molyneux wrote later: “The dialectical theory of development through contradiction was the philosophical expression of the revolution. But because the French Revolution was a bourgeois revolution, one led by lawyers and intellectuals, it necessarily appeared to Hegel that the driving force of history was the struggle between opposite ideas ( between the idea of a monarchy and the idea of a republic, between the idea of aristocracy and the idea of equality and so on). Marx, coming 50 years later and taking the standpoint of the working class, was able to go beyond Hegel and show that this struggle of ideas was a reflection of a struggle of material forces. With Marx the dialectic became the logic of class struggle.”

Of course, revolutions don’t take place every five minutes, because they are extreme forms of human behavior, where everyday caution is thrown to the winds, mildest men are agitated and become violent opponents of authority. What does dialectics have to say about the periods of relative social peace – such as we in New Zealand are in at the moment? How does humdrum everyday life transform to a state of revolution?

A central proposition of dialectics is that quantitative changes become qualitative changes. “It has been said that there are no sudden leaps in nature, and it is a common notion that things have their origin through gradual increase or decrease,” states Hegel. “But there is also such a thing as sudden transformation from quantity to quality. For example, water does not become gradually hard on cooling, becoming first pulpy and ultimately attaining a rigidity of ice, but turns hard at once. If temperature be lowered to a certain degree, the water is suddenly changed into ice, i.e., the quantity – the number of degrees of temperature – is transformed into quality – a change in the nature of the thing.” As British Trotskyist Rob Sewell observed:

This is the cornerstone of understanding change. Change or evolution does not take place gradually in a straight smooth line. Marx compared the social revolution to an old mole burrowing busily beneath the ground, invisible for long periods, but steadily undermining the old order and later emerging into the light in a sudden overturn. Even Charles Darwin believed that his theory of evolution was essentially gradual and that the gaps in the fossil record did not represent any breaks or leaps in evolution, and would be “filled in” by further discoveries. In this Darwin was wrong. Today, new theories, essentially dialectical, have been put forward to explain the leaps in evolution. Stephen J. Gould and Niles Eldredge termed their dialectical theory of evolution “punctuated equilibria”. They explained that there were long periods of evolution where there were no apparent changes taking place, then suddenly, a new life form or forms emerged. In other words, quantitative differences gave rise to a qualitative change, leading to new species. The whole of development is characterised by breaks in continuity, leaps, catastrophes and revolutions. The emergence of single-cellular life in the earth’s oceans some 3.6 billion years ago was a qualitative leap in the evolution of matter. The “Cambrian explosion”, some 600 million years ago, where complex multicellular life with hard parts exploded onto the scene was a further qualitative leap forward in evolution. In the lower Paleozoic, some 400 to 500 million years ago, the first vertebrate fish emerged. This revolutionary design became dominant and advanced through the amphibians (which lived both in water and on land), through reptiles, and finally branched off into warm-blooded creatures: birds and mammals. Such revolutionary leaps culminated in human beings that have the capacity to think. Evolution is a long process whereby an accumulation of changes inside and outside the organism leads to a leap, a qualitatively higher state of development.” Applying this principle to history, Ray Nunes wrote: “A war cannot be won by a platoon. But by recruitment a platoon can grow to a battalion, a battalion to a division, and a division into an army capable of winning a war. Similarly, a gradual increase in revolutionary forces within a country can bring about a position of strength from a position of weakness and lead to a successful revolution such as took place in Russia and China, or a successful national liberation war such as took place in Viet Nam. The success of such revolutions in turn gives rise to a great growth in other revolutionary forces. Thus, not only is quantity transformed into quality, but quality is also transformed into quantity. Within the working-class Party the gradual accumulation of experience and of Marxist-Leninist understanding leads to improvement in the quality of its members and in the correctness of its policies. At a certain point this is transformed into an increase in numbers, until continued development of this kind leads to the point where the Party becomes the Party of the masses and is capable of successfully leading the socialist revolution.

Marxism only comes to life when it’s applied to actual circumstances. By way of illustration, here is part of a Wellington Workers Party branch examination of the New Zealand trade union movement using dialectics. Past President of the NZ Federation of Labour Jim Knox was fond of declaiming: “Governments come and go, but the union movement goes on forever.” That undialectical and rather complacent sounding statement bears the stamp of its time.

Unions appeared much more durable on Jim’s watch. In that era, compulsory unionism, national awards with gradually improving conditions, large blue collar sites and relatively unrestricted freedom to strike were the order of the day. Then, it was theorised by not a few leftist minded unionists that a steady gradual progression of union and parliamentary reforms would eventually and peacefully lead to a fully socialist New Zealand. In fact, below the surface, the apparently united union movement of the ’60′s and ’70′s was rent with contradictions, several of which were later resolved, mostly to the huge detriment of the movement.

The NZ union movement came into being historically recently and, like everything else, will, eventually go out of being. In fact, we can see right away that the union movement, as the late Jim Knox knew it, has already gone out of being. Jim Knox’s comment about the unions may have been shaped by a line from Tennyson’s poem The Brook: “men may come and men may go, but I go on forever” – rolling along interminably, essentially unchanging. A glance at New Zealand union history is enough to show the opposite – a passage of constant change and contradiction. New Zealand unionism began in the mid 19th century, as a reaction to the harsh terms of employment faced by New Zealand workers. Initial groupings were branches of existing British unions. Local unionism grew and spread in opposition to local employers and government. At the end of the 19th century in 1895, the antagonistic contradictions between labour and capital reached an apparent state of truce. This took the form of government union recognition substituting arbitration for strike action; the IC& A act. New Zealand was heralded internationally as having done away with class antagonisms. But after some time, numerous pent up quantitative frustrations moved some workers to a radical qualitative change in their attitude; illegal industrial action in defiance of the state’s I C& A act as “Labour’s leg-irons”.

In 1935, the antagonistic relationship between unions and the capitalist state again seemingly resolved itself amicably when a new industrial law made union membership compulsory. The surface appearance of this law was to cast the government as a neutral and possibly benign player in the struggle between labour and capital.

