Kaimahi Kaha
For workers' power and international socialism
Wednesday, 24 October 2012
An updated, improved website
We have updated and improved our website, and, over the rest of the year, will be merging our blog pieces into this new site: www.iso.org.nz
Please go to this site for regular political analysis and commentary from the International Socialist Organisation.
We will be closing this blog towards the end of the year. All the material from here will be available at the new site.
Saturday, 20 October 2012
Southland women need access to abortion services
To Invercargill Abortion Clinic Staff,
This is a letter of support for the essential service that you provide. We were disgusted to find out about the threats you have received. These abhorrent messages as well as the protests against the clinic are the acts of cowards and bigots.
We fully support the opening and running of abortion clinics. We understand the necessity of such a service for women’s reproductive health and general well-being.
Such services should be made more accessible by establishing clinics in all areas, not just major cities and by making the service free for all women.
Our struggle against anti-choice bigotry must start to extend beyond defensive acts. Abortion needs to come out of the Crimes Act. For even though women in New Zealand now can get access to abortion services, the hoops which have to be jumped through and the stigma placed on women by society is not even close to acceptable.
We say no guilt, no shame for those who get abortion and those who provide the service. Your work is important.
In Solidarity
Rowan McArthur
(International Socialist Organisation)
[Find out more about the campaign to defend abortion services in Southland by going to the Abortion Law Reform Association website. Alison McCulloch from ALRANZ debated an anti-choice spokesperson on television earlier this week.]
Wednesday, 17 October 2012
Film Review: American Radical: the Trials of Norman Finkelstein
Film review by Andrew Tait
"Every single member of my family on both sides was exterminated. Both of my parents were in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. And it is precisely and exactly because of the lessons my parents taught me and my two siblings that I will not be silent when Israel commits its crimes against the Palestinians."
It is a tragedy to be born out of your time, when keeping faith with your past means breaking radically with the present. This documentary about radical Jewish American academic Norman Finkelstein is more gripping and tragic than any documentary about an academic should be.
If Israel had a public enemy list for intellectuals, Norman Finkelstein would be number one. He is a figure held up for derision and hate for Zionists for two reasons: He is the foremost and most fearless critic of the Israel's racist theory and increasingly barbaric practice and worse, he is a Jew whose parents survived Hitler's concentration camps. This last is the worst crime in a critic of Israel. For a state based on Jewish identity Finkestein's Jewishness is galling but his direct link with survivors of Hitler's attempted genocide is unforgivable.
His parents loom large in this documentary.
They are ever-present points of reference for Finkelstein, who grew up in the long shadows cast by the watchtowers of Auschwitz.
He says of his mother that she was always reflecting on the camps, on the smallest events as if they revealed the secret of human nature.
His father, who became a factory worker in New York after the war, spoke little of the camps, or anything else.
The horrors of the Holocaust meant the Finkelsteins were unusual parents. When they said the simplest things, like share your things or don't waste food, simple lessons that all parents pass on to their children, Norman's parents were deadly serious because in the camps the basics of human decency were not a luxury but the only thing left to cling to give life any meaning at all.
On war, specifically the American war in Vietnam, Finkelstein's mother was almost hysterical in her opposition, he said - “why would people do such things? How could they?”
Finkelstein was animated from his high school days by a horror of injustice and cruelty, so anyway said a former classmate who now lives in Tel Aviv. Everyone was against the war in Vietnam but Norman was serious about it. He was passionate.
When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, Norman's opposition to war collided with the increasingly brutal trajectory of the “Jewish” state.
Israel bases its right to existence on the supposed eternal hostility of non-Jews to the Jewish people, who depend on the security a nation state brings. Israel bases its right to mete out violence and destruction on the enormous violence meted out to European Jews by the Nazis. How can the bombing of Lebanon and Gaza be compared to the death camps, to the annihilation Hitler sought to bring upon the Jews? The Holocaust Industry (the title of one of Finkelstein's books) exists, he argues, to use the legacy of that time to justify the state of Israel. The Holocaust is like an inexhaustible bank account of horrors that Israel can draw on – in a more moderate, “democratic” way, more in sorrow than anger – and pay forward to the Palestinian people.
