The Auckland Māori consultation hui on state asset sales took place yesterday at Tainui’s Airport Novotel under heavy police and Māori warden presence. The hui revealed universal dissatisfaction from Māori about the government’s plans, but also exposed important class divisions within Māoridom itself.

In his opening presentation, Minister for SOEs Tony Ryall stated that the controversial Section 9 will stay in the SOE Act, and that the government had “got the message on that.” Section 9 provides that “nothing in this Act shall permit the Crown to act in a manner that is inconsistent with the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi.” Whilst the audience made it clear that Section 9 should also apply to the new legislation enabling partial sell-offs of state assets, the debate that followed rapidly broke out of the bureaucratic parameters that the government had laid down for the hui.

A Mana Movement member asked Ryall what guarantees that, after these sell-offs, the government wouldn’t sell more. His response was that the government only had a mandate to sell a 49% stake in each of the power companies, and the rest of its stake in Air New Zealand. The questioner replied that they were already privatising further by selling off state housing in her neighbourhood of Glen Innes. Ryall reiterated that the general election had given them a mandate, whereupon a Workers Party member interjected that “one million non-voters is not a mandate!”

Another questioner put it to the minister that many people, especially tāngata hauā (disabled people) live far below the poverty line and would never be able to buy shares, further disenfranchising them. Similarly, Joe Carolan, speaking on behalf of the newly-formed “Aotearoa not for sale” group, asked how the low paid Unite union members working at the airport could ever become one of the so-called “mum and dad investors”. Ryall’s answer was that they could benefit from asset sales through their KiwiSaver investments. A large chorus in the audience responded with: “they can’t afford KiwiSaver!”

A speaker from the Māori council stated that since the genesis of the existence of the energy companies was water, it is necessary to determine who has rights to water before any sell-off. Claiming that the Māori Council represents hapū, he appeared to take a sideswipe at the Brown Table with the comment that “it was hapū that got off the waka, not Iwi Leaders Forum.” He concluded by saying that the Sealords deal was an excellent model (where iwi got 20% of the fish and a share of the fishing rights). The government has stated that it “considers interests in water to be beyond the scope of this consultation.” The Māori Council has lodged a claim with the Waitangi Tribunal for control of fresh water which, if successful, could lead to consumers having to pay for it.

Another speaker identifying himself as a Manurewa resident said that the experience of the privatised Contact Energy pointed to a future where the energy companies would be robbing the government and taxpayers. Noting how Pike River Coal is coming out of the enquiry looking like a bad employer, he asked why – since the clauses relating to being a good employer and social responsibility are to be removed from the new legislation – would the companies continue to act according to those principles. Ryall’s blithe reply was: “I think you’ll find that they will.”

Emerging from the hui a few things are obvious: there is widespread dissatisfaction with the SOE sales amongst Māori. Some oppose the sell-off outright, whereas others just want to know “what percentage of the private shares will Māori collectively own?” For the campaign against the sell-off, how the question is framed is vital. As Ryall correctly pointed out: “under both governments, SOEs have been driving at profit,” and energy prices are already high. Therefore we must fight privatisation in the name of a positive alternative – workers’ and users’ democratic control of public utilities.

If assets are in private hands, whether foreign or New Zealand owned, they only care about three things – (1) profit, (2) profit and (3) profit.

-Hone Harawira

I want to begin by acknowledging the specificity of Aotearoa, in that it is unique amongst imperialist countries in having a sizeable indigenous population possessing a significant social weight. This fact is important to Cultural Nationalists as well as Marxists: “Unlike any other indigenous colonized people, the Maori live within white culture. Not on reserves. Not in rural areas. [...] This is the Maori radicalizing potential.”[Awatere]

The Treaty

We have recently had some debate within the WP around the character of pre-European Māori society. I believe that the basic argument advanced in Ray Nune’s pamphlet is correct – that the lack of a regular surplus in pre-European Māori society prevented the formation of class society.

In any case, Māori did not have any concept of private property in the form of land:

 The Maori people [...] were not interested in the ownership or “possession” of land as the Treaty expressed it. Philosophically, at least, it was land that possessed the people. Land was a medium for building and maintaining relationships. Buying and selling real estate was unknown. But it was soon to become only too problematic.

In 1835, the British Resident, James Busby convened a meeting of 34 chiefs to sign a Declaration of Independence, designed to head off claims from rival imperialists.

As Europeans continued to arrive in ever greater numbers, Governor Hobson was instructed to obtain the surrender of sovereignty from the chiefs in order to enable annexation. Some chiefs opposed signing. Forty-three Chiefs signed the Treaty of Waitangi on 6 February 1840. Over the following months, many other chiefs signed, bringing the total number of signatories to around 500.

As each chief signed, Hobson shook hands, saying, “He iwi tahi tatou” (We are one people), thereby laying down the ideology of assimilation that was to dominate colonial policy well into the twentieth century. Each chief who signed the Treaty was given two blankets and some tobacco.

The English version of the treaty clearly states (Article 1) that the chiefs cede “Sovereignty” to the Queen of England. The Māori translation, however, renders the word “Kawanatanga” – a transliteration of “governance” which had no equivalence in Māori society. Moreover, Article 2 of the Treaty guaranteed the chiefs “undisturbed possession” of their resources in the English version, translated as “tino rangatiritanga” (absolute chieftainship) in Māori. Thus the version of the Treaty that the chiefs signed did not appear to relinquish sovereignty for Māori. Ranganui Walker argues that while “nominal sovereignty” may have been ceded to the Crown, the chiefs believed they retained “substantive sovereignty” over their lands.

The Treaty was also significant in being the first official document to refer to tangata whenua as “Māori” (literally: normal, usual or ordinary). Pre-European contact Māori had no single term for themselves; groups were distinguished by their tribal names alone.

Extensive efforts were made to secure more signatures of North Island chiefs, but two paramount chiefs refused to sign, Te Wherowhero (Tainui) and Te Heuheu (Tuwharetoa). Te Heueu repudiated those who had signed with the words:

"As for these blankets, burn them."

I will not agree to the mana of a strange people being placed over this land. Though every chief in the island consent to it, yet I will not. I will consent neither your act nor your goods. As for these blankets, burn them.

Hobson declared the whole of the South Island, terra nullius (“land belonging to no one”), thus dispensing with the need to obtain the consent of Ngāi Tahu.

At the time of the signing of the Treaty, Māori outnumbered Pākehā ten to one. The chiefs who signed could not have envisaged the consequences of colonisation that was to follow. Ranginui Walker commented that: “By their acquiescence in the Treaty, the chiefs opened the way to replicate among their own people the colonial experience of African tribes and the Indians of the American continent.”

The colonial state almost immediately ignored and neglected the Treaty, but for Māori it was the major point of reference with the state that they returned to again and again. Movements such as the Kingitanga and Kotahitanga appealed to the government by reminding it of its obligations under the Treaty.

