SACP Launches Red October and Banks Campaign

26 September 2000

The South African Communist Party (SACP) will launch its Red October Campaign, including the campaign directed at the transformation of the banks/financial sector, as detailed below. For the entire month of October, the SACP will mobilise thousands of our people across South Africa around the slogan

BUILD A PEOPLE'S ECONOMY BUILD THE PARTY

DATE : Wednesday, 04 October 2000
TIME : 17h30 - 19h30
VENUE : 10th Floor Boardroom, COSATU House, 1 Leyds St, corner Biccard St, Braamfontein

SPEAKERS :
Blade Nzimande - SACP General Secretary
Thenjiwe Mtintso - ANC Deputy Secretary General
Zwelinzima Vavi - COSATU General Secretary

This launch is open to the media and the public.

BUILD THE SOUTH AFRICAN COMMUNIST PARTY

This will include an intensive recruitment campaign among urban and rural workers and the establishment of SACP units in workplaces. The SACP calls on workers to help build industrial and work-place units of the Party. Let us strengthen work-place struggle s around wages, working conditions and employment with working class politics. The struggle to defend and expand worker power is linked to the struggle for socialism.

BUILD A PEOPLE'S ECONOMY MASS CAMPAIGN FOR THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE FINANCIAL SECTOR

This Red October Campaign will also address specific issues including, the campaign for the transformation of the banking and financial sector in South Africa, the building of co-operatives and the campaign for a massive ANC victory in the forthcoming loca l government elections.

On 21 October, the SACP will lead mass marches and pickets for the restructuring and diversification of the financial sector in our country, with a particular focus on commercial banks. We are calling upon South African workers and people to join us.

The Red Saturday Against Redlining in marches (Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban and Klerksdorp) and pickets in more than 20 other centres across the country.

This is an important campaign in which we call on our people to exercise their power

through the money they have put into these banks
for the banks to invest in low-cost housing, credit access for SMMEs and the poor and generally infra-structural development in poor, predominantly black areas. Commercial banks in South Africa today command enormous financial resources most of which are moneys from our people from their burial societies, stokvels, mogodisano and workers wages and government money.

But these commercial banks are nothing other than instruments of capitalist power, of capitalist economic oligarchies whose purpose is to finance white luxuries and greed but using black worker's monies. Their practices are not only racist, but continue to foster poverty among black people,entrenchment of racial inequalities and racism itself.

As the SACP we are therefore calling for legislation to force these banks to reinvest in our communities. We also are calling for the diversification of the financial sector for the establishment of co-operative banks, owned and controlled by the people an d for the people.

Through these marches and pickets, we will also be calling for the convening of a national summit on the transformation of the financial sector. This campaign should be seen as an integral component of building a co-operative movement and a strong co-operative sector in our economy. This is a campaign for building a people's economy.

CONTACT
Mazibuko K. Jara (surname Jara)
Department of Media, Information & Publicity
South African Communist Party
Tel - 011 339-3621/2 Fax - 011 339-4244
Cell - 083 651 0271 Email: sacp1@wn.apc.org