Finkelstein is a real problem, not just because of the strength of his arguments or the depth of his historical knowledge (which is great) but because as a child of the Holocaust he is in a way a trustee of that legacy of genocide.
His arguments and his knowledge are deeply significant though. Isolated though he might appear to be now – Finkelstein was driven out of his teaching positions at two US universities and has been detained and deported from Israel – if you were to survey Jewish intellectuals of the last 100 years it would be the Zionists, not Finkelstein, who would be in the minority. Socialism in one form or another was the mainstream political ideology of European Jews up until the Holocaust.
Finkelstein's mentor, Noam Chomsky, is a great example of this progressive anti-capitalist tradition that Finkelstein also represents.
Nonetheless, the times are against him and he is a lonely figure. In some ways, this is self-inflicted. Finkelstein could have kept his radical politics and his condemnation of Israel as a sideline to, say, rebutting the Holocaust denier David Irving or US imperialism. Instead he has chosen the more difficult path, to make what is closest to his heart his life's work. He is a passionate public intellectual. He is a prophet.
"Every single member of my family on both sides was exterminated. Both of my parents were in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. And it is precisely and exactly because of the lessons my parents taught me and my two siblings that I will not be silent when Israel commits its crimes against the Palestinians."
It is a tragedy to be born out of your time, when keeping faith with your past means breaking radically with the present. This documentary about radical Jewish American academic Norman Finkelstein is more gripping and tragic than any documentary about an academic should be.
If Israel had a public enemy list for intellectuals, Norman Finkelstein would be number one. He is a figure held up for derision and hate for Zionists for two reasons: He is the foremost and most fearless critic of the Israel's racist theory and increasingly barbaric practice and worse, he is a Jew whose parents survived Hitler's concentration camps. This last is the worst crime in a critic of Israel. For a state based on Jewish identity Finkestein's Jewishness is galling but his direct link with survivors of Hitler's attempted genocide is unforgivable.
His parents loom large in this documentary.
They are ever-present points of reference for Finkelstein, who grew up in the long shadows cast by the watchtowers of Auschwitz.
He says of his mother that she was always reflecting on the camps, on the smallest events as if they revealed the secret of human nature.
His father, who became a factory worker in New York after the war, spoke little of the camps, or anything else.
The horrors of the Holocaust meant the Finkelsteins were unusual parents. When they said the simplest things, like share your things or don't waste food, simple lessons that all parents pass on to their children, Norman's parents were deadly serious because in the camps the basics of human decency were not a luxury but the only thing left to cling to give life any meaning at all.
On war, specifically the American war in Vietnam, Finkelstein's mother was almost hysterical in her opposition, he said - “why would people do such things? How could they?”
Finkelstein was animated from his high school days by a horror of injustice and cruelty, so anyway said a former classmate who now lives in Tel Aviv. Everyone was against the war in Vietnam but Norman was serious about it. He was passionate.
When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, Norman's opposition to war collided with the increasingly brutal trajectory of the “Jewish” state.
Israel bases its right to existence on the supposed eternal hostility of non-Jews to the Jewish people, who depend on the security a nation state brings. Israel bases its right to mete out violence and destruction on the enormous violence meted out to European Jews by the Nazis. How can the bombing of Lebanon and Gaza be compared to the death camps, to the annihilation Hitler sought to bring upon the Jews? The Holocaust Industry (the title of one of Finkelstein's books) exists, he argues, to use the legacy of that time to justify the state of Israel. The Holocaust is like an inexhaustible bank account of horrors that Israel can draw on – in a more moderate, “democratic” way, more in sorrow than anger – and pay forward to the Palestinian people.
Finkelstein is a real problem, not just because of the strength of his arguments or the depth of his historical knowledge (which is great) but because as a child of the Holocaust he is in a way a trustee of that legacy of genocide.
His arguments and his knowledge are deeply significant though. Isolated though he might appear to be now – Finkelstein was driven out of his teaching positions at two US universities and has been detained and deported from Israel – if you were to survey Jewish intellectuals of the last 100 years it would be the Zionists, not Finkelstein, who would be in the minority. Socialism in one form or another was the mainstream political ideology of European Jews up until the Holocaust.
