04 May 2001
Address by Phillip Dexter
Member of the Politburo of the South African Communist Party
To the Special Congress of the Communication Workers' Union
Comrade Chairperson,
National Office Bearers,
Delegates to this Congress,
Leaders of the Alliance,
International guests,
I bring you revolutionary warm greetings and good wishes from the General Secretary, the Central Committee and entire membership of the South African Communist Party (SACP).
1. BOLSTER THE LEGACY OF MAY DAY - BUILD WORKING CLASS POWER
Your Special Congress comes a few days after the celebrations of May Day. We want to salute South African workers and all workers of the world for their continued determination to wage an unceasing struggle against capitalist barbarism, class exploitation, gender oppression and racism.
On 01 May in 1886, the police mowed down unarmed workers in Chicago. The bosses and their police, like South African bosses continue to do, had hoped that they would deal a blow to the workers, little knowing that this was to set a worldwide workers' movement determined to challenge and overthrow the barbaric system of capitalism.
This year's May Day celebrations demonstrate for all to see that poor and working people throughout the world want to bolster and continue with the legacy of May Day in order to build working class power to drive the democratic revolution in our country, defend and deepen workers' gains and lay the basis for a transition to socialism.
Even more important, the imperialist assault on workers' rights through neo-liberal economic restructuring and the job loss bloodbath we are experiencing in our country necessitates escalating workers' struggles even more.
Imperialist globalisation and neo-liberal restructuring have forced workers into a defensive mode in many respects and all over the world. But the reality is that those who had thought that the collapse of the Eastern bloc of socialist countries was an end to history have been proven wrong. As we start a new decade and millennium, we witness a growing rejection of neo-liberalism and new mass struggles against capitalist globalisation. This provides renewed impetus from shifting from defensive struggles to targeted offensives against capitalism and neo-liberal restructuring of our economy.
We must do this without ever forgetting, even for a moment, that, despite setbacks to our struggles for socialism, imperialism is not invincible. This is the most important lesson of the 20th Century for all poor and working people. Our very own recent victory against the greed of the pharmaceutical companies is another instructive example and should motivate all of us to escalate our offensive against exploitation.
2. BUILD A PEOPLE'S ECONOMY
The SACP is of the view that a working class programme needs to be consolidated and cohere around building a People's Economy as the main platform on which to deepen our National Democratic Revolution (NDR) and advance towards socialism in our country.
Why a People's Economy now?
It is not an exaggeration to say that the principal plane on which to advance, consolidate and deepen the NDR in the current period is on the economic front. To say this does not translate to economic reductionism, but to capture the reality that, the principal task of the NDR is to address the interrelated contradictions of class exploitation, the legacy of national oppression and gender inequalities in relation to, and not in isolation from one another. But much more importantly, over the last few years, the economic, and therefore, class question, has perhaps burst to the fore, in a manner unseen before in our struggle. Whilst the totality of the class struggle cannot be reduced to the economy alone, this is the principal foundation on which the class struggle is based. The class contradiction is also the fundamental contradiction in our society in relation to which the national and gender questions need to be addressed. This by no means reduces the latter two contradictions to the former, but these cannot be addressed outside of their class dimensions.
The capitalist character of South African society, and the simultaneous deepening of neo-liberal economic restructuring brought forward by, inter alia, the globalisation of the capitalist economy, in the context of the liberation movement being in power, have focused our realities to the importance of the economic question more than ever before. In particular, as we have noted before, the contradiction of seeking to transform the apartheid political, social and economic order in the context of the deepening capitalist character of the national and international conjunctures, has further sharpened the centrality of the question of economic transformation in deepening the NDR.
Underlying recent economic and political developments has been the deepening of the ideological dominance of the neo-liberal ideology in our own country, in particular its own South African version, which at our 2000 Strategy Conference, we appropriately characterised as Afro neo-liberalism. This combines an aggressive black African petty bourgeois agenda through the acceptance of neo-liberalism, provided it works to create an accumulation regime favourable to its own class interests. Afro neo-liberalism restricts Black Economic Empowerment to the creation of a black capitalist class, and the use of the state in a parasitic manner whereby it is used as an instrument for black capital accumulation. Afro neo-liberalism would also support privatisation as a means to hand over to this class some of the state assets for its own purposes of accumulation and to enter the ranks of the capitalist class.
