FightBack

Welcome to the May 2013 issue of Fightback, newspaper of Fightback (Aotearoa/NZ). Fightback is a socialist organisation with branches in Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington and Christchurch.

Over Queen’s Birthday Weekend, the 31st of May to the 2nd of June, Fightback will be holding its annual public conference in Wellington. Turn to the back page or visit fightback.org.nz for more information.

In April, thousands rallied across Aotearoa against attacks on public schools. Fightback member Rebecca Broad covers the background of the dispute and argues the need for industrial action to defend and extend public education.

The campaign against further privatisation of power companies has also won some apparent victories lately, with the petition for a Citizens-Initiated Referendum achieving its goal of a non-binding referendum and with the Labour-Green opposition announcing a policy of bulk-buying power to reduce consumer prices. Fightback member Daphne Lawless argues the need for abolition of for-profit “State-Owned Enterprises,” introduced by the fourth Labour government, in favour of democratic community control.

In late March, racist group Right Wing Resistance were outnumbered by an anti-racist rally in Christchurch. Fightback member Byron Clark discusses the role of mainstream racism in fostering racist views.

In the April issue of Fightback, we covered the “peaceful revolution” in Iceland, (http://tinyurl.com/cu694hy) arguing while it has received little coverage in the capitalist press, it has conversely been exaggerated in some circles concerned with economic justice. Fightback reader Jessica Ward submitted an article for this issue, commending the inspirational nature of the struggle in Iceland. Fightback member Ian Anderson responds, contending that while the people of Iceland have won important concessions, international supporters have distorted the realities on the ground, the capitalist state in Iceland retains a monopoly on violence, and there are no “peaceful revolutions.”

On April 17th 2013, a bill passed its final reading in parliament extending marriage rights to same-sex couples in Aotearoa/NZ. This was the result of decades of struggle by supporters of queer rights. In an article reprinted from Scoop, Anne Russell discusses the limitations of this reform for dispossessed queers, while acknowledging that it can act as a spur to further action.
Sexism (like other forms of oppression) is deeply embedded in the daily lived realities of capitalism. Fightback supporter Robyn Kenealy discusses the role of everyday humour and irony in both reinforcing, and undermining sexism.

We also print two obituaries in this issue. Byron Clark explains the background behind celebrations of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s death; her devastating attacks on the working class, repression of resistance, and backing of violent counter-revolutions internationally. We also reprint a piece by MANA leader Hone Harawira, paying tribute to our comrade Mike Kyriazopolous, a unionist and Fightback member.

2013 May Fightback

Byron Clark

Members of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) including Nicky Hagar, have spent the past 15 months working though a cache of 2.5 million leaked files full of information on the people using off shore tax havens- foreign jurisdictions one can use to avoid paying tax on their income. According to ICIJ:

“The leaked files provide facts and figures, cash transfers, incorporation dates, links between companies and individuals that illustrate how offshore financial secrecy has spread aggressively around the globe, allowing the wealthy and the well-connected to dodge taxes and fuelling corruption and economic woes in rich and poor nations alike.”

The documents mostly concern the British Virgin Islands but the Cook Islands also feature prominently. This has put Cook Island authorities on the defensive, Jennifer Davis from the Cook Islands Financial Services Authority told One News:

“The media and information that we’ve seen come out … in relation to this matter seems to presume that anyone using the services or structures of the international finance centres are dodgy and that is simply not the case,”

Island nations often face limited development opportunities because of their small population and land area, so legislation giving them ‘tax haven’ status is seen as a method of attracting foreign capital. In 2002 The Economist described the main asset of these countries as the right to write the laws- something the Cook Islands did in the early 1980s, following lobbying from Australian and New Zealand business people. Today financial services are second only to tourism in the nation’s economy. Read the rest of this entry »

This event will be a discussion evening about socialism, alternative politics, and their relevance to Aotearoa today. Joel Cosgrove of Fightback will facilitate the discussion and present introductory info on what socialism is and why we believe it’s important.

The night will mostly take the form of a discussion so those with questions are welcome to voice their opinions. All are welcome :)

6pm, Monday May 13th
WEA, 59 Gloucester St, Christchurch

[Facebook event]

AE MARIKA is an article written every week by Hone Harawira, leader of the MANA Movement and Member of Parliament for Te Tai Tokerau. This tribute, to Fightback comrade Mike Kyriazopoloulous, was originally published on Mana.net.nz

On Saturday night I was privileged to host my first ever citizenship ceremony as a Member of Parliament. The ceremony was for a good friend of mine, Mike Kyriazopoulos and his wife Joanne. Mike is a mix of Greek and Jewish ancestry, and used to live and work in England where he met his wife Joanne.

