01 December 2000
On 01 December 1985, more than 30 000 workers gathered at Durban Kings Park Stadium to launch the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). This followed more than a decade of militant workers struggles against apartheid and striving for workers unity which culminated into a founding Congress attended by worker delegates from unions organising workers in all sectors of the South African economy.
Now it is 15 years since this historic occasion. This 15 years represents years of organisation building, struggles for better working conditions, mass mobilisation against apartheid and the eventual defeat of apartheid in 1994.
On this 15th anniversary of COSATU, the South African Communist Party (SACP) congratulates COSATU and all workers who contributed in building and shaping this precious organ and institution of the South African working class.
As we celebrate this 15 years of COSATU we also remember many of the struggles which shaped and built COSATU.
COSATU was born at the height of apartheid repression with the apartheid regime having just re-imposed the state of emergency.
Part of the regime's objective was to break the back of the growing working class movement in our country through the weakening of the progressive labour movement which COSATU represented. Key in the regime's strategy was to build counter-revolutionary fronts such as the United Workers Union of South Africa (UWUSA) which never represented the interests of South African workers. Needless to say the strategy of the regime failed to weaken COSATU as COSATU withstood the state of emergency and many attacks on it by the apartheid regime and many of its counter-revolutionary fronts. Where is UWUSA today? Where is COSATU today?
Given the banning of the United Democratic Front (UDF) and many other political organisations, COSATU, as a legal registered trade union, played an important role in many community struggles and in the political struggle against apartheid.
Many of our people who were affected by counter-revolutionary violence from the mid-1980s right to the 1994 breakthrough will remember the role played by COSATU in defending our communities and struggling for democracy and peace. As far back as 198+ICY- COSATU was central in supporting initiatives for peace as far in KwaZulu Natal.
As we also know that this same COSATU also championed many of the workers rights we take for granted and which are in fact under neo-liberal attack today. It was COSATU which led and sustained militant struggles for fair working conditions, for health and safety, and for a living wage.
For all these reasons, the SACP is proud to be associated with this critical, crucial and leading institution of the South African working class.
This 15 years of COSATU do not only represent its history and achievements. This 15 years is also about challenges facing COSATU, the alliance and the country as a whole. With COSATU's contribution we defeated apartheid and established a democratic dispensation in our country. But this does not mean that we have achieved what we want.
Our starting point is that the struggle of South Africa's working class is a
struggle for socialism, for democratic working class control of the means of
production in order to build true and meaningful Democracy, Equality, Freedom,
Rolling back of the Capitalist Market, Transformation of the Market, and the
Socialisation of the predominant part of the Economy.
The struggle to build socialism now is deeply connected to the struggle of
deepening our democracy and national liberation and to empower working class and
popular forces.
Thirdly, it is only the working class that can take the struggle to its conclusion a better life for all our people and the winning of a socialist South Africa.
Whilst we defeated apartheid and entrenched democracy in the last five years,
the possibility of rolling back of our gains remains very real. Already the
bosses are pushing for the consolidation of a democracy of a special type and
the restructuring of our economy on the carcass of the South African working
class. They are telling us that the working class must sacrifice itself whilst
the bosses continue to be the main beneficiaries of our democracy. These new and
intensified ideological attacks on the working class are the teargas and
casspirs of today. These attacks may not necessarily be based on naked violence
but they are based on economic power to achieve the same results +IBM- to break
the back of the working class, weaken
its movement and entrench the hold of capitalism in our country.
These intensified ideological attacks have also been battered by neo-liberalism through the job loss bloodbath, outsourcing, contracting out, privatisation, and rolling back of the public sector.
The most sinister of these ideological attacks has been an attempt to project
the gains of organised workers (e.g. worker friendly labour laws) as the
principal cause of unemployment and poverty. These attacks have also demonised
organised workers as being responsible for the very same retrenchments they have
been victims of. Even more sinister in these attacks
have been attempts to project working class struggles as being directly at the
expense of the poor.
Recently we have heard calls for the deregulation of the labour market apparently because our labour market is rigid and thus limiting economic growth and development.
