Posted on

Internationalist response to FTA needed

– John Edmundson

The New Zealand-China Free Trade Agreement (FTA) signed on April 7 is the first free trade agreement China has made with any developed Western country. It is an historic deal for the Chinese government in its push to be fully accepted into the capitalist club.

The deal is historic for New Zealand too, for the simple reason that China’s economy is by far the largest that New Zealand has ever signed such an agreement with. With a growing middle class already numbering over 100 million, China offers a huge market for New Zealand businesses, particularly for luxury goods and services.

Reaction to the FTA has been mixed. Opponents of the agreement have ranged from the Green Party on the left, to New Zealand First on the xenophobic right. The CTU, eager to cosy up to Labour in the lead-up to an election that Labour is uncertain of winning, has come out in support of the agreement.

The critics of the FTA have claimed that the agreement in some way condones the poor human rights record of the Chinese government. This objection has become more strident with the recent Chinese crackdown on Tibetan protests.

The New Zealand government and the FTA’s supporters have countered with the point that New Zealand trades with all sorts of countries with all sorts of human rights records. In fact, government-led boycotts of countries over “human rights abuses” have a dubious record, with the independence of small, weak countries often being threatened by countries in the imperialist world on spurious grounds.

Continue reading “Internationalist response to FTA needed”

Posted on

Should socialists opppose free trade? A response to an Alliance activist

With the signing of the recent FTA with China, the debate over the issue of free trade has been reignited among workers and left-wing political activists in New Zealand.

Many left union officials and members of political parties such as the Alliance have argued that immigration controls and tariffs must be retained to protect NZ jobs and businesses from being undercut by foreign competition.

By contrast the Workers Party strongly believes that this kind of economic protectionism is a poison which only serves to divide the international working class and encourages illusions in the “progressive” nature of local capitalists. We argue that the solution to NZ companies closing down production and laying off workers is not protectionism, but instead a militant union-led campaign to occupy all those businesses threatened with closure and keep them running under workers’ control.

Below we reprint an interview from 2004, in which Workers Party and Spark editorial board member Don Franks responds to a series of questions from an Alliance Party activist on the question of free trade and the approach that the left should take towards it:

Continue reading “Should socialists opppose free trade? A response to an Alliance activist”

Posted on

Modern New Zealand unions – “fighting blindfold”?

Philip Ferguson

It’s not often that leading trade union officials in New Zealand speak openly about the exploitation of the working class, let alone about the surplus-value created by workers and expropriated by employers. Therefore, when such speeches are made, it’s useful to analyse what is being said, why, and what the political implications are for trade union activism.

Last November, Robert Reid, the national president of the National Distribution Union, one of the few left-leaning unions, made such a speech at a gathering organised by the Trade Union History Project to commemorate the life of the late Rona Bailey, a longtime New Zealand communist.

In the speech, Reid recalled being part of Marxist study groups with Rona Bailey and learning about surplus-value. Reid then rightly noted that “without an appreciation of Marxist economics or political economy, we have no understanding of how wealth is created and expropriated in the 21st century. This leaves, in many cases, the modern trade union movement fighting blindfolded.”

Continue reading “Modern New Zealand unions – “fighting blindfold”?”

Posted on

World and NZ economy: as good as it gets under capitalism

John Edmundson and Philip Ferguson

In late 2006. IMF chief economist Raghuram Rajan declared, “The global economic expansion has been stronger in this period than at any time since the early 1970s.” Yet barely a year later, media reports are regularly speculating about upcoming economic disasters.

Recent economic woes in the United States have impacted on the global economy, as the US remains by far the largest economy in the world. However, problems in the United States – of which the state of subprime mortgages is a classic case (see below) – indicate deeper problems in the world economy.

Continue reading “World and NZ economy: as good as it gets under capitalism”