Their citizenship application was finally approved a couple of weeks ago, and the ceremony was held at the Auckland Trades Hall in Auckland as part of a special tribute evening for Mike who is a committed socialist, a union activist, and chairman of the MANA branch of Te Raki Paewhenua.

Mike gave his oath of allegiance in Maori and followed that with his own personal vow to honour Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the principles of international socialism.

The tribute part of the evening was because Mike has motor neurone disease which causes nerve cells to degenerate and muscles to waste away. Sufferers invariably end up unable to walk, speak, use their arms and hands, or hold up their head. It has no known cause and is invariably fatal. Mike is not expected to live much longer.

Tributes flowed in from union activists and socialist comrades from around the world and from the many gathered for the evening, and ended with my wife Hilda getting all these staunch socialists to hold hands and each say something nice about Mike as part of a big karakia for him.

Mike is not a man given to much emotion, and his speech was one urging everyone to have clear purpose and a strong commitment to the future.

A sad occasion but a great celebration nonetheless.

And then on the Sunday I was out at Piringatahi Marae in West Harbour where the body of another good friend, Wiremu Hamahona (Samson) was lying in state.

Wiremu is from Pawarenga but born and raised in Auckland. His family had gracefully agreed to my request that his body be released from the funeral home so that he could spend his last night with us, and MANA activists and friends and whanau came from far and wide to pay their final respects to a man who had been the backbone of MANA Waitakere for the past couple of years.

Wiremu was a complex guy – very intense, very loyal and totally committed.

He was training to be a teacher and some of his teacher mates came to farewell their friend. But to most of us, Wiremu was the guy who took charge of putting up my billboards right across Waitakere during my by-election in 2011 and the general election later that year, and him and his boy Davian would often be out all hours of the night in the cold and the rain, repairing billboards, refacing the defacing, “removing” obstacles, and making sure that regardless of how little money we had, MANA’s presence would be as strong as everyone else’s.

Wiremu once told one of the brothers that he wasn’t much into politics, but that MANA gave him heart and purpose and a reason to live. I’m glad that we were all there for him on his last night – to share the many hilarious stories that gave context to his life and hopefully gave warmth to his mum.

By his will, Wiremu was cremated and his ashes remain with his family.

Wiremu was like the sun. Regardless of how bad yesterday went, you always know that he would be there to warm your soul tomorrow. Haere e te rangatira, haere.

Welcome to the second issue of Fightback, newspaper of Fightback (Aotearoa/NZ). Fightback is a socialist organisation with branches in Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington and Christchurch.

Child poverty has continued to feature in headlines this year with at least one in five children living in poverty. Fightback participates in MANA, supporting this party in the struggle for reforms while maintaining the need to build a socialist party. Grant Brookes discusses MANA’s Feed The Kids bill, and calls for a collective approach which reinforces that children are part of a wider community and we need to ultimately end poverty in general.

Socialists support struggles for living wages while recognising that “fair wages” are ultimately unachievable under capitalism. Ian Anderson reviews previous struggles for a living wage and covers the current campaign backed by the Service and Food Workers Union.

Full employment is a key to ending poverty. Jared Phillips covers recent attacks on the unemployed and beneficiaries by the National government and the need for socialist solutions.

Fightback is an internationalist organisation, which recognises workers in Aotearoa/NZ must stand with the Pasifika working class. Byron Clark covers a leaked video of police brutality in Fiji, and the hypocrisy of our government condemning this brutality while approving the abuses carried out by its allies in the region.

Socialists must reassess some parts of our understanding of capitalism in the “age of the geek.” Daphne Lawless argues that information workers are part of the working class and discusses the implications of this for socialist transformation in the 21st Century.

Socialists argue that class solutions are required to combat climate change. Ian Anderson covers the impact of climate change on increasing drought risk, and conflicting approaches to water conservation.

Fightback comrades have a range of socialist perspectives on history. Mike Kyriazopoulos revives a piece of lost history, the 1939 condemnation of the Soviet invasion of Finland by Wellington seafarers, and suggests that this offers a glimpse of what socialist politics could look like in Aotearoa/NZ.

2013 April Fightback

Fightback is a Marxist organisation that houses a range of anti-Stalinist historical perspectives. In this article Mike Kyriazopolous argues for a third camp position on 20th Century history, which can be summed up as “neither Washington nor Moscow but international socialism.”

Readers with a knowledge of the history of Trotskyism will know that the USSR’s invasion of Finland on 30 November 1939 marked a turning point for the movement. It triggered a fierce debate, and eventually a split among the US Trotskyists. What is less well known is that a contemporary parallel development emerged among the Wellington seafarers. The Evening Post of December 7, 1939 reproduced the full text of a long resolution passed by a stop-work meeting of the Federated Seamen’s Union which expressed its “profound sympathy with the people of Finland now suffering under a brutal aggression in pursuance of the policies of the Stalin – Hitler partnership.”

