WORKERS’ BAN ON CAPITALIST GENETIC ENGINEERING

Our position on GE is like that on Nuclear power. It is not safe under capitalism! We do not trust the bosses to do anything that affects workers lives because they are motivated solely by profit. We do not trust our health and safety on the job to the bosses, so why should we trust them or their state to regulate GE? This does not mean that we think that GE is necessarily bad. Under a socialist state where informed workers can democratically regulate GE many social benefits are possible. But we need socialism before we need GE! We reprint below a short excerpt from an article by Chris Wheeler responding to the Royal Commission’s Report based upon his experience of 20 years of monitoring the failure of Government environmental ‘controls.’

“…The Commission’s report in favour of GE has now become an effective tool for beating the GE opposition and the Green Party in Parliament around the head – probably the only reason for this whole $NZ6.5 million taxpayer-funded farce in the first place! As PM Helen Clark, her parliamentary colleagues and the GE industry are now saying all across the NZ media: “You got what you asked for – a complete and comprehensive review of GE policy and science. The expert view resulting from the Royal Commission’s deliberations is that GE is an essential part of New Zealand’s economic survival and a leading aspect of our new ‘Knowledge Economy’ and must be allowed to go ahead with the minimum of restrictions. Now shut-up. Stop complaining, and accept the majority opinion.”

Of course there are some derisory “controls” being recommended in the Royal Commission report, but in my past 20 years of direct involvement in agriculture issues and membership of official bodies deliberating on environmental control strategies in New Zealand, I have yet to see effective legislation or regulation controlling ANY aspect of the agrichemical abuse that New Zealand is notorious for in informed world environmental circles and GE abuse will fare little better. The Environmental Risk Management Authority (ERMA) cited in the Commission’s report as the responsible agency overseeing GE trials and releases has been controlled from the first day of its establishment several years ago by powerful industry lobby groups with the necessary financial resources to fight any environmental group’s submissions to a standstill.

For 20 years I have been involved in various attempts to place effective controls over the profligate application of carcinogenic pesticides by New Zealand farmers, which contributes to New Zealand’s record levels of breast, prostate and bowel cancer, childhood leukemia and birth defects, and have met with continual official apathy and obstruction, particularly from official regulatory agencies. I and the knowledgeable anti-GE community in New Zealand have absolutely no faith in the new GE review apparatus being suggested by the Commission because we know that just as with appointments to the food regulatory Australia New Zealand Food

Authority (ANZFA) and ERMA, membership will be heavily weighted with GE industry stooges and political appointees guaranteed to preserve the status quo…”

GE run by the bosses? No Way!

Class Struggle No 40, August-September 2001

ON PORNOGRAPHY

Dear Class Struggle,

I have concerns about the views expressed by J.L. and the comments by Class Struggle in the November issue. I think pornography needs to be seen as systematic abuse rather than ‘freedom of speech’. I agree that we need to think very carefully about the issue, which is why I don’t support panic-driven opposition to all state interventions.

Pornography is a billion dollar industry that systematically promotes the sexualised subordination and commodification of women. Along with rape and battery, incest and prostitution it is part of a system of terror directed against women.

Pornographic films use real women and real women’s bodies. The women being filmed suffer real abuses. The language of assent that women are made to use in the films is part of the forced sex and humiliation they suffer.

Pornography prevents the freedom of speech of women. It silences our dissent and stops our self-determined sexual expression. It promotes the lie that women actually like to be hurt, raped and degraded.

“The women say the pimp’s words; which is worse then silence. The silence of the women not in the picture…hurt but silent, used but silent, is staggering in how deep and wide it goes.” (Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, p268)

Most women filmed in pornography are coerced: either by extreme economic vulnerability, or by a conditioning to powerlessness caused by previous rapes or childhood sexual abuse, or even by physical coercion (ie rape).The pornography is then used to encourage further rapes, sexual abuse and violence towards women and children.

Pornography is also used as training manuals for prostitutes. In turn, may prostitutes become rape victims, the rape sometimes being filmed to be used as further pornography (with the threat of blackmail if they were to report it.)

The billion-dollar industry of prostitution involves the international trafficking and slavery of women and girls. Linked to this, economically and culturally, is the mass of pornographic material being distributed on the internet. What does this say about the status of women in the world? What does this say about the attitudes of men who consume it.

Women, or men, who have campaigned against these abuses are not engaged in ‘bourgeois moral posturing’, any morethan those who have campaigned against abuses of workers in factories or against slavery itself. Indeed a woman in the sex industry is an extreme example of a worker with only her “skin to sell” as Marx has described all workers. That is, if she isn’t a slave. Marx has pointed out how in Capitalism the workers’ pain becomes the capitalists’ pleasure and wealth. Similarly, in pornography, the woman’s pain becomes the pimp’s wealth and the pornography consumer’s pleasure.

But it is not only those directly employed in the work who are hurt by pornography. All women are hurt and controlled by it.