Labour Party leaders and union careerists still evoke this long discredited fantasy. In fact, one effect of compulsory unionism was to increase antagonistic contradictions between some workers and time serving union officials. Some unions were maintained not by loyalty from within, but state imposed fee collection undertaken by employers. At its worst, government compulsion turned some unionism into its opposite; a form of state control over workers. A movement made up in large part of unwilling conscripts was in no condition to stop the union busting 1991 Employment Contracts Act.

What is the state of the union movement today? Can the sum of New Zealand unions be properly described as a movement? Today’s equivalent of the Jim Knox mantra is the statement: “The CTU’s 300,000 members make up New Zealand’s largest democratic organisation.” That comforting catchphrase, originated by Ross Wilson and frequently repeated by his successor Helen Kelly, suggests a stable positive going concern.

What contradictions lie beneath the surface of this apparently harmonious social organisation? To uncover the contradictions of anything, we need to see the factual material of which they are composed.  In this case, we need to know what percentage of the workforce is unionised, and which way the trend is going. We need to know something of the relationships between the unionised and un-unionised, between employed and unemployed workers, between higher and lower paid, casualised and permanent, highly skilled and ‘unskilled’ various unions of the CTU, the contradictions between individual unions and the central body.

We also need to know something about the employers, their organisation, expectations and their unity or disunity, the contradictions between workers and bosses and contradictions between bosses. As we collect this data some contradictions seem to loom larger than others. For example, sometimes the contradiction between organised and unorganised workers appears more acute than the contradiction between all the workers and all the bosses, especially when there’s a disruptive strike. Which is really the more important contradiction? Why?

A few more questions: What is the principle contradiction inside the union movement? What is the principle contradiction inside your own union? What contradictions exist on your job? How might they be resolved?

A good starting point is Mao’s materialist dialectical advice that to understand something you have to change it. His example was that of a person biting into a pear, to taste it you have to change it. To find out how organised and how democratic NZ’s largest democratic organisation is, we must try and change it. If you attend a CTU conference as an affiliated union observer you will be given a large pile of printed matter in glossy covers and hear a number of speeches. This material will tend to confirm and underline your existing information that the ” The CTU’s 300,000 members make up New Zealand’s largest democratic organisation.” If you just sit quietly at the conference and behave yourself, you won’t leave much the wiser. But if you try to change the direction of the conference you will start to learn more about its real nature. If, let’s say, you leap up to suggest union disaffiliation from the Labour party because they introduced GST you’ll get some idea of how democratic the outfit really is. There, then are a few words to try and introduce what is currently the most advanced and comprehensive human philosophy.

In conclusion I will raise the question – if this dialectical materialism is so all encompassing and wonderful, why isn’t it used more widely? It is relatively easy to see why capitalist institutions shy away from dialectical materialism. Like the feudal lords before them, it suits the capitalists to cast their system as ‘natural’ and basically unchanging. As a philosophy of change, dialectical materialism is hostile to that idea. Dialectical materialism also cuts through the bullshit presentation of the speculator as creator of value. It is no accident that the “Marxism” component of bourgeois university courses is unspeakably boring and seemingly peripheral to the real business of life. Academic “Marxism” preserves its comfortable irrelevance by remaining disconnected from any real life modern struggles. Less easy to understand is the neglect of Marxism by left and socialist groups.

One of the attractions the Workers Party has for me is that it’s an organisation which takes Marxist theory seriously and consistently tries to apply it to all our political activity. This is at variance with most of my previous political experience. My recollection of being in the Workers Communist League and The Socialist Workers Organisation is that from time to time we’d study Marxist classics and we’d also participate in unions and protest groups, but there wasn’t much connection between the two activities.

There has long been a leftist tendency of contempt for theory altogether, on the grounds of “being practical”. One throwaway line from Marx’s entire correspondence: “Every step of real movement is worth a dozen programmes” has often been evoked to justify the abandonment of his theory altogether. Several different factors have helped diminish the importance of Marxist theory among New Zealand activists.

One factor is the fall of communism and the preceding atrocities committed in the name of communism. While it’s true that the likes of Brezhnev and Pol Pot were not practicing Marxism, the fact that they committed vast anti social crimes beneath its banner could not but take a toll on public opinion.

Another factor has been the relative weakness of organised labour in this country. Marxism is about the conscious self-activity of the working class. Historically, most workplaces have been small and scattered, with the employer often working alongside his hired staff. From this base grew the myth of New Zealand as a “classless society”, a myth much encouraged by astute ruling politicians.

In recent years the decline in manufacturing, plus repeated political assaults on a disunited union structure has diminished the strength of the working-class further. Other social movements have seemed more viable and worthy of activist energy. Some global issues, such as today’s environmental concerns, and, prior to that, the threat of nuclear war, have been explicitly presented as rendering Marxism irrelevant.

It’s also a fact that single issues are relatively easy to grasp and offer quick tangible returns. At various times there appear ready markets for things like opposition to genetic engineering. Doesn’t it make sense to go where the action is? Perhaps, after sufficient ‘common sense’ campaigns for free buses and GST off food, someday in the future an awakened populace will spontaneously decide – hey, what we really need is to get rid of capitalism and replace it with a cooperative social and economic system. Wouldn’t that be the working out of quantitative to qualitative change? The point about ‘common sense’ requests to authorities is that they are often not so much changes as a reorganisation of what’s seen to be socially affordable. That ‘soft contradiction’ does not make for a clash leading to political advance. An aspect of popular ‘sensible’ campaigns is that they can actually reinforce acceptance of the present system as arbiter of what’s practical and possible – and not possible.

This is not to say reforms shouldn’t be fought for, it is to say that struggles for reforms do not all intrinsically translate into revolutionary consciousness. The last 30 or so years of left pragmatism and single issue protests has seen a marked decline in worker’s political weight and a growth of capitalist material and ideological control. The note on which I will end this introduction is that its time for the Marxists to return to Marxism.

Since its formation the Workers Party of New Zealand has recognised that immigration controls are essentially a boss’s device to control workers. Accordingly, the Workers Party has always stood firmly in opposition to immigration controls. Point 4 of our 5-point programme spells it out in these words:

“For working class unity and solidarity – equality for women, Maori and other ethnic minorities and people of all sexual orientations and identities; open borders and full rights for migrant workers”.

