Address by SACP General Secretary, Blade Nzimande at Launch of 2000 Red October Campaign, 04 October 2000
Chairperson
General Secretary of COSATU, Zwelinzima Vavi
ANC NEC member, Mavivi Myakayaka-Manzini
Comrades and friends
It is with a deep sense of satisfaction that I am able to announce the launch of the 2000 'Red October' campaign, our second Red October campaign.
Rooting the SACP and socialist politics in the working class
As we said last year, the Red October Campaign is extremely important because it signifies a positive step forward in taking the organisational presence and political message of the party of the working class, the SACP, to the mass of our people.
At last year's launch we also referred to our 10th Party Congress Programme which says amongst other things, that "in the effort to build working class hegemony within our formations and in society at large, the SACP considers the core social constituency of the Party - organised workers in the formal sector - as the crucial social force. It is this stratum of the working class that has the collective numbers and the strategic economic location as well as the revolutionary organisational traditions to provi de effective social weight to any progressive agenda. The SACP needs to pay special organisational and ideological attention to this critical contingent of the working class."
Indeed, a brief evaluation of our programme for the year 2000 indicates that the 1999 Red October went a long way in consolidating the SACP and building a new sense of communist activism throughout the last nine months. Indeed, we are rekindling the spirit of Chris Hani and all great Communists produced by our party. From February to May, thousands of SACP activists were enmeshed in the COSATU mass campaign against job losses and for job creation. In fact this campaign was one of our best campaigns in a lon g time. Of course this was in the context of the COSATU mass mobilisation programme. Our specific contributions to this campaign were the linkage of unemployment and poverty, and countering the neo-liberal ideological onslaught against the working class th rough sustained media work. The most sinister of these 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.
Further, thousands of our activists are involved in work for the local government elections - mobilising our people for registration, participation in choosing the best candidates for wards and the councils and campaigning for a massive ANC victory in the elections.
As if these were not enough, again hundreds of our members have taken an active part in the HIV/AIDS campaign, particularly the struggle for access to affordable HIV/AIDS treatment. Currently, the SACP led campaign for the transformation of the financial s ector and the campaign for the building of co-operatives has caught the imagination of our people in a way, which emphasises the need for mass mobilisation for socio-economic transformation. As an indication of this, the ANC, COSATU and the South African N GO Coalition have also endorsed the campaign.
As a result of the above work, the popularity and profile of the SACP has grown, particularly amongst organised workers, the unemployed and other sections of the working class. We can confidently assert the massive popular working class support the SACP en joys, which unparalleled in our history and by any socialist organisation in South Africa.
The Red October Campaign seeks to harness this mass popularity into effective communist mobilisation and organisation. We seek to recruit principally, but not exclusively, amongst organised workers with a particular emphasis on women workers. This, we see as part of building SACP industrial/workplace units in order to root our party amongst the very constituency that holds the key to fundamental transformation.
We are launching this Red October campaign because the SACP believes that it is the working class that has the collective numbers and strategic economic location, as well as the revolutionary organisational traditions to fundamentally transform our country and to win socialism in our country.
The SACP calls on fellow workers to help us build industrial and work-place units of the Party. Let us strengthen work-place struggles around wages, working conditions and employment with working class politics. The struggle to defend and expand worker rig hts is linked to the ANC's programme of democracy and our struggle for socialism.
We are also focusing on the landless rural masses, the unemployed and the urban poor. The building of co-operatives is essentially about the mobilisation of rural masses, the unemployed and the urban poor to have a stake in economic transformation. In this regard the SACP is working with SAAPAWU for the mobilisation and organisation of the more than 1 million farm workers who are currently not unionised, who are subject to daily exploitation and victimisation at the hands of racist white farmers in the rura l hinterland of our country. As part of the Red October Campaign and mobilisation of farm-workers, the SACP and SAAPAWU will co-host a joint rally in the Northern Province on 15 October 2000. Transform the Financial Sector
Central in our economic transformation struggles is the transformation of the architecture of the financial sector of our country. This requires a co-ordinated strategy to drive both the private and public financial sectors towards development priorities i n our country. For instance the banking sector needs urgent transformation and diversification in order to ensure the release of some of the resources in this sector for developmental goals. Similarly this needs to be related to a co-ordinated strategy for public financial institutions like the DBSA and IDC, as well as other financing instruments like Umsobomvu, etc.