Andrea Dworkin (ibid p 246) says that “stopping pornogaphers and pornography is not censorship… [because]…pornographers are more like the police in police states then they are like the writers in police states…Intervening in a system of terror where it is vulnerable to public scruting is not censorship; it is the system of terror that stops speech and creates abuse and despair.”

Any small concessions we have gained from the state to limit pornography are human-workers-women’s-children’s rights which should be supported by Communists.

In addition I would like to see the socialist movement promote the idea by that any sexual and violent abuse of women and children by workers is a betrayal of the working class; just as scabbing or stealing off each other is seen to be.

The state’s abuse of anti-pornography laws to persecute minorities such as gays is a real concern, and needs to be opposed, but I’m not convinced that opposing all pornography laws is the answer.

One way to stop the abuse of anti-pornography laws is to promote a clear legal definition of pornography. Anrea Dworkin defines it as “The graphic sexually explicit subordination of women” plus at least one other factor from a list of specific abuses. (ibid p264). Erotic material that does not do this could not then be prosecuted.

Using this definition, I’m not sure that Madonna’s work would be pornographic. Whilst she does seem to exploit herself as a sexual object, she also comes across as a sexual subject, and I have never seen her looking sunbordinated.

I don’t think we have a moral panic about pornography. I think we have a kind of new-right liberalism where anything goes, and every human trait can be commodified.

Recently there has been an upswing in neo-nazi aattacks on immigrants and foreigners in Germany. This is directly related to the freedom of these groups to promote their views and activities on the internet (The Guardian Nov 30-Dec 6). On the other hand, the internet has made it possible for the left to communicate and organise internationally.

I appreciate the very real concerns of Class Struggle that if controls on access to pornography on the internet were put in place, the technology could be extended to censor the left.

But I don’t think we should unthinkingly promote a blanket policy of ‘freedom from state controls” including lifting the controls on pornography that we already have now, at the expense of the human rights of women and children.

Yours etc J.A.

Class Struggle responds,

Dear J.A.

Thanks for your letter and your comments on our last issue. We hope that we can answer your concerns.

Perhaps we can agree that our opposition to state controls on pornography does not mean we accept pornography. In fact we see pornography to be an extension of the oppressive relations in the bourgeois family and of private property which we want to abolish. This ‘bourgeois moralists’ will never do. They will keep alive the very causes of pornography.

It is the working class that can and must end pornography. That is why we’re against any form of state controls, internet, or street level. The state is dedicated to the defence of private property and the bourgeois family. This can be seen clearly from the fact that its ‘laws’ cannot and do not protect women, children and gay men from sexual abuse – whether individuals ‘consent’ or not.

Dworkin’s definition is just another attempt to draw a line between ‘acceptable’ abuse and ‘unacceptable’ abuse, which the state would then police. This sows illusions in the state being able to end the oppression of women. Her argument that censoring pornography is OK because the pornographers are the ‘police’ is really dangerous because it masks the power of the state police to repress working class resistance to sexual abuse and fascism (they are strongly related). Pornographers are not police they are scumbag capitalists.

This clears the way for communists to oppose state controls (including against fascists) and in doing so to makes it possible to organise the working class to ‘police’ sexual abuse (and fascists) ourselves. Meanwhile, so long as the bourgeois family and private property exist there will be ‘sexworkers’ who are driven to sell their ‘skins’ to survive. We must support their legal right to do so, and organise support against all sexual violence as well as all other forms of violence against members of our class. In doing so we build workers power, not the bosses’state power, and open the way to socialism.

From Class Struggle No 36 December-January 2001

Chomsky’s blurred Vision [February 1999]

Noam Chomsky recently visited New Zealand as a guest of the Peace Foundation. He spoke to overflowing audiences eager to hear his critique of the US role in imposing the neo-liberal New World Order on the rest of the world. While Chomsky has a long track record in exposing the lies and hypocrisy of the US in its exercise of power, he cannot explain why the US behaves like this. Nor can he explain where we go from here, or what to do. We argue that Chomsky’s vision is blurred.

The core of Chomsky’s argument is the US drive to dominate the world in the post-WW2 period by subordinating the rest of the world to its global plan. fact the beginnings of globalisation. The world was partitioned so that the developing countries would serve as suppliers of raw materials and labour for the developed countries. This exploitation of the third world required political policies that did not allow the populations in these countries to opt out of this global plan. The IMF and World Bank and its more recent offspring NAFTA, WTO the MAI etc, were the instruments of this plan. Against this third world nationalism backed by the Soviet Union was identified as the main enemy. US backed coups and the cold war to isolate and ultimately destroy the Soviet Union were the tactics designed to keep this global plan on track. Chomsky’s writings over the last 30 years are really no more than documentation of the application of these policies in Latin America, Asia and the Middle East.