Broadly, this neo-liberal agenda is no different to the global capitalist agenda of marginalising, if not weakening, the working class as a basis upon which to grow our economy. This neo-liberal offensive argues that the black working class is a spoilt "elite", an "aristocracy" that is only interested in its own "selfish" interests at the expense of the unemployed poor. This ideological offensive serves to mask the real agenda behind such attacks, that the working class has to be weakened, not because it is actually an aristocracy, but because it is a threat to the consolidation of post-apartheid South Africa as a capitalist society. Neo-liberalism ideologically projects itself as more concerned about the poor, when in fact the category "poor" is conveniently used to attack the real potential obstacle to capital accumulation, a strong, organised and united black working class which is actually constituted by the overwhelming by the majority of our people including formally and informally employed workers in all sectors of the economy, and unemployed workers. Afro-neo-liberalism correctly emphasises the urgency of tackling racial inequalities and racism in our society, but conveniently forgets that the very same black working class is an even worse victim of racism, rather than being an aristocracy of any sorts. Instead the real aristocrats, white monopoly capital, are not even mentioned, except in so far as to how they should be encouraged and given incentives to support the creation of a black capitalist class. Thus a new type of anti-working class, and typically compradorial-type relationship and dependence is created between white finance monopoly capital and the black petty bourgeoisie.
In essence Afro-neo-liberalism, like its global neo-liberal foundations, seeks to strip the national question of its class content, or conversely, seeks to insert a different class content into the struggle to address the national question. Slowly emerging with this hegemony of neo-liberalism is a veiled characterisation of the (black, and particularly African) working class as the enemy of progress and economic transformation in our country. Even worse, the black working class is cynically demonised as being its own worst enemy by not accepting the realities of capitalist globalisation, by continuing to engage in "adversarial" labour relations!
The SACP rejects these neo-liberal ideological distortions with the contempt they deserve. We need not remind these bourgeois apologists that the working class constitutes the overwhelming majority of the people of this country. To denounce the working class struggles as sectarian is nothing but a defence of the bosses and their greed. The interests of the bosses are in fact the most selfish and narrowest of interests that unashamedly aim to secure wealth for the few at the expense of the majority.
Two kinds of contradictions threaten to swallow neo-liberalism and its African version in its own ideology. Firstly, the strengthening of neo-liberalism is unlikely to address the national and gender questions, instead it tends to deepen the racial contradictions in broader society and class inequalities even within the very previously oppressed black majority. Secondly, instead of creating an independent black capitalist class it creates a black section of the capitalist class that has a (internal) compradorial-type relationship to the white capitalist class, thus deepening the hold of white local and international monopoly capital over the South African economy. This is likely to become a new form of internal colonialism, reflecting itself less through the political, but increasingly through economic forms of subjugation and domination.
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 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.
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, in line with our programmatic commitment to rolling back and transforming the capitalist market.
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, in line with our Programme. 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 should not be seen as economic reductionism, but is essentially located within 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. This focus is principally about building working class power for a people's economy in a period where the question of the development of an appropriate economic development path for our country has become the fundamental question of the political conjuncture.
Central in a people's economy is the defence and extension of the public sector in key strategic areas such as education, health, water, municipal services, central banking, development finance, transport, communications, electricity supply, energy including liquid fuels, mineral rights and housing. In other words, we must fight for the socialisation of the predominant part of the economy through the upsizing of the capacity of the democratic state to transform the economy in favour of the working class and the directing, disciplining and rolling back the private sector in our economy. It is for these reasons the SACP 2001 Programme calls for a COSATU-led mass mobilisation campaign (similar to the 2000 jobs campaign), whose main aim would be to consolidate progressive public sector transformation and restructuring of state assets.
We must struggle against neo-liberal conceptions of running down the state. It is simply untrue that the only way to engage with the private sector is through privatisation. Instead, we should seek to strengthen parastatals and the state as a whole as important instruments to eradicate poverty, create jobs and accelerate the bringing about of a better life for all. It is only a state-led and public sector-driven economic transformation that will bring a better life to all our people.
As the SACP we reiterate our strong opposition to privatisation. We need to expose the false nature of arguments about the benefits of privatisation, whether it is sold to us using sophisticated words like, "restructuring", "outsourcing", "economic empowerment" and defining communities as "clients" and "consumers". This is a dangerous discourse, which flies in the face of the RDP as a people-driven programme, made up of active recipients rather than consumers".
We need to take up these anti-privatisation struggles to deliberately roll back the private sector in key sectors of social delivery, as listed above, rather than outsourcing and privatising these to the private sector.
However, it is not enough for us to criticise the private sector and privatisation, we need to take up concrete struggles to create alternative forms of economic enterprises and sectors. In particular, we need a wide-ranging programme to create a co-operative sector as well as co-operatively owned worker enterprises.
