COCKROACH! EXTRA..(NEW ZEALAND !) A EZINE FOR POOR AND WORKING CLASS PEOPLE. WE HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT OUR CHAINS. It is time that the poor and working class people have a voice on the Internet. Contributions can be sent to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscribtions are free at <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Now online at http://www.kmf.org/malecki/ How often this zine will appear depends on you! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1. Letter to Cockroach from New Zealand. 2. Bureaucracy, Workers, the Bourgeoisie and Breaking the Chains. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------- Kia Ora Ano Greetings Again Personal Background I write from Wellington, New Zealand. I have been very active in the Unemployed and Beneficiaries Movement, at a local level and national level. That work (all voluntary, as I too are on a benefit) has brought me into contact with hundreds/thousands of fellow beneficiaries, all with their degree of knowledge of the struggle. They have been solo-mothers at state-funded/privately-run Training Programmes, street people (some being alcoholics, glue-sniffers, with ages ranging from mid-teens to 70s), members of Gangs, new migrants, those with learning problems. The work has included writing a manual about benefit assistance, making Community Radio programmes on issues affecting unpaid workers, writing submissions about various law changes our Government try to impose on us, one-to-ne advocacy, organising campaigns of various kinds, research of various subjects, and visiting schools/Training programmes for beneficiaries to talk/listen on issues to, do with Income Support and the history of unemployment in NZ. I am certainly socialist - but also see some of the activities which the state imposes on people need to be challenged there and then, and where possible the states legal abuse of working people stopped/minimised. Hence I have been accused of being a "reformist" by some on the left. I started this article after reading Cockroach 33 ===================================== Bureauracy, Workers, the Bourgeoisie and Breaking the Chains It seems that society and organisations have created bureaucracy for many years - at least in the last century. These bureaucracies are a set of people, a class or caste, that have power, and use that power to thrawt genuine progress that will free all people from the oppression that defiles both oppressed and oppressor. These bureaucracies take the form of business managers, management of government agencies, trade unions and very often community based groups. While the ownership of business is spread quite thinly among shareholders, the large multi-nationals are the realm of large corporate owners and the managers. The multi-nationals are becoming more and more dominant in terms share of world turnover. So while capitalism itself is a problem, the concept of the indivdual working, using their own tools, their hands and minds is not. Capitalism corrupts the sharing of the fruits of labour and leisure. Bureaucrats in the private sector are powerful peices in this process of corruption. Government agencies, whether the Police, Welfare Department officials or whatever often follow an unwritten ethos which defies the spirit if not the letter of the laws they are there to administer.. In NZ our Welfare agency (Income Support) is continuing on a move to tightly targeted systems rather than universal provision in an capitalist system showing increasing signs of collapse - yet somehow never collapsing. While many trade unionists - perhaps the vast majority of those who are members, delegates and officials - have a true vocation in the fight for worker rights, they as an organisation often respond to weakly, or too slowly. In NZ we had a classic example in 1991 when the newly elected National (Conservative) introduced legislation which would make collective wage bargining much hardly, AND legislation which would cut benefits by over 30% in some cases and introduce savage "stand down" provisions where unless the beneficiary met extra conditions they would not be eligible for state support for six months. Our trade union movement - or at least its leadership - some avowed members of the Moscow aligned Soiclaist Unity Party - failed to respond t calls for action from their own members and from community groups including the unemployed workers movement. Support for the fight against these two peices of legislation was token. Dispite massive public support there was little industrial action and the legislation was passed. Many groups not fitting the description, private sector, government agancy or trade union have equally created bureaucracies which defeat the purposes for which the organisations were set up. Bureaucracts have let the people down. Public servents feel the need to serve Ministers of State. Trade Unionists hide behind the rules set up by the members to stiffle ground-swell fights. It is also my belief, that while members of left parties do indeed have plans/programs, they run the risk, if not have fallen into the trap already of becoming bureaucrats themselves. Left groups seem more interested in theoritical debates of which program is most pure. Meanwhile the attacks by the state and the business class continue to grow. The attacks on workers (those receiving wages and those denied and living on benefits) have been increasing in NZ at least since 1975. (My personal/life exerience of these attacks - obviously the attacks have been going through-out history). While some of the left parties have been involved in the groups formed to fight these attacks, their involvement has been in part to form a United Front, and once formed, to lead it. This seems to me arrognace. Freire talks of the need for those from the oppressor class to become one with the oppressed. To recognise the structures, and fight for the end of oppression - not merely the replacement of one oppressor with another - which what the USSR became. Simone Weil became concerned about the arrogance of the freedom fighters in the Spansih Civil War. An arrogance and lack of care or consideration of the peasants they were supposedly fighting with. My experience of the oppressed in New Zealand is that they are very aware of the causes of their oppression. Whether these people be university drop-outs or those from the glue-sniffing community who have lived on the streets since before their teens. They also recognise those from the oppressor class who try and claim to be the leaders in any so-called class struggle. It seems to me until these leaders drop such titles and actually become one with the oppressed, rather than just an intelligent person with good intentions, rather than displaying unconscious arrogance then the struggle will not become anything mere than rhetoric in a world becoming increasingly oppressive. The struggle is not after all to replace one set of leaders with another - it is too free us from oppression. While the us is often called "worker class" many by some twist of statistics we arrive at 75-80% of the population, many of the oppressors are workers (called Bourgeoisie in the parlance) and these oppressor have no intention of changing the system. While in many senses workers are 75-80%+ of the worlds population this belies the nature of the oppressor state (whether capitalist or USSR type). In the community/society I work in (New Zealand), the oppressed make up about 25% of the population. Many of the workers making up the balance of the 75-80%+ "workers" are far to scared to fight the oppressor state because short term it will cost them. The left are doing very little to ( in NZ anyway) become one with the these oppressed, although many are beneficiaries (welfare recipients) It is my belief that many in the vanguard have in fact become the bourgeoisie despite their ability to quote program, to use the rhetoric. So, how to break the chains. It certainly requires those wanting to do the breaking to understand the structures and concepts which cause oppression. It certainly requires an understanding that the goal is not to replace one form of oppression with another. But it also means working as one of the oppressed, in always ensuring actions are designed to reduce oppression and the effects of oppression. It means fighting on every issue, individually and collectively for the greater goal - that of ridding the world from oppression. It means acknowledging the fact, that while the revolutionaries of October 1917 may have had good intentions, by the end of a few short years these ideals had been all but forgotten, and it was the party, power (the other side of the coin called oppression) that became all dominant. Graham H. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------- Check Out My HomePage where you can, Read the book! Ha Ha Ha McNamara, Vietnam-My Bellybutton is my Crystalball! Or Get The Latest Issue of, COCKROACH, a zine for poor and workingclass people HTTP://WWW.ALGONET.SE/~MALECKI If The links are not working you can write to me from my home page and get the latest issue of COCKROACH! --------------------------------------------------------
