NUMSA Rupture Could Mark New Start for Socialist Politics in South Africa

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Socialist Project • E-Bulletin No. 935
February 12, 2014

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NUMSA Rupture Could Mark New Start for Socialist Politics in South Africa

Sam Ashman and Nicolas Pons-Vignon

The resolutions adopted at the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa's (NUMSA's) congress in December mark an important rupture in South African politics. NUMSA, the Congress of South African Trade Unions’ (COSATU's) largest affiliate, has refused to endorse the African National Congress (ANC) ahead of this year's elections and is to explore the establishment of a new movement for socialism. This is a significant challenge to the increasingly contested leadership of the ANC-led alliance, not least because it seeks to build and draw on a mass movement in order to win social and economic change. In our view, it is also the most promising development that progressives – those who support substantial economic and social change in favour of the disadvantaged – could have hoped for.


NUMSA's decision can be seen as a political consequence of the Marikana massacre of August 16, 2012 and the shockingly tame response to it. How could such an event, entailing a deliberate act of violence by security forces, targeted at a (supposed) constituency of the ruling alliance in the key mining sector not affect the status quo? We still do not know who ordered the use of live ammunition. Why have there been no resignations from the Cabinet or the police?

Last year, Planning Minister Trevor Manuel gave the annual Ruth First memorial lecture at the University of the Witwatersrand, a choice of speaker that was a travesty in the light of First's radical legacy, including outstanding work exposing the conditions of migrant labour. Manuel was prepared to discuss the long-term proximate causes of Marikana, yet say nothing about the immediate responsibility for the massacre, and to advocate continuity in policies that have failed workers.

Break with the Past

NUMSA has confronted the elephant in the room: mine workers’ anger toward the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), once Cosatu's largest affiliate. It testifies to a decision to break with the past that is anchored in a will to honour the victims of Marikana. At its congress, NUMSA raised more than R350,000 for the families of those who were killed, who have been largely abandoned, having to fight even for fees for legal representation at the commission of inquiry investigating the massacre. NUMSA delegates wanted President Jacob Zuma to resign over Marikana, not just Nkandla.

All this puts NUMSA in stark contrast to the ANC's Cyril Ramaphosa, a former NUM general secretary and a strategic shareholder in Lonmin, who called the Marikana strikers “dastardly criminal” and who demanded “concomitant action” be taken against them, or the South African Communist Party's Blade Nzimande, who called the striking mine workers “counter-revolutionaries.”

NUMSA's decision entails recognizing that the ANC government obsessively defends the interests of big business and finance, as well as of a few of its own selected ‘partners’ to established capital, at the expense of the working-class, which includes the unemployed and the precariously employed. Indeed, too many in the ANC now openly show contempt for the poor, as when the Gauteng premier told Bekkersdal residents: “The ANC doesn’t need your dirty votes.”

Post-Apartheid, Neoliberal Revolution

The official rhetoric is, of course, different, including the increasingly ludicrous reference to a “second stage” of the national democratic revolution. Instead, what South Africa has experienced since 1994 is closer to a national neoliberal revolution, with the control of policy in the hands of the Treasury in the name of “business friendliness.”

In post-apartheid South Africa, many of the characteristics of late apartheid are being actively reproduced and are not simply an unchallenged legacy of the past. The financialization of the economy has seen enormous growth and rewards to finance and shrinking levels of long-term investment. Liberalization of exchange controls has resulted in large-scale capital flight, made worse as big corporations have relisted overseas. Capital flight has been combined with a debt-driven consumption boom causing what economists call an import leakage: the middle and upper classes’ credit-fuelled consumption of imported (often luxury) goods exacerbates the current account deficit, which makes the economy increasingly dependent on portfolio (short-term, not long-term, investment) flows.

To attract such flows to balance the current account, it is necessary to maintain high interest rates – reminding us that low interest rates are another promise on which the Growth, Employment and Redistribution strategy did not deliver. The “economic freedom” denied to the majority has not really benefited the aspiring black bourgeoisie.

The control of much black economic empowerment (BEE) funding by large private companies has furthermore led to jobs being outsourced to “micro-entrepreneurs,” who are asked to perform the same task but without permanent employment and its associated benefits. Well-paid consultants are then brought in to help them acquire the “business skills” they lack.

BEE in mining also often entails new ‘black’ firms exploiting old mines, and using casual labour to stay profitable.

Looking Forward

South Africa needs an economy that creates more and better jobs. This will entail policies that regulate finance and address productive sectors, as well as policies that address all areas of workers’ lives, from housing to transport, education and health. An important part of this will be to deal with the consequences of cartels, which assert control over value chains, often directly appropriating the income of poor workers and grant-holders.

Two moves are thus promising. First is NUMSA's intention not to rush into electoral politics but to form alliances with progressive forces, whether political, union or social movements. The latter have been all too often attacked by the state, and their inclusion in a broad movement promises that key questions – from housing to water and electricity distribution – will receive the attention they deserve. Second is NUMSA's statement about organizing across value chains, including its announcement that it will organize mine workers. Moreover, NUMSA shows signs of serious engagement with economic policy issues and willingness to mobilize labour in support of progressive economic policy objectives, such as the all-important issue of the (inflated) price of key industrial inputs.

There is time to debate what sort of party South Africa needs and its establishment will be a process. And while there is much to commend about NUMSA's decision, it would be foolish to imagine that it will succeed easily. The building of such an ambitious project will face huge challenges.

The first and most immediate one is the difficulties the union is bound to experience when it integrates large numbers of mine workers. Building new alliances on the left will in all likelihood entail difficulties as well as opportunities. And last but not least, the reaction of the alliance will be harsh, with great effort made to isolate NUMSA. This is intensified for the ANC because there is much to lose with political power for a movement that presides over avenues of accumulation intertwined with the circuits of the state.

Yet, if NUMSA continues to send positive signals, it may well succeed in building a mass movement, attracting those disillusioned with the ANC and ready to embrace a credible socialist alternative. Looking at the state of politics around the world, Latin America aside, it is hard to think of a more promising opportunity for real progressive change. •

Sam Ashman and Nicolas Pons-Vignon are economists at the University of Johannesburg and the University of the Witwatersrand. This article first published on bdlive.co.za website.

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Socialist Project • E-Bulletin No. 936
February 14, 2014

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“Manifestos and Reality”

A Presentation to the Cape Town Press Club by NUMSA General Secretary

Irvin Jim

I speak to you today with a powerful and united mandate from 341,150 metalworkers. They made their views extremely clear in our workers’ parliament in December last year – the parliament we called the NUMSA Special National Congress. In that parliament there was vigorous debate. Every delegate knew that they would have to account to their constituency. We are justifiably proud of our democratic heritage. We know that what we decide has the backing of our members. We don't have to change decisions after the Congress has spoken, as some do, even though there are those who would urge us to “come to our senses” and take NUMSA in another direction from the decisions of that Congress.

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NUMSA General Secretary Irvin Jim. [Photo: NUMSA]

And we are also justifiably proud of our militant heritage. Our union, right back from its beginning, has taken the side of the working-class and the poor. We have always been a union that champions shop-floor struggles as well as the struggles of working-class communities. We have always understood that workers come from communities and live in communities. Community struggles are workers’ struggles. So, as metalworkers we fight for policies and strategies that will create jobs. We want more working people from our communities to have jobs. We fight for water. We fight for houses. We fight for the safety of our communities. We fight against a police force which kills our people when they protest because they don't have water. Because they don't have houses.

We are also a union that has been in the trenches with revolutionary forces within the liberation alliance led by the ANC (African National Congress) and SACP (South African Communist Party). Yet when we speak out clearly in defence of the working-class and the poor, our allies attack us. They call us oppositionists because we reject the policies of the ANC and SACP which attack the interests of our members. They call us ultra-leftists suffering from infantile disorders because we refuse to betray the interests of the working-class and support an ANC and SACP whose leadership has consistently attacked the working-class.

Taking Sides, Splitting with Old Allies

We are not just talking about labour brokers. We are not just talking about e-tolls. We are talking about an ANC and SACP leadership which has clearly and unequivocally taken sides with international capital against us. There is no other way to look at it. The examples stare us in the face. At Marikana, the armed forces of the state mowed down workers who were demanding a living wage from an international mining company, Lonmin. The same happened during the farmworkers strike in the Western Cape. The same is happening now in Mothuthlung and Sebokeng and other communities across the country too numerous to count.

Our people are protesting because they have no water – that most basic of necessities. And the State... that very same state which failed to supply them with water... kills them for their protest.

Underneath all of this is a harsh material fact. The South African economy has not fundamentally changed. The structure remains the same as it was under apartheid... the same dependence on exporting raw minerals, the same enslavement to the Minerals Energy Finance complex. Far from an increase in the manufacturing sector – the sector which can really produce jobs – we have a rapid process of deindustrialization. We are not gaining jobs, we are losing them. In 2004 there were 3.7 million unemployed people in our country. Last year that had risen to 4.1 million. More unemployed, not less.

This will not stop until we fundamentally change direction. We, as a union, have understood that the ANC and SACP will not lead that change. It is the ANC and SACP which gave us GEAR (Growth, Employment and Redistribution). It is the ANC and SACP which has given us the NDP (National Development Plan). It is the ANC and SACP which is investing in improving the rail lines to Richards Bay so that more of our minerals can be exported.

We know that the current leadership, the very same leadership that calls itself anti-imperialist, is in a lucrative alliance with international capital. It has accepted its shares in the mining industry, but those shares were not given for nothing. They had a price, and the price is being paid by the working-class and the poor of our country. The price is a macro-economic strategy which focuses on maintaining profit, not jobs. This fact cannot be changed by a fig leaf called the Employment Tax Incentive Act. A fig leaf which claims to be about creating jobs whilst actually it is yet another attack on the working-class.

I want to say this very clearly and very straightforwardly. There is only one way to create the number of jobs that are needed in South Africa – the number the NDP dreams about. That is to harness the profits of the mining and financial sectors and use them to build manufacturing industry. That is why we call for the nationalization of the mines and the financial sector. It is not some dogma from the past. It is an immediate and urgent requirement to save our nation.

The Star newspaper last week said “A Nation burns.” That headline said more than it knew. It is the nation that is burning. It is burning because it is being ruthlessly looted by international capital.

For the investors in London and New York and Berlin, South Africa is just another possible investment destination. They don't care about the working-class and the poor of South Africa and we don't expect them to. But now our political leadership has aligned itself with the global looters. Our political leadership is no longer able to represent the nation because it has a conflict of interest. Its real, material interest in the profitability of the mining and financial sectors prevents it from looking after the interests of the nation. The interest of building our manufacturing industry. The leadership's interest in the profits of global capital prevents them from being the leadership that the nation needs – the leadership that Hugo Chavez represented in Venezuela, for example, or that Evo Morales has represented in Bolivia.

State of the Nation

So, what is the state of the nation when it comes to policy and direction?

Flowing from their class interest, the ANC and SACP have presided over a series of policies that have consistently failed the working-class and the poor of South Africa. I can give you a few examples:

They liberalized trade, allowing the dumping of production from China and elsewhere. This was part of the deindustrialization process – it caused massive destruction of jobs across the economy. Nearly 300,000 jobs lost in the manufacturing sector.

They removed exchange controls, allowing money that should have been invested in productive industry in South Africa to leave the country.

They championed the privatization of the state and the rise of the tenderpreneurs who replaced the functions of the state. The tenderpreneurs have got wealthy. The working-class and the poor have suffered.

They pursued an approach of nodal development. The result has been a demarcation which clusters together pockets of poor municipalities. They have absolutely no revenue. Yet they are expected to deliver in the face of belt tightening that has been championed by the National Treasury.

They have refused to impose export tax on our minerals or to ban exportation of scrap. One result was that we lost seven foundries which were closed. Many jobs have been lost.

The Reserve Bank continues to target inflation instead of jobs. This supports the interests of finance capital.

Despite the call in the Freedom Charter for a national minimum wage, the ANC government has allowed apartheid colonial wages to continue. So the super exploitation of black and African labour continues as an accumulation path for South African capitalism. Now the ANC says it promises to investigate a national minimum wage in the next 5 years! We don't need long-winded investigation. We need immediate implementation.

The Freedom Charter called for the banning of contract labour and the tot system. But the ANC government has chosen to regulate slavery rather than to ban it. They have even gone further, under the so called NDP, to incentivize labour brokers and given them a fancy name. They call them “replacement labour.”

And what is the state of the nation for the majority of its people – the working-class and the poor?

400,000 young people per year do not progress past matric

72% of the unemployed are young people; most have not completed secondary education

68% of the unemployed have been unemployed for more than a year

60% of the unemployed have either never worked in their lives or have not worked in the past 5 years

44% of workers in South Africa live on less than R10 a day

Most of the unemployed rely on support from the employed... who survive on less than R10 a day

Almost 25% of South African households have inadequate access to food; this figure was 20% in 2009

Almost 20% of people who head households save money by walking to work

Now let's look at who owns the nation. That must be part of any assessment of the state of the nation.

