Issue No: 848; 13 June 2001

In an article published today in the Fiji Sun, Te Karere Ipurangi states that Fiji needs a revolutionary party to nationalise land and other means of production. The author stated that the Fiji Labour Party was not revolutionary enough and that Fiji's solution lies in a class based struggle comprising ethnic Fijian workers and commoners and ethnic Indian workers and farmers.

Ipurangi states:

"A revolutionary labour party willing to draw clear class lines, and oppose crypto-feudal as well as capitalist privilege, would be able to achieve a great deal more. Such a party would advocate the nationalisation of land, as well as all other means of production."

"It would seek to implant its cadres in every union and fight to break down ethnic hostilities by actively championing the struggles of working people and the oppressed from each community."

"It would build on the decent instincts of ordinary people who have always protected their neighbours from rampaging mobs, by creating integrated workers' defence guards, to enforce picket lines and put an end to racial attacks."

"It would seek to address the needs of the entire oppressed, not only employees, but also working farmers, the village poor and the urban unemployed."

"The obstacles to working class struggle in Fiji - communal conflict and indigenism -are posed with extreme sharpness, but they are hardly unique."

"And precisely because they are posed so sharply and the existing social order is so brittle, the connection between ethnic conflict and social oppression may prove to be more transparent and thus more directly addressed in Fiji than elsewhere."

"A revolutionary workers' party with an anticommunalist perspective could profoundly impact the class struggle internationally by providing a model for other societies in which similar questions are posed. Fiji cannot return to pre-European village communalism, and the imperialist world order offers neither a secure future, nor a viable way of living for either indigenous of Indo-Fijian working people."