Capitalism: Not Our Future conference report

June 12, 2014 by

heleyni annette fightback conference 2014

More than 100 people packed into the activist space at 19 Tory Street in Wellington. to discuss struggle, solidarity and socialism Queen’s Birthday weekend. The occasion was the Capitalism: Not Our Future conference, hosted by Fightback.

The conference came on the back of the growing development of the electoral alliance between the MANA Movement (of which Fightback is a part) and the Internet Party (IP), and the announcement of former Alliance cabinet minister Laila Harré as the IP’s leader. Given this theme, the choice of the opening night presentation – “Elections and Community Struggle” – was a pressing one for all socialists.

For this and many other reasons, contributions from MANA leader Hone Harawira and Annette Sykes were highlights of the weekend. The conference was also honoured by overseas guest Sue Bolton, local councillor in Moreland (Melbourne) and Socialist Alliance activist.

Other important guest panelists were Gayaal Iddamalgoda from the International Socialist Organisation; poet and lecturer Teresia Teaiwa, who discussed gender and decolonisation; climate scientist Simon Fullick; and Mike Treen, general secretary of the UNITE union, who gave a presentation on the Marxist theory of crisis.

For Fightback members, Grant Brookes discussed “Tino Rangitaratanga – What’s it got to do with Pākehā”; Heleyni Pratley discussed her experience visiting New York for a global fast-food workers’ organising convention; and Wei Sun talked about her experience as a migrant worker.

The conference was a huge success, both in terms of attendence and political content. Attendees enjoyed a spirit of open and frank debate, in which contributions from the floor were relevant and comradely and real discussion was possible with the visiting speakers. Generous donations from attendees raised $1300, more than enough to cover costs.

At a members-only meeting after the conclusion of the conference, Fightback made the following decisions:

  • to reaffirm its commitment to the MANA movement;
  • to affirm its commitment to socialist feminism, and to create a Socialist-Feminist caucus within Fightback.
Filed Under: Events

Why Fightback supports the MANA Movement

June 10, 2014 by

hone at fightback conference 2014

The decision by the MANA Movement to enter into a formal alliance with the Internet Party has drawn criticism from Right and Left. Fightback has voiced criticism of our own.

In our April editorial, we said that “Fightback opposes any close ties between the Internet Party and the MANA Movement”. We added: “Fightback also opposes MANA entering a coalition government with pro-capitalist parties”.

We argued that the Internet Party “is more or less a front for millionaire Kim Dotcom”, that the “Internet Party’s politics are extremely vague and no candidates have yet been revealed” and that “there is no sign that it represents a progressive force.”

We were wrong.

Even as we criticised moves towards the alliance back in April, however, we did reaffirm that “whatever MANA decides on this issue, Fightback will continue to belong to and support the movement, as long as policies and principles are not sacrificed”.

At our national conference in Wellington on 2 June, Fightback members voted unanimously that we should remain in MANA. As a contribution to the public debate over MANA’s new direction, we would like to restate why we support the Movement, including its decision to join the Internet MANA alliance.

Fightback decided to participate in MANA back in 2011. “What makes Mana an important progressive force”, we wrote at the time, “is the interface of its class composition, its leadership, its policy, its democratic space, and the class/community outlook of the non-socialist activists involved, who are the majority of the party membership”.

The “democratic space” within MANA, and the role of the leadership in maintaining it, were clearly displayed during the negotiations with the Internet Party.

“Democracy” within a kaupapa Māori movement does not always look the same as it does in a European context. Nor should it. But party leader Hone Harawira announced in April that “it will be the membership and not the leadership, who will make the final decision on any possible arrangements” (MANA – and, or, or not – Dotcom).

Despite criticisms from some on the Left about “authoritarian” leadership in MANA, it was our experience that branches thoroughly debated the pros and cons of the alliance. Where opinion was divided, members voted. The decision to enter into the alliance reflected the democratic will of the membership.