The financial sector is dominated by four large privately owned banks (ABSA, Nedbank, FNB and Standard Bank). ABSA is 56% foreign owned. Standard Bank is at least 40% foreign owned.

The Reserve Bank is privately owned.

SASOL is about 30% foreign-owned and Arcelor-Mittal is 65% foreign owned.

The pharmaceuticals sector is dominated by foreign-owned companies. Aspen, Adcock-Ingram, Sanofi, Pfizer, Norvatis, etc. all have significant foreign-ownership. Today these companies of international capital are blackmailing the nation. The minister accuses them of genocide and chemical warfare. As the working-class we have to ask: what happened to the 100% state-owned pharmaceutical company that might begin to be able to protect our national interest.

The sale of 30% of Telkom to the Thintana Telecommunications consortium led to massive job losses in Telkom from 67,000 workers to 25,000 workers. The nation is poorer as a result.

The construction sector is also monopolized and, dominated by four players: Murray & Roberts, WBHO, Aveng and Group 5 – all with foreign ownership.

So the productive and wealth-producing forces of our nation are increasingly owned by global capital, not by South African capital. As a nation, we are increasingly required to dance to the music of global capital. That music plays a very sad tune for the working-class and the poor of our nation.

So, what have ANC manifestos done for the nation?


Vision 2014, announced in 2004, pledged to reduce unemployment by half. We have seen the reality:

In 2004 the unemployment rate was 23%. In 2013 it had risen to 24.7%

In 2004 the number of unemployed was 3.7 million. In 2013 it had risen to 4.1 million.


Vision 2014 promised to reduce poverty by half:

In 2004 the number of social grant recipients was 7.8 million

In 2011 the number of social grant recipients had risen to 15.5 million.

In 2004 48% of our nation was living below R524 a month

In 2011 this had increased to 52.3%.

That means that in 2004 22 million of the people of our nation were living on less than R524 a month
In 2011 that number had increased to 26.5 million.

In 2008 The Department of Labour said that the total skills shortage in the economy was 512,357 people

In 2012 the Department of Higher Education and Training's Skills Demand List reports says that the skills shortage is now 1.7 million people.


The ANC's 2009 manifesto promised to encourage students from working-class and poor communities to go to tertiary institutions by improving the National Student Financial Aid Scheme

We have seen over the last week or two what disarray the NSFAS scheme is in. It is precisely the students from working-class and poor backgrounds who are prejudiced. As a result, enrolment in tertiary institutions still reflects our apartheid heritage.

The 2009 manifesto also promised to phase in the National Health Insurance over the next five years. Here we are, at the end of those five years, and what do we have? A pilot scheme in 11 areas.

The ANC is now telling us to wait for another 16 years to reap the fruit of its neoliberal fantasy which it calls the National Development Plan

I could go on, with more examples. But the message is already clear. There is very little correlation between ANC election manifestos and reality.

NUMSA's Response

So, what is NUMSA's response to the state of our nation?

It was against this background that NUMSA's Special National Congress debated and passed its ground-breaking resolutions.

The Congress demanded accountability for the Marikana massacre right from the Minister and the National commissioner of police downwards, including all politicians who were involved. Those who were party to this massacre of workers must go.

The Congress decided that NUMSA will not spend workers’ money on the ANC campaign and we will not, as a union, campaign for the ANC. I have already today given you enough explanation for that decision.
The Congress resolved that NUMSA will play a central role, as a catalyst, in the building of a united front. That United Front will take up the bread and butter issues of the working-class. It will link our struggles on the shop floor with our struggles in our communities. It will build an irresistible force for fundamental change.

The Congress agreed to open the scope of our union to organize across value chains. This has been necessitated by the global restructuring of capitalism.

The Congress mandated the NUMSA leadership to study, research and investigate various forms of independent working-class parties and to serve as a catalyst to form a party. Such a party would contest elections at an appropriate time. This resolution came from the understanding that unless the working-class organizes itself as a class for itself, it will remain unrepresented and for ever toil behind the bourgeoisie.

The Congress also called on the COSATU leadership to convene a COSATU Special Congress in line with the COSATU Constitution, with immediate effect. And it called on COSATU to break out of the alliance, which has failed to use the political power it secured in 1994 to take ownership and control of the national wealth of our country and replace the white racist colonial economy.

Finally the Congress threw its weight behind the campaign of rolling mass action initiated by the NUMSA structures to demand fundamental change in the direction of the South African economy and society.

So, on February 26th, NUMSA has called for a national strike and community action to demand an end to the Employment Tax Incentive Act:

It will not encourage real employment creation

It discourages decent work

It will lead to the displacement of unsubsidized workers


Instead we demand the fundamental restructuring of the economy to create jobs through building manufacturing industry. When it comes to the young people of South Africa, we demand from the government:

Provide us with free tertiary education

Build stronger links between FETs and industry

Give career guidance at schools to match youth to skills needed in the economy

Use infrastructure projects to train local youth


And we demand from employers:

Invest in your workforce through training and development

Increase your intake of interns and apprentices

Support the FETs and disadvantaged schools in your area

Use the infrastructure project tenders that you win to train local youth


We are calling for the working-class and the poor of South Africa to demonstrate in their numbers on February 26th that we have had enough. The nation must be protected from those who are destroying it. February 26th is the beginning of our rolling mass action throughout 2014. We are starting to build the irresistible force that will take back our nation and build it in the interests of the majority. •

Adopted by the NUMSA Special NEC on 15th September 2013, Issued publicly by: Irvin Jim, NUMSA General Secretary.

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Statement from the Workers and Socialist Party on developments within COSATU



Time for a socialist trade union federation

Cosatu is convulsing in its death throes as the once mighty federation’s long drawn out death agony nears its conclusion. The pro-ANC wing in Cosatu’s leadership, at this week’s Special Central Executive Committee (SCEC) plumbed new depths in their long standing betrayal of the working class. The meeting in effect read Cosatu its last rites. The constitution of Cosatu has been torn up in the decision not to convene a special congress. The principle of workers’ control – a central tenet of Cosatu since its foundation – has been annihilated in the effective declaration that the leadership of Cosatu is no longer accountable to the membership or recallable by them. Cosatu is now officially run by a cabal whose priority is not advancing the interests of the working class but of serving the ANC and the capitalist class behind them. Numsa’s long expressed fear that Cosatu was in danger of being turned into a mere ‘labour desk’ for the ANC has been realised.

In reality, the SCEC meeting was nothing more than a factional meeting of the pro-ANC Cosatu leaders. The absence of the nine unions supporting Numsa’s call for a special congress shatters the claim that this meeting had any constitutional standing. Only eight of nineteen affiliates were represented at the meeting. The contortions that Cosatu president Dlamini and acting general secretary Ntshalintshali performed for the media to attempt to claim quoracy for the SCEC was a thinly veiled attempt to disguise the illegitimacy of their own leadership. A split is all but guaranteed now.

Central to the escalation of the factional war in Cosatu were the decisions taken by Numsa – Cosatu’s largest affiliate – at their own Special National Congress in December last year. Numsa’s SNC took a series of historic decisions, most importantly to withdraw their support for the ANC and the South African Communist Party. In recognising the significance of this, we described Numsa’s congress as “the most important trade union congress since the founding of Cosatu in 1985”. We explained that the stand of Numsa was an aftershock of the earthquake of the Marikana massacre and that Numsa’s decisions were themselves seismic events in their own right. More tremors would certainly follow and this week’s SCEC has confirmed this.

In a letter sent to Numsa immediately after the SCEC meeting the pro-ANC faction has thrown down the gauntlet and given their answer to Numsa’s special congress decisions. They have helped to further clarify the class lines that divide the two factions. The letter says that “the CEC formed the preliminary view that NUMSA should be suspended or expelled from its affiliation of COSATU because NUMSA has in the recent past acted against the interests of the Federation, and implicitly threatens to continue to do so in the future”. The letter then itemises Numsa’s ‘crimes’ as, (1) breaking from the ANC, (2) planning a march to Cosatu’s next CEC meeting, (3) Numsa’s withholding of their affiliation fee to Cosatu, (4) breaking from the SA Communist Party, (5) the decision to expand Numsa’s scope of recruitment.

All pretences have thus been abandoned. The battle in Cosatu was never about Vavi as we have consistently pointed out. The reality is that it is the ANC that “acted against the interests of the Federation” if by that we identify the interests of the working class. It is not Numsa that has a case to answer but the pro-ANC Cosatu leaders. Even so they have the audacity to demand that Numsa must explain why it is that Numsa should not be expelled!

So arrogant is the pro-ANC wing that they are not just showing the door to Numsa but threatening the other eight unions exercising their constitutional right in supporting the call for a special congress. They too will be written to asking them to “clarify” whether they share Numsa’s views on the ANC and the Tripartite Alliance. Having made an example of Numsa and how such views would be treated this equates to placing a gun to the head of the other unions.

The continuing campaign against suspended Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi was also escalated at the SCEC. Further internal charges are to be brought against Vavi based on investigations of his day-to-day management of Cosatu by an external auditor. Whether or not there is a case for Vavi to answer, the move is entirely factionally motivated.


The new calculations of the ANC

The pro-ANC wing is pursuing a scorched earth policy. On the one-hand this suits their narrow self-interest by allowing them to maintain the perks of office as long as possible. But more fundamentally it reflects the new calculations of their ANC masters after the failure of ‘plan A’ of keeping the federation intact – at least formally – as part of the Tripartite Alliance. Early on in the dispute a task team of high profile ANC leaders was appointed to try and quell the rebellion within Cosatu. But Numsa’s defiant stand and the support they won from nearly half of Cosatu’s affiliates for a special congress – which would see an attempt to remove the pro-ANC wing from office and reinstate Vavi – scuppered this scenario.

Then came the blow of Numsa’s SNC decision to sever ties with the ANC and SACP. This represented the conscious articulation by Numsa that what was driving the factional war were not the merits of the case against Vavi but the contradictions inherent in the participation of Cosatu in the Alliance with the pro-capitalist ANC. In other words the real issues were finally put on the table.

Now the ANC is calculating that it is better for them to wreck Cosatu and attempt to splinter the organised working class. This is the only course left open to them to try and weaken the inevitable response of the working class to the worsening position of the SA economy and the mass resistance that will be stoked by another five year term of ANC rule and the implementation of the anti-working class National Development Plan. The ANC is calculating that if they can maintain a rump Cosatu as their loyal servant they will be able to use what remains of the federation as a treacherous fifth column in the labour movement paralleling the way that the National Union of Mineworkers operates in the mining industry following Marikana.


Time to found a new federation

There is no way that the pro-ANC Cosatu leaders acted in the way they did without a nod of approval from the highest levels of the ANC leadership. The only way to minimise the danger of a divided working class and to avoid being out manoeuvred by the ANC and their stooges in the Cosatu leadership is bold and swift action. The time has come for Numsa to lead the founding of a new trade union federation.

Up until the events of this week we had called for the formation of a Socialist Trade Union Network to unite workers in struggle on the key issues facing the working class – rising living costs, retrenchments, labour broking, service delivery, e-tolls etc. The purpose of such a call was to provide an organisational form that could act as a bridge from Cosatu’s inaction to working class unity on the basis of a programme of struggle without jeopardising the battle to reclaim Cosatu from the pro-ANC wing or raise unnecessary barriers to workers uniting in struggle regardless of union, federation or political affiliation. In the fast pace of developments this call has been superseded and the need to immediately move to found a new federation has been placed on the agenda. It falls to Numsa to make this call and lead the process.


Enormous potential and the danger of delay

Any delay will be used by the ANC to attempt to peel away some of the other eight unions that boycotted the SCEC with Numsa and win them back to the prison of the now emasculated Cosatu. Any delay will be used to sow confusion within the ranks of the unions led by the pro-ANC wing to limit the certain exodus of members to any new federation. Any delay will prevent the inevitable – and necessary – split in Cosatu from being as decisive as it needs to be.

The potential for a new federation is enormous. Ceppawu (Chemical, Energy, Paper, Printing, Wood and Allied Workers Union), one of the pro-ANC led unions, is facing a revolt. Four of its seven regions have opposed the action being taken against Vavi. The four regions have gone public claiming Ceppawu has no mandate to be acting in the manner that it is as no national executive committee meetings have been held since last year. The four regions have broken from the pro-ANC national leadership of Ceppawu. In their statement they say “the four regions at their congresses have thus resolved and mandated their leaderships to join the call that the suspension of [Vavi] be lifted with immediate effect”.