Finkelstein's mentor, Noam Chomsky, is a great example of this progressive anti-capitalist tradition that Finkelstein also represents.
Nonetheless, the times are against him and he is a lonely figure. In some ways, this is self-inflicted. Finkelstein could have kept his radical politics and his condemnation of Israel as a sideline to, say, rebutting the Holocaust denier David Irving or US imperialism. Instead he has chosen the more difficult path, to make what is closest to his heart his life's work. He is a passionate public intellectual. He is a prophet.
Tuesday, 16 October 2012
A wave of anti-US protests in Okinawa
[This article by Khury Petersen-Smith first appeared in Socialist Worker US]
THE DECISION by the U.S. and Japanese governments to deploy the Osprey MV-22 military warplane to Okinawa, a Japanese island south of the mainland and north and east of China and Taiwan, has sparked a wave of mass protest.
The largest demonstrations to date took place in a simultaneous mobilization on September 9 when 100,000 people gathered in Okinawa, thousands of people surrounded the Diet (Japanese legislature) in Tokyo, and protests were held on Ishigaki and Miyako Islands as well as the city of Iwakuni on the mainland, where Osprey aircraft are currently stationed.
The Osprey has tilting rotors that allow it to take off and land like a helicopter, but it also has fixed wings so it can fly like an airplane. These qualities, along with the fact that it can fly four times further than the helicopters that it is replacing, give the Osprey appeal as a tactical vehicle for the U.S. military. However, the Osprey is prone to crashing--there have been two Osprey crashes so far this year, in Morocco and Florida.
The deployment of the Osprey to Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, located in the densely populated city of Ginowan on Okinawa, comes with obvious risk to the civilian population.
"We refuse to accept a deployment of Osprey that has already proven so dangerous," said Ginowan Mayor Atsushi Sakima at the September 9 protest, according to the English-language news site Japan Update. "Who is going to take responsibility if they crash onto a populated neighborhood?" In 2004, a U.S. military helicopter did crash into a building at Okinawa International University.
Kazuhisa Kawamura, principal of Ginowan's Futenma No. 2 Elementary School--which is located just 200 yards from the Marine air station--is worried about an accident involving the Osprey. "The aircraft fly right over our school every day," he said in a recent report by National Public Radio (NPR). "It's frightening."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THE CURRENT wave of demonstrations is only the latest in a history of Okinawan protest against the U.S. and Japanese governments following the Second World War--and the deployment of the Ospreys is only the latest injustice in a bitter history of crimes against the Okinawan people.
While August 1945 is generally understood in the U.S. to be the end point of the Second World War, the war did not end for Japan until April 1952 when the U.S. occupation formally ended. And when the Treaty of San Francisco re-established Japan as a sovereign country, exception was made for the southern prefecture of Okinawa, which remained formally occupied by the U.S. until 1972.
The deal under which Japan allowed Okinawa to remain under U.S. military rule is considered one of many betrayals in which Okinawa has been sacrificed by the Japanese state for Tokyo's--and now Washington's--strategic aims. Today, Okinawa bears the burden of more than half of the U.S. troop presence of 50,000 soldiers, and three-fourths of Washington's military bases in Japan. The Okinawa prefecture (similar to a state) comprises only 0.6 percent of Japan's total land area--fully 20 percent of the prefecture belongs to Washington's bases.
Okinawa's tropical climate and location have made it ideal for training and stationing of U.S. troops there. U.S. bases in Okinawa were central to the U.S. war in Vietnam in the 1960s and '70s, played a critical role in the 1991 and 2003 invasions of Iraq and the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. The Pentagon continues to regard the Okinawa bases as strategically invaluable.
But the cost to the prefecture has been heavy. According to Closethebase.org, a website run by a coalition of peace groups called the Network for Okinawa, there were 1,434 incidents and accidents related to training exercises by U.S. forces between the end of the formal occupation and 2008. During the same period, there were 5,584 cases of U.S. military personnel committing crimes against Okinawans.