Chief Justice Prendergast declared the Treaty to be a “simple nullity” in 1877, but latterly the Crown’s view has shifted significantly. The Fourth Labour Government introduced the Treaty of Waitangi Amendment Act in 1985, which made claims retrospective to 1840, which Walker credits to pressure from the emerging Mana Motuhake. “Consequently, the activist movements suspended resort to direct action, as the tribes moved to avail themselves of the tribunal and other legal avenues”

The balance of power between the Crown and iwi meant that proportion of land returned, and the per capita value of settlements has been very low. “When Sir Robert Mahuta was asked why Waikato settled for so little he replied ‘Because we’re tired of being poor.’”

There are Māori activists who focus exclusively or excessively on the Treaty. Sections of the Mana Movement are not immune from such “Treatyism”. Such an approach is mistaken, not least because  it’s not hard to conceive of a thought experiment in which British imperialism annexed New Zealand through military conquest alone, and without resort to the deception of a treaty (as it did elsewhere).Would this scenario mean that Māori could therefore claim no group rights? Clearly such rights need to derive as much from Māori’s status as tangata whenua, as from their enshrinement in the Treaty.

That said, to ignore or downplay the significance of the Treaty (as the WP has done) is ahistorical. We must acknowledge that the Treaty has been, and continues to be, a point of resistance between Māori and the Crown.

What I think the WP has failed to grasp is that there are two Treaties. There is the the Treaty, a fraud  perpetrated by British imperialism designed to achieve colonisation on the cheap; and Te Tiriti, a contract in which Māori agreed to the settlement of tau iwi, but did not renounce their sovereignty. It is the latter treaty from which TR activists derive their radical subjectivity. Perhaps some of that outlook is utopian and backward-looking, like the hankering for a Saxon golden age by English nationalists who denounced the “Norman yoke” in the 17th century. But I don’t think it is entirely.

The Foreshore and Seabed

In 1997 a confederation of tribes from the northern part of the South Island, Te Tauihu o Nga Waka, applied to the Māori Land Court to determine whether their customary rights to the foreshore and seabed remained extant. The confederation was concerned about the impact of aquaculture on their customary fishing rights, and was frustrated at being shut out of the marine farming industry by Marlborough District Council.

Judge Hingston reached the conclusion from the case that, in the absence of evidence of express extinguishment, customary title to the foreshore remained extant. In 2001 the Attorney-General appealed this ruling. Te Tauihu o Nga Waka appealed to the High Court in 2003. Chief Justice Sian Elias concluded that the Māori Land Court had the jurisdiction to determine the status of the foreshore and seabed. The response of the opposition National Party was to polarise the issue along racial lines, stoking up fears of Pākehā being denied access to the beach.

In January 2004, Don Brash delivered a speech to Orewa Rotary Club denouncing alleged Māori privilege. He asserted that “The Treaty of Waitangi should not be used as the basis for giving greater civil, political or democratic rights to any particular ethnic group.” The reaction of the Labour-led government was to pass the Foreshore and Seabed Act in November 2004, which deemed the title to be held by the Crown.

My recollection of the WP attitude towards the F&S Act at the time was: (i) that it was no big deal, and (ii) that it was probably better for the foreshore to remain in “public” hands, than to be controlled by what may be undemocratic iwi. On the first point, we missed the boat on how important (even if only symbolically) the issue was to Māori. On the second point, reading the Act as being “nationalisation” of the foreshore was way wide of the mark for several reasons.

Firstly, nationalisation is not always progressive. There is perhaps some parallel here with the “orthodox” Trotskyists who accommodated to the the Stalinist states by making a fetish of their “progressive nationalised property”. James Connolly’s comment is apposite on this point:

[S]tate ownership and control is not necessarily Socialism – if it were, then the Army, the Navy, the Police, the Judges, the Gaolers, the Informers, and the Hangmen, all would all be Socialist functionaries, as they are State officials – but the ownership by the State of all the land and materials for labour, combined with the co-operative control by the workers of such land and materials, would be Socialism. [...] To the cry of the middle class reformers, “make this or that the property of the government,” we reply, “yes, in proportion as the workers are ready to make the government their property.”

Secondly, there is the historic relationship of land alienation between Māori and the Crown. Often, “it was the state that took their land, not individual settlers.” And finally, there was a racist double standard within the law, in that it extinguished Māori customary rights, but did not expropriate any of the roughly 30% of coastline under private ownership (mostly in the hands of rich Pākehā).

Annette Sykes described the Act as “the largest confiscation of land since the early colonial period.” The WP did not engage with the spontaneous movement of the June 2004 hikoi. It was during this ferment that the Māori Party was launched, as a split from Labour. Pita Sharples set the tone by declaring the party to be “neither left nor right”.

The National-led government repealed the F&S Act as part of its coalition deal with the Māori Party. It was replaced with the Marine and Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) Act 2011 which allowed Māori the right to make claims for protected custody rights, but based on the extraordinarily high threshold of proof showing customary use dating back to 1840. The consequence of these laws today, says Sykes, is that: “the government is licensing transnational companies like Petrobras to mine the petroleum and other mineral deposits which subsist in the continental shelf.”

Tino Rangatiratanga

Donna Awatere’s Maori Sovereignty, based on articles published between 1982-3, is regarded as the sourcebook of the modern TR movement. Awatere advanced the bleak thesis that all white people were captives of their “own” culture, that “white society” could not be changed, and that Māori should instead seek their liberation through “withdrawal and exodus.” Potentially progressive allies were written off as hopelessly conservative (Trade Unions) or mired in splits caused by “individualism” (the Left). Even Pacific Islanders were dismissed as having formed an uneasy alliance with Pākehā against Māori Sovereignty.

Today, parts of the polemic are obviously very dated (such as Awatere’s assertion that there is no New Zealand identity (independent of British colonialism). However, many of the heavily essentialist notions she presents have since become widely accepted, albeit in a watered-down form. There is a radical gloss to the thesis, drawing on Gramsci. She accuses the Trade Union and Left Wing movement of possessing a corporate class consciousness based on “inward looking selfishness”, which she counterposes to the opportunity to create a hegemonic class consciousness based on Māoritanga.

Arguing from a Marxist perspective, Evan Te Ahu Poata-Smith commented:

Awatere’s account of the Pākehā left had such a powerful political impact precisely because it highlighted many of the inherent weaknesses and real shortcomings of the ideas that existed on the left. Unfortunately, however, it often prevented through its very rhetoric and posturing the possibility of building a mass movement that represented a real challenge to racism and the state because its emphasis on autonomy in struggle resulted theoretically at least, in the exclusion of Pākehā, whatever their social class and gender, from playing a key role in fighting for Māori liberation.

Ranganui Walker has written a historical account of the struggle for Māori liberation from the perspective of cultural nationalism. Attempting to explain recurring divisions within Māori movements, Walker states that: “ Although Maori radicals are the cutting edge of social change, the conservatives are the slow grinding edge.” Poata-Smith, however describes how class interests can actually lead to a contradiction of interests of the two. For instance, he describes how conservative elements within the Ngāti Whātua leadership eventually colluded with the government to end the occupation of Takaparawhau/ Bastion Point, “reveal[ing] that on the one hand the Maori middle class will support certain kinds of struggle so long as it advances their interests but their endorsement of militancy is sharply curtailed if the protest actions threaten their own position or the system itself.”