We believe 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 infrastruct ural development in poor, predominantly black areas. This is a typically working class campaign that has strong resonance with the concerns of the poor people of our country. 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 pu rpose is to finance white luxuries and greed - but using black workers' 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 some of our moneys in our communities. The poor are creditworthy, if approached collectively. We also are calling for the diversification of the financial sector for the establishment of co-operative banks, owned and controlled by the people and for the people. We are calling upon South African workers and people to join us on 21 October in our marches on what we call "The Red Saturday Against Redlining". Through this marc h, we will also be calling for the convening of a NEDLAC 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 i s a campaign for building a people's economy!
Use Red October to resist neo-liberalism and mobilise for socio-economic transformation Our 2000 programme emphasised the need to Build People's Power for the Eradication of Poverty. Indeed, this task is not only a one-year task, but we have used 2000 to lay a strong foundation to achieve this objective. This commitment anticipated the curren t ideological and direct onslaught on the working class internationally and locally. Red October is the highlight of the implementation of this commitment.
One of the most disturbing developments in the current period is that of attempting to pose the developmental challenge for South Africa as that which requires the smashing of the labour movement. This is also being manifested by disturbing tendencies for the bosses to want to return to some of the most repressive employer practices during apartheid labour relations.
This is part of a broader attempt to try and turn South Africa's democratic victory into a victory for a small elite, who see in the working class an obstacle to the accumulation of wealth and pursuance of a neo-liberal agenda. Workers should not allow the fruits of their very own sacrificed to be taken away in a manner that seeks to exclude the workers in change, defining them as a nuisance and a spoilt labour elite. As part of the working class struggle we should consistently expose and challenge such ten dencies.
Underpinning these attacks on the working class and organised workers in particular, is a disturbing right-wing economism which wants to reduce workers to numbers in a balance sheet, things to be retrenched, objects to be downsized and casualised and outso urced. As the SACP we are strongly of the view that workers in this country are an asset of transformation. In a way, Red October is part of a broader struggle to defend and enhance the dignity of the working people in this country.
Therefore, an integral part of the Red October campaign is also to address the key issues of job losses, the need to defend and extend the public sector as a key to meeting basic social needs, the struggle for fundamental economic transformation in favour of the working class, the struggle for gender equality in the workplace, building community participation through development and policing forums and the struggle against HIV/AIDS.
The centrality of the Tripartite Alliance
The SACP asserts the importance of strategic unity and cohesion of the alliance without at the same time undermining and submerging the autonomy and independence of each alliance partner. In this regard, the SACP asserts itself as the independent political party of the South African working class with the long-term objective of building socialism in our country. Therefore, the SACP will not fail in its duty to uphold and implement its independent programme and articulate its independent positions in public and in the context of the alliance. This principle also applies to the ANC and COSATU.
Local government elections
Another key task for the alliance is the need for an overwhelming ANC victory in the forthcoming local government elections. It is however important to ensure that the question of local government transformation be taken beyond the elections. Let the worke rs mobilise for a state-led municipal transformation, in particular the building of strong ward and village committees as primary organs of people's power at local government level. Among issues the SACP has worked for the ANC election manifesto is a commi tment to decommodify basic services, such as water, electricity, and sanitation, including the supply of life-line services and progressive block tariffs and the public sector as the preferred public service provider.
In conclusion, and much more fundamentally, South Africa needs a politically conscious working class led by a strong SACP in order to realise the most thorough transformation of our society. We call upon all workers and the mass of the poor people to be pa rt of our campaign.