Sexual crimes, in particular, have been a disturbing and constant feature of the U.S. military presence in Okinawa. In the recent movement against the Osprey's deployment, many commentators referenced the last great wave of Okinawan protests against the U.S. military in 1995, sparked by the rape of an elementary school girl by three U.S. Marines.
This past is impossible to separate from the current protests. In the words of anti-base activist and professor at the University of the Ryukus Kosozu Abe, "Without Okinawa's history, our opposition to the Osprey wouldn't have materialized. This forced deployment is symbolic of what we have experienced in the past."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THE OTHER factor that can't be ignored in the deployment of the Ospreys is Washington's new strategic interests in the Asia-Pacific region.
The Obama administration has coined the term "pivot to Asia" to describe a whole set of steps that the U.S. government is taking to militarize the region in preparation for growing conflicts with China.
This includes deploying a majority of the U.S. Navy's fleet to the Pacific Ocean (it had been previously split evenly between the Atlantic and Pacific); stationing more U.S. troops in the region; increasing the already large U.S. military presence in Hawaii and Guam; greater military cooperation with partner states, including Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea, Indonesia and Japan; and the introduction of more weapons.
The U.S. deployment is designed to help ensure that Washington shapes the economics and politics of Asia for the foreseeable future. In a November 2011 article in Foreign Policy magazine, titled "America's Pacific Century," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote, "From opening new markets for American businesses to curbing nuclear proliferation to keeping the sea lanes free for commerce and navigation, our work [in Asia] holds the key to our prosperity and security at home."
U.S. officials are very explicit about preparing for a military conflict with China in the future. The U.S. is anticipating this confrontation because of China's rise as a world power, but it is also ensuring it by threatening China with its escalation of weapons and forces to the region.
The horrible prospect of a future war with China, however, shouldn't stop us from seeing the violence of Washington's "pivot" as it is unfolding right now. The deployment of Ospreys and the more forceful U.S. presence in Japan have already had negative consequences for ordinary Japanese.
For example, when a U.S. serviceman stationed at the Atsugi Naval Air Facility in Kanagawa Prefecture raped a local Japanese woman in July, police were prevented from arresting him by the Japanese government. According to the magazine Shukan Bunshun, supervisors at the local police station were told: "Because of the problems with deployment of the Ospreys, an incident involving the U.S. military might have repercussions, and is undesirable"--and therefore, they weren't allowed to issue a warrant for the serviceman's arrest.
With this latest chapter of Washington's violent history in Japan unfolding, the outpouring of Okinawan protest is very hopeful.
The movement has been building for some time throughout the prefecture. In the Yanbaru Jungle, home of the largest base in Okinawa--the Pentagon's Jungle Warfare Training Center--residents have sustained a five-year long sit-in to stop the construction of new helipads, which is where the Ospreys would land if they are ever built.
Opposition to the Ospreys is uniting Okinawan society, including peace groups, trade unions and elected officials from across the political spectrum. As Australian Okinawa solidarity scholar and activist Gavin McCormack wrote in a September op-ed in Ryuku Shimpo, "This is no longer an opposition movement, but a prefecture in resistance, saying 'No.' Japanese history has no precedent for this."
Takeshi Onaga, the mayor of Okinawa's capital, Naha and member of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party, described the situation this way in the New York Times: "Anger has been building up like hot magma beneath the surface, and the Osprey could be what finally causes an eruption. If they force the Osprey onto us, this could lead to a collapse of the U.S.-Japan alliance."
On October 9, Okinawa's governor Hirokazu Nakaima and Ginowan Mayor Atsushi Sakima met with Japan's Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda to urge the removal of the Ospreys.
As more plans for the Osprey come to light, the demonstrations are spreading. While the U.S. and Japanese governments have kept the routes for the Ospreys' training flights a secret, an Osprey sighting last week revealed that the routes extend over cities in Kochi Prefecture, leading to protests there.