Poata-Smith further notes how the frequent denunciation of such leaders as “sell out”, “kupapa”(traitor), or “house nigger” by radicals, fails to explain their social role. Far from lacking cultural fortitude, “this group of Māori are perfectly conscious of their own interests. The problem is, however, that their material interests are not the same as those for working class Māori.”

Poata-Smith identifies how the interpretation of TR has been transformed a number of times:

In the period from the early 1970s onwards, four interconnected interpretations were to emerge: tino rangatiratanga as Maori capitalism (in tribal or individual form), tino rangatiratanga as Maori electoral power (primarily through the orthodox parliamentary system), tino rangatiratanga as cultural nationalism, and tino rangatiratanga as involving more radical far-reaching strategies for change.

The degeneration of elements of the TR movement has been latterly analysed by Sykes, who identified her own previous complicity with “the rise of a Maori elite with the process of litigating, negotiating and then implementing Treaty settlements, many of whom have become active sycophants of the broader neo liberal agenda which transfers a limited subset of publicly owned assets and resources into the private ownership of corporations to settle the injustices that have been inflicted upon hapu and iwi Maori.”

Along with the rise of the corporate warriors, Poata-Smith also identifies collapse of Stalinism as politically disarming groups such as the CPNZ and SUP, who were unable to effectively oppose the generalised retreat from class and socialism.

Sykes, whose background is in leftwing cultural nationalism, has to a large extent converged with the Marxist analysis of the trajectory of the TR movement. But idea of the Ao Māori/ Ao Pākehā world view is still widely accepted within Mana. Poata-Smith contends, “Given that identities are blurred, multiple and historically contingent the idea that the main division in society is between Māori and Pākehā also risks fragmentation of the movement itself because it inevitably leads to confusion and fights over authenticity.”

Elizabeth Rata’s take on TR is worth examining, especially since Phil Ferguson claimed that she was an academic whose views were close to that of the WP’s. Rata argues stridently against the constitutional inclusion of  any “foundational group rights”. She charts the emergence of an elite based on the creation of  what she calls “neo-tribes” (to distinguish them from traditional iwi). This is based on a “total rupture” between the pre- and post-colonial periods, due to the traditional redistributive Māori economy being incompatible with accumulative capitalism. Ideologies of culture like neo-traditionalism (emphasising kin over class) and culturalism (identity is primary) support the new elite.

To this phenomenon, she counterposes the political economy approach, where politics and economics are primary (but “textured” by culture). The group rights alternative, Rata argues, leads to brokerage politics and the formation of a self-interested elite.

I think Rata provides a trenchant critique of the “Brown Table” with her analysis. However, she conflates that tendency with the whole of the TR movement. She ignores the class struggles occurring within iwi and hapū. And her motivation for opposing group rights is that: “The structural cohesion of the nation-state itself will be destabilised by altering the meaning and practice of citizenship.” Well, we want to smash the state!

Rata also overemphasises the historical rupture of colonisation. Whist most Māori today may be urbanised, proletarianised and detribalised, many still retain strong links to their “bones”, their ancestral lands and traditions. The victory of capitalism is not as complete as Rata makes out.

To Poata-Smith’s list, we may add a fifth interpretation of TR: self-determination in legal processes. Moana Jackson writes of the “criminality of imposed law” of colonisation and repudiates the idea that “in Aotearoa Maori people were held to have no law, and therefore no authority, because the early settlers could not discern in Maori society the things they identified as ‘legal’ – the courts, the police, the written reports.” Traditional society had to be suppressed “in order that the monist idea of ‘one [English] law for all’ could be imposed

Jackson exposes criminal law as largely ideological, and contrary to the liberal view, is subject to political power and cultural bias. Interestingly, Rua Kennena flew a flag with the slogan “Kotahi Te Ture/ Mo Nga Iwi E Rua/ Maungapohatu” (One Law/ For Both Peoples/ Maungapohatu), which was seized as evidence for his trial for sedition in 1916. Today the phrase “one law for all” is used by the likes of Don Brash demagogically and hypocritically (since in reality, Brash supports class law, not “one law”).  “The key in the phrase ‘one law for all’”, writes Jackson, “is not the process but the result at the end, and the result must be justice for all.

What I find problematic in Jackson are not his alternatives to the current legal system (a focus on rehabilitation/ restorative justice and community – rather than just individual – responsibility), but rather, his slippage into relativism: “The French have their way of getting justice, the Americans have their way of getting justice, so the Maori people have their way of getting justice, and that is as valid as any other.” My concern is that this approach may inadvertently open the door to reactionary measures, like the introduction of sharia courts to try muslims.

As this brief survey shows, TR is a heavily contested term, and to reject it wholesale seems to me dogmatic and class reductionist. Perhaps we can say, as Socialist Aotearoa do, that TR is impossible to realise without overthrowing capitalism. In any case, it is the task of socialists in the Mana Movement to help redefine and transform TR into a revolutionary cause.

Mike Kay
October 2011

Sources

Awatere, D. (1984) Maori Sovereignty, Broadsheet

Connolly, J. (1899) http://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1901/evangel/stmonsoc.htm

Jackson, M. (1991) “Maori Access to Justice” Race Gender and Class

Jackson, M. (1995) “Justice and political power: Reasserting Maori legal processes” in Hazlehurst, K.M. (ed.) Legal pluralism and the colonial legacy: indigenous experiences of justice in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, Avebury

Kawharu, I.H. (2001) http://www.aucklandmuseum.com/site_resources/library/Maori_Culture/Events_Lectures/Land_and_Identity_lecture_notes.pdf

Kay, M. http://workersparty.org.nz/2010/09/15/book-review-encircled-lands-te-urewera-1820-–-1921-by-judith-binney-bridget-williams-books-2009/

Nunes, R. (1999) http://workerspartynz.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/the-maori-in-prehistory-and-today2.pdf

Rata, E. (2005) http://tazi.net/JFriedman/IMG/pdf/RataSS_20Address12Feb05.pdf

Rata, E. (2011) http://www.nzcpr.com/guest232.htm

Sykes, A. http://news.tangatawhenua.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Annette_Sykes_Lecture_2010.pdf

Poata-Smith, E.S. Te Ahu(2001) The Political Economy of Maori Protest Politics 1968-1995 PhD Thesis, University of Otago

Poata-Smith, E.S. Te Ahu (2005) http://www.pjreview.info/issues/docs/11_1/pjr11105review_strugg_p211-217.pdf

Walker, R. (2004) Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou: Struggle Without End, Penguin

Originally published here, reprinted in February Spark.

