The loss of 29 lives at the Pike River coal mine is a tragedy that never needed to happen. 

But while we morn alongside the miners, there are also reasons to get angry.  Because, contrary to what the media and government would have you believe, not everybody in this country does stand in solidarity with those miners. The people in charge of that mine, its CEO and its corporate executives have no right to cast themselves as victims of this disaster. They grew rich on the blood and sweat of people like those who died in the Pike river mine. They used the power to take away the miners jobs and to effectively force them to accept working conditions that were dangerous and deadly. They knew about the risks, they knew how they could be avoided and did nothing about them for the sake of their profits. These people, who now appear in the media with their heads hung in grief, have nothing in common with the men whose lives they destroyed. These bosses are not heroes, victims or leaders, they can rightly be described as social parasites; growing rich and bloated from profits earned by the sacrifices of their workers.

So despite all John Key’s rhetoric about unity in the midst of disaster, the truth remains that even in the midst of this national tragedy, New Zealand is a divided nation. The question becomes, how do these social parasites get away it? The answer is that these people have the government, the media and the economic system at their disposal and, with all this power; they manufacture ideas that are designed to prevent people from identifying their oppressors. There are many examples of such ideas; racism is one of them and you will read about it in this magazine. The one thing such ideas have common in the context of a capitalist society is that they trick the workers into bullying each other, leaving the bosses free to exploit the working class. Workers are exploited by a ruling class, a class of bosses irrespective of their race, colour, religion or nationality. In order to fight back, workers need to stop pointing their fingers at each other, and start pointing at the ones in power.

However, workers everywhere can see the truth. Throughout Europe working class people are taking to the streets to protest cut backs to government spending. We are told  by governments and businesses that this is a recession and we all have to make sacrifices, but we can all see that ordinary people, who had nothing to do with causing the recession are the ones  who suffer, while the wealthy carry on as they always have. 

Cutbacks on safety, cutbacks on welfare – they are all part of the same agenda.  The bosses agenda.  But there is an alternative to simply watching the tragedy unfold around us.  We can fight back.  As workers in Europe fight back in their tens of millions, 30,000 young workers and students in London decided to stand up.  When their union capitulated to the government they didn’t back down.  Instead they battled the police in Parliament Square.  They mightn’t have won yet, but 30,000 radicals is a good place to start a fight back.

In New Zealand, it was among West Coast miners that the union movement began, more than 100 years ago.  They led the way campaigning for better conditions.  Here, as in Europe, there is an alternative to crisis and cutbacks.  We too can fight.

Vincent A

Cover image courtesy of Jeremy Osborne / DeviantArt