Undoubtedly similar processes are taking place in all the pro-ANC led unions. Numsa must rally the eight already supporting their stand and appeal to the membership of the pro-ANC led unions to join in founding a new federation. Those unions supporting Numsa must immediately make preparations to convene their own special congresses to prepare their members as Numsa did in December. Then the nine must swiftly move to call a founding conference for a new trade union federation to play the role that the Cosatu special congress should have played. Rank-and-file members of the right-wing dominated unions should be invited to send delegates as observers. The Numsa leadership must also call on the new generation of non-Cosatu unions that have developed as the crisis in Cosatu has built up over years – such the National Transport Movement and the South African Correctional Services Workers Union (SACOSWU) – to take part.

From its inception a new federation must be explicitly socialist if it is to offer a genuine way forward for the working class. It must be based on a fighting socialist programme than can unite the working class in struggle on the immediate issues described above but also link that to the need for the socialist transformation of society. The political struggle must be taken-up in the foundation of a new federation.


The sham of ANC support

The 2014 elections are a key battle field. As is increasingly recognised, the splitting of Cosatu reflects the incompatibility of the Alliance between Cosatu and the pro-capitalist ANC. The recent events are in step with the collapsing support for the ANC more generally. The ANC will boast of Cosatu’s continuing participation in the Tripartite Alliance in the 2014 elections. After this week’s events this claim, already threadbare, is completely hollow.

In the 2004 election twelve million did not vote. In 2009 this increased to 12.4 million. The largest trade union on the continent – Numsa – based on the industrial working class has decided not to campaign for the ANC. The previous holder of the title of largest trade union – the NUM – saw its membership decimated after years of class collaboration with the mining bosses at the behest of the ANC. Especially after Marikana, the mass of mineworkers – the backbone of the working class – has simultaneously broken their political tie to the ANC and helped found the Workers and Socialist Party. The country is burning with record numbers of service delivery protests now averaging 32 per day. The students are in open revolt on the campuses. Support for the ANC is collapsing. Even ahead of the 2014 elections, the working class are already voting with their feet!

Such is the anger of the working class that there exist, side-by-side with each other, apparently contradictory attitudes towards the 2014 elections – a boycottist mood and a desire to punish the ANC at the polls. The former has the potential to increase the voter stay-away that has been developing particularly over the past two elections. This however has not prevented the ANC – the biggest frog in the small parliamentary pond – from gaining a substantial share of the vote (nearly seventy percent and just under two thirds in 2004 and 2009 respectively). In reality the ANC’s share of the vote of the eligible voting population was reduced to 34% 2009 from 38% in 2004. In reality this is a minority government. Despite this the ANC has presented itself as the party enjoying the support of the overwhelming majority. This has emboldened them to go on the offensive that culminated in Marikana, the abandonment of nationalisation, the adoption of the NDP, the youth wage subsidy, the implementation of e-tolls and an assault on hard won democratic rights.

On the other hand the mood to punish the ANC at the polls has resulted in the highest level of voter registration ever – 80% according to the IEC. This suggests that people will vote for other parties not necessarily out of conviction, but to reduce the ANC’s vote. This could result in an increase in the vote for the pro-capitalist opposition parties, especially the DA or even Agang. Similarly the EFF will benefit. Either way, the lack of a positive decision by Numsa for a definite alternative could complicate the path towards the socialist revolution in the immediate period ahead. Numsa’s current position, unfortunately, leaves a vacuum. Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. It can be filled just as easily with left wing populism, or right wing reaction as it can with a genuine revolutionary socialist alternative which it is in the hands of Numsa to spearhead the formation of. By the time that Numsa’s schedule for a new party in 2015 arrives the path to a new mass workers party will be strewn with the debris of small pro-capitalist parties with both openly anti-working class programmes but others disguised with nationalist and and/or left populist.

Numsa’s courageous stance has placed them firmly in the position of the political vanguard of the working class. It is to Numsa that the working class is looking. But the situation demands action now. The rhythm of historical events cannot be determined by tempo of Numsa’s internal processes towards a workers’ party.


The intertwining of the political question

But this mass opposition needs to be harnessed into a positive alternative in 2014. Not to do so delivers the pro-ANC Cosatu leaders the prize that they are willing to destroy the federation for: the continued dominance of the ANC in the rule of this country and behind them the advancement of the interests of the capitalist class. They have admitted as much in citing “financial constraints” and “election work for the ANC” as excuses for not convening a special congress. In other words they are shamelessly hijacking the name and resources of Cosatu to place them at the service of the anti-working class ANC.

Whilst we applaud the historic decision of Numsa not to campaign for the ANC in 2014, not to throw their weight behind a working class socialist alternative contains dangers. Numsa general secretary Irvin Jim is clearly realising the limitations of Numsa’s current position on 2014. In the face of the defiance by the pro-ANC wing at the SCEC comrade Jim therefore proposed taking Numsa’s SNC position a step further by saying it was “tempting” to propose a vote against the ANC. We consider this a step forward. In practice, actively not campaigning for the ANC naturally poses the question of how this is to be done. It can surely only mean voting for an alternative party.

Unless this is clarified the Numsa SNC decisions, even with the further clarification added by comrade Jim, remains ambiguous and susceptible to manipulation by enemies of Numsa and the working class. The unintended consequence of cautioning that “there is still no decision” to campaign against the ANC, could embolden the pro-ANC wing as it can look like hesitation on this decisive question on the part of the Numsa leadership. The ANC already assumed that this was the meaning of Numsa’s decision in their calculations before launching the latest assault at the SCEC. To them this threat to call for a vote against the ANC is not fundamentally different from the original SNC decision to withdraw support from the ANC. To them comrade Jim’s threat merely reaffirms the original SNC decision and will therefore barely register.

Numsa’s enemies will not hesitate on any ambiguities in Numsa’s positions. For example, following comrade Jim’s remarks it could be argued that it suggests there is a gap between Numsa as an organisation and Numsa members as individuals. What other interpretation of Numsa’s decision not to campaign for the ANC is there other than that Numsa is simultaneously encouraging its members not to vote for the ANC? The ANC has already attempted to open up a division between Numsa along these lines. ANC general secretary Gwede Mantashe attempted to dismiss Numsa’s decision not to campaign for the ANC as being of little importance by his casual suggestion that he expects individual Numsa members to still vote for the ANC. The failure to call for support for an alternative has opened up the space for this attempt to sow divisions because the question of how Numsa members should vote has been left unanswered. The attempt to draw a distinction between unions as “organisations” and “individual” union members is a subtler part of the many divide-and-rule tricks in the book of the class enemy.

In reality a union is nothing but its membership. Democratic decisions are binding on individuals in a union because of the understanding that the basic principle of trade unionism in strength in unity. We know that this is the Numsa leadership’s understanding of trade unionism and that they have been scrupulously democratic throughout the period of the crisis in Cosatu. So the comrades must be cautious not to make statements that give the capitalist class any traction in trying to undermine Numsa and slow the process of the building of the working class’s political independence.

The consolidation of the other eight unions supporting Numsa has also been weakened by the failure to propose a clear alternative to voting ANC in 2014. The tremendous potential for a political alternative was shown in the Numsa organised press conference with leaders of the other eight unions. As a group, Numsa and the other eight warned the Cosatu leadership that there was no Cosatu policy to give unconditional support to the ANC in 2014. In the words of Samwu general secretary Walter Theledi “workers have never agreed that Cosatu should give the ANC a blank cheque”.

But the day after this press briefing, five of the eight unions pulled back from the brink and indicated that they would indeed be either campaigning for the ANC or calling on their members to vote ANC. This backtracking should not be a surprise. Anyone who challenges the ANC head-on as Numsa has done puts themselves in the line of fire. This is why the Numsa leadership can confidently be called courageous regardless of our criticisms of the limitations of the position adopted on the 2014 elections. But why would the leaders of the other eight unions stick their necks out further when no positive alternative is being offered. A break with the ANC would unleash an avalanche of ANC slander against them. The most effective defence against that would be to rally behind a definite alternative which would provide the political basis for the working class solidarity that must be the foundation of the new federation.


Clear guidance on 2014 is urgent!

As the crisis in Cosatu reaches its apogee and the 2014 elections rush toward us, the intertwining of all the strategic organisational questions are laid ever more clearly before the class. The general task is the building of the independence of the working class. That now means the urgent necessity for the founding of a new federation to unite and lead struggle. But this is only one half of the answer. The other half is the need to build a mass workers’ party on a socialist programme to give a lead in 2014 and take the fight onto the political plane.

At Numsa’s SNC, delegates, in their endorsement of the Secretariat Report adopted a set of criteria that should be used to appraise any political party. These included (1) the class composition of the party, (2) the class politics represented by the party’s programme, (3) the party’s track record, (4) the extent to which the party has democratic structures. These criteria were used to explicitly reject supporting the new Economic Freedom Fighters and Agang SA. In rejecting the EFF, attention was drawn to their failure to call for nationalisation on the basis of workers’ control or clearly naming the alternative to capitalism as socialism. As a minimum, we believe that Numsa should issue the criteria described above, already adopted as policy at the SNC, as voting guidelines to its members and promote them in a high profile campaign.

Given the parties that are likely to contest the 2014 elections this in practice amounts to calling for a vote for WASP. From the above it is clear that supporting WASP complements Numsa’s internal decision making processes. It is clear that WASP meets Numsa’s criteria. WASP was born out of the struggles of the mineworkers. WASP stands for the nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy under workers control and management as the basis for constructing a socialist society. In its short life, WASP has been central to the struggles of the mineworkers and led and engaged with all manner of struggles of other workers, communities and youth. WASP has a democratic and federal structure in order to lay the basis for the maximum unity of the working class. In the run-up to their SNC WASP invited Numsa to “take its place in the leadership of WASP”. We repeat that call with growing urgency as the 2014 elections loom.

WASP has been set up with a federal structure. Upon the basis of agreement with a basic socialist programme, organisations and individuals can unite under the WASP umbrella. We believe this is the only way to begin uniting those forces that can lay the basis for a genuine mass workers party in the future. We are taking an inclusive approach to the drawing up of election lists for the 2014 elections and those candidates we hope to send into the National Assembly. WASP’s federal structure offers Numsa the opportunity to send its own candidates into the National Assembly under the WASP umbrella. The only requirement would be adherence to the basic programme and principles of WASP, cooperation with other WASP representatives, participation in the leading bodies of WASP and a commitment to help build and develop the party. This includes the crucial requirement that all elected representatives of WASP are recallable by the party and will only take the average wage of a skilled worker with the remainder of the MPs salary going back into the party. This is the only way to guard against the corruption and co-option of workers representatives that the state institutions that facilitate the capitalist classes’ rule encourage.

Even a small group of MPs in the next parliament would be an important ancillary to the struggles that will be waged in the workplaces and the communities in the next period. Numsa’s current answer to the political crisis facing the working class was the decision at their SNC to launch a Movement for Socialism. We intend to play a full part in this but have raised elsewhere our criticism that it is a significant limitation that this initiative is not clearly a call for a campaign to build a mass workers’ party on a socialist programme. Using the WASP umbrella to send workers’ representatives into parliament in 2014 does not preclude the widest possible consultation taking place now and after the elections on the road to a mass workers’ or labour party. On the contrary, imagine how immeasurably the case for the Movement for Socialism would be strengthened by already having demonstrated the appetite amongst the working class for such a movement by having elected representatives even at this early stage. In pursuing such a twin tactic, Numsa would make an invaluable contribution to laying the foundation for a new mass workers party on a socialist programme.

http://workerssocialistparty.co.za/time-for-a-socialist-trade-union-federation/

[guy123]

South Africa: Forward to the Building of a Mass Workers’ Party Based on a Revolutionary Program!
NUMSA’s break with the ANC is an important step forward. A strong revolutionary organization is needed to overcome mis-leadership and to avoid yet another betrayal of our struggle for liberation!
Statement of the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT), 5.2.2014, www.thecommunists.net

1. South Africa’s largest single trade union, the metal worker’s NUMSA, has broken its long-standing ties with the bourgeois ANC and the Stalinist SACP. NUMSA has also raised – albeit in algebraic terms – the possibility of forming a mass workers’ party. In addition, COSATU – the country’s largest federation – is deeply divided and could split in the next few months because of the loyal support for the ANC government by the dominant faction in COSATU’s leadership. The recently founded Workers and Socialist Party (WASP) as well as the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), led by the former ANC youth leader Julius Malema, reflect the desire of the most advanced sectors of the workers and poor to build an new party alternative to the bourgeois ANC. This creates the historic opportunity to form an independent mass workers’ party for the first time in South Africa, a party which could lead the working class and the poor towards socialism. However, this exciting opportunity is in danger since, at the top of NUMSA, EFF, and WASP, are leaderships which have proven during their history that they are incapable of fighting for the historic interests of the working class. To build a mass workers’ party which is really independent of the bourgeoisie, socialists in South Africa must organize on the basis of a revolutionary program in order to fight against these existing petty-bourgeois leaderships.