Some people see our policy of open borders as extremist. Others realise that a truly internationalist position can’t settle for anything less. Genuine socialists insist on workers absolute freedom to travel and take up residence wherever they choose.

Previous New Zealand attempts to create a socialist movement did not always reach a clear understanding of this matter. The Workers Communist League (WCL), which I used to belong to, was one such example. In the 1980s the WCL was a relatively large party, with members active at various levels in 17 different unions. The WCL lead a number of big struggles, including several political strikes. This brought our comrades into contact with workers of many nationalities and our organisation tried to take an internationalist position with regard to these workers. In the 1980 Manifesto of the Workers Communist League a detailed section on Pacific Island Minorities noted:

“The capitalists are quite cynical in their use of Pacific Island labour. In the boom they are eager for Pacific Island workers and couldn’t care less if they overstay their permits. In the slump when unemployment appears they suddenly remember their own laws and mercilessly hunt over stayers down. The pacific Island nations are used as a reserve of cheap labour for the New Zealand boss.”

Our Manifesto went on to argue that: ‘communists must support the just demands of the oppressed minorities for economic, political, social and cultural equality between themselves and European New Zealanders … full rights for Pacific Islanders living in New Zealand, including the right to stay here if they wish, a general amnesty for oversteers and an end to state harassment.”

However, when specifically relating to immigration law, our Manifesto

said:

“On the question of Pacific Islands immigration, communists must fight for non-discriminatory migration criteria.”

However well intentioned, this sentence is not true internationalism.

It recognises the right of the capitalist class to maintain a system immigration control.

1982 Political Report of the WCL referred to a need to better develop its internationalism and noted, with particular reference to Pacific nation people:

“Our glaring weakness in programme, line and policies for the oppressed minorities hampers the rapid development of our work in this sector. An investigation plan has been drawn up in Wellington to broaden and deepen our knowledge of the specific nature of the oppression of minority peoples, the different political forces at work among them and their aspirations.

I don’t recall whether that investigation plan was fully executed, but the WCL never developed its internationalist understanding to the necessary extent of opposing immigration controls. The WCL’s next – and final – major policy document, the 1984 Socialism and Liberation merely advocated:

“support ( for) the struggles of workers and other oppressed people in other countries for socialism, democracy and peace. In particular this country must cease its imperialistic role in the South Pacific and assist in the development of the Pacific Islands”

The WCL’s attempts at internationalism fell short. On that score, our organisation never moved beyond a position of left nationalism. This shortcoming of ours had its roots in the flawed Stalinist concept of socialism in one country. On page 34 of the 1980 Manifesto, – appropriately alongside a photograph of Stalin – our programme projected a sort of future southern hemisphere Albania, vis:

“a socialist New Zealand will throw off all foreign domination, particularly that of the two super powers. The working people will build a strong independent country through self-reliance. The lopsidedness of the New Zealand economy will be overcome so that we are no longer buffeted by every jolt in the international economy”

The original communist challenge “Workers of all countries unite!” sounds so simple. The practical realisation of that vision has proved difficult. Future civilisation demands such a realisation. An indispensible step in that direction is the demolition of all gates in the global village – insistence on open borders.

Dobbs makes it clear that the biggest setback for workers in the Great Depression was a bureaucratic union movement. In fact, membership in unions actually declined in the early days of the Depression. Dobbs describes the “business unionism” of the American Federation of Labour, involving strict division of crafts, a minimum of strikes and suppression of dissidence.

This is comparable to the behaviour of trade union brass in contemporary NZ, who refused to provide coordination for responses to attacks on workers in the late ’80s and early ’90s – with such laudable exceptions as the Maritime Union. Unionisation has since declined, in keeping with the pattern Dobbs describes. Teamster Rebellion is a great book in large part because of its pertinence.

Armed workers defended themselves against cops.

The intro states, “Teamster Rebellion is not a manual or a handbook.” While this is certainly true – revolutionaries must base their approach on objective conditions – Teamster Rebellion is an enormously practical, relevant work. Dobbs packs his narrative with tactical detail, treating his subject as a battle history. And that it is; when cops resort to violence, the workers of Local 574 arm themselves. They clobber the police officers, an incident which is broadcast in newsreels across the nation to thunderous applause. When the local Governor declares martial law, a war of attrition develops between workers and employers, with government forces caught in the crossfire. However, the leadership of Local 574 is careful to avoid unnecessary skirmishes; workers only use violence defensively. Describing the state of the union, Dobbs explains, “relations between the strike committee and the union ranks were somewhat akin to the Leninist principle of democratic centralism; democracy in reaching decisions; discipline in carrying them out.” This is fundamentally a book about organization, and why Local 574 prevailed.

This emphasis on strategy allows Dobbs to avoid getting bogged down by sectarian squabbling, while retaining a staunchly revolutionary perspective. When the pro-Moscow CP makes attacks on the Trotskyist leadership of Local 574, Dobbs simply engages on tactical grounds. While the CP argues the purpose of the strike should be exposing local government, he points out that all goals are secondary to recognition of Local 574 as a union. When the reactionary employers’ association the Citizen’s Alliance attempts to use red-baiting to scare off workers, Dobbs highlights the benefits of a fighting leadership – under the previous leadership, the union wasn’t even recognised.

These arguments are directly relevant in early 21^st Century New Zealand. When Go Wellington locked out its drivers for taking industrial action, some observers resorted to scaremongering over the involvement of openly revolutionary socialists. However, their unwillingness to be cowed by strong-arm tactics had real benefits; the bosses lifted the lockout and improved on their previous “final offer.” This won over some of the more skeptical rank-and-file, demonstrating that there isn’t an essential difference between a revolutionary and a realistic union leader. On the issue of union recognition, Unite’s recent battle with McDonalds concerned the company’s unwillingness to recognise any union. It is strategically vital to place union recognition as top priority; as Dobbs argues, every other battle follows that one.