Elsewhere in Asia, Korean peace activists in Gangjeong Village are waging an heroic struggle against the construction of a base on Jeju Island. The base, which South Korea's government insists is for Korean purposes only and won't be used by the U.S. is nevertheless understood by activists as another local aspect of the U.S. plan in the region. But the Korean, Japanese, and U.S. governments are vulnerable to these social movements, which represent an alternative to another century of war in Asia.
Thursday, 11 October 2012
"Overpopulation" is not to blame for the ecological crisis
Overpopulation is a
common theme when discussing the ecological crisis. It’s undoubtedly true that
since the 1960s an ecological crisis has emerged causing loss of biodiversity,
plunging fish stocks, deforestation, and
dangerous climate
change.. Coincidentally since this
time the global population has doubled. It might seem logical therefore
to link the two.
The idea that 'overpopulation' is to blame for present
destruction of the natural world is ridiculous when we understand that
capitalism destroys the environment, whilst creating poverty and
starvation.
As John Bellamy Foster notes “it is not the areas of the world that have the highest rate of
population growth, but the areas of the world which have the highest
accumulation of capital, where economic and ecological waste has become a
way of life that constitute the greatest danger''. Consequently, the richest 7%
of the world’s population are responsible for 50% of global carbon emissions,
whilst the poorest 50% are responsible for 7%.
The rate of global population growth peaked in the 1960s and has declined ever since. Population
levels, rather than permanently growing, will rise slowly during this century,
peaking at 9 billion by 2050. Declining fertility rates could mean that
populations could level off as low as 7.5 billion by 2040.
Enough food is produced currently to meet the needs of everyone on the
planet. In 2008 when the global food crisis once again raised fears of too few
resources to too many people, enough food was produced to feed every human with
2,800 calories per day. By 2030 the estimated population will be 8.3
billion and enough food will be produced to feed everyone with 3050 calories
per day according to the UN.
The origins of the overpopulation argument lie with that of 18th century thinker Thomas Malthus. Malthus's argument was that food production would grow
arithmetically at a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. rate, whist population would expand
geometrically at a 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 rate. Malthus came to his conclusions
with very little in the way of scientific data and present food production has
outgrown population size. Worse still, Malthus's
argued to cut all social services to the poor for fear that they would
encourage them to breed faster. Checks to population such as starvation,
disease, low wages and the tightening of England's poor laws were recommended
to ensure a 'stable' working population!
Unsurprisingly Marx
criticized Malthus in Grundrisse. To
quote Marx, Malthus picked the idea that the earth can support a set number of
humans ''out of thin air'' whilst arguing that overpopulation ''is likewise a
historically determined relation, in no way determined by abstract numbers or
by the absolute limit of productivity of the necessaries of life, but the
rather specific conditions of production...how small did the numbers which
meant overpopulation for the Athenian's appear to us”.
We must reject the argument that environmental destruction can
be blamed on ordinary people. Instead the blame must be placed on a system
where enough food is produced to feed all, and yet a billion starve and a
billion more survive on less than $2 a day.
Even within an ecologically sustainable system of organic
agriculture more than enough food could be produced to meet human need.
It’s clear that if we ended the system based of profit, the environmental
footprint on a planet with 9 billion could be far less than one with 7
billion.
Being a Marxist means fighting alongside millions of workers
around the world against a system responsible for the destruction of nature and
the condemnation of millions to starvation. This means fighting for a fair and
equal distribution of nature’s bounty to all regardless of population limits!
Johnny Fersterer-Gawith
Wednesday, 10 October 2012
The Rena Disaster: One Year On
Friday the 5th of October
marked one year since the container ship MV Rena struck an artificial reef off
the coast of Tauranga as it headed into port, triggering New Zealand’s worst
ever environmental disaster. The clean-up that followed took months, and is
still not complete: the Rena remains grounded on the Astrolabe Reef and oil
from the ship still occasionally washes up on Bay of Plenty beaches.
Media attention for much of the past year has vilified the ship's captains and
whipped up racism aimed at the Filipino crew.
Such scapegoating only serves to obscure the
real causes of the disastrous "accident".
