Re: The DSP, Fiji and indigenous land claims

[Green Left Parramatta <glparramatta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Louis Proyect wrote:
>
> maybe you can explain the wisdom behind
> socialists in an imperialist nation like Australia demanding economic
> sanctions against an underdeveloped island of less than a million people in
> the South Pacific. This is a terrible misjudgement and I hope that the
> DSP'ers will reconsider.
>
> Louis Proyect
> Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/


The Fiji Trades Union Congress called for the sanctions, the DSP --
trusting that the multiracial Fiji working class movement was the best
judge of what was required to help their democratic struggle --
supported their call and chose to go beyond words and pressure the
government to act and support Australian unions' actions.

You find all this controversial. We find that it is elementary
internationalism. The parralel is with the sitations in South Africa,
Zimbabwe and Namibia in the 70s and 80s (and Burma today). Socialists
backed the liberation and democracy movements calls for sanctions, we
dismissed the hypocritical claims of Thatcher, Reagan and Fraser that
sanctions would ``hurt the blacks''. We said that it was the liberation
movements' call and they understood that any harm caused to ordinary
people was the responsibility of the rulers and were prepared to put up
with it because it would eventually aid their struggle.

It is a myth that Australia and New Zealand have imposed sanctions of
any consequence. They have ``threatened'' to impose sanctions at each
stage of the crisis and not done so because, when push comes to shove,
Australian big business (even if it is true that there some aspects of
the Fijian elite's policies that impede imperialism's interests) prefers
to work with the neo-colonial elite (as in most former colonies, partly
based on the existing social structure -- in Fiji it happens to be the
eastern Melanesian aristocracy) that has been constructed from before
independence.

While the Fiji Labour Party in and of itself is no great threat, the
growing working class unity between Indian and Melanesian workers and
small farmers that its victory reflected is what worries Canberra and
Wellington. It has been the trade union sanctions that have hit Fiji
hardest, not government action.

Lou believes we should be analysing the Fiji events -- and so we should.
But more immediately we should be taking action to support the
democratic and anti-chauvinist struggle of the multiracial Fiji working
class. If we sit on our hands, theorising about why it is so
``unprinicpled'' to support the FTUC's calls, painting the overwhelminly
impoverished Indian Fijian peasantry as ``invaders'' and ``oppressors'',
sliding towards the view that Speight should be supported, or at least
tolerated, as the South Pacific's Milosevic or Mugabe battling
imperialism, why should the best elements in the Fiji working class give
our ``Marxist analysis'' a second thought? They would rightly reject our
views as bunk.

Norm.