Where is Aotearoa/NZ Going?

If we believe the leader of the opposition, Aotearoa/NZ is going “backwards”. Certainly as a neo-colony of China and the USA, Aotearoa is going backwards so long as it remains subservient to the big powers. Both China and the USA are only interested in extracting surplus value from NZ workers and working farmers as part of the global contest between the current hegemon and the challenger, China. The solution is to counter this cataclysmic backwardness by the forward motion of the working class,  all those who produce the value syphoned out of the country by imperialism, and to expropriate that value and use it to build a socialist Aotearoa.

The NZ capitalist class is a comprador class serving as the agents of both the USA and China to manage their respective interests. Both have significant capital invested in the production of value in NZ as a source of surplus-profits/rent expropriated from productive workers and small farmers that are sucked offshore. As the global economy faces worsening slumps, pandemics and global warming, both competing big powers are forced to pressure NZ to join their camp against the other.

As the cold war ramps up into a hot war in Ukraine and threatens to become a new world war, NZ is in a lose-lose situation. To support one camp is to make an enemy of the other. It cannot maintain any pretence of ‘independence’ since the economic nationalism of the First Labour Government was junked by the Fourth Labour Government. The war in Ukraine is the first big test of NZ loyalty. The US is demanding that NZ become part of the extension of NATO in the Indo-Pacific to meet the “challenge of both Russia and China…”

At a recent NATO meeting the non-NATO countries Korea, Australia, New Zealand and Japan were specially invited. The NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg made it clear why. “Beijing has decided to support Russia and question the right of countries to self-determination and to choose their own path…China must be made to pay the price for supporting Russia”.

Heather Conley, head of the German Marshall Fund think tank, said: “This is now for the U.S. one Eurasian theater. We’re looking at the challenge of both Russia and China long term in similar ways. We’re going to have to have a NATO that prioritizes collective defense for Europe while at the same time being able to build greater partnerships and bridging mechanisms to our Indo-Pacific allies.”

There we have it. A/NZ is caught up on the rush to WW3 for Eurasia that continues the “Great Game” that led to WW1 in 1914. The Ardern Liberal-Labour Government has already made its decision. It has jumped on the warmongers’ bandwagon to impose token sanctions on Russia. It has already signed up to an ‘enlarged NATO’ in the Indo-Pacific that will be used to make make China pay for supporting Russia in the war with NATO in Ukraine.

NZ sucks up to the jingoist Boris Johnson who sends weapons to Ukraine and partners with the US and Australia in AUKUS against China. Meanwhile the working masses in Ukraine, Russia, and increasingly the world over, will be sacrificed in this war and the ones that follow as cannon fodder. We need an international workers United Front that is capable of stopping these wars through direct action against their own ruling classes, putting an end to the rotten capitalist system.

End imperialist war with socialist revolution!

Workers, refuse to fight for your ruling class!

Mutiny against your officers and fraternise with those you are ordered to shoot!

Turn imperialist war into civil war!

Turn you guns against you own ruling class!

For an Independent Socialist Republic of Aotearoa!