A combination of lax
environmental, labour and maritime regulation combined to produce the perfect
conditions for the grounding. In accordance with New Zealand maritime
law, the crew of the Libyan flagged Rena were not allocated the same rights
as other workers in Aotearoa. They worked long periods at sea for little
pay. In court, the Rena's captain was described as being "obsessed
with reaching port by 3 am", leading him to take unnecessary risk. But
that's little wonder he was due for a period of shore leave and hadn't been
home to see his family in one and a half years. Meanwhile, the company
responsible for the Rena is under no obligation to pay for the clean-up.
Under New Zealand's flagship environmental law the Resource Management Act,
liability is limited to only $600,000. Maritime laws also put limits on the
ship owners' liability. Meanwhile the estimated cost of the disaster is as much
as $47 million. Without adequate regulation and penalties that amount to
a mere slap on the wrist, an environment was created where corporations run
rampant with little regard for the consequences of their actions.
In spite of having to foot for as much as a
$20 million shortfall in funds for the clean-up, the National government has no
plans to do anything about the situation. For National, the interests of
business trump the interests of the environment. "As a country that
significantly requires shipping into our ports, for our economy to survive, we
just have to wear this one" Transport Minister Gerry Brownlee told the
media on Tuesday the 2nd of October. In other words, penalties
that could hit importers in the pocket are out of the question. Furthermore,
even the limited provisions of the RMA are under attack as the government seeks
exemptions for industrial projects of "local significance" in
addition to the many exemptions already in place.
But they haven't got everything their own way.
The tactics of protest and direct action that made New Zealand nuclear free in
the 1980s are being resurrected. Protests by Te-Whanau-a-Apanui in the Rakamura
Basin succeeded in forcing out oil prospectors. They've shown what can be
achieved. We must organise to defend the environment.
Cory Anderson
Tuesday, 9 October 2012
Review: The Significance of the 1912 Waihi Strike
Review:
The Significance of the 1912 Waihi Strike
Martin Gregory
International Socialist
Organisation, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-473-22214-7
$5
Reviewed
by Andrew Cooper
On Monday a force of thugs
and scabs attacked the union hall
under the gaze of the police with a hail of missiles. A plug of gelignite was
thrown, exploding just outside the hall
entrance. The windows were smashed. The attackers broke in to besiege a group
of unionists in the committee room. After a while the police called the
violence off and the unionists made their escape, only one being caught and
beaten up. On Black
Tuesday… the police and scabs
attacked. The unionists were not able to bolt the door in time. There were gun
shots as thugs and police broke in and the unionists fled through the back way.
The scabs and a notorious thug fell upon the stricken union man (pp. 33-4).
These events didn’t
happen in some far-off country but in the small town of Waihi one hundred years ago. The
victim was Frederick
Evans. His death
was the first of a New Zealand worker on the picket line (and the only one
until Christine
Clarke was killed in 1999).
In this lively pamphlet,
Martin Gregory provides not only a fascinating description of this pivotal
event in NZ radical history, but crucially draws out its key political lesson:
The defeat of the goldfield
strike initiated a turning point of such immense political significance that
its effects echoed for decades after. The lessons to be drawn from the strike
are profound and are still vitally relevant to the working class movement today…
Setbacks are an unavoidable part of the working class’s experience, and there
is no escaping the fact that Waihi was a crushing defeat. The significance of
the Waihi Strike lies in the conclusions that were drawn from the intervention
of the state. They were to greatly affect the future course of working class
organisation and the history of New Zealand. The strike marks a real turning
point (pp. 4, 35).
In 1894 the Liberal
Party Government had passed the Arbitration
Act, giving registered unions official recognition but also binding them to
the Arbitration Court’s decisions as well as forcing workers to fight employers
in the courts where the employers and state were at their strongest. Strikes
were outlawed.
Arbitration
was initially popular with workers as it led to improvements in pay and
conditions, but inevitably over the long term it favoured employers. The first
serious challenge to Arbitration came with the successful Blackball miners‘ strike in
1908, leading to the formation of the Federation of Mineworkers, the forerunner
of the “Red” Federation of Labour or FOL.