The Thorton family: “They want drones when we are actually parents”

Shaun Thorton, 43, drives a straddle at the Ports of Auckland where he has worked for 18 years. He met his wife Leah at the port where she worked before becoming a fulltime mum looking after their four kids: Ben (9), twins Max and Amy (5) and Nina (4).

“We want predictability so we can have a family life,” he says. “We only get one weekend off every third weekend meaning I work 35 weekends in the year. I’m striking for the kids.”

Leah interrupts: “and for the marriage”.

“Shaun’s work is a nightmare for me and the kids,” she says. “Dad only went to two soccer games last year and couldn’t come to the preschool Christmas party. We’ve learnt to live with it but it’s far from perfect.”

“It’s clear from the ports casualisation plan that they want drones, when we are actually parents. You can’t sustain a family as a casual and deal with the everyday stuff parents have to put up with. One of our kids has a chronic illness and another is getting progressively deaf in one ear. I should be able to count on partner to help out with hospital visits and specialist’s visits.

“Everyone complains about irresponsible teenagers going out on town and they wonder where their parents are. They are here and in other unsociable jobs. The only other option to this work is working on the minimum wage.

“It astounds me that they are trying to increase productivity by ruining our work life balance – do they want people sleeping on the job?” she says. “Can I complain to the company about not having annual leave or sick days?”

The Wallace family: “It’s not just husbands affected, it’s our families too”

Mark Wallace is a stevedore at the Ports of Auckland. He worked his way up from a casual to a permanent crane driver over 18 years. Mark and wife Katrina have two children, Ashley (9) and Rebecca (7).

“I’m trying to protect my family life,” he says. “The company wants the right to tell me at midnight, eight hours before a shift, that I don’t have the shift anymore. How can I plan a family life around that?”

“The company goes on about caring for its employees, but they treat us like shit. We’ve given them the best container rates ever. If they really cared about us, we’d be inside working. We had to strike at Christmas just to get time off with our kids.”

Katrina, is a self-employed dress-maker who works from home.

“I brought the kids down to the picket show solidarity with my husband,” she says. “But it’s not just husbands affected, it’s our families too. The company’s proposed changes would be hard for me and the kids. I couldn’t take on huge jobs because I wouldn’t know day-to-day what Mark would be doing. I wouldn’t even be able to count on him to pick up the kids from school.”

The Witehira family: “Keeping family time is more important than a pay rise”

Jermaine Witehira, 31, got his first ever job at the Ports of Auckland where he has been working as a stevedore for 14 years. Jermaine and wife Destiny have three children, Gabrielle (5), Karine (2) and Jayda (1)

“I’m doing this for my family and my mates,” he says. “A 10% pay rise isn’t worth the new casual roster system – family time is more important than a pay rise.

“The company says we earn $91k a year – I‘ve never earned that in the 14 years I’ve been here. I get around $64k but I have to work 24 hours overtime and that costs my family.”

Destiny says Jermaine doesn’t see his kids because he leaves for work at 5:30am and gets back at 11:30pm.

“Being a young family is hard enough, but with his hours it feels like I’m a solo mum,” she says. “If the company gets what it wants I’ll have to put my kids in day care and get a job. The thing is that the job would probably only just cover day care costs and I’d have to find a job that worked around casual hours.”

Brandon Cherrington

Brandon Cherrington, 38, has worked at the Ports of Auckland for 1½ years. He is a permanent part-timer and is only guaranteed 24 hours a week. Brandon has a 1½ year old daughter.

“This strike is all about our families,” he says. “We are here supporting the boys to keep and improve our conditions. With the company’s [proposed] new flexibility, they want us to be on call and I won’t be able to plan activities with my daughter anymore.”

Shaun Osbourne

Shaun Osbourne works at the Ports of Auckland. Because he is a casual employee, he hasn’t had a single guaranteed hour in the eight years he has worked there.

“My shifts are allocated the day before I go to work,’ he says. “I could get anywhere between eight and 48 hours a week which could be in the morning, afternoon or graveyard or a combination of the shifts. I won’t be crossing over. We’ve got to make sure permanent workers don’t end up like us casuals.”

Wayne Wolfe

Wayne Wolfe, 58, works as a stevedore at the Ports of Auckland. He has worked on the ports for 35 years. Wayne has three adult children and two grandchildren, including a two-week old baby. Wayne is an executive member of Local 13 of the Maritime Union.

“Many of these young fellas are casuals and have had busted up marriages because of their casualised hours,” he says. “When I first joined, conditions were brilliant and I am doing my best to leave it that way.”

Ron Bell

Ron Bell, 53, is a stevedore at the Ports of Auckland. He will have worked on the waterfront for 31 years this coming April and has been union since he was 17. He has four daughters Jac (20), Katherine (18) and twins Samantha and Amanda (15). He is an executive member of Local 13 of the Maritime Union.

“I just want our guys to keep their jobs on decent hours and not get shat on waiting by the phone 24 hours a day,” he says. “People before us made our conditions what they are today and they should stay that way.”

Ken Ziegler

Ken Ziegler, 49, has worked as a stevedore at the Ports of Auckland for 12 years. Ken is the main provider for his son Carlos (10). He is an executive member of Local 13 of the Maritime Union.

“It’s really simple,” he says. “The company is trying to casualise the entire workforce to keep labour costs down.”

Napo Kuru

Napo Kuru, 27, has worked as a casual lasher at the Ports of Auckland for four years.

“I’m on $16 an hour as a casual and can get anywhere between 16 and 30 hours a week,” he says. “We have the same fight as the permanent boys. They want everyone to be cheap which will drive down everyone’s pay.”

This article is the second of a four part series by Kelly Pope. The first part can be read online here or in the December-January issue of The Spark. ‘Consumer’ in this article refers to a person who currently or has previously used psychiatric services. ‘Bourdieuian’ refers to the theories developed by French Sociologist Piere Bourdieu and  ‘taangata whai ora’ is a Te Reo term that translates to ‘person seeking well-being’.

The instrumental value of employment is that it creates opportunities for mental health consumers to access additional resources to improve their health and wellbeing such as financial resources and supportive social networks. From a Bourdieuian perspective, therefore, employment allows people with experience of mental illness to beneficially increase their social and economic capital. The benefit of these resources has been expanded on in research exploring resilience factors for mental health. One example of this is a 2002 Ministry of Health publication which cites economic security as being crucial for well-being as well as the availability of opportunities. Because of the lower-than-minimum-wage rate of benefits in New Zealand society and difficulties attaining work without experience, the mental health benefits that come from economic security and accessibility of opportunities is likely to disproportionately benefit those in paid work in comparison to the unemployed.

In terms of the intrinsic value of work in facilitating wellness and recovery, research shows that an ‘employed’ status is beneficial in that it fosters positive self-image. In her thesis on New Zealand Women’s career experiences through mental illness, Annie Southern quotes Neff (2006) that “to be able to work in a work-oriented society is to be ‘like’ others … unemployment can only exacerbate feelings of worthlessness and low self-esteem”. Additional research has found that work can facilitate wellbeing and recovery by providing identity outside of the family unit, enhancing positive self-concept, feelings of mastery through acquiring new skills, feeling of being ‘normal,’ and increasing confidence.