NUMSA’s Break with the ANC: a Historic Step

2. It is certainly no exaggeration to call the results of NUMSA’s Special National Congress in December 2013 “historic.” There, NUMSA denounced the so-called Triple Alliance (ANC, SACP, and COSATU) as “been captured by rightwing forces” and “calls on COSATU to break from the Alliance”. In addition, NUMSA resolved to “[withhold] our subscriptions to COSATU as an ultimatum for the convening of the Special National Congress of COSATU.” In line with this decision, in late January 2014 nine unions issued an ultimatum to the leadership of COSATU regarding the calling of a Special Congress before the end of March, and demanding the immediate reinstatement of Zwelinzima Vavi as General Secretary. (The latter was recently sacked by the pro-ANC faction in the COSATU trade union bureaucracy.) The NUMSA congress also resolved to “lead in the establishment of a new United Front that will coordinate struggles in the workplace and in communities, in a way similar to the UDF of the 1980s.” In addition, it resolved that “Numsa will explore the establishment of a Movement for Socialism as the working class needs a political organisation committed in its policies and actions to the establishment of a socialist South Africa.“
3. These decisions are historic. They put on the agenda the possibility of breaking up the reactionary popular front which– with the help of the Stalinist-reformist SACP – tied the workers’ movement to the ANC for many decades. The ANC was initially a petty-bourgeois-nationalist movement which was transformed into a bourgeois, pro-imperialist party in the early 1990s. In 1994, the ANC – with the full support of the SACP and the COSATU leadership – concluded a reactionary deal with the white monopoly capitalists in South Africa. This rotten deal formally ended Apartheid and was cheered by the reformists and most centrists (including the DSM/CWI) as “national liberation.” In fact it was a democratic counterrevolution – as were the sell-outs and de-mobilizations of the heroic liberation struggles of the workers and youth that occurred in many other countries in the 1970s and 1980s. In fact, the white monopoly capitalists were allowed to continue their rule in exchange for accepting the ANC as the new executive of the ruling class, and by incorporating a small layer of black politicians and capitalists.

South Africa’s Post-Apartheid Capitalism: Continuation of Super-Exploitation and Poverty for the Black Working Class and Oppressed

4. Since 1994, the ANC has ruled the country in the service of the bourgeoisie. While formal political Apartheid has been abolished, social Apartheid continues. Capitalist South Africa is one of the most unequal countries in the world. According to official statistics, more than a quarter of the population is unemployed. Related to this is the dramatic increase of diseases and violence. It is estimated that a total of at least 2.6 million people have died of AIDS (mainly young adults and children), and as a result, the median age of death has fallen from 52 in 1997 to 43 in 2007. Another expression of the society’s decline is the extremely high level of murder, rape, and violence against women (the homicide rate for women was 25 per 100,000 in the early 2000s, six times the global average!)
5. While a small black middle class and an even smaller black bourgeoisie have been created after 1994, the huge majority of the black population remains super-exploited and poor. Official unemployment among black people is five times higher than among whites. Only 2% of white households earned less than Rand 20,000 ($ 2,500) a year, compared with 49% of black and 23% of colored households. At the same time, the rich capitalist and land-owning classes remain nearly completely white. While the white population constitutes only 9.2% of the population, over 95% of the Johannesburg Securities Exchange is still controlled by white capitalists. The white minority nets 45% of total household income, about eight times that of black households. Similarly, the land expropriation of the black population continues to exist: A small elite of 60,000 white farmers own almost 87% of the land.
6. In addition, an increasing number of migrants now live in South Africa – the majority of these are about 3 million documented and undocumented migrants from Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Mozambique, and Swaziland. As migrants, they are even more super-exploited by South Africa’s capitalists than the native black workers.
7. This development is a glaring confirmation of the Marxist thesis that neither poverty nor national and racial oppression can be abolished as long as capitalism continues to exist. Equality for all can only be achieved if the working class overthrows the capitalists by means of a socialist revolution and builds a workers’ republic. In other words, as Trotsky explained, Marxists have to combine the democratic tasks with the socialist tasks in the strategy of permanent revolution.
8. It is hardly surprising that the workers and poor have become increasingly disenchanted with the ANC after two decades of its rule. In the last two elections, only 56% of the registered voters went to the polls. However in 2012, anger turned into mass resistance culminating in the heroic miners’ strike in Marikana in August 2012. The brutal repression by the police was an important lesson for millions of workers. It demonstrated that the ANC government is an executive of the bosses, that the SACP bureaucracy, which has two ministers in the government, is equally a class enemy, and that the COSATU bureaucracy was either also supporting the repression of the miners or remained passive and failed to mobilize support for the miners. Marikana convinced the workers’ vanguard that it needs unions which are liberated from the treacherous bureaucracy, as well as and a new party which serves the working class and not the capitalists’ interests.
9. It has been this massive shift in the consciousness of the workers and youth that led 100,000 miners to leave NUM/COSATU and join AMCU and propelled the foundation of the Malema’s EFF as well as the WASP. Similarly, it was this massive pressure from the rank and file workers which forced the leadership of NUMSA to end its support for the ANC and call for a new United Front as well as a “Movement for Socialism.” These developments reflect that South Africa has entered a pre-revolutionary phase.

The Challenge of a New Mass Workers’ Party

10. These developments are of major importance for all socialists in South Africa and around the world. Without doubt, in terms of the class struggle and working class consciousness, South Africa is today one of the most advanced countries world-wide. The South African workers’ vanguard now has the historic opportunity to form for the first time an independent mass workers’ party in South Africa, a party which could lead the working class and the poor towards socialism. However, the pre-requisites for achieving this are a realistic assessment of the existing leaderships, the elaboration of a revolutionary action program, and the unification of the South African revolutionaries in a Bolshevik organization.
11. Socialists should strongly welcome the decisions of the NUMSA congress and join the thousands of activists in moving forward with a policy of class struggle. However, at the same time, they must differentiate between the enthusiasm of the rank and file activists and the reformist political calculations of the union leaders. Socialists judge the NUMSA leadership not by its words in congress resolutions, but by its deeds. What has been the record of the union bureaucracy in the past two decades? It politically and financially supported the capitalist government ANC party. What was the record of the union bureaucracy during the Marikana strike? It failed to mobilize its support for the miners and call for the expulsion of the police union from COSATU and the banishment of the strike-breaking NUM leadership. Of course, socialists must not draw any sectarian conclusions from this. If, rather, NUMSA now mobilizes for mass actions against the government, this must receive the full support of socialists. Similarly, socialists should call on NUMSA to launch a mass workers’ party and initiate or participate in every possible activity towards this goal. But at the same time, socialists must warn against any illusion regarding the NUMSA bureaucracy.

Obstacles to the Founding of a New Workers’ Party

12. Not only has the NUMSA leadership failed in the past, the dangers of future betrayals are already lurking in the resolutions of their recent congress. These fail to give a clear commitment to the building of a mass workers’ party and to challenge the ANC in the upcoming elections this year. They also praise the old ANC program – the “Freedom Charter” – and commit themselves to fight for it. But the “Freedom Charter” was a petty-bourgeois democratic, not a working class socialist program. The historic ANC leader Nelson Mandela explained this unambiguously as early as 1956: “Whilst the Charter proclaims democratic changes of a far-reaching nature, it is by no means a blueprint for a socialist state but a programme of the unification of various classes and groupings amongst the people on a democratic basis. Under socialism the workers hold state power. They and the peasants own the means of production, the land, the factories and the mills. All production is for use and not for profit. The Charter does not contemplate such profound economic and political changes. Its declaration ‘The People Shall Govern!’ visualises the transfer of power not to any single social class but to all the people of this country, be they workers, peasants, professional men, or petty-bourgeoisie.” (Nelson Mandela: Freedom in our Lifetime, 30 June 1956). Thus, the “Freedom Charter” already contained the future capitulation to the monopoly capitalists in the early 1990s. A new independent workers’ party must be built on a socialist and not a petty-bourgeois program! In addition, the NUMSA resolution calls for a united front “similar to the UDF of the 1980s.” But the UDF was a popular front, i.e., an alliance with petty-bourgeois forces that sought to win over sectors of the white bourgeoisie. It was a chief instrument in advancing the sell-out in 1994!
13. The NUMSA leadership is a trade union bureaucracy which is currently moving to the left because it is being forced to do so by pressure from the workers’ vanguard. This leadership remains stuck in reformist policies and an orientation towards a popular front. Given the nature of the NUMSA bureaucracy, like that of all trade union bureaucracies, i.e., a privileged layer integrated via numerous strings into the capitalists’ system, this cannot be otherwise. In order to transform the unions into organs of the revolutionary class struggle, it is necessary to liberate them from their bureaucracies and win them over to a socialist program. In order to facilitate the process of building unity with NUMSA workers, socialists should apply the united front tactic as developed by the Bolsheviks: They must call on the union leaders to organize militant actions, while at the same time warning the rank in file workers about the dangers of betrayals by the union leadership. They have to focus on closing ranks with the workers and winning them over for a socialist program, instead of focusing on deals with the bureaucrats. Socialists should work inside NUMSA – as well as inside other unions – and organize a revolutionary opposition. They should build a rank and file movement, and win it over for a socialist program, thereby transforming the union into an authentic instrument of class struggle.
14. Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) have attracted many militant youth as well as sectors of the workers. This is hardly surprising, given the militant rhetoric of the EFF and its support for the Marikana strikers. However, Malema must be judged by his deeds, not his words. Malema, too, has for many years supported the ANC government. Today, he is reaching out to Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the arch-reactionary leader of the Inkatha Freedom Party, who collaborated with the white Apartheid regime in the 1980s against the liberation struggle. The EFF is not a workers’ party, but rather a petty-bourgeois left-populist force. However, socialists would be dead-wrong to ignore the fact that the EFF today rallies tens of thousands of workers and youth behind it. In addition, in practical terms, Malema’s EFF has, in various recent class struggle events, stood to the left of the COSATU bureaucracy and the Stalinist SACP. The task is to work side-by-side with the EFF supporters and implement the united front policy towards the EFF, in order to break the workers and youth away from the Malema leadership.
15. The formation of WASP has been an important step forward since this reflects the political radicalization of vanguard sectors of the militant miners and other workers. Since promoting the formation of a mass workers’ party is a chief task in South Africa, socialists should have a positive attitude towards WASP and should work together closely with its militants (including, perhaps, even joining its ranks). However the major defect of WASP is the fact that its leadership is dominated by the right-centrist DSM, the South African section of the CWI. In the 1980s the predecessor of the DSM was part of the ANC and refused to fight for an independent workers’ party. In 1994, it supported the ANC in the general elections and was complicit in camouflaging the democratic counter-revolution as “national liberation.” Unsurprisingly, the DSM leaders don’t say a single word critical of NUMSA’s praise for the “Freedom Charter” and the UDF of the 1980s. (See WASP: After Numsa's congress – seize a historical opportunity in the 2014 elections, 30.1.2014.) In addition, the CWI absurdly believes that socialism can be achieved peacefully and via parliamentary elections. It also refuses to defend semi-colonial countries and peoples against imperialist aggressors (e.g., Gaza, Afghanistan, and Iraq). To ensure that WASP becomes an important instrument for the revolutionary class struggle, a strong revolutionary opposition has to be built to win over the entire party – including many of the honest DSM rank and file members – for an authentic socialist program.

What Should be the Program of a new Mass Workers Party?

16. As we have said earlier, present developments offer excellent opportunities to advance the organization of the workers’ vanguard independent of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois forces and to win them over to a revolutionary program. Socialists must enthusiastically participate in activities and discussions of NUMSA, EFF, WASP, and other organizations in order to advance a revolutionary program and a class struggle perspective. NUMSA speaks about the need for a united front. This is absolutely correct, and should be welcomed by all socialists. Revolutionaries should propose a program of struggle for such a united front. Such a program should include important immediate and transitional demands like: a massive raise of the minimum wage in all sectors; equal wages for women and migrants, a public employment and infrastructure program to abolish unemployment and to improve living and health conditions; the nationalization of the major industry and banking corporations under workers control; the expropriation of the white farmers; etc. The task should be to prepare for a nation-wide general strike which unites public sector workers with precarious workers and the unemployed, youth, and the poor. Such a perspective has to go hand in hand with a call to form factory committees and action councils in the townships, schools, etc., thereby organizing the broad masses. Furthermore, the formation of self-defense units must be promoted to repel the forces of repression which – as we saw at Marikana –are prepared to kill workers in the interest of the bosses. All organizations claiming to defend the interests of the workers and the oppressed should be called to join such a campaign.
17. At the same time, socialists should support all efforts to build a mass workers’ party independent of all factions of the bourgeoisie. It would be sectarian to make the adoption of a socialist program a precondition for participating in the formation of a new workers’ party. However, from the start socialists should argue for the necessity of an Action Program which outlines the transition from the present situation to the socialist revolution. Such a program should include the expropriation of the super-rich – native and foreign, white and black – and the nationalization of industry and the banks under workers’ control. It should also call for a comprehensive public reconstruction plan – elaborated in detail and under the control of the workers and the poor – to build the necessary infrastructure (housing, electricity, transport, health sector, etc.) to eradicate the extreme inequality in living conditions between the rich and poor, and the white and black populations. Another important task would be to rally the (mostly black) rural poor for the expropriation of the white landowners and the nationalization of the land. While socialists advocate, in principle, the formation of larger agricultural units to increase productivity, it is up to the rural poor to decide whether they wish to go along with such a policy of cooperatives, or if they prefer to distribute the land among them for individual farming. Finally the workers’ party should fight for the overthrow of the capitalist ruling class and the formation of a government of the workers and poor, based on councils and popular militias of armed masses.
18. The most urgent task now is to unite all authentic revolutionaries in a Bolshevik organization which will fight for such a program and actively participate in the present process of building a new workers’ party. It should also combine such a campaign with the fighting for a new workers’ International which, in our opinion, will be the Fifth Workers’ International. The RCIT looks forward to discussing these matters and collaborating with revolutionaries, in order to advance the formation of such a revolutionary organization.