Further, Dobbs argues for the importance of forging class solidarity; between workers of different crafts, between the employed and unemployed, between men and women. This is sorely missing in the current union ethos, where unions exist to represent the interests of a particular craft. A recent attempt to merge unions representing hospitality and distribution workers unfortunately collapsed due to political differences, but this atleast demonstrates that the idea isn’t without support. Local 574 fought a major battle to represent not only truck drivers, but helpers, platform workers, warehouse and shipping department employees. These workers had common interests, and working together had tactical advantages. The union also formed a women’s auxiliary, an Unemployed Council and a relationship with local farmers.

This strike was not solely a battle to improve truck drivers’ wages and conditions. It was a battle to strengthen the working class, one which turned Minneapolis into a union town. Teamster Rebellion contains a wealth of information not only about the politics of unions and employers, but about the internal politics of the union movement. It’s a must.

-Ian Anderson

The CPP has led the struggle against feudalism, capitalism and imperialism in the Philippines for four decades. Having withstood the Marcos dictatorship through to the current brutal regime of Arroyo, the CPP has been sustained through its deep roots among the masses. When many other communist parties around the world collapsed in the 1990s, the CPP carried on the struggle, constantly reassessing itself and further developing its strengths.

 The CPP’s commitment to internationalism has given confidence to many organisations and individuals in the struggle for world revolution.

 We hope that 2009 will bring much success to the comrades in the Philippines.

 In solidarity
Workers Party of New Zealand

The Dominion Post warns of a malicious workers’ enemy currently lurking in New Zealand.

What “it” supposedly “wants to see (on workers tables) are scraps of stale bread and cups of cold water.” Along with “the power and the phone cut off, holes in the roof, and the car up on blocks in the front yard.”

“Nothing delights it more than the sight of padlocked factory gates, and the sobbing of laid-off workers is music to its ears.”

According to Dominion Post columnist Chris Trotter, this inhumanity embodies none other than the revolutionary component of the political left.  He specifically cites the Workers Party as an example.

According to Trotter:

“The more the National Party cuts back and hacks away at the workers’ economic and social rights the better the revolutionaries like it.

“The far Left is always at its unhappiest when Labour is in power. In no time at all they’ve got the power and the phone reconnected, filled up the fridge, got a bit of a fire going in the grate, slipped a couple of pizzas in the oven, and cracked open a few cool ones.” (From The Left, Dominion Post 12/12/2008)

Chris may have forgotten that it was under Labour that Mrs Folole Muliaga tragically lost her life when her power was cut off.

He has also forgotten – or is unwilling to acknowledge – the last Labour government’s promotion of privilege at working people’s expense.

On July 21, 2006 the National Business Review (NBR) published its annual Rich List. The list contained the richest 187 New Zealand individuals and 51 families. This super-rich group had increased their wealth by just over $3.7 billion in the past year. That increase is as much as the entire wealth of the entire Rich List back in 1992. The people on the Rich List now have wealth estimated at over $35.1 billion.

By the time the last National Party government went out of power in 1999, the Rich List had 135 individuals and 36 families, with wealth estimated at just over $9.8 billion, so the growth of the fantastically rich has speeded up under Labour. The graph of the rate of growth of wealth by these parasites is therefore interesting. Under National in the 1990s it went up relatively modestly, and then after Labour entered government in 1999 it curved dramatically upward. The rise in the 2004-2005 year – when the super-rich got over $9 billion richer -makes the upward curve especially pronounced.

By contrast, during the period that Labour has been in power since 1999, wage rises have averaged between 2 and 3 percent per annum, barely keeping up with inflation. Some years, real wages – what you can buy with your pay – have actually fallen. Median household income grew by a mere 13 percent between 2001 and 2004, while the super-rich saw their wealth increase by 75 percent in those same years.

Meanwhile poverty remains endemic, especially child poverty. The number of people living in “extreme hardship” has risen from 5 percent of the population to 8 percent under the current Labour administration.

The above three paragraphs are an excerpt from the Worker’s Party published book The Truth about Labour, by Daphna Whitmore and Philip Ferguson.

The Truth about Labour concludes: “as we’ve noted here, time after time workers’ living conditions and democratic rights have actually got worse under Labour governments. Our experience under National, Labour and all the other capitalist parties points to the need not only for a new workers’ party but a new kind of workers’ politics.”

The Workers Party has been consistently putting that line of argument since its formation, in our magazine, on line, at meetings and throughout our recent election campaign. As a well-informed political correspondent, Chris Trotter cannot but be aware of that. But instead of addressing our actual position, Chris finds it easier to invent an opposite idiotic position and then attack that.  Thus, he sneers:

“The election of a National government is always the Far Left’s equivalent of Christmas. Overnight, their world is transformed. All the old and familiar class enemies are restored to their proper places, and all of the old banners and placards can be taken down from the shelf, dusted-off and returned to service. “

Of course, some placards have been in unbroken service since 1984, such as those opposing Labour’s anti-worker GST. But as protesters all over the country can attest, during the last 9 years of Labour government we’ve had to make and display a great many new banners and placards. Like the ones we painted when Labour supported the US bombing of Afghanistan. The ones demanding Ahmed Zaoui be released . The ones against Labour’s Jobs Jolt, the ones demanding paid parental leave and  the many opposing layoffs and low pay. Or the ones against the recent police Terror Raids – which Chris Trotter defended.

Chris Trotter is at pains to differentiate and counterpose “the far left” and “workers”. During my 37 years in the far left I’ve been unable to help noticing that most of us are workers.  Members of the left who aren’t workers tend to be tertiary students, as Chris himself once was. Leftist students go various ways after completing their formal education. Some continue various forms of political activism and some leave politics altogether. A few, for reasons best known to themselves , crawl beneath the fence and offer their skills and services to the other side.

It seems as though these days the only time you are likely to hear the name of Karl Marx mentioned is when he is being dismissed as the proponent of some outlandish utopian ideology which had marginal relevance in nineteenth century Europe but none at all now (the view of most standard history texts) or as a the prophet of capitalist globalisation who also had some rather funny ideas about workers and exploitation with which we need not concern ourselves too much (the view of more sophisticated bourgeois pundits such as the writers for The Economist).

It is indeed true that the idea that the working class of which Marx wrote so volubly is rapidly vanishing from the stage of history has some material basis (at least in first world countries like New Zealand).  However while the number of workers directly engaged in the creation of surplus value in areas such as manufacturing and raw material extraction has certainly decreased in New Zealand over the past few decades, the amount of exploitation i.e. the mass of surplus value created by workers in these sectors and expropriated by the capitalists has not.