 Along with reported improvements in self-esteem and feelings of wellness and competence, clinical improvements have also been shown to be correlated with employment. Hospital admissions and length of stays, relapses, use of medication and psychiatric symptoms can be reduced if people with mental illness are employed. Research that proves the benefit of employment for recovery in this way supports the view that “it is rehabilitatively useful for people with even severe and prolonged psychiatric illness to be in work” (VandenBoom & Lustig, 1997). This is also supported by a number of consumer definitions of recovery published on the Centre For Recovery Awareness website which equate recovery with occupation – “working is recovery” (Share Centre patron), or with activities that induce feelings of contribution, purpose and meaning – “recovery is living-not surviving” (Recovering Mental Health Client), “volunteering is recovery” (Share Centre patron), “recovery is a purpose outside one’s self” (Psychiatric patient).

These occupational understandings of recovery fit with the findings of qualitative research undertaken by Kelly, Lamont and Brunero looking at the recovery experiences of consumers participating in a task-orientated support group, GROW. In this paper, occupation was understood to be “the doing of any activity by a real person at a specific point in time, whereby engagement in the occupation has the opportunity to influence purposefully one’s culture” (Kramer et al, 2003, cited in Kelly et al) so did not focus on paid employment, rather capturing the experiences of these volunteer peer support workers. One participant commented on the confidence he had gained saying “If this group of people were willing to accept me as their organiser, maybe I can do a lot of other things as well.” Another participant alluded to the potential occupational opportunity has for the recovery of people experiencing acute mental health issues, “I know people in 4A [psychiatric unit], they’d love to be able to swing their legs out of bed and wash the floor and why ‘cause they’d have something to do.” In terms of paid employment, a Mental Health Foundation Study also based on qualitative data found that “employment was a positive experience” for the people interviewed (Peterson, 2007.

Supporting the idea that work is beneficial to mental health, is research which indicates unemployment “tends to have a significant adverse effect on both physical and mental health” for the majority of people (Acheson, 1998). This relates to long-term unemployment where studies have found substantial deterioration of mental health when measured for minor psychiatric morbidity over the first six months of unemployment and a slight decline for the following two year period. Mental health is also impacted at the time of job loss where the person feels overwhelmed with a sense of hopelessness. Evidence also exists highlighting that for those moving from unemployment into paid employment , an increase in well-being is likely especially where the position taken on is permanent.

This anecdotal and empirical evidence indicates the benefits of employment, or work in the broader sense, for mental health consumers’ wellbeing and recovery, including the decreased need to use mental health services. In light of this, we may expect that the employment rate for people with mental illness to be level with or greater than that of the general population, as taangata whai ora pursue wellness and recovery. Despite the evidence of benefits associated with meaningful activity and contribution, unemployment rates for people with experience of mental illness are considerably high. Less than half of the mental health consumer population in New Zealand were in employment at the time of a study by Jenson, Sathiyandra, Rochford, Jones, Krishnan and McLeod. The researchers found the level of employment amongst mental health consumers to be 44%, with approximately 27% being full-time employees.

For a number of reasons such as employment discrimination and its structual basis, this makes people with experience of mental illness to be amongst those disability groups with the lowest levels of employment.

The raids of October 15th 2007, targeting Tuhoe and radical supporters, are etched into national consciousness. Police officers blockaded the roads leading into the Ureweras, with squad cars and traffic cones along the historic line of confiscation. They broke windows and smashed down doors at Wellington’s 128 Radical Social Centre.

They used terror legislation to justify these attacks, but did not charge any of the defendants with terrorism. Their tactics were designed to demonstrate the power of the capitalist state, installed and maintained through confiscation. Local and global solidarity actions showed the defendants they were not alone.

Tuhoe never signed the Treaty of Waitangi. Their radicalism, embodied particularly in Tame Iti, consists of their demand for self-determination in a territory where they comprise the majority.

On February 13th, the four remaining defendants will face trial at the Auckland High Court, and supporters will mobilise to conduct solidarity actions.

Sonny Bill Williams (or SBW for the many readers, who I’m sure pay little or no attention to organised sport) is the second player following Lomu who most clearly fits the bill of ‘Superstar’. Yet this is a player who has played for the All Blacks rugby team for only two years, failing in his attempt to attain a starting spot in the team to Ma’a Nonu. Boxing aficionado and parasite capitalist Bob Jones has described SBW’s capabilities in his boxing side project as being “He can’t box. …but that’s hardly surprising given his novice status.”[1]. In his most recent fight against 43-year-old gospel singing, sickness beneficiary, Alipate Liava’a, he couldn’t even score a knockout, cue Jones’ negative reaction. However as spectacle SBW is a Superstar. With his boxing match raising over $350,000 for the Christchurch earthquake.[2] Alongside his boxing efforts, his every move is debated and discussed, in a manner far greater and wider than that of either Dan Carter and Richie McCaw, two All Blacks players, generally acknowledged as two of the greatest players to have played Rugby Union in any country in any time.[3][4]

This situation explains most clearly (but somewhat indirectly) Marx’s intention behind the phrase “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”[5]

The question then, revolves around the concept of the spectacle and SBW’s place within the spectacle. Within this conception of SBW, meaning becomes more abstract and less obvious than say Jonah Lomu whose initial meaning is more obvious, primarily in the act of scoring tries and particularly in the act of the creation of the monstrous black man using sheer force and power rather guile and deception in the scoring of said tries. Framed around this is the constant go-to within rugby circles of the racist conception of Maori/Polynesian players as not being as intelligent or capable of decision-making as ‘white’ players.[6] The historic image of Jonah Lomu running over Mike Catt contains all these ideas.

The Meaning of Sarkozy by French Philosopher Alain Badiou is a reference for both the title of this column but also an idea of the meaning of SBW himself and what he represents, what he ‘means’ on a wider level. One of the key points put forward by Badiou is the idea that the election of French President Nicholas Sarkozy, on the first part represents the fear of the electorate by electing him and in the second part, fear of that fear in the response of the opposition Socialist Party (the French version of the New Zealand Labour Party) to Sarkozy himself. [7] Comparisons can be made in the reaction of the Labour Party to the Don Brash led National Party.

Although SBW does not fully represent the immediate physical fear that Jonah Lomu represented. He reflects a deeper more abstract fear. Of professionalism, neoliberalism and fuller absorption of popular sport into a more commodified form within capitalism. As opposed to Lomu, who is portrayed as a modern day ‘noble savage’, brutal on the field, but kind and gentle off it. SBW is none of that, since his break with league over the salary cap in place, he has become an international player for hire. His stay within New Zealand rugby has been marked by a lack of collective team focus, his decisions have been made for his sake only. His contracts have been short-term one year contracts, as opposed to the four year contract Richie McCaw signed with the NZRU (New Zealand Rugby Union).