[Jolly Red Giant]

the right-centrist DSM
Excuse me while I ROTFLMFAO :laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh:

[ckaihatsu]

http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/946.php


Socialist Project - home
The B u l l e t

Socialist Project • E-Bulletin No. 946
March 6, 2014

Socialist Project - home
The State of Class Struggle in South Africa

NUMSA

“People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be until they have learnt to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises.”

— V.I. Lenin in Three Sources and Three Component parts of Marxism, March 1913.

“Nothing demonstrates better the increasing rigor of the colonial system: you begin by occupying the country, and then you take the land and exploit the former owners at starvation rates. Then with mechanization, this cheap labour is still too expensive. You finish up taking from the native their very right to work. All that is left for the Natives to do in their own land, at a time of great prosperity, is to die of starvation.”

— Jean Paul Sartre, 1964.


http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/b946.jpg


A. The world we live in today and our 20 years of “Democracy”

It is impossible to deny that the world has seen the most severe crisis of the global capitalist system. And, there is no end in sight, to this crisis.


More than anything else, what makes the current systemic and structural global crisis of capitalism more dangerous and frightening than in the past is the total intellectual, ideological, political and moral bankruptcy of the world capitalist leaders and their capitalist theorists: they have no answer to what increasingly appears to be the world's relentless progression toward mass poverty, worldwide unemployment, growing extreme global inequalities within and between nations of the world, vicious and extremely violent civil and international wars, global warming, environmental destruction – all pointing to the eventual destruction of our Earth and all life on it.

The neoliberal “Washington Consensus” has been completely discredited and confirmed dead especially by the 2007/08 global financial capitalist crises.

There is no alternative to discarding the theories and practices of capitalism, if we must save the Earth and its living systems. No amount of cosmetic reforms either in the centre of the global capitalist system nor anywhere in its periphery can hide the most obvious fact today: at a time when humanity has the most profound knowledge and technology, the world capitalist system of private greed risks all our lives and the very Earth we live on.

Mankind today is faced with one choice: abandon the capitalist system or perish by it.

We at NUMSA have no illusion that only a total destruction of capitalism and all it represents can save the Earth and give birth to a new civilization, a new reordering of common and democratic ownership, production and consumption patterns along a higher human life and Earth respecting human civilization. Such a civilization is Socialism.

A.1. The South African “Democratic Transition” and squandered opportunity

We at NUMSA have taken the trouble of reading the South African economic and political history, ultimately focusing on the imported capitalist revolution in the 20th century and our “negotiated settlement,” and their impact on the South Africa we live in today.

We have come to the following conclusions, very well captured in our policy papers and resolutions of our December 2013 National Special Congress, also found in the SACP “Path to Power” document of 1989:

The South African capitalist state did not emerge as a result of an internal popular anti-feudal revolution. It was imposed from above and from without.

From its birth through to the present, South African capitalism has depended heavily on the imperialist centers.

Capital from Europe financed the opening of the mines. It was the colonial state that provided the resources to build the basic infrastructure – railways, roads, harbours, posts and telegraphs.

It was an imperial army of occupation that created the conditions for political unification. And it was within a colonial setting that the emerging South African capitalist class entrenched and extended the racially exclusive system to increase its opportunities for profit.

The racial division of labour, the battery of racist laws and political exclusiveness guaranteed this. From these origins a pattern of domination, which arose in the period of external colonialism, was carried over into the newly formed Union of South Africa. From its origins to the present, this form of domination has been maintained under changing conditions and by varying mechanisms.

In all essential respects, however, the colonial status of the black majority has remained in place. Therefore we characterize our society as “colonialism of a special type.”

The 1994 “democratic transition” was supposed to lay a foundation for destroying colonialism of a special type in South Africa, a form of colonialism characterized by the existence side by side, of the colonial subjects and the local agents of colonialism and imperialism in the same geo-economic and political space.

Today, 20 years after the “democratic transition” nothing best confirms the fact that in all essential respects, however, the colonial status of the black majority has remained in place than of the 26 million South Africans who live in abject poverty, 25 million are Africans.

Further, all economic policies since 1994 have been incapable of defeating Colonialism of a Special Type and the effects of Apartheid capitalism, which condemned the South African black working-class to a life of misery and hardship.

The South African government's own 2011 census so well captures this ugly fact, the fact of the continuing colonial lives of millions of Black and African South Africans, post 1994.

Any shallow class analysis of the “negotiated settlement” in South Africa easily reveals the most obvious fact: the “negotiated settlement” was secured on the basis of abandoning the Freedom Charter and the land and property claims of the “natives.”

These devices of protecting white property rights in the “1996 negotiated constitution” effectively guaranteed white property rights and therefore, white economic dominance, and the logical and inevitable continuation of imperialist economic and political domination of South Africa.

A.2. The Freedom Charter and the Negotiated Settlement

At NUMSA we are convinced that the abandonment of the property clauses of the Freedom Charter by the ANC and the SACP formed the basis for the “democratic transition.”

We now know that while COSATU was busy putting together the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), ANC and SACP negotiators, together with representatives of South African white monopoly capitalism and their imperialist counterparts were busy stitching together a neoliberal post-Apartheid South Africa.

We are not surprised, therefore, that the RDP was quickly discarded in favour of GEAR, which has now formally become the National Development Plan (NDP).

It was inevitable that in 2012, in the ANC Mangaung Conference, GEAR mutated into the neoliberal National Development Plan, and, in the ANC, the matter of expropriating land and the commanding heights of the economy without compensation was formally buried. Effectively too, was buried any prospects of a worker friendly “National Democratic Revolution” and all hope of a seamless transition to a Socialist Republic of South Africa.

Today in South Africa, black and African poor people must wait for the profits to grow of white people and their sprinkling of a tiny filthy rich black and African middle class for any changes in their mass poverty and widespread unemployment.

It is this cruel reality, post 1994, and 20 years into our “democracy,” which caused NUMSA to hold its historic 2013 Special National Congress, and to take the resolutions it did, prominent among which is the recognition that the ANC led Alliance no longer serves any revolutionary purpose in South Africa today.

A.3. The State of the South African black and African working-class

At NUMSA we are, following the class analysis above, not surprised that in all black and African communities there is a state of restlessness, there are widespread protests now increasingly turning violent, against the bitter and cruel conditions of life in these communities.

We are not surprised that 20 years after the negotiated settlement, very little real wealth has been redistributed and as a result, education, housing, water services, sanitation, electricity, distance from quality social and economic productive activities and so on continue to be disastrous problems for black and African people of this country.

We are not surprised that South Africa, post 1994, has become the most unequal and socially violent place on Earth today.

We are not surprised that the white population continues to dominate in the economy, society and culture, today.

It is against this background that we examine the President of South Africa's State of the Nation Address of 2014, and the ANC government 2014 Budget Speech. Further, we examine the election promises using this background.

We in NUMSA understand the crisis in COSATU as simply a reflection of the on-going class struggles in the wider South African society in general and inside the ANC led alliance in particular.

B. State of the Nation Address (SoNA)

There is nothing in the State of the Nation Address that even remotely indicates that the ANC and its government are embarked upon a “radical transition” for full social justice in South Africa.

Nor does anything in the SoNA remotely signal the fact that the ANC is worried that virtually ALL Black and African communities, 20 years into democracy, are at war inside themselves!

While the SoNA correctly recognizes the ongoing extreme burden of unemployment, mass poverty and extreme inequalities, the SoNA simply treats all these as products of the failure of the South African economy to grow fast enough post 1994, and on the global crisis of capitalism.

The SoNA lamentably fails to locate the real roots and causes of the South African crisis of unemployment, poverty and extreme inequalities – the ongoing economic and social domination of South Africa by white capital and its black and imperialist surrogates.

The SoNA celebrates liberal democracy in South Africa without any shame at the exclusion of more than 25 million South Africans from this system that is black and African.

We see that the 2014 Budget Speech takes its cue from the SoNA, and also wastes time singing praises of the neoliberalism of the past 20 years.

C. ANC's Elections Manifestos: a look at the ANC's 2014 Vision

In 2004, the ANC launched its “Vision 2014.” The 2004 Manifesto was framed within this vision. We have now reached 2014, and the ANC has produced another Manifesto and yet another vision, which is now called “Vision 2030.” It is therefore propitious that we evaluate the ANC's performance in relation to its “Vision 2014” and in relation to its subsequent Manifestos.

In its 2004 Message from the President, the ANC called for “A People's Contract to Create Work and Fight Poverty.”

The combination of some of the most important targets and objectives making up Vision 2014, together with our findings, are as follows:

Reduce unemployment by half through new jobs, skills development, assistance to small businesses, opportunities for self-employment and sustainable community livelihoods.

Today, unemployment has in fact increased beyond the 2004 levels, self-employment has dwindled, and, more dangerously, Black and African communities are reeling from violent crimes and daily violent protests!

Reduce poverty by half through economic development, comprehensive social security, land reform and improved household and community assets.
Precisely because unemployment has in fact increased beyond the 2004 levels, we see today that more than 26 million South Africans are classified as extremely poor!

Provide the skills required by the economy, build capacity and provide resources across society to encourage self-employment with an education system that is geared for productive work, good citizenship and a caring society.

Marikana sums it all: the bulk of the population remains poorly educated, unskilled, living in abject poverty and in a very uncaring society. Today we are being conditioned to accept that every community protest will lead to deaths of some protesters!

Ensure that all South Africans, including especially the poor and those at risk – children, youth, women, the aged, and people with disabilities – are fully able to exercise their constitutional rights and enjoy the full dignity of freedom.
Violent crime and crimes against women and children are still intolerably high. An African child in South Africa today is many times more likely to be born in a poor household than before 2004.

Compassionate government service to the people; national, provincial and local public representatives who are accessible; and citizens who know their rights and insist on fair treatment and efficient service.

Again, the Marikana massacre speaks volumes about where we are. It is an open secret that the system of local government has collapsed, with very few of them having clean audits. So-called service delivery protests are the order of the day everywhere in the country. South Africa in fact leads in the number of violent community protests in the world today.

Massively reduce cases of TB, diabetes, malnutrition and maternal deaths, and turn the tide against HIV and AIDS, and, working with the rest of Southern Africa, strive to eliminate malaria, and improve services to achieve a better national health profile and reduction of preventable causes of death, including violent crime and road accidents.

While there have been some improvements in these variables, the quality, levels and efficiencies in the health system, especially the public health system, are pathetic. TB cases have actually increased.

Significantly reduce the number of serious and priority crimes as well as cases awaiting trial, with a society that actively challenges crime and corruption, and with programmes that also address the social roots of criminality.

Unemployment is globally recognized as a “significant contributor” to all crimes, including violent ones.

The fact that unemployment has in fact increased since 2004 is experienced by black and African communities through the high incidence of violent crimes, today with an increasing incidence of extreme forms of violence even among teenagers.

The failure to implement the property clauses of the Freedom Charter is the most profound root cause of violent crime in South Africa, in our opinion.

Position South Africa strategically as an effective force in global relations, with vibrant and balanced trade and other relations with countries of the South and the North, and in an Africa that is growing, prospering and benefiting all Africans, especially the poor.

The xenophobia that has engulfed post 1994 South Africa is the best test of just how badly positioned South Africa is globally, especially in the South. None of the rhetoric on balanced trade and other relations have materialized precisely because the ANC government has no real economic levers, because it has not implemented the property clauses of the Freedom Charter.

D. The ANC 2014 Budget speech

NUMSA has carried out the only comprehensive and detailed class analysis of the National Development Plan (NDP). Our conclusions are that the NDP is simply GEAR dressed up as a populist document.

Not only does the NDP fail to tackle the economic and social structural and systemic foundations of South African colonial economy and society, it quite pathetically promises wholly unrealistic and totally unachievable goals, just like its father – GEAR.