It has become clear to us that the Internet Party is not “a front for millionaire Kim Dotcom”. MANA has also had influence, for example in the choice of party leader. Laila Harré, a former cabinet minister from 1999-2002, championed paid parental leave and caused controversy by joining a picket line of striking journalists. After stepping down as Alliance Party leader in 2003, she went on to head the Nurses Organisation’s historic “Fair Pay Campaign” and then the National Distribution Union (part of FIRST Union today). As a Left wing and pro-union leader of the Internet Party, Harré has already influenced candidate selection and party policies.

So we can now see many signs that the Internet Party “represents a progressive force” and is a legitimate political ally.

From its foundation, MANA has sought to broaden out its main support base among Māori in Te Tai Tokerau to include progressive Pākehā, tagata Pasifika and other tau iwi. At the 2011 general election, MANA stood Pākehā and Pasifika candidates in general seats, including Sue Bradford, John Minto and James Papali’i. But this strategy did not succeed. The alliance with a new, progressive force – the Internet Party – simply represents another strategy to achieve MANA’s original vision.

Critics of the alliance have also claimed that MANA is “selling out”, trading its principles or its ability to bring in list MPs on its “coat tails”, in return for Dotcom’s cash. Ironically, this attack comes mainly from parties to the Right of MANA, who happily accept corporate donations and “game the system” all the time.

But MANA’s policies for the 2014 election, to be released soon, will reflect even more strongly the principles of uplifting Māori and the poor. The agreement with the Internet Party guarantees MANA’s policy independence. Meanwhile, the more MPs that MANA can help to elect, the greater the chance of changing the government.

MANA also remains committed to the goal of changing the world – a goal broadly shared by Fightback. At the party’s AGM in April, president Annette Sykes outlined “rules of engagement” for dealing with all other parties. We will not work with a party that maintains the status quo, she said, or one with incompatible policies or people. We will only work with another party if it does not compromise MANA’s values. Fightback supports the view that MANA should allow Labour to form a government in September, but not join it. Staying outside of capitalist coalitions is necessary for MANA to keep playing the role described by Hone Harawira – being “the independent voice for Maori, the fighter for te pani me te rawakore (the poor and the dispossessed)”.

Fightback’s ongoing commitment to MANA reflects a long-term perspective about the importance of linking the fight for indigenous self-determination and the socialist struggle for an egalitarian society in Aotearoa.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can see some reasons why we were mistaken in our earlier assessment of the Internet Party alliance. Hone Harawira pursued the opportunity of the alliance from the outset. Many of the MANA members who supported the idea had come to know Hone through whanau connections and decades of shared struggle, and developed deep trust in his political judgement. Fightback, as an organisation made up of mainly young, Pākehā members, do not yet have the benefit of this experience.

Finally, therefore, Fightback will continue to belong to and support the MANA Movement in order to gain experience and learn, so we can better contribute to the struggle for a world beyond the parliamentary capitalist system.

Filed Under: Mana Party

Māoridom and Marxism

June 5, 2014 by
MANA Movement leader Hone Harawira addresses Fightback's 2014 educational conference, Capitalism: Not Our Future.

MANA Movement leader Hone Harawira addresses Fightback’s 2014 educational conference, Capitalism: Not Our Future.

By Joshua James. Originally published by Salient, student newspaper of Victoria University of Wellington.

I should warn the reader, I’m a Marxist. Unashamedly and unapologetically. I believe that groups in society are oppressed, marginalised and disenfranchised by the capitalist class in order for them to keep their profit margins high and revolutionary thoughts low. I’m also Māori, albeit not visibly: I’m a light skin from Ngāti Whātua. I grew up as Pākehā as possible, but have recently started to learn Te Reo Māori and have recently added Māori Studies as a major in my degree.