In addition, although the largest occupational group as measured in the 2006 New Zealand census were labelled as “professionals” (18.85%) followed by “managers” (17.14%), the relationship of these individuals to the means of production is clearly shown in the “status in employment” category where we learn that over 75% of the population are still dependent on selling their labour power in order to earn a living.

The real problem here then is not the absence of class but rather the collapse of working class consciousness (such that a supermarket checkout supervisor may now well consider themselves a “manager”, and various politicians can proclaim that we are “all middle class now”).

And contrary to what the school textbooks might say, this development would not have surprised Marx.  While his political opponents have often charged him with predicting the inevitable demise of capitalism and the victory of the working class, in fact he did nothing of the sort.  What Marx outlined in his writings (most notably in his magnum opus, Capital) were the basic laws, tendencies and internal contradictions of the capitalist system.

Dialectical View

In order to identify these processes Marx employed the method of dialectics, pioneered by the German philosophers Georg Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach.  However unlike those philosophers Marx was also a materialist, and realised that the primary contradictions driving human history were located in the modes and forces of production – not the ideas in peoples’ heads.  Marx’s materialism allowed him to avoid the making the same mistakes as the utopian socialists and anarchists, who imagined that sheer revolutionary willpower was all that was required to bring about political change.  While the subjective factor of peoples’ consciousness was extremely important, other vital prerequisites were the existence of material abundance and a certain level of technological progress. As Marx put it in The German Ideology (anticipating by over a century the central problem which would bedevil the attempts to construct socialism in countries such as Russia, China and Cuba), wherever there is generalised want and scarcity “…the struggle for necessities begins again and all the old crap revives”.

Returning to the subject of the laws of motion of capitalism, the major dialectical contradiction that Marx perceived was the creation of a large landless, propertyless class with nothing to sell but their labour who are then forcibly collectivised by the need for capital to valorise itself in production.  This development, coupled with the increasing division of labour and specialisation, gives rise to the possibility of a society in which production is organised and run collectively rather than on an anarchic individual basis.

The hidden nature of exploitation under capitalism

However, as Marx pointed out under capitalism (unlike say feudalism) the real relations of exploitation are obscured.  The worker sells his or her labour and is duly remunerated at a mutually agreed price. The capitalist provides his or her tools, factory premises and raw materials and in return claims his or her rightful share. What could be simpler or fairer?

The secret of course as Marx discovered was that unlike raw materials, machinery or tools which only transmit a portion of their replacement value into the process of production and wear out over time, labour transmits not only the value equivalent to the cost of its own reproduction but also an additional surplus value.

Thus the worker may in a 9 hour day create in 4 hours labour sufficient value to pay for the cost of their daily upkeep, and then work another 5 hours creating surplus value for the capitalist employer.

This is very different from the state of affairs under feudalism, where it was obvious when the peasant worked on their own land to meet their own subsistence requirements and when they worked on their lord’s demesne to grow crops for the lord of the manor and his retainers.

Effect on workers consciousness

In this way while under feudalism the peasantry was held in check only through the threat of armed force (or eternal damnation in Hell), under capitalism workers will usually willingly acquiesce in their own exploitation since on surface appearances all that takes place is a free and equal exchange.

As Marx put it in Chapter 28 of Capital (Volume 1):

It is not enough that the conditions of labour are concentrated in a mass, in the shape of capital, at the one pole of society, while at the other are grouped masses of men, who have nothing to sell but their labour-power. Neither is it enough that they are compelled to sell it voluntarily. The advance of capitalist production develops a working-class, which by education, tradition, habit, looks upon the conditions of that mode of production as self-evident laws of Nature. The organisation of the capitalist process of production, once fully developed, breaks down all resistance. The constant generation of a relative surplus-population keeps the law of supply and demand of labour, and therefore keeps wages, in a rut that corresponds with the wants of capital. The dull compulsion of economic relations completes the subjection of the labourer to the capitalist. Direct force, outside economic conditions, is of course still used, but only exceptionally. In the ordinary run of things, the labourer can be left to the “natural laws of production,” i.e., to his dependence on capital, a dependence springing from, and guaranteed in perpetuity by, the conditions of production themselves.

To be sure, from their practical experience an individual worker will often perceive a common interest in joining with other workers together to sell their labour at a higher price (through a trade union) or support efforts to legislate for better working conditions.  However they will not spontaneously draw from this experience the revolutionary conclusion that they are being exploited – not just by the lack of fairness or compassion of a particularly reactionary employer – but by the economic system itself.

Need for a revolutionary political organisation

This realisation, as Marx made clear in the Communist Manifesto, can only come about through the organised intervention of a revolutionary political organisation.  As he put it:

The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.

In the Communist Manifesto Marx also made clear that it was the actual process of struggle against the capitalist class which would create the preconditions for the future socialist society.  In this sense, what mattered were not so much the demands or slogans under which workers were organised but rather the dialectical process that led them to see themselves as a collective revolutionary subject, as opposed to merely an agglomeration of marginalised individuals.

As for the often quoted section of the manifesto which says that

The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties…

it should be born in mind that this was written in 1848 – before the historic betrayals of the Second International in World War I and successive social democratic governments throughout Europe in the decades since then. However, in places such as Venezuela where new untried and untested working class movements, oscillating between reform and revolution, have emerged in recent years Marx’s advice still holds good.

The most important thing that we as 21^st century socialists can learn from Marx is not to fetishise programs or lists of demands (which change depending on the time in history and geographical place) but rather to stress the need for self-activity of workers and to overcome all barriers (racial, sexual, national) to class unity.

This is the reason why the Workers Party includes “open borders” as well as  “opposition to all New Zealand and Western imperialist intervention in the Third World and all Western imperialist alliances” in our 5 point platform, but does not lay out a prescriptive plan or blueprint telling workers how to implement socialism, such as calls to nationalise industries a b and c or more spending on social programs x y and z (such points may be raised as secondary agitational demands during an election campaign, but do not challenge or advance the existing level of consciousness in the same way that slogans such as “open borders” or “workers should be running the country” do).