NUMSA has consistently argued that South African National Treasury Department has been post 1994, the home and custodian of neoliberalism in the South African government.

Pravin Gordan's 2014 Budget Speech announces that it locates the 2014 medium term budget in the NDP.

Like the SoNA, the 2014 Budget is littered with some self-praise, and the false promise of jobs, more housing, more water, more social security, better health and so on, all of them to be done within the NDP framework.

It is impossible to ignore Lenin's words in 1913:

“People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be until they have learnt to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises.”

The sweet coated promises contained in this Budget, including the pathetic increases on the social grants do not succeed to hide the fact that this is a budget designed to please South African white capital and its local agents and imperialism and their rating agents.

There is nothing in this budget which signals a “radical transition.” This is why the bosses and their political formations have received it very well.

A most blatant betrayal of the Black and African working-class is the bribery to white and black capital the budget gives in the form of the Youth Employment Incentive Tax. This has been done without exhausting the NEDLAC process and actually by contemptuously bypassing NEDLAC.

Rather than abolition the colonial and apartheid wage as demanded in the Freedom Charter, the budget instead bribes capital with free money, to divide the working-class!

This budget, more than anything else, confirms the rightwing shift in the ANC/SACP government.

E. The crisis in COSATU

We understand COSATU's launching principles and values as being the following:

COSATU is a worker controlled and democratic trade union federation.

COSATU is a Revolutionary Socialist Federation.

COSATU is an anti-imperialist federation; it fights against foreign capitalist domination.

COSATU rejects all forms of cultural, male chauvinist and racist prejudices.

COSATU is a militant federation.

It is a transformative federation.

COSATU is a champion of working-class democracy.

COSATU believes in working-class power, and advocates worker control not only of the progressive trade union movement, but of society as well.

COSATU believes in the revolutionary power and unity of the working-class, which is why it champions the formation of one union in one industry and one federation in one country.

In our opinion, it is these values and their articulation, which is at issue in COSATU today.

On one hand, there are those among COSATU leaders who see a COSATU guided by the values above as a threat to their potential careers in the ANC or its government. These leaders have long abandoned Socialism and are only paying lip service to the struggle for Socialism.

On the other hand, there are those leaders such as in NUMSA and the affiliates NUMSA is working with, who are determined to defend and advance the ideals for which COSATU was founded, including defending a Socialist COSATU.

Given the abandonment of a radical NDR by the ANC and the cooptation of the SACP into the ANC and its government, it is inevitable that COSATU must be plunged into a crisis by the fight to the death between these two class positions in COSATU – one for a COSATU that simply transmits the wishes of the rightwing ANC nationalists among the working-class and the other which wants to fight for a COSATU with its original values.

NUMSA has thus become the “enemy within” among the COSATU leadership clique that is embedded in the ANC and SACP. It so happens that this clique is numerically strong in the CEC of COSATU.

This pro rightwing ANC and SACP clique in COSATU wants to engineer the expulsion of NUMSA from COSATU. It has already engineered first the paralysis, and later the suspension of the General Secretary of COSATU – Zwelinzima Vavi.

This rightwing clique ignores the COSATU Constitution at will. It has refused to abide by the COSATU Constitution that demands that when a third of COSATU affiliates demand the convening of COSATU Special Congress, the President of COSATU must convene such a Congress or be replaced by a convener.

This rightwing clique, knowing very well that its positions have no mandates from its own members, is very scared of a Special National Congress because it knows the Special National Congress, besides exposing this rightwing, may also trigger leadership removals in their unions.

NUMSA's positions are very clear and quite simple:

Zwelinzima Vavi's unconstitutional public humiliation, harassment and suspension must be lifted immediately.

All mischievous and unconstitutional efforts to frustrate and expel NUMSA from COSATU must stop forthwith.

A COSATU Special Congress as requested by the appropriate number of unions must be convened immediately, to resolve all the causes of the crisis in COSATU.

NUMSA will do everything possible to achieve these objectives, including using the courts to stop the violations of the COSATU Constitution.

NUMSA is calling upon all members of COSATU affiliates to defend their federation from being swallowed into the ANC/SACP rightwing camp.

In the meantime, NUMSA continues to run with its section 77 campaigns.

F. Progress on the United Front and the Movement for Socialism

In order to understand NUMSA, especially in order to understand our resolutions on the United Front and Movement for Socialism, one has to understand what NUMSA is first.

NUMSA is a revolutionary formation, a red trade union, playing a leading role in the struggle to defeat capitalism and the exploitation that is associated with it. In that role we are unashamedly Marxist-Leninist, rooting ourselves in the traditions of Marx and Lenin. So we defy the boundaries between nations that are set up to divide workers as we proclaim ourselves as proletarian internationalists. That tradition also gives us democratic centralism, that combination of robust, vigorous and democratic debate with the discipline of marching together when we have made a decision. That combination makes us what we are proud to be – a red union.

The leadership of the national liberation movement as a whole has failed to lead a consistent radical democratic process to resolve the national, gender, and class questions post 1994. This leadership is predominantly drawn from the Black and African capitalist class; it kowtows to the dictates of white monopoly capitalist and imperialist interests. It is nothing more than parasitic and crony capitalists.

It is half-hearted and extremely inconsistent in the pursuit of a radical democratic programme and has completely abandoned the Freedom Charter.

It is these circumstances, combined with the worsening situation of the South African working-class as a whole post 1994, which has lead NUMSA to rethink and revisit its relationship with the ANC and its Alliance.

Work is well underway to mobilize the working-class in all their formations, into a United Front for the radical implementation of the Freedom Charter and against neoliberalism.

During our January NUMSA Marxist-Leninist Political School we met with the leaders of some of the social movements and community structures, to begin the process of mapping out how we will work together.

In order to reach out far and wide, NUMSA shall convene Provincial and National consultative meetings to share the content of our resolutions on the United Front and Movement for Socialism.

We are happy to note that many social movement organizations and community organizations are joining us in our Section 77 campaigns starting with a national strike on 19th March 2014.

During the course of this year, work will be done to assess the state of the world socialist movement and its formations, to inform our work toward the Movement for Socialism. The NUMSA Marxist-Leninist School in the first week of April 2014 shall receive representatives of Workers and Communist Parties from countries such as Brazil, Greece and Venezuela to share experiences and to lay the basis for our international research.

G. Engineering and Eskom negotiations in 2014 – The NUMSA
National Bargaining Conference (NBC)

As always, NUMSA has begun our Ear to the Ground Campaign in workplace general meetings to listen to the aspirations of NUMSA members with respect to collective bargaining demands in the Engineering industry and Eskom.

In collecting these demands our key and strategic objective is to improve the benefits and conditions of employment. The demands from the 9 NUMSA Regions shall be consolidated and tabled for discussion in our NUMSA National Bargaining Conference scheduled for 10-12 March 2014 in Saint Georges Hotel, Centurion.

Without pre-empting anything, we must be upfront that we are preparing for the mother of all battles as we shall champion the struggle for a living wage for workers in the Engineering Industry and Eskom in particular.

The union will use this round of negotiations not only for wages but also take up a very important campaign of defending existing jobs and to fight for more jobs. In extending our work beyond the factories, NUMSA shall on the 19th of March 2014 embark on a national strike to demand the scrapping of the employment tax incentive act or the so called youth wage subsidy. We shall do so in defense of existing jobs as we have reason to believe that the current spate of retrenchments notices across various sectors are directly linked to this stupid incentive scheme.

We refuse that the working-class of SA must be forced to pay for the global crisis of capitalism.

That is why we are calling on the mining bosses and government to quickly resolve the current strike in the platinum belt. It has become abundantly clear there is a joint pack between government and mining capital to destroy union activity outside of the NUM.

With respect to Eskom, NUMSA shall not rest until workers at Eskom receive a fair increase. We view the arbitration award that imposed 5.6 per cent as an insult that constitute a wage freeze.

We do need equity of pay. Currently white workers sit at the top of their pay grades while many black workers still languish at the bottom of their grades.

We can no longer tolerate Eskom and Government hiding behind the skirt of Nersa to justify paying lip service to a negotiation process where the power (the only power) of workers to withhold their labour is removed.

We are calling on all workers at Eskom to unite behind their legitimate right to demand a living wage if in these round of negotiations Eskom management doesn't move swiftly to make a real offer that will settle workers’ demands and hide behind essential service but pay workers peanuts, they would have to take full responsibility for a load shedding that would come as a result of workers insisting that their demands must be met.

Eskom now has a shareholder compact with government, but it does not call for fair wages rather it focuses on profit targets. Profit targeting means Eskom is under pressure to moderate wages.

Our members are victims of high standards of living as a result of administered prices that continue to rise and affecting negatively their basket of food and all aspects of their lives.

They continue to receive low wages as there is no National Minimum Wage that can guarantee them a living wage.

Workers are taking loans from loan sharks in-order to make a living.

There is poverty with virtually no assistance from the employers.

Unemployment, which makes those who are working to support those not working, imposes a heavy burden on our members as a result of the triple crises: poverty, unemployment and inequalities.

It is our members who are the victims of privatization and commodification of basic needs/services.

H. What is to be done?

As Lenin so well said, in 1913:

“People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be until they have learnt to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises.”

Twenty years into our “democracy,” we the Black and African South African working-class are sick and tired of listening to the same stories about us having to wait for the rich to grow their profits for us to see some minor improvements in our lives.

The working-class can only be defeated because it is not united. United, no force on Earth can defeat us.

As immediate tasks, we state the following:

NUMSA is calling all South African workers, Black and White and African, to join us in our United Front to demand the immediate and radical implementation of the Freedom Charter as the only basis for a truly democratic South Africa and in our fight against all neoliberal manifestations.
We are calling on all members of affiliates of COSATU to demand that their national leaders explain where they stand today, on the ongoing crisis in COSATU.
We call on all members of affiliates of COSATU to stand up and defend their federation from the vultures who want to turn it into a toy telephone of the ANC and the SACP.
We call on all mineworkers to stand together, united against the mine bosses and the government who are both fighting mining workers in their just struggle for a living wage.
As NUMSA, we fully support the just demands for a living wage for the mineworkers. We remain convinced, however, that with the increasing marriage between the ANC and its government and the mine bosses and shareholders, no just wage will be secured by mine workers.
We therefore call upon all workers to intensify the struggle to nationalize South African wealth, including the mines and land.

Our consistent Marxist-Leninist inspired class analysis of the world and South Africa today informs us that we have no option but to fight to the bitter end, for a Socialist world and Socialist South Africa. •


“Man at the Crossroads” by Diego Rivera.

Issued by the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) National Office Bearers at www.numsa.org.za.

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http://www.socialistproject.ca/leftstreamed/ls212.php


Home » LeftStreamed


New Working Class Leadership and the Prospects for Socialist Politics in South Africa


Toronto — 6 March 2014.

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View on YouTube website (http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhiXBRrj94PcqxWjoF9to5T_559slyIsD)

The dramatic upsurge of popular grass-roots protest in South Africa's townships and rural areas in recent years has been well-termed as marking a virtual “rebellion of the poor” in that country. The working-class itself has also been assertive there, prompting the ANC-led state's orchestration of an horrific massacre of dissident mine-workers at Marikana in 2012. Until recently, however, leading trade unions have themselves been cribbed and confined within the tri-partite governing coalition of the ANC, the South African Communist Party and COSATU, the country's largest trade union central body. Now NUMSA – the country's National Union of Metalworkers with over 340,000 members – has begun to break that mould, under the leadership of its General Secretary, Irvin Jim, a longstanding socialist militant in the union. At its Special National Congress in December it heralded a new socialist political direction for South Africa.

Presentation by Irvin Jim, General Secretary of National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA). Chaired by John S. Saul.

More recent analysis of South African politics:

NUMSA, “The State of Class Struggle in South Africa,” The Bullet No. 946
Judith Marshall, “Building a United Front Against Neoliberalism,” The Bullet No. 944
Irvin Jim, “Manifestos and Reality,” The Bullet No. 936
Sam Ashman and Nicolas Pons-Vignon, “NUMSA Rupture Could Mark New Start for Socialist Politics in South Africa,” The Bullet No. 935
Leonard Gentle, “Forging a New Movement,” The Bullet No. 933
Sponsored by: Greater Toronto Workers’ Assembly, Centre for Social Justice, Socialist Project, and BASICSnews.ca.


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http://socialistorganizer.org/dossier-on-the-recent-south-africa-elections/


Dossier on the recent South Africa Elections

By Fourth International

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IN THIS MESSAGE:

1) South Africa After the May 7 General Elections — by François Forgue (reprinted from Informations ouvrières)

2) Report from Tiyani Lybon Mabasa, president of the Socialist Party of Azania (SOPA)

3) May 15 Statement by the Central Committee of the Central Committee of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

1) South Africa After the May 7 General Elections

By François Forgue

[reprinted from the May 14-21 issue of Informations ouvrières (Labor News), the weekly newspaper of the Independent Workers Party of France (POI).]