In short SBW represents on one level the perennial fear of the loss of talented players to overseas market, but on the deeper secondary level. SBW represents a break with the amateur ethos held so dearly within New Zealand sporting folklore. The unpaid team player, putting team and country before himself. On both aspects SBW is a rejection of both. And he is feared for that.

Joel Cosgrove

[7] mondediplo.com/blogs/the-real-meaning-of-sarkozy

All great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice… first as tragedy, then as farce.

-Karl Marx, 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

October 15th has a double significance in this country, as both the day of the 2007 invasion of the Ureweras, and the day the global ‘Occupy’ movement arrived here in 2011. On October 15th 2011 thousands were mobilised across the country; turnout in Auckland was particularly impressive, while the hundreds who showed up in other centres were largely new to ‘the usual suspects’ (such as myself.) Smaller occupations cropped up in New Plymouth, Marton, Invercargill and elsewhere, showing the resonance of this new political language.

Numbers have fluctuated since. Commentary by Socialist Aotearoa accuses the left of ‘vacillating,’ however the reality is that occupiers have vacillated in general; while Occupy Auckland mobilised thousands on its first day, its current battle with attempted eviction involves a relative hard core. We have to learn from this downward trajectory: what happened and why?

Different situation
While it undeniably resonates, Occupy does not drawn in the breadth of support here that it does in the US. This in large part follows from different economic conditions; while this country is relatively sheltered from the global financial crisis, in the US it rapidly destroyed significant chunks of the middle-class. Mass foreclosures provide Occupy Wall Street, and the other US occupations, with a steady stream of radicalised forces. There are concrete forces pulling people into being involved, whereas New Zealand has seen a more moral aspect to many people’s involvement.

Things are not peachy in the land of sleeping hobbits either. While our comparatively limited financialisation, and close relationship with the booming Australian economy, keep our economy stable for now – real wages have fallen 25% in the last 30 years. Inequality is second highest in the OECD. Instead of mass foreclosures, a steady build up of pressure is developing within the housing market, with the rate in the first 6 months of 2011 being 1008 as opposed to 230 mortgagee sales in 2007, a pattern identified in the US before the crash. We’ve seen over five billion dollars of mainly working class savings, frittered away in a silent tragedy affecting hundreds of thousands of people, in the US everyone was affected, in New Zealand it has been the working poor. Our sleep-walk leads either towards an awakening or a cliff, towards socialism or barbarism.

Political character of Occupy
People’s attraction to Occupy stems partly from its “non-political” nature, that is non-parliamentary and non-party political. In 2011 NZ had its lowest turnout since women got the right to vote in the 19th Century, so this rejection of formal politics certainly resonates. The politics of Occupy come through in support for locked out meat workers, for evicted public housing residents in Glen Innes and Pomare, for the homeless – it’s a movement that sides with the working class when it matters.

There are limitations to the (anti)politics of Occupy. Raising existing divisions within “the 99%” is frowned upon. Myths and hierarchies that run throughout society, such as victim-blaming attitudes toward people who bring up sexual abuse, are reproduced. The initial understanding of the 99% concept is for a homogenous unity of the majority that leaves those not straight, white, pakeha, either having to keep quiet for the sake of unity or being consciously or unconsciously pressured to leave.

Idealism makes this harder to address. The notion of “horizontalism,” of networks that go across rather than top-down, in effect mean attempting to wish away concrete power structures. The consensus process (replaced with 90% majority in some places) means that a conscientious majority cannot respond to immediate situations, for example destructive behaviour. Protracted processes of ‘defence’ for destructive behaviour (sometimes concieved in a quasi-legal language) outweigh concerns such as respecting those who’ve been harassed, with a reactionary minority able to filibuster.

In Wellington in the middle of December, after the majority of people had left, the focus changed to concentrating on the issues facing the homeless, who unlike other occupiers have nowhere else to go. The issues faced by those with mental health issues, recent releases from jail or other situations that leave them without shelter are serious and are not dealt with enough. The political collapse of occupation, and the solidarity and goodwill felt at the start, has isolated occupiers, leaving them vulnerable to attacks by the state, seen already in the repeated attacks on Occupy Auckland.

Some insist on the form of commune-style camps over the content of organising communities. After a number of women and queers left over destructive behaviour, one person stated at a General Assembly: “Occupy Wellington is this campsite, and if you leave the campsite you leave Occupy Wellington.” This is very different from saying “we are the 99%.”

Solidarity is fundamental.

What next
Councils and cops are finally coming down hard on the occupations, after appearing for a while to put up with or actively condone the various occupations. It is an important principle to support all progressives under attack. Right now, councils are bypassing the legal process, arresting people and releasing them an hour later with no charge. The key strategy right now seems to be the straight up theft of occupiers tents and personal possessions, in an effort to make their lives as difficult as possible.

However, the state is not the primary risk in the long term; occupations in the US have outlived many evictions; the real risk is that we don’t learn from our mistakes.

Ian Anderson and Joel Cosgrove

“Anti-Stalinism, by itself, is no program for common struggle. It is too broad a term, and it means different things to different people.”

-James P Cannon, American Stalinism and Anti-Stalinism

Recent shifts in our organisation are renewing historical questions. At Workers Power 2011, comrades from the International Socialist Organisation and Socialist Aotearoa noted that our organisation was revising its position on tino rangitaratanga, and advocated we also revise our position (or more accurately come to a position) on “Stalinism.” Over the last year Mike Kay has contributed Discussion Bulletins on the subject, noting continued disorientation in the wake of Stalinism. His latest IDB argues, “In 2012 we must begin the discussion on Stalinism in earnest. We also need to address why it is that comrades have not been forthcoming with substantial written replies to the IDBs tabled so far.”

In this spirit I take up the discussion of Stalinism.

Stalinism(s)

While thoroughly rejecting Stalinism during the counter-revolution itself, Cannon noted in American Stalinism and Anti-Stalinism that it “means different things to different people.” Less than a century since, the definitions of Stalinism (and therefore anti-Stalinism) have multiplied.

In 1991, two “Stalinist” groups took opposite positions on a question that would determine the future of the working-class movement in this country. The Socialist Unity Party (SUP) was a pro-Moscow organisation that dominated the trade union bureaucracy, with Ken Douglas heading the Council of Trade Unions. The Communist Party of New Zealand (CPNZ) had joined China in the Sino-Soviet split, then followed Enver Hoxha, a determined Stalinist. Both groups had real roots in the working-class and trade union movement.

1991 was the year of the Employment Contracts Act, (ECA) the essence of which remains intact to this day. The ECA would cut off union access rights; kill compulsory unionism; further restrict the right to strike; and all but demolish organised labour. This required a substantial fightback. The CPNZ was the leading socialist group in agitating for a General Strike. By contrast, the SUP placed significant pressure on trade union leaders to vote against the move, sometimes against the wishes of their membership.