In a recent article in the New Left Review (No 230 July/August 1998) Chomsky develops this analysis further. He argues that the mechanisms for imposing this global plan are increasingly secret and outside democratic control. NAFTA and the MAI are examples of new agreements designed to force small states to accept trade and investment on the US terms that were conceived in secret. Resistance to these agreements only arose after their existence was ‘leaked’. On the MAI Chomsky states: the MAI “would constitute a major attack on democracy; it would shift the decision-making power over social and economic affairs even further into the hands of private tyrannies that operate in secret, unaccountable to the public. Corporations had been granted the rights of immortal persons by radical judicial activism early this century; but the MAI grants them the rights of states” (p.25).

Chomsky concludes: “The long-term goal of such initiatives is clear enough to anyone with open eyes: an international political economy which is organised by powerful states and secret bureaucracies whose primary function is to serve the concentrations of private power, which administer markets through their internal operations, through networks of corporate alliances, including the intra-firm transactions that are mislabeled ‘trade’. They rely on the public for subsidy, for research and development, for innovation and for bail-outs when things go wrong. They rely on the powerful states for protection from dangerous ‘democracy openings’. In such ways, they seek to ensure that the ‘prime beneficiaries’ of the world’s wealth are the right people; the smug and prosperous ‘Americans’; the ‘domestic constituencies’ and their counterparts elsewhere.” (p.27)

But what causes this power surge, and what do we do about it? Where do we go from here? Chomsky is a radical democrat; some would say an anarchist or libertarian socialist. He is certainly hostile to Marxism and Communism, which he associates with the Soviet Union. His solutions are to rally the citizenry to the cause of democracy and to bring these power plays under the control of the people. “There is no reason to doubt that it (this excessive power) can be controlled, even within existing formal institutions of parliamentary democracy (my emphasis). These are not the operations of any mysterious economic laws; they are human decisions that are subject to challenge, revision and reversal. They are also decisions made within institutions, state and private. They have to face the test of legitimacy, as always; and if they do not meet that test they can be replaced by others that are more free and just, exactly as has happened throughout history.” (p.27)

Chomsky’s logic is classic social democrat. Once the masses are informed, and reject the exercise of arbitrary power, then they can use the institutions of bourgeois democracy to “challenge, revise and reverse” such power. Here Chomsky detaches the state (and private) institutions from the ‘political economy’. Lenin said that politics is concentrated economics. Chomsky reverses the power flow from ‘political’ to the ‘economic’. There are no ‘mysterious economic laws’ he says. There is just the zero-sum game of a struggle for scarce resources. Who wins this struggle has the power. Therefore economics becomes reduced to politics – to decisions taken in secret, that can however be exposed and made public. So economic problems can be resolved by means of realising the ideal of parliamentary democracy.

What’s missing from this analysis is any understanding of the economic social relations that motivate the power struggle. Already under capitalism, social relations exist depending upon whether one owns the means of production or not. Therefore power flows from the ownership of private property that enables the capitalist class to force wage-labour to work and produced surplus value, to politics. This power relationship cannot be reversed or revised by parliament. In fact parliament functions to defend this power relationship by defending private property. Parliament can respond to democratic demands only when private property is not challenged. But once workers become ‘informed’ i.e. class conscious, and begin to ‘challenge, revise and reverse’ existing power relations, the threat to the property relations, upon which such power rests, will ensure that the state renounces its democratic trappings and imposes direct rule upon its subjects.

That’s why in the postwar period that Chomsky documents, no successful challenge to US power by means of parliamentary institutions has occurred inside or outside the US. The only successful challenges, all of which failed ultimately, arose from the exercise of non-democratic challenges; that is challenges that did not result from the existence of parliamentary democracy. They arose either from undemocratic elite opposition, such as that of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, or from mass struggles that by-passed the trappings of formal parliamentary democracy – street protests or civil disobedience in the US, or popular uprisings and mass movements such as in Cuba, Vietnam, Palestine, etc. Nor can it be argued that these social movements have succeeded in ‘renewing’ parliamentary democracy. The fate of the ex-SU and other so-called ‘socialist’ states proves this fact. Whatever the failings of so-called ‘socialist’ regimes – their non-democratic and bureaucratic nature etc – the return to ‘democracy and free markets’ is an unmitigated disaster; unmitigated by any exercise of democratic rights in moderating the devastating impact of the market.

The failure of these radical movements which threatened to overturn bourgeois states is not due to their non-democratic form, but due to their suppression by the military might of imperialism in the name of ‘democracy’. Therefore, it is naive and ultimately self-defeating for popular movements to have illusions in parliamentary democracy. The foundation of ‘actually existing capitalism’, as Chomsky calls it, is not an aberrant concentration of power that can be corrected by democratic process. No it is the underlying property relations, defended by the capitalist state, which can only be “challenged, revised and reversed” by extending the struggle for democracy to socialist revolution. Smashing the capitalist state, and creating a planned economy in which production is for need and not profits.

From Class Struggle, No 25, Dec 1998-Feb 1999