This past May 7, 2014, general elections were held in South Africa. The elections took place at a time when tens of thousands of platinum mineworkers — on strike since January 23 to demand a monthly wage of 12,500 Rands (about US$1,300) — continued their strike, together with their union: AMCU.

The African National Congress (ANC) obtained 62.2% of the votes cast (with 59.3% of eligible voters turning out to vote) — that is to say, 5 percentage fewer votes cast than in the previous elections in 2009. Jacob Zuma will thus return as head of state.(1)

It was only 20 years ago that the overwhelming majority of the population of South Africa — the 90% of Blacks, mixed-race and Asians — were granted the right to vote, hitherto reserved only to the white minority.

The ANC, the party of Nelson Mandela, was identified with this great upheaval. For an entire generation, the vast majority of Black people of South Africa gave their support to the ANC to lead the country.

But it’s the policies implemented by the various ANC governments that are responsible for the current situation: these governments all accepted the dictates of the so-called “Kempton Park” Accords. This agreement, signed in 1994, preserved the status of property rights as it existed at the time of the political downfall of Apartheid. In other words, this agreement maintained the economic and social domination of the white minority, which in South Africa carried out the capitalist domination.

The ANC received the unyielding support from the leadership of the South African Communist Party. With the backing of the SACP, the ANC has been able to maintain its control over the main trade union confederation: COSATU.

The upheaval of Marikana in August 2012 initiated the political destabilization of the entire political system built over the 20 years since the fall of Apartheid.

A few months before the legislative elections, the crisis ravaged the leadership of COSATU. The metalworkers’ union, NUMSA, which is the largest federation in COSATU, and eight other federations joined together to call for a Special National Congress of the confederation and raised the question of COSATU breaking with the “Tripartite Alliance” — that is, the ANC-COSATU-SACP.

It is in this context that Julius Malema — the former ANC Youth leader who was expelled from the ANC after he called for the nationalization of the mines and took a stand in solidarity with the striking Marikana mineworkers — formed a new political organization: the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF).
Why this name?

Its meaning is clear in South Africa. When they overturned the Apartheid regime, Black people won their political freedom, but economically they remained bound to the system of exploitation and oppression that was the underpinning of Apartheid. This is what the EFF leaders wrote in their platform:

“South Africa is supposed to celebrate its 20 years of democracy and true freedom. The reality is that 20 years later, Black people are still not free! Black people are still shackled by conditions of poverty, lack of hygiene and lack of security! The Black majority is still landless and homeless, and its wages are still slave-wages. . . .

“Twenty years later, Black workers still receive miserably low wages, working in dangerous conditions in mines, farms, factories, shops and elsewhere!

“They still lack the most basic workers’ rights!

“Twenty years later, the police still kill. They killed at Marikana, Mothutlung, Ficksburg, Relela and throughout South Africa! . . .

“What we demand is the nationalization of the mines, banks and other strategic sectors of the economy without compensation!”

The EFF also call for the return of the land to those who work it — that is, to the Black farmers — and the expropriation of the holdings of the large white landowners.

This EFF election platform was presented at a major rally attended by more than 50,000 people in the outskirts of Johannesburg. Lybon Mabasa, the president of the Socialist Party of Azania (SOPA), addressed the crowd, stating: “We are not afraid of associating ourselves with those who say that the land must be returned to its rightful owners and that the mines should be nationalized. The EFF can be assured of our support.”

SOPA — which participates in the campaigns of the International Liaison Committee of Workers and Peoples (ILC) — fully committed itself to the EFF election campaign. In one of its leaflets, the SOPA leadership wrote:

“A vote for the EFF is a vote to expropriate the large land holdings and return the land to its rightful owners; a vote for the EFF is a vote to nationalize the mines. A vote for the EFF is a means to build a powerful force capable of expressing the aspirations of the Black working class, of the Black majority of this country, a force that is capable of putting the past behind us. This is the meaning of our vote on May 7, 2014 — and the struggle for these goals will continue beyond that date.”

These elections provide a somewhat attenuated reflection of the situation. The decline in the number of votes for the ANC may seem small at first glance, but it is an indication of what is ripening.

The Democratic Alliance — the party that has its origins among the “liberal” white voters seeking to preserve their privileges — received about 22% of the votes. The EFF — which was established as an independent political force only this past April, on the eve of the general elections, and which was the target of repeated attacks — received 6.3% of the votes, or about 1 million votes. The real total, was no doubt higher; Julius Malema denounced the election fraud in certain sectors as “mafia-type” actions.

Nobody could ignore the meaning and scope of this vote for the EFF, which even the mainstream media characterized as “surprising.”

The New York Times, on May 10, wrote that “a new party, the EFF, was able to give South Africans a vision for the future.”

That is what’s essential.

- – - – -

Endnote

(1) The analysis of the election results by both the Democratic Front and NUMSA highlighted the growing abstentionism in South Africa’s general elections — from a 85.53% voter turnout in 1994, when Apartheid fell, all the way to a 59.3% voter turnout in 2014. In terms of votes cast for the ANC, this meant that 53.01% of all eligible voters cast their vote for the ANC in 1994, compared with 36.39% of all eligible voters in 2014.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

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2) Report from Tiyani Lybon Mabasa, President of the Socialist Party of Azania (SOPA)

The general national elections in Azania (South Africa) have come and gone. It has been three months of work on the part of SOPA, which had taken a decision to support the EFF in the 2014 national elections. We supported the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) slate on four cardinal points:

1. Land expropriation without compensation;

2. Nationalization of the commanding heights of the economy, starting with the mines;

3. The building of a socialist project;

4. The struggle for the name Azania as the first symbol of a break with colonialism and imperialism that imposes restrictions on our country, including the repayment of the Apartheid debt and the subordination of the country into the clutches of the Bretton Woods financial institutions that have imploded many economies throughout the world.

We understood that the EFF was largely a product of among other things the aftermath of the Marikana massacre and the struggle of workers in the platinum belt. In our initial letter to the EFF we raised the need for a United Front to advance the struggles of the Black working class and the Black majority.

To show our support for this platform, many of us in SOPA were added into the EFF parliamentary lists. SOPA members also organized and addressed some of the rallies of the EFF.

The EFF ran a very credible election campaign and were largely able to draw a lot of young people. The EFF were given 6.37%, which translate to 25 parliamentary seats in a 400-person-seats parliament.

SOPA members shared a platform with [EFF leader Julius] Malema and AMCU [the new mineworkers' union formed in Marikana] on May Day organized by NACTU [National Council of Trade Unions] and we were able to pledge solidarity with the workers and also promised to galvanize local and international support for them.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

http://socialistorganizer.org/wp-content/uploads/NUMSA.jpg

3) “There’s No Turning Back!”

(Statement of the Central Committee of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa [NUMSA] — May 15, 2014)

Union Says United Front Not a Project to Improve the ANC or Provide Futile CPR on SACP/ANC

STATEMENT OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE (CC) OF THE NATIONAL UNION OF METALWORKERS OF SOUTH AFRICA (NUMSA), Lakeside Hotel and Conference Centre, Benoni, Thursday May 15, 2014

A. Introduction:

The Central Committee (CC) of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) met from May 12, 2014 -until- May 15, 2014, at The Lakes Hotel and Conference, Benoni, Ekurhuleni Metropolitan, Gauteng province. The CC was attended by the National Office Bearers, elected regional representatives, key members of staff, and in this instance was extended to include a number of shopstewards who serve as Local Deputy Chairpersons on the 52 locals of the union. This was indeed a meeting of NUMSA’s workers parliament.

This was the first national constitutional meeting of the union, since the watershed Special National Congress (SNC) of December 2013. The CC happened against the backdrop of national elections and the re-election of the African National Congress with a reduced and actually minority vote.

For the first time in 20 years of this neo-liberal democracy the ANC almost lost control of Gauteng, the industrial heartland of our country. This we say is the result of 20 years of our neoliberal democracy which has not decisively uprooted our colonial character of the South African economy and society, and its symptoms of mass poverty, deepening unemployment and extreme inequalities, given the ideological fog that has been spread during the electioneering campaign by various political leaders of a “good story to tell”.

The CC received reports of the current political, socio-economic, and international situation. Through the organisational report we reviewed our work over the past year, and assessed progress since the SNC. What was evident through these reports is that increasingly Numsa remains an activist, militant, revolutionary, campaigning and Marxist-Leninist orientated trade union, rooted amongst factories and working class communities, and continues to play a leadership role on the many popular struggles being waged by its members, workers more broadly, working class youth, the unemployed and poor communities in every corner of our country.

The CC was emboldened by the huge support we received during our National Day of Action on the 19th of March 2014, when we swamped the streets of our country to fight against “False Solutions to Youth Unemployment”. The good turnout of our members sent a clear message. Our members fully own the decisions and resolutions of our Special National Congress (SNC), and all our campaigns. The red of metalworkers on the streets silenced our detractors. The CC agreed to honour the request of the Minister of Finance inviting Numsa for an engagement on the Employment Tax Incentive Act (ETIA).

The CC agreed that the National Day of Action was also a correct political platform to build a United Front from below, and diminish the fictitious wall erected between community struggles and struggles on the shopfloor. It is our belief that the struggles of workers for better wages and better working conditions are inseparable from the working class community struggles for transport, sanitation, water, electricity and shelter.

B. The strike in the mining sector

http://socialistorganizer.org/wp-content/uploads/platminers.jpg

[striking platinum miners]

The CC also took place against the backdrop of a four month strike by mineworkers in the Platinum Belt where workers are demanding nothing more than a living wage of R12, 500 per month. This happening when the CEO of Anglo Platinum and 11 other senior managers racketed bloated bonus payments. What is even more disgraceful is the fact that the ANC has after 20 years of democracy not done anything to break down the apartheid capitalist colonial economy which is based on super exploitation of Black and African labour.

The root cause of this strike is the capitalist imperialist ownership of our mineral resources and the persisting structural problem of this sector of the economy still being based on the supper exploitation of migrant labour which is a continuation of apartheid in our so called democratic state by other means.

The CC strongly condemns the disturbing trends by the state in its attempt to amend the terms of reference of the Falam Commission. Numsa is consulting its lawyers in this regard.

The CC categorically holds the mining bosses and government responsible for the impact on the economy and the deficit on GDP, for failing to concede to the demands of the mining workers.

We condemn the bosses for approaching individuals miners with their offers and we further condemn Riah Piyega for asking bosses to arrangement transport for scab labour.

C. Transnet strike

Workers in Port Elizabeth Transnet are currently on strike against labour brokers and the Central Committee expressed its support for our members, and further condemned the collusion between Transnet management and SATAWU in their attempts to undermine the right of these workers to join the union of their choice. NUMSA members are in a peaceful protected strike and the propaganda against these workers by both SATAWU and the Transnet management is about breaking the back of the striking worker and their legitimate demands.

D. Global context

The CC was taking place within the context of the continued global crisis of Capitalism, mostly affecting the working people and poor countries of the world. This is evidenced by massive shrinkage of manufacturing, and a shift into insecure services, especially finance, retail, security and so called “knowledge production” tertiary sectors. The global shift in manufacturing, financial and trading power from the imperialist super-powers, namely United States and Europe, into China and Asia continues. Their low-cost production, based on attacking the working conditions of workers, challenges the ability of Third World economies like South Africa to increase our productive capacity and to share the social surplus.

Further, we noted the continued military approach to ‘solving’ the worsening economic crises, and continued attacks on human rights and liberties. What is evident is that global capitalism has NO solution to the problems of humanity. Neoliberalism has failed and the dominance of finance capital continues to co-opt governments and devastate the world population. The only alternative to this barbaric system of capitalism and imperialism is revolutionary socialism in which the working class of the world will take control of society.

E. National and domestic situation

The African National Congress (ANC) led government continues to pursue neoliberal policies, including deregulation, inflation targeting and privatisation. We have also witnessed massive de-industrialisation which has led to a jobs bloodbath in the key sectors of our economy, more especially in the manufacturing sector. Between 2009 and 2012 we lost 271,000 jobs in manufacturing and between 2007 and 2010 manufacturing declined from 17% of GDP to 15%. All of this is against the backdrop of high levels of unemployment, deepening inequality and mass poverty amongst the Black and African working class.

The results of this neoliberal trajectory are as follows:

Widespread and now increasingly violent strikes, service delivery protests, including violent crimes of domestic and sexual violence;

A strike by platinum mineworkers which is now in its fourth month.

Increasingly tough responses by employers to industrial action, including suing unions for lost production during strikes;

Racial polarisation of the South African population; AND

Massive concentration of wealth in South African banks, and increasing affluence of the White population.

Mass poverty concentrated among the black and African working class population.