Marx opens The Communist Manifesto with the line “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”, and that is most certainly true for our post-colonial history. There is the myth that the first settlers to arrive in Aotearoa wanted to escape the class system that existed in England; however, I would suggest that they moved here to set up their own class system – with them at the top and Māori at the bottom. These settlers, some of my whom are my ancestors, exploited Māori and our taonga and sent the profits back to the European continent. We saw European powers doing this to all of their colonies: they export raw goods from their colonies on the cheap and turn it into goods to either consume themselves, or sell it back to their colonies at a premium. This is capitalism in practice, profits at, any cost. The exploitation of Māori was only possible once the Crown and private companies had alienated Māori from the land – this was done through an influx of settlers, confiscation of land, and buying Māori land at vastly undervalued prices. Once Māori had little land ownership, it was easy for the capitalist class to further their exploitation, because Māori had lost their ability to ‘live off the land’ i.e. they had to partake in wage slavery just to get by.

It is only partially useful to use Marx to look at the history of our colonisation and exploitation; we must also use his theories to look at the future for the Aotearoa we could live in. Under Marxism, we could have Iwi and Hapu having autonomous kaitiakitanga of our taonga and resources. We would no longer be wage slaves. There wouldn’t be any 40-hour working week, because we would only need to work as much as we needed to to get by. The degradation and degeneration of our environment would also cease – no companies would be allowed to pollute, because under Marxism, there is a recognition of taiao. This isn’t some sort of silly dream: this is a very possible reality. It would require a combined Māori and Pākehā effort to rise up against the hand that feeds us (even as it robs us). For all Māori to truly live a good life, we must absolutely reject capitalism and its notion of profit before people and the planet. Capitalism can’t be tamed or restrained, only smashed by the workers of the world.

Filed Under: Oppression & Liberation

MANA gets it right on Pacific migration

May 23, 2014 by
Many Pasifika migrants work in fruit-picking through the Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) scheme.

Many Pasifika migrants work in fruit-picking through the Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) scheme.

by Byron Clark.

Following questions directed at Immigration Minister Michael Woodhouse from opposition MPs and media regarding a meeting with businessman and National Party donor Donghua Liu, who in Woodhouses words “had ideas about investor policies and his experience as a migrant coming in” Woodhouse rejected the idea that the meeting was controversial, claiming there were “hundreds of examples” of people who don’t donate to political parties who have access to him and other ministers.

The MANA movement responded by issuing a press release inviting the minister to make a house call “to discuss the matter of a struggling family of three children, one of whom has a medical condition which a medical expert said would be exacerbated in a hot Pacific climate and advised strongly against the child being forced to live there”.

Significant was the statement from MANA co-president John Minto: “MANA wants to discuss with the Minister why the government discriminates against Pacific people from Tonga and Samoa while it puts out the welcome mat for anyone from Australia – irrespective of skills or any other criteria. An Australian can get off the plane, get a job and no-one bats an eyelid but Tongan and Samoan people face demeaning discrimination to enter New Zealand.”

While locally there isn’t a groundswell of support for opening New Zealand’s borders to people from the Pacific, regional labour mobility has been a key demand of Pacific countries in the ongoing negotiations for a successor to the Pacific Agreement on Closer Economic Relations (PACER). “The reality is that without substantive commitments on labour mobility and development assistance, [Australia and New Zealand] will be the major beneficiaries of this Agreement.” Robert Sisilo, Lead Spokesperson for the Forum Island Countries (FICs) told the Solomon Star News on May 5th.

“We have three main demands on Labour Mobility, namely the legal certainty of the RSE and SWP labour schemes, removal of the caps or increasing the current numbers and to include employment sectors in which the FICs have a comparative advantage such as healthcare and construction.”

The Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) scheme allows workers from a number of Pacific countries to come to New Zealand for fruit-picking jobs in the provinces. It was created in response to labour shortages. While under the scheme employers must give New Zealand citizens hiring priority, few citizens are moving to rural towns to take up the low wage work.

In many ways the scheme has been hugely positive for Pacific island countries, for whom labour could be considered an export, but workers who come here are at risk of the all too frequent abuses of migrant labour: underpayment of wages, violation of labour laws, substandard accommodation, and the threat of deportation if they complain about any of the above.