The Waihi miners worked
under a competitive contract system that set miner against fellow miner. It was
said that a miner had a useful working life of about fifteen years - but it was
a hugely profitable life for the mine owners.
In early 1911, the powerful Waihi Workers’ Union (WWU) achieved
the absolute majority it needed to escape Compulsory Arbitration by cancelling
its registration under the system. As a direct result the miners’ working conditions
greatly improved - but these gains could all be lost if a rival union was
registered under the Arbitration system: If just fifteen members could be found
it would become the officially recognised union - and the Arbitration Court’s
decisions would be binding on all 1,200 Waihi miners. On May 11, 1912, the
mining companies succeeded in doing just that. The following day the WWU
executive made the momentous decision to send an ultimatum to the mining companies
demanding that they disband the new union.
Many of the miners’ leaders
were influenced by “syndicalist“
ideas, particularly those
of the American Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW or “Wobblies”).
Syndicalism
emphasised the key role of the strike and a “whole class” outlook as opposed to
that of the narrower craft unions.
The FOL was closely linked
to the supposedly revolutionary NZ Socialist
Party. As Martin correctly points out in his pamphlet, understanding the
politics of this organisation is key to understanding the politics and tactics
of the strike itself - and its outcome.
The party was split into
several political currents, expressing a range of both revolutionary and
reformist positions - though in practice it was the parliamentary arena to which
the Socialist Party’s leaders devoted most attention. This factionalism led to
increasing dissatisfaction within the party, with some leaving to join the
Wobblies. Although the Socialist Party’s leaders espoused revolutionary
socialist positions, in practice they
avoided strikes where possible, seeing them as a threat to the party’s growth.
During 1912 the party was unable to offer revolutionary leadership and its
members would instead look to the IWW for leadership and ideas.
Along with the NZ Socialist
Party there was also the United
Labour Party, constituting the formally more moderate wing of the labour movement
at the time.
Meanwhile the Federation of
Labour leadership equivocated in its support for the Waihi miners. After they
failed in negotiations with the mining companies, pressure from members led to a
new constitution modelled on the IWW’s being adopted: “including the rhetorical
gesture that was the splendid revolutionary syndicalist IWW preamble“
(p. 23).
With the militants’ call
for a general strike defeated and the leadership majority’s position
essentially one of inaction, the Federation merely agreed to a 10% weekly levy
on members’ wages to support the strikers:
Both the majority position
of inaction and the IWW fetishist demand for an immediate general strike were
faulty. The working class is not a stage army. A general strike cannot be
conjured up without a broad-based head of steam for action. The call for an
immediate general strike from the Federation conference was unrealistic even
for Federation unions, let alone the unaffiliated (p. 24).
The Federation had missed
an opportunity to broaden the strike beginning with other mine workers, and
while the mining companies had no intention of letting legal niceties get in the
way of defeating the
miners, there was uneven support for the mine workers, with the “moderate” ULP
actively opposing the strike and even helping to organise scab labour. As
Socialist Party member and future Labour leader Harry Holland
put it: “Thus the Federation of Labour was fighting directly the Gold-mine Owners’
Association and the Employers’ Federation, and secondly the scabs, the press,
ruling class law and its Massey Government, and the United Labour Party” (p. 27).
Between the strike’s
beginning in May 1912 and August that year, attempts to alternately starve then
divide the workers had failed. In August the companies began recruiting
strikebreakers and the following month police stepped up confrontation with the
miners. Strikers were jailed, gaining more widespread working class support. A
scab union was formed with the intention of forcibly reopening the mine. The
editor of the United Labour Party’s newspaper went to Waihi to help organise
the scab union.
On the back foot, the
Federation of Labour called a general strike in October. It failed to win
support beyond the miners due to the FOL’s inept handling of earlier disputes.
By early November there were over a hundred strikebreakers working the Waihi
mines, and police violence against the strikers increased. The author gives a
vivid account of the events of Black Tuesday and their aftermath. Nine thousand
would attend Evans’ funeral
in Auckland.
Strike leaders were run out
of town. The strike was now effectively over, though not officially called off
until the end of November. By the end of the year the competitive contract
system was reinstated.