These massive inequalities, widespread structural unemployment and national poverty inherited from our Apartheid past legacy continue to characterise and define the South Africa of today, post-1994 neoliberal political democracy. This is witnessed through the ‘real’ story of South Africa’s working class and the poor. To mention a few realities:

26 million people in South Africa today face abject poverty, 25 million of these are and African
In 2004, 48% of South Africans were living below R524 a month, in 2011 this increased to 52,3%
There are now more people in South Africa living in shacks as there were in 2009 (13.4% in 2009, 14.1% in 2012)
In May 2008 there were 5.1 million unemployed people in South Africa, today there are more than 7 million
South Africa remains the most unequal country on the planet, our Gini Coefficient, which is a measure of inequality, increased from 0.66 in 1993 to 0.7 in 2008
The above ugly and scandalous reality has made our calls for the radical and full implementation of the Freedom Charter relevant, given the continued reproduction of the colonial and apartheid economic status quo by the clearly fading ANC led government.

F. Analysis of the 2014 National and Provincial Elections and Outcomes

The CC reflected on the recently concluded national elections. An initial analysis was presented. The CC noted that while the ANC celebrates their 62% victory and lays claims that their support base has not shifted below 60%, this is both misleading and in fact completely fallacious.

While the ANC/SACP leadership will feel strengthened by this result, a deeper analysis presents something far more revealing than a short lived celebration. Indeed, the ANC received 62.15% of the valid votes cast, but 64% of South Africans DID NOT vote for the ANC. Combined, out of the total potential and actually registered voters in South Africa today, analysis of election statistics confirms that the ANC has been, this year, elected into government by a mere 36% of all those who were eligible to vote.

Further, the 10% loss of votes in Gauteng and a mere 48.5% of the vote in Nelson Mandela Bay spells a disaster for all progressives forces and demonstrates clearly that the working class are seeking alternatives to the failed policies of the ANC.

The CC mandated the Numsa Economic and Research Institute to do a more detailed and through scientific analysis of the election results and what this means for building the Movement for Socialism.

Below we illustrate the glaring diminishing support for the ANC in the voting trends since 1994:

1994: Of the 23 063 910 eligible voters, 85.53% (19 726 610) voted while the remaining 14,47% (3 337 300) stayed away. The ANC received support from 53.01% (12 237 655) of the eligible voting population.

1999: Of the 25 411 573 eligible voters, 62.87% (15 977 142) voted while the remaining 37.13% (9 434 431) stayed away. The ANC received support from 41.72% (10 601 330) of the eligible voting population.

2004: Of the 27 994 712 eligible voters 55.77% (15 612 671) voted while the remaining 44.23% (12 382 041) stayed away. The ANC received support from 38.87% (10 880 917) of the eligible voting population.

2009: Of the 30 224 145 eligible voters, 59.29% (17 919 966) voted while the remaining 40.71% (12 304 179) stayed away. The ANC received support from 38.55% (11 650 748) of the eligible voting population.

2014: Of the 31 434 035 eligible voters, 59.34% (18 654 457) voted while the remaining 40.66 (12 779 578) stayed away. The ANC received support from 36.39% (11 436 921) of the eligible voting population.

We see that from a high of 53.01% in 1994, the ANC has disastrously dropped to 36.39% of the share of votes in 2014. This is the true story that reflects the reality of the loss of confidence by our people in the neoliberal capitalist ANC!

G. The United Front (UF) and the Movement for Socialism (MfS)

The CC affirmed the analysis that the current Numsa moment is not a simple knee jerk reaction or development, but that it is a product of a deep class analysis and understanding of the continuing colonial character of South African economy and society, and the profoundly worsening conditions of the working class. The CC was unambiguously clear that there was no turning back on the resolutions taken at our Special National Congress. There is no stopping this Numsa moment.

The CC noted that the launch and building of the United Front and the Movement for Socialism would not be simple. It reaffirmed the basic principles which would guide the United Front and amongst these are:

The United Front is a weapon for uniting the working class, in all walks of life;
Ideological orientation, political affiliation, religious, gender, social or any other affiliation or orientation shall not be a condition for denying or preventing participation in the programmes of the United Front; AND
The basic guiding principle shall be “Unity in Action” against the ravages of neoliberalism and in support of the full implementation of the Freedom Charter
The CC affirmed that there are two legs on which Numsa’s work to build the United Front would stand; gaining support for our campaigns and building our concrete support for other struggles of the working class and the poor wherever and whenever they take place.

As part of building a common minimum programme for the United Front, the CC agreed that we should embark on an intensive political programme to build the United Front as well as the Movement for Socialism. This programme will include building township-based United Front political discussion forums with the express aim of building the Front locally and exploring the possibilities for taking up local campaigns and issues. It will also include further political schools, engaging global left political parties and our sister unions globally, culminating in a national Conference on Socialism.

The CC was clear that building the Front and the Movement for Socialism is NOT a project to improve the ANC, to carry on doing useless Cardiac Pulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) on the ANC and SACP, nor to resuscitate another neoliberal discourse. This engagement is about nothing else but the working class organising itself as a class for itself, for the war to win socialism.

H. Cosatu and the Alliance

The Central Committee received a report on the current situation in COSATU. This included the outcome of the court case to have the COSATU General Secretary reinstated, update on the shopsteward status of the COSATU 2nd Deputy President, Zingiswa Losi, report of the last COSATU CEC at which the ANC intervened.

The CC confirmed that COSATU remains our fighting weapon and we must struggle to reclaim it as an independent, militant fighting federation. We shall not be leaving the federation and together with the other 8 affiliates we have served court papers to compel the COSATU president to convene the Special National Congress.

The CC is not convinced that the ANC task team intervention in the last special COSATU CEC was genuine and sees it for what it is, an election ploy, as the ANC and the SACP have themselves always been part of the problem. However in the interest of unity NUMSA did not oppose this intervention.

In addition the CC argued that the NUMSA NOB’S must urgently write to the COSATU leadership and demand the following:

(a) Information on all the costs incurred by COSATU in defending the illegal suspension of the COSATU GS,

(b) That the COSATU President be suspended for violating the COSATU constitution, bringing the federation into disrepute and sowing divisions in the federation and amongst the affiliates

(c) The response of COSATU to the detailed Numsa report on why it should not be suspended from COSATU.

We condemn the Cosatu President for attempting to isolate Numsa members from their leaders in organised companies like Toyota, Dunlop and Hulamin, and for contacting former shopstewards and current shopstewards under the guise of mobilizing for the ANC vote.

The CC is clear that the reactionary forces are determined in their campaign to expel Numsa from our federation but we will remain resolute on our affiliation to a militant fighting COSATU in the interest of working class unity.

Numsa remains resolute in defense of its unity and leadership.

I. Nkandla and the Public Protector

The CC welcomed the findings by the Public Protector Advocate Thuli Madonsela in relation to the security upgrades or renovations to the private residence of President Jacob Zuma. The CC affirmed that Nkandla is nothing other than the ruling elite spending a huge amount of public money, the money of ordinary workers and the poor, on a private residence for one man and his family. Further, the CC noted the continued undermining of Chapter 9 institutions, President Jacob Zuma’s blatant defiance of the Public Protector’s recommendations, and the arrogant defence to this looting and dependence on political patronage by the ANC and the SACP factions.

We demand that he immediately responds to the Public Protector’s Report.

The CC reaffirmed the resolution of our Special National Congress. The President must resign! Further, the CC called on the resignation of those Ministers who scandalously defended the President and who misled the public on Nkandla and calls on the defence of the Public Protector by working class formations and all components of the working class.

J. Numsa a growing fighting union

The CC noted that we are well on our way to meeting our target of 400 000 members before our 10th National Congress in 2016. The meeting reiterated our commitment of implementing the service charter as agreed to in the Special National Congress to improve servicing to our members.

The CC noted that over the last few months there has been an alarming number of retrenchments in the auto and component sectors. We agreed to investigate the root causes of these retrenchments because we believe that we have to continue to champion industrialisation as it is the engine for economic growth.

This investigation must also explore two additional things: (a) are any of the retrenchments linked to the youth wage subsidy and (b) has the youth wage subsidy generated the number of jobs as promised.

The CC resolved to engage government on our proposals on job creation and to help dispel the notion that working class demands diminishes investor confidence.

As part of our commitment to building a stronger Numsa on the shopfloor we affirmed the following strategic priorities for the next period:

i. Protect members jobs and improve their wages, conditions and benefits

ii. Transform services to members through organisation and representation

iii. Champion political, economic and social policy and strategy in favour of the working class and poor

iv. Strengthen staff and worker leader capacity

v. Build a bigger, stronger, smarter and better organised union

Notwithstanding the success of the March 19th strike, we are determined to continue with our campaigns in relation to the strengthening of the manufacturing sector through encouraging localization using the government infrastructure project and effective beneficiation. We will continue to engage with government to ensure that the working class benefits from lucrative tenders such as the Transnets acquisition of locomotives.

Finally we are currently in the midst of negotiations in our biggest sector, engineering and by all accounts we are preparing to strike against an intransigent employer.



K. International situation

Nigeria:

The CC condemns the vicious and inhumane abduction of the 230 young school girls by Boko Haram in Nigeria. We call for the unconditional release and safe return of the young girls so that they can be reunited with their families, including their return to school.

The Nigerian government must be held responsible for their safe return and the deafening silence of the AU is worrying. We reject the humiliating calls for the imperialist United States (US) or Britons to help with rescue attempts. These feudal backward and savage practices cannot be resolved by appealing to imperialist forces that have killed millions of school girls through wars of invasions and drone attacks in Afghanistan, Libya, Palestine, Iraq and elsewhere. Africa must take full responsibility for the safety of all its peoples.

Swaziland

The Central Committee (CC) met at a time of some of the worst attacks on the democracy-thirsty Swazi people by the autocratic Monarch led by King Mswati. Therefore, the CC reviewed and discussed our perspective on the ongoing political and economic situation in Swaziland. Numsa has always been a historical and reliable ally of the progressive forces in Swaziland.

The leadership of the progressive forces in Swaziland under PUDEMO has been arrested, intimidated and harassed for doing their political work by the regime. It is within this context that we call for the introduction of democratic reforms, unconditional release of all political prisoners and return of all exiles. Furthermore, we call for the economic isolation of the Swaziland’s Royal family and economic sanctions until a democratically elected government is installed in Swaziland.

Ukraine and Russia

We note the maneuvers of imperialism in the regions of the former Union of Socialist Republics of Russia (USSR), which are potentially capable of leading to both civil and international wars. We are aware that led by the US, the imperialist powers will do everything to weaken the progressive unity of all the peoples of this region, by all means necessary I order to secure imperialist control of this part of the world.

The crisis in the former USSR is pregnant with all sorts of possibilities, for the whole world.

As a counter weight to US led imperialism, we note the possibilities for progressive changes presented by the growing significance in world affairs of China, India, Russia, and Brazil, socialist oriented countries of Latin America and elsewhere on the globe.

We will study this situation further, to see how best to advance the interests of the world working class for a socialist world.

On 27th Anniversary of NUMSA!

The CC saluted the generation of militants and radicals that formed Numsa 27 years ago. Numsa stature has grown in leaps and bounds over the years. We are now the biggest trade union affiliate in South Africa and Africa with a total membership of 341 568 paid-up membership. This qualitative growth of the union of John Gomomo, Jabulile Ndlovu, and Mbuyiselo Ngwenda can be attributed to our ideological and political orientation, worker-control, participatory democracy and accountability.

We are proud of the many achievements we have scored over the past 27 years of our existence. We want to recommit ourselves to continue building this revolutionary trade union to be a militant and fighting weapon of the workers in South Africa and the world.

Statement issued by NUMSA, May 15 2014

[ckaihatsu]

http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/985.php

[ckaihatsu]

Massive Numsa strike begins in South Africa

Jul 1, 2014

Over 220,000 members of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) have embarked on an indefinite strike in the metal and engineering sectors today, 1 July 2014.

“This was not an easy decision, but a painful one,” reads a Numsa statement from the National Executive Committee meeting last week. “It has never been in our agenda to call a strike; this strike has been imposed on us. Ours is to use the strike as part of a tactic to exert organizational pressure on the bosses, to return to the table and present an offer acceptable to our members.”

Numsa declared a dispute at the end of May after two months of negotiations with the employer bodies, under the auspices of the Metal and Engineering Bargaining Council (MEIBC), failed to achieve an agreement. Workers initially demanded a 15 per cent wage increase but had reduced it to 12 per cent when the dispute was declared. The 220,000 Numsa members on strike represent around half of all workers in the sectors.

Numsa is also demanding that the bargaining agreement with MEIBC covers one year and not a three year period as has been the practice in the past. The union wants employers to agree to scrap the use of labour brokers, and remove the short time and layoff clauses from the main agreement.

http://www.industriall-union.org/massive-numsa-strike-begins-in-south-africa