These two groups had a very different relation to the international state bureaucracy. The SUP formed the local branch of an international bureaucracy that had suppressed uprisings in Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia and Paris in 1968, and been defined by Mao as “social imperialist.” The CPNZ had followed Mao in his rejection of Soviet social-imperialism, and would later affiliate to the International Socialist Tendency, an explicitly anti-Stalinist organisation. What does it mean to say both groups were Stalinist?

Original generation of Bolsheviks liquidated

Defining Stalinism
Returning to Cannon’s American Stalinism and Anti-Stalinism, he defines Stalinism in relation to the Stalinist bureaucracy:

Stalinism has its social base in the nationalized property of the Soviet Union—the product of the great revolution. It is not the continuator and legitimate heir of Bolshevism, but its antithesis. The Stalinists, a privileged bureaucracy which fastened itself on the Soviet state in a period of its degeneration and decline, had to liquidate in blood virtually the whole generation of the original Bolsheviks, before they could consolidate their power.

This is certainly compelling, and if anyone in our organisation wishes to defend the Stalinist counter-revolution, particularly its repression of communists, the floor is open. Otherwise, we must ask what implications Stalinism has for the ongoing movement. Cannon notes how Stalinism is widely conflated with communism:

Most anti-Stalinists, especially the professionals, identify Stalinism with communism. This only serves to embellish Stalinism in the eyes of the radical workers, to reinforce their illusions, and to strengthen the position of Stalinism in their midst.

We now see the flipside of this, how the discrediting of Stalinism has discredited communism for many workers. This partially confirms Mike Kay’s argument that the left suffers from post-Stalinist disorientation. However it needs to be taken further.

In a brief article entitled Three-Phase Stalinism, Marxist intellectual Ernest Mandel partially accepts “[the] position that a stalinist or neo-stalinist party is one which subordinates the interests of revolution (i.e. of the working class) in its country, to those of any state bureaucracy.” However he notes that not all Stalinists have a state bureaucracy to defend; for example pre-revolution Hoxha, Mao or Ho Chi Minh. Mandel treats Stalinism dynamically, as something movements depart from and uphold aspects of, not something fixed and absolute.

Some socialists use this organisation’s lack of affiliation with any one tendency to discredit us as ‘soft on Stalinism,’ an accusation also levelled at Mandel. Comrades continue to draw inspiration from Mao’s work, particularly Combat Liberalism and his work on the mass-line. It would be opportunism to simply abandon Mao for the sake of easier agitation; we must debate the role of pro-Mao politics in the movement, and the degree to which they represent a continuation of “Stalinism.”

Mao and the problem of state power

The Chinese revolution was in part a departure from Stalinism as practiced in the Soviet Union. Mao assessed Stalin and his period as “70% good, 30% bad.”  Mao’s mobilisation of the peasantry as a revolutionary class departed significantly from the Soviet strategy. My point here is not to advocate for Mao’s position on the peasantry, especially as we have no peasants in this country – rather to note the specific aspects of the Chinese revolution and the limitations of the term “Stalinism.”

Mobo Gao’s The Battle For China’s Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution teases out the class contradictions within Chinese society, and the way they affect memories of the revolution. Gao was a peasant during this period, and as an academic tirelessly campaigns against caricatures of the revolution by the Chinese intelligentsia.

Mass participation

One of the primary differences between the Stalinist Soviet Union and the Mao era in China is that, unlike Stalin who employed an efficient and iron state machine to crack down on political opposition, Mao… mobilised the masses and let them consume the truth and belief values of class struggle in practice.

It’s important to understand that the Cultural Revolution mobilised the masses against a layer of Stalinist bureaucracy. This ‘revolution within the revolution’ was a major departure, in fact a plain reversal, of Stalin’s approach. Contrary to the common depiction that revolutionaries were forbidden to read anything but the Little Red Book, publications, cinema and cultural clubs proliferated during this period – along with the circulation of previously prohibited material. Some revolutionaries even departed from Mao, considering his works insufficient (Gao.)

This upsurge in struggle, connected to a rejection of Soviet social-imperialism, helped galvanise the New Left throughout the West. Mao remains a popular figure in Third World struggles, including struggles against the party bureaucracy in China.

Pro-Mao thinkers generally recognise that the Cultural Revolution ultimately failed to seize control of China’s direction, with right-wing bureaucrats taking control of the party after 1976. In the ensuing years they would restructure the economy as a sweatshop for the world, and massacre radicals in Tiananmen Square. This brings us more fully to the question of bureaucracy, and of ‘socialism in one country.’

I would argue no tendency has an absolutely correct answer to the problem of bureaucracy, that we’re in the very early days of that debate. In his article A Theory Which Has Not Withstood The Test of Facts, Mandel challenges the SWP on this point:

Let us suppose that one day [the SWP] succeed in leading the British working class to a siezure of power. What type of society would emerge from this victorious revolution? A socialist society? Have the SWP comrades been suddenly converted to the reactionary utopia of socialism in one country? A state capitalist society because of the “the pressure of competition from the world market”? Workers’ power would scarcely be in a position to counter this pressure in Great Britain alone. Would their efforts have then been in vain? A socialist society by virtue of the fact that the British revolution “would immediately spread to the rest of the world”? But if that does not happen, or at least not for some time, wouldn’t Britain then be a transitional society between capitalism and socialism which all advanced workers and communists/socialists would unite in an effort to protect from the dangers of bureaucratisation, even if they couldn’t elimate them entirely? What is the point of rejecting today the very concept which one would be forced to apply tomorrow?

It would be idealist hubris for any group to claim the answers to Mandel’s questions, the problem of how a revolutionary administration functions in isolation. Our organisation formed from a merger of pro-Trotsky and pro-Mao elements, who figured that these differences shouldn’t prevent revolutionary unity. This had the affect of obscuring historical questions, particularly the continued impact of Stalinism. In functioning as the “memory of the class,” we must study and debate these historical problems, before we consider aligning ourselves with any one tendency.

Ian Anderson
09 Jan 2012

Sources
Cannon, James P (1947) American Stalinism and Anti-Stalinism
Gao, Mobo (2008) The Battle For China’s Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution
Mandel, Ernest (1989) Three-Phase Stalinism
Mandel, Ernest (1990) A Theory Which Has Not Withstood The Test of Facts, taken from Resistance pamphlet State Capitalism: A Marxist Critique of a False Theory

Only he [sic] who can keep his heart strong and his will as sharp as a sword when the general disillusionment is at its worst can be regarded as a fighter for the working class or called a revolutionary.

Gramsci, Avanti, Piedmont edition, 24 September 1920

 At the last Retreat, I raised the concept of the fighting (or “combat”) propaganda group as an appropriate model for the WP in current conditions. Whilst the idea seemed to meet with general approval, I haven’t had the chance to expand on it until now.

The WP now, and for the foreseeable future, needs to be a “fighting propaganda group”: an organisation whose chief concern is propaganda, but which conducts its propaganda while always immersing itself in and responding to the class struggle, and while always seizing every real opening for genuine agitation.