The SACP rejects the neo-liberal restructuring of our economy based on sacrificing the South African working class. The Lenasia killings are the most concrete and literal manifestation of this onslaught on the working class. The Lenasia case also exposes how serious the bosses are with the super exploitation of workers through starvation wages and extremely long working hours. The Lenasia factory pays its workers R375 a month for 15 hour daily shifts. The Lenasia case is just another reason why we need a consolidation and strengthening of our labour standards. The SACP supports the long standing COSATU demand for a living wage and fair working conditions. This consolidation and strengthening of the basic floor of workers rights cannot be done through downward variation of our labour standards. Otherwise, COSATU will not be worth the 15 years of its existence, sacrifice and struggle.
The SACP rejects all these neo-liberal ideological distortions with the contempt they deserve. The struggle against job losses is simultaneously a struggle against poverty, as the loss of a job means the loss of the only means of livelihood that the overwhelming majority of our people have. Therefore the struggle of the working class for job creation and against job losses is the same struggle as that of the urban and rural poor to make ends meet. And there can be no job creation without job retention, job security and consolidation of our labour standards.
These many tricks represent only one objective - to entrench a capitalist market economy in South Africa. As such COSATU and workers are accused of not understanding globalisation. COSATU is being urged to stop and adjust mass mobilisation so that the bosses can have a stable economy for a new round of accumulation. Part of this is the argument that a strong COSATU is not good for our economy. Also part of this trickery is the argument that COSATU is being un-political and not understanding the challenges of our revolution when it is correctly taking up genuine shop-floor struggles. On the other hand, when COSATU takes up political issues it is accused of wanting to become a political party. In other words, the bosses want a tame COSATU which does not do anything about conditions in the shop-floor or in the townships.
Like the apartheid regime failed these neo-liberal forces and their agenda are doomed to fail. COSATU is vital in the current period and in the long term struggle for socialism. Socialism is not a goal because the SACP wishes so. The struggle for socialism is necessitated by the massive inequalities which are part of the capitalist system in our country and world. To argue and struggle for socialism in our times is the most appropriate response to the monster of capitalist barbarism.
The above realities point to only one direction, the need to mobilise our people to struggle for the building of an economy in which they effectively participate and which is increasingly oriented towards meeting their needs. This will, in the first instance, enable us to shift the terms and contours of the economic debate such that it is dominated by concerns of the working class and the poor. This also requires concrete struggles around economic restructuring that favours the working class and the poor.
Part of building People's Power for a People's Economy includes unleashing mass mobilisation for the Defence, Extension and Consolidation of the Public Sector. As the SACP we are happy about the ANC manifesto in this regard. The defence and consolidation of the Public Sector represents one of the key struggles in our period.
In short a people's economy seeks, in the first instance, to challenge the logic of the capitalist market whilst simultaneously building elements of and momentum towards socialism. A people's economy places the eradication of poverty at the centre of economic restructuring strengthening the role of the state in directing major economic resources towards meeting the basic needs of our people challenging the dominance of the capitalist market in the allocation of resources intensification of our ideological challenge to, and critique of, neo-liberalism and much more importantly harnessing the energies of the working class and the poor towards economic transformation.
Focusing on building people's power for a people's economy is essentially located with the overall political context of deepening the NDR through building people's power to effectively tackle, in an integrated manner, the class, national and gender contradictions in our country.
In contrast, neo-liberalism marginalises people from the economy. Neo-liberalism constantly seeks to limit discussion and development of economic policy options to elitist policy designs by explicitly marginalising the working class and the mass of the people from effective participation. In our context this is constantly reinforced by the generally hostile bourgeois media which constantly castigates working class interests as narrow and self-centred, whilst projecting neo-liberal policies as the most appropriate set of economic policies.
Another important fact which we do not get from our media is the fact that the neo-liberal paradigm is in crisis all over the world. In Latin America, many progressive governments and movements are actively and creatively challenging neo-liberalism. For example, whilst privatisation is drummed down our throats daily, in Cuba we see the consolidation of the public sector and the up-sizing of the capacity of the state to drive the economy. As we know neo-liberalism has produced more poverty and misery and no economic growth in Africa. Our very own experience of job losses and struggles against these job losses tell us of the crisis of neo-liberalism.
Given these challenges, it is therefore critical that we continue to build a strong COSATU, strong affiliates. As the SACP we pledge our support for a strong and independent COSATU which does not sacrifice its members and the broader working class on the altar of neo-liberalism. This also applies to our jealous and fearless assertion of the SACP's independence as the primary and leading political organ of the South African working class. As the SACP we will never abandon the working class and our struggle for socialism on the expedience of neo-liberalism.