Tactics for revolutionaries in a period of downturn

Today in “First World” countries such as New Zealand it can seem as though communists are also alone in advocating any kind of  class-based politics at all, due to the collapse of social democracy and the sharp decline in the levels of unionisation among workers.  Some ostensible marxists infer from this that we need to drop for the moment all talk about the need for revolutionary change and instead adapt our agitation and slogans to the current low level of political consciousness.

Such a viewpoint however runs counter to Marx’s materialist approach to politics which led him to realise that small groups of revolutionaries must not try to substitute themselves for the lack of a mass movement.  When the wave of revolutions that swept Europe in 1848 ended in defeat for the working class  and the onset of a sustained period of reaction Marx did not decide to abandon his revolutionary politics – although the conditions did necessitate for the time being a retreat from mass agitation to carrying on political activity in small revolutionary study circles and propaganda groups.  The revival of struggle across Europe in the 1860s and 70s allowed Marx to once again direct his political activities on a larger public stage through the International Working Men’s Association (the so-called “First International”).

At all times Marx sought to lend to the mass struggles that were taking place a revolutionary dynamic and stress the need for workers’ self-activity and workers control (often despite opposition from his own nominal allies such as the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who advocated building a clandestine conspiratorial organisation to organise the revolution rather than the formation of a public, mass democratic revolutionary party).

The important point here though is that at no stage did Marx attempt to substitute himself or his followers for the lack of a genuinely mass movement, or disavow his belief in the need to overthrow capitalism simply to pander to the reformist mentality of some of his more opportunist colleagues in the First International (such as the followers of Ferdinand Lassalle, who argued for the exclusion of women from the workforce on the grounds that there was only a fixed amount of money available in the capitalist “wage fund”).

Instead, Marx maintained throughout his lifetime a standpoint of uncompromising, ruthless criticism towards all apologists for capitalism (including the progenitor of the modern day Green movement, Thomas Malthus) while adjusting his perspectives and methods of organising according to the ebb and flow of the class struggle.

Capitalism still incapable of resolving its internal contradictions

The current crisis on the world financial markets came as a shock to many of the so-called “business commentators” who opined that capitalism had in the world of hedge funds, derivatives and futures trading a means of transcending its roots in commodity production and exchange. However, it would have come as no shock to Marx, who in Capital explained that all profit is ultimately derived from surplus value, and that surplus value can only be created in the exploitation of wage labour engaged in actual production.

Marx even anticipated that as capitalists looked to produce commodities more cheaply and increase the level of workers exploitation by investing more in machinery (so that the worker would spend a greater proportion of their work day creating surplus value for the capitalist) that there would be a decline in the amount of surplus value relative to the total capital outlay. He referred to this as the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to decline.  Marx also identified that there were two main ways in which the capitalists could try to get around this difficulty:

1)      through implementing speedup and lengthening the working day

2)      redirecting investment away from production into credit and loan markets

However, as we are discovering in New Zealand at the moment there are definite limits beyond which both of these strategies cease to work!

Utilising the scientific and dialectical approach to politics and to analysing capitalism pioneered by Marx we can see that capitalism is a flawed and historically aberrant economic system that contains within it the seed of its own negation. It is for this reason that now in the 21^st century when the ideas of empiricist philosophers or utopian writers from 50 or 150 years ago have surpassed their useful shelf-life, Marx’s political and philosophical method continues to be as relevant as ever.

Orginally published at Socialist Democracy.

The situation in most of Latin America in 1968 was vastly different to that in Europe, the United States and South East Asia. Throughout most of the continent the revolutionary dynamic seemed to be running in reverse – since the 1959 Cuban Revolution the left seemed to be everywhere on the retreat, with right-wing military dictators ruthlessly crushing any opposition.

It was not as though the left suffered from any shortage of militancy – in Venezuela and Colombia communist cadre inspired by the example of Ernesto “Che” Guevara fought heroically to overthrow capitalism by setting up guerrilla foco in the countryside. However unlike their Cuban comrades they failed in the vital task of building a parallel mass underground movement among the urban working class, and consequently were left isolated.

An attempt by Guevara himself to lead a guerrilla insurgency in Bolivia in similar conditions led to his capture and execution at the hands of local military and US intelligence officers in 1967.

In Peru the peasant leader Hugo Blanco had led a relatively successful guerrilla campaign in the early 1960s which had mass support among the indigenous population of the Cuzco region, but by the mid 60s Blanco was in jail and the insurgency crushed.

In 1968 a left-wing army officer named General Juan Velasco Alvarado took power in Peru in a coup d´état, however despite implementing land reform and some other progressive measures the workers and peasants continued to be marginalised under his regime.

In Argentina too a military regime was in power throughout the period and the left driven largely underground for most of the decade. Only in 1969 would the class struggle briefly reassert itself with the urban uprising known as the Cordobazo.

However, in the continent of Latin America there was one key flashpoint in 1968 – Mexico.

Mexico was almost unique in Latin America it had since the 1930s been under uninterrupted civilian rule. In the aftermath of the 1910 Mexican Revolution the country was stabilised through a mixture of agrarian reforms and economic protectionism – although periodic peasant uprisings were still ruthlessly suppressed.

In the 1930s under President Lázaro Cárdenas the government took on a more radical nationalist bent, nationalising the oil industry which until then was largely controlled by US and British interests. Cárdenas also set up a corporatist political party, the Party of the Mexican Revolution, subsequently re-branded as the Institutional Revolutionary Party or PRI, which acted to integrate peasant and labour unions as well as army officers into the state and maintain political control.

Cárdenas’ successors were however much more conservative and pursued an aggressive policy of state capitalism which meant zero tolerance for strikes and land occupations. By the 1950s workers were increasingly coming into conflict with the government with several splits from the main PRI-controlled labour federation. However despite this no opposition movement was able to challenge the PRI’s electoral stranglehold.

In 1958 and 1959 what began as a wildcat strike by railway workers in Oaxaca spread to become a nationwide movement in which rank-and-file militants sought to wrest control of the railway workers union from the corrupt PRI officials. It was only defeated finally by the military occupation of the railways and the jailing of the main agitators.