Violence against the
strikers and the government’s failure to hold an official inquiry caused
outrage amongst the working class. Much of the ULP membership shifted to the
left, repudiating strikebreaking. However the main lesson drawn by the
Federation of Labour’s executive was that the government had to be fought
politically (i.e. through elections) rather than by direct action.
The events of 1912 and the
following year’s Great
Strike would ruthlessly expose the IWW’s weaknesses too. Its “fetishisation”
of the general strike ignored the role of the capitalist state: the idea that
industrial action alone could force parliament to enact reforms ignored the
fact that the ruling class could also use force in the form of its army and
police forces:
The real tragedy of the
Waihi Strike is that a generation of revolutionary socialists rebounded from
the industrial defeat to retreat into reformism. The significance of the
eclipse of the Socialist Party is incalculable for what might have been. What
is certain is that reformist politics was strengthened immensely by the liquidation
of its revolutionary rival. Reformism gained a cohort of activists with
enormous authority within the working class and the standing of the leftist
leaders would grow. These and other former revolutionaries became leaders of
the Labour Party. Compared to today’s Labour careerists they were giants, but
they became shadows of their former revolutionary selves, Red Feds, once feared
by the capitalist
class (pp. 43-4).
The reformists’ fear of “scaring
off” supporters by being “too militant”, and their focus on parliamentary
elections rather than direct struggle will no doubt sound familiar to any
activist today. The negative lessons drawn by reformist union and political leaders
- that workers couldn’t win against the superior repressive powers of the state
and its police force, that militancy would scare away most workers and
supporters, and most of all that elections and parliament are the most
effective arenas to bring about change - had a disastrous impact on the
subsequent development of NZ radical politics.
What might have been had
subsequent struggles been led by a workers’ organisation with clear
revolutionary politics? What if the Stalinist
leadership of the CTU
(who gave up the struggle against the Employment Contracts Act
before it had begun) had been seriously challenged from below in 1991?
Or if the struggles
around university fees and the loans scheme during the 1990s had been led by
activists with revolutionary politics rather than career-minded reformist
student officials (who for most of that decade told us to put our faith in
university management and vote for an “education-friendly” government).
Much the same criticism
could be made about reformist leadership in dozens of other struggles over the
last century.
This pamphlet is precisely
what we need: more in-depth analyses of our hidden radical history, more
writing on current politics from the International Socialist perspective. As
well as producing work like this, we should be encouraging student members and
supporters to think about writing their theses on similar topics.
On the centenary of the
Waihi strike, this pamphlet ensures that our working class history is a little
less “hidden from history”. But unfortunately as so much of NZ’s radical past is hidden from history, readers lacking
a detailed knowledge of this period are likely to struggle a little with the plethora
of acronyms: IWW, NZSP, FOL,
ULP,
WWU, SDP,
UFL,
etc.
A helpful addition to this pamphlet might have been a glossary of these
acronyms along with a brief description of their respective organisations.
Martin provides a useful
list of further reading at the end of the pamphlet, and rightly singles out
Harry Holland’s The Tragic Story of the
Waihi Strike as the key early resource. First published in 1913, it is now
in the public domain and is available in several free electronic versions,
including PDF, epub and Kindle (here and here)
along with at least
two
new
print
editions.
How
to purchase
If you’d like to order this
pamphlet send a cheque for $5 per copy made out to “ISO Wellington” to:
PO Box 6157
Dunedin North
Dunedin 9059
Please make sure you
include your address.
Alternatively you can make
a direct credit payment to our BNZ bank account: 02-0536-0456903-00, then email
us: internationalsocialistsnz [at] gmail.com - to confirm payment and your address details.
Image Credits
Rogers, R fl 1912. Miners outside their union hall,
during the Waihi strike. Nash, Walter :Postcards associated with Walter Nash.
Ref: PAColl-5792-05. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/22583647
Waihi Arts Centre and Museum. Striking Waihi miners
leaving the union hall after a mass meeting. Waihi Arts Centre : Photographs
and lantern slides of Waihi. Ref: 1/2-116691-F. Alexander Turnbull Library,
Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/22832745
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