The meeting conveyed its “admiration of their splendid fight against overwhelming odds in defence of their homes, of the conditions established in their country, and of their national culture. It notes that the Labour and Trade Union movements in Finland and all the surrounding Scandinavian countries have expressed their solidarity with the Finnish people and their detestation of the present unprovoked aggression.

“This meeting remembers the conditions under which the Soviet Government was first established in 1917 under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky, and how it expressly repudiated the kind of aggression that Stalin and the present Russian dictatorship have launched. Marx and Engels, the founders of scientific socialism, vigorously opposed aggression against small nations. In 1917 the new Soviet Government appealed for, and secured, the support of workers throughout the world, largely because it stood for the freeing of small nations from their oppressors and for the determination of hostilities without annexations and without indemnities. The original Constitution of the Soviet Union expressly stated that it was ‘a voluntary union of equal peoples’ and that each constituent republic enjoyed ‘the right of freely withdrawing.’ Further, the Soviet Government at the  time gave practical proof of its sincerity by surrendering the rights it enjoyed over China and Persia under the former Tsarist treaties and by freely granting its independence to the Finland that Stalin is now endeavouring to crush.”

The president of the Seaman’s Union, Fintan Patrick Walsh, wrote to Trotsky in Mexico on 3 January 1940 enclosing a copy of the resolution. Walsh stated, “Although we down under are more or less outside the world affairs we nevertheless take a keen and live interest on matters effecting [sic] the international working class.”

Trotsky replied on 19 February, “Thank you cordially for your warm letter of solidarity. I enjoyed it the more that, in this period of terrible chauvinistic pressure in almost all the countries of the world, sincere and consistent socialist voices are rather an exception.” Five months later Trotsky was murdered by one of Stalin’s agents. Walsh, who had cut his teeth as a militant in the IWW in the US during the early 20th-century, was rapidly moving rightwards. By 1951, he would sell out the wharfies in their epic battle against the government.

What makes the Wellington seafarers’ resolution so significant is that, in my view, they had a clearer perspective than the great revolutionaries Trotsky and James P Cannon, who refused to condemn the invasion of Finland in their intra-Trotskyist polemics. (Although in his public writings, Trotsky was far more critical of the USSR’s invasion.)

Walsh was already an irredeemable bureaucrat in 1939. He was never likely to play a progressive role in politics, and his correspondence with Trotsky is more of a historical curiosity than anything else. What is important, though, is that the resolution was moved discussed and voted for at a meeting of rank and file workers at a crucial point in history. As such,the record of the seafarers’ position stands as a tantalising glimpse of the “Third Camp” politics that might have been in Aotearoa.

Sources:

Evening Post http://bit.ly/WyWr5z

Graeme Hunt Black Prince: the biography of Fintan Patrick Walsh

Counter-protest against Right Wing Resistance “White Pride” rally

Welcome to the first issue of Fightback, newspaper of Fightback (Aotearoa/NZ). Fightback is a nationwide socialist organisation with branches in Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington and Christchurch. With this paper we plan to continue and develop our agitation for struggle, solidarity and socialism.

The fight against asset sales is a key struggle in Aotearoa/NZ. In this issue we lead with two articles on this struggle. Firstly, we report on the mass protest against asset sales, and argue for the need to fight at the point of production. Secondly, we interview Annette Sykes, a lawyer in the Maori Council claim against Crown commercialisation of water.

Last month, we reported on a strike planned by Christchurch teachers, which would have challenged both charter schools plans and laws against political strikes. This was called off and replaced with a march, which we cover. We also report on a successful mass teachers’ strike in the Solomon Islands, where teachers are fighting for unpaid wages.

Internationalism is a key to workers’ liberation, overcoming the imposed national divisions which drive down conditions overall. In an article on rising health insurance costs under the Regional Seasonal Employer scheme, we argue the need to show solidarity with migrant workers.

During the global financial crisis, debt has received a lot of attention. We explain the Marxist theory of debt, which is necessary to the capitalist system. A second article debunks the myth of Iceland’s “peaceful revolution” against debt and finance capital.

Fightback is affiliated to Mana, an organisation in which tino rangitaratanga activists and revolutionary socialists work together. We review Red October: Left-Indigenous Struggles in Modern Bolivia, a book by Jeffrey Webber, which has lessons relevant to the Mana movement.

Like all fights against oppression, queer liberation must be integral to socialist politics. We provide a snapshot of the Gay Liberation movement, 1969-1979; and finally conclude with a review of Black Faggot, a play about the “gay Samoan male experience.”

2013 March Fightback