The failure of the revolutionary left to break PRI control of the unions was in large part due to the perfidious role of the official pro-Moscow Communist Party (PCM), which continued throughout the period a strange love-hate relationship with the government – at times strongly criticising it but always careful not to do anything that might endanger its legal status (such as calling for an indefinite general strike or armed insurrection).

For the PCM the only legitimate path to power was through the ballot box, hence their denunciation of the railway workers’ strike as an “adventurist” action inviting state repression for which the workers supposedly had only themselves to blame.

This failure was to have important repercussions in 1968 when the PRI-loyalist bureaucrats who remained in control of the main union federation actively worked to prevent the radical student movement in Mexico City from linking up with rank-and-file workers, even going so far as to support the government’s use of lethal force against the students.

The 68 Student Rebellion

Not only were students in Mexico isolated from the working class by the hostility of the union bureaucrats, but they were also isolated in terms of their class origin. The overwhelming majority (77%) of students attending the National Autonomous University of Mexico or UNAM, which was the epicentre of the 68 rebellion were the sons and daughters of the military, professional and managerial elite. Only 18% were from working class or peasant families.

These students were certainly not (unlike the revolutionary heroes of Mariano Azuela’s novel about the 1910 Mexican Revolution) “los de abajo” – the underdogs, the downtrodden and dispossessed. Yet in 1968 they rose up in their hundreds of thousands to challenge the capitalist system.

The spark which set the 1968 Mexican student rebellion off was the violent conduct of a squad of riot police in the aftermath of a college football match on July 22. The use of the federal riot police against students was particularly resented due to the fact that it happened within the “University City”, a district of the capital comprising the main UNAM campus as well as several other educational institutions which historically had its own council, regulations and law-enforcement.

The July 22 incident was followed by a strike by university, polytechnic and high school students and mass protests. On July 30 there was a pitched battle in the centre of the city between students and riot police, as well as the army which had now been called in along with its tanks and armoured vehicles. Shortly afterwards army troops used a bazooka to destroy the entrance doors to a high school which had been barricaded against them.

In the face of the intense military and police repression many of the teachers and lecturers sided with the students, and the rector of the university publicly condemned the army intervention.

The Polish-Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska in her book Fuerte es el Silencio describes how the authorities spent vast sums of money in trying to paint out all the political graffiti which began to appear all over the capital city, which was preparing to host the Summer Olympics that year. Among these graffiti slogans were the six points of the grand petition drawn up by the leaders of the student protest movement:

…”Freedom for the political prisoners” “Freedom for the imprisoned students” “Delimitation of responsibilities “Dissolution of the Riot Police” “Repeal the anti-subversion law” “Indemnify the families of the dead and injured…” Many teachers criticised these six points and branded them parochial, too narrow. Why couldn’t the students ask for more essential things? Wage rises, union democracy, a better standard of living in the countryside, the end of monopolies, the end of Fidel Velázquez, one of the most powerful men in México…the transformation of the PRI, lower food prices? Why in these six points did they not include educational demands? These six points were ridiculous; their movement a veritable improvisation, who knew how it was going to all end up…

Yet the movement still had the government seriously worried. By August, hotel reservations by international tourists attending the Summer Olympics were being cancelled, and overseas journalists arriving in advance of the Games were broadcasting to the world the ugly scenes of violent repression on the streets of Mexico City.

Moreover, there were signs that the movement was beginning to get more serious and organised. Members of the university faculty staff such as the renowned writer and Trotskyist José Revueltas and the radical socialist professor of civil engineering Heberto Castillo joined the new National Strike Council bringing with them decades of experience in the class struggle.

On August 26, students began an occupation of the Plaza de la Constitution opposite the Presidential Palace after some 300 000 people marched in support of the students’ demands through the streets of the capital. For the first time in Mexican history the office of the president was publicly denigrated with chants such as “muera el chango Díaz Ordaz (death to the monkey Díaz Ordaz)” and “chango carbon, al paredón (to the wall with the monkey he-goat)”.

Elena Poniatowska describes how

The paranoia of Díaz Ordaz reached unimaginable heights. There were fifty people locked up for every poster put up denouncing him. He was apparently dealing with a vast international conspiracy originating in Moscow; from there came the orders to call him a monkey, braggart and murderer…”

The siege of the Presidential Palace was only broken after two days when the army used tanks to clear the Plaza de la Constitution.

Meanwhile a reporter from the New York Times described how the atmosphere on the campuses had now reached revolutionary fever-pitch:

…[The students] have plastered walls and bulletin boards with revolutionary mottoes. In the School of Economics, quotations from Mao Tse-tung are seen…the auditorium of the School of Philosophy and Letters has been renamed ‘Auditorium Ernesto Che Guevara’, and classroom doors have been painted with such names as ‘Lenin Room’ or Ho Chi Minh Room.’ Schools all over the city have taken on a revolutionary look, with students manning them 24 hours a day against possible intrusion by Government forces…The strike committee has no fixed meeting place, and its members are reluctant to have their pictures for taken for fear of reprisals. Every political student organization is involved – Moscow Communists, Mao Communists and Trotsky Communists… From almost all the students come expressions denoting the greatest lack of respect for governing officials, the Institutional Revolutionary Party which has ruled for almost 40 years, and all other political groups…

Meanwhile the students bitterly denounced the official media outlets for censoring any mention of the government repression, holding a silent protest march in which all the marchers had handkerchiefs tied around their mouths.

As Poniatowska notes, during the months of August and September

...the movement transformed into a movement of the masses, in which a series of values or myths were placed in doubt…the so-called “national unity” and the social partnership in which the capitalists and workers did not have any conflicting interests; the supposed economic and social stability of the country; the intangibility of the Executive, Legislative and Judicial powers; the honesty of the big national press (in all their protests – except the silent protest of September 13 – the marchers stopped in front of the offices of the newspapers Excélsior and El Universal on Juarez Avenue to shout with their fists and arms in the air, waving their banners “Prensa Vendida, prensa vendida”); the validity of stage-managed democracy, the personal and inadequate form of government; the supposed independence of the workers and peasants unions…the authenticity of many associations which in fact represent nobody…

Meanwhile the Mexican Communist Party could offer no strategic vision to the student movement, blindsided as it was by the conviction that the PRI represented the progressive wing of the bourgeoisie that was supposedly carrying out a revolutionary nationalist, anti-imperialist mission. On these grounds, it had supported the election of President Díaz Ordaz in 1964, and so now was scarcely prepared to lead a revolution against him.