One ridiculous seeming example of the tight control RSE workers are put under is the actions following a group of Vanuatu workers entertaining people at a multi-cultural day in Nelson, this activity as well as busking at weekend markets were deemed to be illegal secondary employment, as the workers were only here to pick fruit. Presumably, these workers are not among Michael Woodhouse’s “hundreds of examples” of people who have access to him.

Giving workers from the Pacific the same rights in New Zealand as Australians would not immediately stop the abuses happening to RSE workers, but it would remove the threat of deportation and in doing so make it easier for those workers to join unions and have grievances addressed, at the very least it would mean no one stopping them from busking on their day off.

Taking the side of migrant workers is a principled stand in an election year where the Labour Party is hoping to ride a wave of anti-immigrant populism by talking of cutting immigrant numbers from the current 31,000 per year to somewhere between 5000 and 15,000. NZ First has gone further with policy to ban migrants from living in the major cities until they have been in the country for five years, and the Green’s have been largely silent on the issue. In this instance MANA is showing itself to be a genuine party of the dispossessed.

Filed Under: Immigration & Open Borders, Mana Party, Pacific

Copyleft: Marxism, the internet and publishing

May 20, 2014 by

copyleft

by DAPHNE LAWLESS

On 23 April this year, Lawrence & Wishart (L&W), publishers of the most well-known English translation of the Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, issued a “take-down notice” to the Marxists Internet Archive (MIA – http://marxists.org). L&W demanded that MIA remove from their website all the works to which L&W held copyright.

Since the late 1990s, MIA has been a vital resource for activists, making the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and hundreds of other socialist and revolutionary writers available free online worldwide. US leftist Scott McLemee, writing in Inside Higher Ed, describes the website like this:

It makes available a constantly expanding array of texts by scores of writers (not all of them Marxists and some not radical by any standard) in an impressive range of languages, and all at no charge. The site draws more than a million readers per month. … More remarkable even than MIA’s long-term survival as an independent and volunteer-staffed institution, I think, has been its nonsectarian, non-exclusionary policy concerning what gets archived.

The reaction to this from socialists and radicals all over the Internet was immediate and outraged, including a petition with thousands of signatures. L&W claimed to be Vaguely Surprised at this, explaining that they would be selling digital issues of the Works to universities and public libraries.

“Income from our copyright on this scholarly work contributes to our continuing publication programme,” stated L&W. “Infringement of this copyright has the effect of depriving a small radical publisher of the funds it needs to remain in existence.” They accused protesters of being part of “a consumer culture which expects cultural content to be delivered free to consumers, leaving cultural workers such as publishers, editors and writers unpaid”.

But MIA spokesperson David Walters responded that this was missing the point:

We have a political difference with L&W … Removing [the Works] from generalized Internet access and bouncing [them] ‘upstairs’ into the Academy is the opposite of ‘maintaining a public presence of the Works.’ It restricts access to those having current academic status at a university that is subscribing to the service…

It is not public access. This is the opposite of the general trend toward making things available for free on the Internet … The MIA existed from the get-go because we wanted to open up the privileged, access-only libraries at universities… The history of the workers movement should in fact be ‘free’.

We’ve seen this argument before, in many different areas where zero-cost distribution of intellectual property such as text, video and music via the Internet is debated. On one side, the social benefits of free information for all who wish to use it; on the other hand, the rights of content producers – and copyright holders – to be paid for their “intellectual property”. Who’s in the right?

Copyright as relation of production

It’s interesting that Karl Marx, living in an era where the most advanced information technology was the printing press and the telegraph – anticipated this very question. In his Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, he argued that “the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production”.

“Relations of production” means the social organisation of who works, who gets the goods, who gets paid and how much. New technologies lead to new relations of production, as the market and society rearrange to accommodate them; but then those new relations can hold back or strangle even newer innovations. One example would be how private cars and tarmac roads were initially a great advance on horses and muddy tracks, but the society which has grown to accommodate them holds back the next movement towards efficient public transport based on renewable energy.