Plekhanov defined propaganda as conveying many ideas to a single person or to a few people, whereas agitation conveys only one or a few ideas to a whole mass of people. Since history is made by the mass, agitation is the aim of propaganda. Propaganda is directed towards the vanguard; agitation towards the masses.

Whilst the Bolsheviks remain our great inspiration as the leaders and organisers of the Russian Revolution, the experience of the US communist movement is also of great relevance to us. Rather than organising under conditions of Tsarist illegality with fledgling industrialisation, the US militants confronted bourgeois democracy with a massive proletariat. James P. Cannon wrote a great deal that is of value to the challenges of organising a fighting propaganda group. That is the starting point of this bulletin.

Cannon’s Opposition

Cannon describes how, as a delegate to the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in Moscow in 1928, he obtained a copy of Trotsky’s document “The Draft Programme of the Communist International: A Criticism of Fundamentals.” He and a fellow delegate, Maurice Spector from Canada, smuggled the document out to North America and began the struggle against Stalinism in the Communist movement there. Cannon had come to realise how “devotion to the Comintern, which had originally been one of the greatest merits of the pioneer communists, was being turned into a sickness which called for a radical cure.”

Cannon says there are two determinants of the fate of a young group: “The first is the adoption of a correct political programme. But that alone does not guarantee victory. The second is that the group decide correctly what shall be the nature of its activities, and what tasks it shall set itself, given the size and capacity of the group, the period of the development of the class struggle, the relation of forces in the political movement, and so on.”

Cannon conceived of a revolutionary group as representing “a dialectical unity of opposites. In one sense it is, in effect, the fusion of the rebel instincts of individuals with the intellectual recognition that their rebellion can be effective only when they are combined and united into a single striking force which only a disciplined organisation can supply.”

When the class struggle revived by the end of 1933, the nascent Trotskyist group adopted the slogan “Turn from a propaganda circle to mass work.” However, the decision “met determined resistance from comrades who had adapted themselves to isolation and grown comfortable in it.”

There were sharp disagreements within the Trotskyists over their fusion with the increasingly radical American Workers Party. The opposition insisted on the principle of the unconditional independence of the revolutionary party. Cannon’s reply was: “All that is correct… but there is just one screw loose in your argument. We are not yet a party. We are only a propaganda group. Our problem is to become a party. Our problem, as Trotsky pout it, is to get some flesh on our bones.”

Furthermore, Cannon argues, “The revolutionary labour movement doesn’t develop along a  straight line or a smooth path. It grows through a continuous process of internal struggle. Both splits and unifications are methods of developing the revolutionary party. Each, under given circumstances can be either progressive or reactionary in its consequences.”

When joining the broader movement, Cannon said: “We enter the Socialist Party as we are, with our ideas.”

“Our first prescription for our people was: Penetrate the organisation, become integrated into the party, plunge into practical work and thus establish a certain moral authority with the rank and file of the party; establish friendly personal relations, especially with those elements of the party who are activists and therefore potentially of some use. Our plan was to let the political issues develop normally, as we were sure they would.”

Undoubtably the WP needs to restructure its organisation. However the task of reviewing our political lines is the prerequisite to this – “The organisational question is important, but the political line is decisive… Organisation questions are important only insofar as they serve a political line, a political aim.”

The African American Question
“The early socialist movement, out of which the Communist Party was formed, never recognised any need for a special program on the Negro question. It was considered purely and simply as an economic problem, part of the struggle between the workers and the capitalists; nothing could be done about the special problems of discrimination and inequality this side of socialism.”

But following the October Revolution, the Comintern began to exert serious pressure on American socialists to “demand that they shake off their own unspoken prejudices, pay attention to the special problems and grievances of the American Negroes, go to work among them, and champion their cause in the white community.”

The Comintern also pushed for the slogan of “self-determination” in the thirties, although Cannon considered that the slogan “found little or no acceptance in the Negro community; after the collapse of the separatist movement led by Garvey, their trend was mainly toward integration, with equal rights. In practice the CP jumped over this contradiction. When the party adopted the slogan of ‘self-determination,’ it did not drop its aggressive agitation for Negro equality and Negro rights on every front.”

 Whither the WP?
The history of US Trotskyism is rich in lessons for a small combat propaganda group such as the WP today. To take one stellar example, the leadership that the movement gave to the Minneapolis General Strike of 1934, remains an inspirational model for revolutionary socialists to this day. However there are also major differences in the situation in New Zealand today compared to Cannon’s “heroic” period: notably, vastly lower levels of class struggle, and the absence of a major Stalinist party. We should also bear in mind that Cannon’s group eventually degenerated into a sect that took on Stalinoid politics that it once struggled against so vehemently.

Establishing the balance between propaganda and agitation is an on-going process, guided by the logic of the class struggle. The group must be flexible and responsive enough to engage with (and initiate) new struggles. Equally, it must continually assess the effectiveness of each intervention, drawing up a balance sheet to determine whether it merits the expenditure of our meagre resources. Our job is not to be “good citizens of the left”, people who religiously turn up to every demonstration and leftist meeting going. We select our activity on the basis of what is irreplaceable about the WP.

 A group like Redline, as a pure propaganda group is incapable of meaningful growth, because of their on-principle abstention from activism. (Although they have managed to act as a “sinkhole”, dragging one or two of our demoralised comrades down into passivity.) Even their ability to produce propaganda and analysis is limited by their disconnect from real struggles, which ensures they cannot do meaningful “reconnoissance” work in new formations such as Mana or the Occupy Movement.

 Socialist Aotearoa, on the other hand, has a tendency to focus on agitation at the expense of propaganda, meaning that it lurches from one frenetic activity to the next, without assimilating the lessons in a coherent and continually developing world view to guide future struggles; they fail to function as the “memory of the class.” Nevertheless, the potential in the coming period for joint work with the likes of SA is far greater than it is with Redline.

 On specific political questions, in previous IDBs I’ve argued that we should pay greater attention to the questions of Māori oppression and Stalinism.

 A common left criticism of the Israeli “tent city” protest movement was that it was very vocal about the level of rents for apartments and the price of cottage cheese, but very quiet about the oppression of the Palestinians. However, the WP has until recently been muted in its criticism of the special oppression experienced by Māori in Aotearoa. We are currently in the process of rectifying this major failing.

Stalinism is largely a historical question, but it casts a long dark shadow over the Socialist outlook in the 21st Century. Even if the bureaucratic states have not endured, the modes of thinking that they gave rise to are still with us. In 2012 we must begin the discussion on Stalinism in earnest. We also need to address why it is that comrades have not been forthcoming with substantial written replies to the IDBs tabled so far.

The motto that Cannon used to quote was: “do what is necessary, not what is possible.” Retooling the WP as a fighting propaganda group for New Zealand conditions is the task we must set ourselves.

Mike Kay
01 January 2012

Sources
Cannon, J.P. (1972) The History of American Trotskyism Pathfinder
Cannon, J.P. (1962) The First Ten Years of American Communism Pathfinder