In addition, because of its slavish pro-Moscow and PRI-loyalist line the Communist Party had by 1968 lost many of its best militants in a series of damaging splits. These included José Revueltas’ Spartacist group, some of the leadership of the Partido Popular Socialista, as well the jailed leader of the 1958-59 railway workers strike Demetrio Vallejo.

1968 provided the impetus for the formation of a number of new parties such as the Trotskyist Revolutionary Workers Party, the radical left Mexican Workers Party of Heberto Castillo and various armed guerrilla groups such as the 23rd of September Communist League. However in 1968 these forces were still too new, too untried and untested to cohere and lead the mass movement to victory.

Sporadic attempts were made by the more politically advanced students organised in brigades to go out to working class districts, in buses commandeered from the nearby polytechnic, to hold street corner meetings where they would try to explain to the workers what their protest movement was all about as well as collect donations to produce more posters and leaflets. However other sections of the student movement retained traditional middle class prejudices towards the workers and thought them too mired in apathy and ignorance to be worth bothering with.

Thus when the Mexican army began its final assault on the campus of the National University itself on the night of 18 September they met with only localised (albeit determined) resistance. After a week of fighting both the National University and Polytechnic campuses were entirely under army control.

With the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games due to take place on October 12, President Díaz was anxious to crush the student protest movement swiftly and at whatever cost. The final brutal stanza occurred when on the night of October 2 – forever remembered by Mexicans as la Noche Triste – when the army opened fire with machine guns on thousands of unarmed demonstrators (mainly students, but also including some workers and their families) in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco district of the capital. As many as 300 people were thought to have been killed in the massacre, although that figure could not be confirmed as government refused to release any official figures or records.

Some 1500 of the students who survived the massacre were arrested and released only weeks later after the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games. However, some eighty leaders of the student movement including Luís González Alba, José Revueltas and Heberto Castillo remained incarcerated for a further 2 years until a prolonged hunger strike and a change in presidential administration finally brought their release.

But although the 1968 movement may have been defeated, it marked only the beginning – not the end – of a radicalisation in Mexican society and politics, one which continues to this day with the discredited PRI now having very little credibility in the eyes of the masses. The more radicalised students who were involved in the events of 68 subsequently left the universities and polytechnics to help set up independent labour and peasants’ unions, challenging the hold of the corrupt bureaucrats and PRI officials over the working class. Others took to the countryside to try to set up guerrilla foco in a bid to emulate the example of the Cuban Revolution.

While to the outside world the enduring memory of Mexico City in 1968 is of the US athletes Tommy Smith and John Carlos giving the black power salute from the medal dais, for Mexico itself the main significance of 1968 was as the year that saw the rebirth of the revolutionary left.

Bilbliography

Carr, Barry. “Mexican Communism 1968-1981: Eurocommunism in the Americas?” Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 17, No. 1. (May, 1985).

Crespi, Simon. Jose Revueltas (1914-1976): A Political Biography

Poniatowska, Elena. Fuerte es el Silencio

Poniatowska, Elena. La Noche de Tlatelolco: testimonios de historia oral

On May 1st 1968, Paris erupted. There had been a few big strikes in the years leading up to it, but by and large the upsurge took all by surprise.

It was the tenth anniversary of the day General De Gaulle had seized presidential power in France by an unresisted military coup. The parliament, feeling helpless to deal with the escalating war in Algeria, had voted over its powers to De Gaulle. The Fifth Republic that he established included wide-ranging presidential powers, reducing parliament to little more than a rubber stamp. During the Algerian war, protests were suppressed with lethal force.

The 1968 protests started with the students at Nanterre on the outskirts of the city. They had begun a campaign to visit each others’ rooms in halls of residence after 11pm, in defiance of their administration’s curfew.

Their campaign drew in students from all over France, who added their own grievances and demands. The immediate issues were the dereliction and overcrowding of universities, which were bursting at the seams due to the trebling of the number of students in less than a decade, and the government’s plans to impose exams in order to reduce the numbers of first-year students.

Violent state repression only served to spread the movement. The daily demonstrations and occupations soon inspired workers to strike in industries from car production to banking. The workers’ demands were at first minimal – for wage concessions and greater social security. However, as a mass strike wave developed and continued throughout May, many long-germinating working-class aspirations came to the fore and began to lead to much more revolutionary demands.

It quickly became clear that the government was unable to control the situation. De Gaulle had initially written off the protests as a sectional student concern. Now, workplaces across France were being occupied by strikers, and people from all walks of life were coming together to enthusiastically debate the shape of the new society they wanted.

At the peak of the general strike, on May 25th, there were between eight and ten million strikers. Yet there was still no national instruction coming from the union leaders. And there was to be none – at least, not until they decided to bring the movement to an end.

The apparatus of the Communist Party’s union, the CGT, organised the return to work. The greatest resistance that it faced was in the large production industries. For instance, at the Renault-Flins factory, where the workers were younger and mostly unskilled, the CRS (military riot police) occupied the plant on June 7th, in an attempt to break the strike. For two days there were violent confrontations between the police on the one hand, and the strikers and students on the other – a 17-year-old Maoist high-school student, Gilles Tautin, was killed, drowned in the river Seine by the CRS.

The revisionist Communist Party sold out the movement, but they were by far the largest force on the left and still well-respected by older workers. The revolutionary groups were tiny, and many of them had written off the working class in the industrialised countries as a spent force before May 1968.

The far left was also largely student-based, lacking real roots in the factories. Had it gained credit in the eyes of a significant layer of workers, it might have acted as a counterweight to the treachery of the Communist Party.

The other lesson to draw from May 1968 is that the uprising was not the result of any kind of economic crisis. Workers’ living standards had been rising for years (although inequality was widening) and society seemed very stable. Even in apparently quiet times, like the present, the potential for mass rebellion lurks beneath the surface of society.