In the Middle Ages, one copy of a 200-page book took weeks, even years, of work by monks and other professional hand-writers. With the printing press, a new copy can be produced and sold for maybe an hour’s pay. With the Internet, the PDF and the tablet reader, the cost of A copy of any book has been reduced to zero. Which means that everyone who made their living through the old technology must adapt to change, or go out of business – in the same way that the music industry has suffered over the last ten years.

The problem is that the “intellectual property” industry got very, very rich during the 500 years that the printing press was the cutting edge. One issue is the question of “copyright”, which is a classic example of a new relation of production. Copyright was developed 400 years ago so that authors had the sole right to decide who made copies of their work – for a period of 21 years after publication. But over the years, as authors increasingly sold their copyrights to capitalist publishing houses in exchange for a steady income, the industry pushed governments to extend copyright further and further, to protect their income stream.

Now, copyright lasts for the whole life of the author plus several decades – 50 years in many countries, 70 in the United States. That last extension was pushed by the Disney corporation, which dreads the day that Mickey Mouse will become “public domain”. Now Disney is notorious for patrolling the world to protect their copyright – for example, preventing preschools in New Zealand from painting Donald Duck on their walls.

No-one should be opposed to authors, artists, and musicians having their creative rights respected and earning a living from their work. But overwhelmingly the current copyright regime benefits not the artists, but the corporates who buy their copyrights from them. Walt Disney is long dead, so it’s hard to see why the corporation that bears his name should continue to “own” his work and characters forever. Copyright – a relation of production established to help authors – has turned into a means to expropriate their property to the benefit of publishers, such as L&W.

Hypertext

The “permanent” privatisation of written culture which the current regime establishes can only impoverish creativity worldwide – the “open source” argument isn’t just for computer software. In fact, the “free” culture of the Internet enables more value to be created from rearrangement of existing work.

For example, the problem with traditional academic publishing is that its method of linking texts together – footnoting and references – is extremely slow compared to the “one-click” links available on a World Wide Web page. McLemee points out that reading Capital – which was a product of its time and place, and written in a difficult style – may be hard work for a new modern reader, without the help of Engel’s commentaries on Marx’s work.

But these commentaries are packaged together with Capital on MIA in a way that they were not in the original Collected Works, or would be in L&W’s library proposal. David Walters in the MIA statement accused L&W of a “cognitive disconnect”, wanting to “destroy [the] enhanced functionality which MIA gave to the MECW material [by] embedding it with the writings of other Marxists.” In other words, L&W’s proposal would make the works less accessible and valuable, to protect L&W’s income stream from them – a classic example of relations of production holding back productive forces.

Prefiguring

McLemme argues, finally, that MIA “seems to embody what Marx himself identified as the goal of his work: a society of “freely associated labour”, in which everyone gives according to ability and receives according to need.” So this website, and by extension, other free digital cultural exchange sites, are perhaps an anticipation of a communist future. And it is against this that L&W – formerly the publishing house of the Communist Party of Great Britain – have decided to make their stand for private intellectual property. The irony is delicious, and yet tragic.

It’s hard to resist James Butler’s conclusion that L&W have been “stupider than a latter-day [King] Cnut, and infinitely more craven.” You’d be hard pressed to find a better example of how new forces of production create new social groups who revolt against the old relations. Butler stunningly refutes L&W’s plea on behalf of small “radical publishers”:

Radical publishers are a necessary evil, but they are not necessary in themselves, and no obligation exists to keep them running out of sentiment. If we accept the internet changes things, then the old models of radical distribution are likely to change profoundly.

It is this very “changing things” in the Internet era that L&W has tried to hold back. “Tried”, because, very soon after the controversy became public, the question became moot. The disputed Marx/Engels works suddenly “appeared” online in 50 PDFs for free download. L&W’s plan to sell digital versions of the works went up in smoke, in perhaps an hour’s worth of work by anonymous Internet forces.

Contrary to L&W, this isn’t a case of a parasitic “consumer culture” – on the Internet, everyone can be a producer and a consumer. Socialists who want to overthrow market relationships in the rest of society have a lot to learn from the new Internet commons.

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Filed Under: Intellectual property
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