It is for these reasons that the SACP launched the Campaign to Make Banks Serve the People in October last year. Now the SACP decided to escalate and increase the momentum of the Campaign. Since the SACP launched the Campaign in October last year, the last three months have marked a turning point with wider and increasing sections of South African society calling for banks which serve the people.
We have noted the Black Economic Empowerment Report of the Black Economic Empowerment Commission which calls for fundamental transformation of the financial sector. There are also initiatives to build local co-operative banks and fight for access to credit led by the Diakonia Council of Churches, rural women in the Eastern Cape and North West Provinces and the SA Municipal Workers's Union. We have also witnessed hundreds of public meetings convened by SACP branches in local areas in order to popularise the campaign and collect demands from our people.
Critical in this Campaign is the formation of a Broad Popular Campaign Front in preparation for a NEDLAC Summit on the Financial Sector. This is a popular Campaign which speaks to all sections of South African society. With the above developments and the formation of the proposed Broad Popular Campaign Front, the banks now have nowhere to hide. They have to respond to these growing calls and pressure from the mass of our people. The SACP calls on CWU and all South African workers to increase the pressure on South African banks so that we can really make banks serve the people and build new co-operative and public sector banks.
3. A COMMUNICATIONS INDUSTRIAL POLICY LED BY THE STATE
The SACP's economic transformation perspective is premised on a developmental state, a state-led industrial strategy and the vision of building elements of, and the momentum towards socialism. In this quest to build socialism, it is necessary to consider the contradictions that arise from the impact of new technologies and resultant new processes particularly in the communications sector of our economy.
Some fundamental questions include the following:
South Africa is at a stage of its development where it already has an established ICT sector. There is a monopolistic form of ownership of the global information infrastructure and intellectual property rights.
The established ICT sector in South Africa is currently fragmented and acting without national purpose. It is mainly comprised of white males at management and operational levels.
A strong indigenous ICT sector is needed. This must be collectively owned by the state, local workers, and local communities, and backed by government policies and regulations. The overall aim must be delivering on local needs. Without a clear sense and direction in the form of an overall strategic goal and some regulatory features that ensures the industry assists to meet the overall development needs of South Africa, the ICT industry will remain one that is directed by the global competitive paradigm of market dictates.
Another key problem is the absence of definitive national or provincial perspective on what ICT skills are needed to build the economy. The general approach emanating from parts of the ICT industry is that the scarcity of skills can be plugged with the importing of skills. In trans-national ICT companies, this aspect is attended to on the assignee basis, the state and society do not benefit from this as no mechanisms exist to monitor the whether indeed skills transfer takes place between assignees and locals.
The problem of resources in the form of skills can only be addressed at root level. The lack of ICT resources in South Africa is traceable way back to the primary schools where there is almost no expose to ICT and this develops a mindset block to new paradigms, which ultimately leads to few graduates and a scarcity of skills. Thus an Industrial Policy must ensure the creation of a feeder system for the constant development of new skills and an environment that will enable the equipping of the education system to deliver a set number of graduates. Given this state investment in ICT skills, a compulsory service to the state, as in the case of doctors could also be considered.
Industrial policies adopted by government are intrinsically linked to the nature and pace of a chosen developmental path. The content of industrial policies determines which social classes are strengthened and which are weakened in the process of economic development. The patterns of ownership and control, income distribution and the demand for different types of labour and the nature of goods produced for consumption form the base of an industrial policy. Industrial development impacts not only on the balance of political and economic power at a macro level, but also at the micro/household level and can have different impacts on gender relations, either empowering the poor more especially women or further marginalising them.
The economy's industrial base and productive capacity need not only be increased, but also moulded into a form appropriate for South Africa, which prioritises maximising sustainable employment opportunities, job creation and meeting the needs of the poor. It is in this respect that the closing of the gap created by the global divide must be considered. A key facet to the equation is the continued re-skilling of the workforce. The challenge in South Africa is around the lack of basic infrastructure, lack of technology and a lack of skills and resources.
The ICT sector currently prefers the least regulation and opts for a market-dominated approach. There is a need for state intervention to support and reshape the ICT sector structures and processes to enable the sector to achieve the objectives of increasing sector revenues, increasing the sector's contribution to GNP, increasing sector exports, increasing employment in the sector, and maintaining or increasing sector profitability, within the paradigm of a socialised economy as opposed to a monopolistic economy.
One method of toppling the balance would be in the areas of co-operative ventures and the setting up of associations not for gain in small but significant areas: such as cabling, PC services and support, call centres, basic IT training, and in the distribution, warehousing and packaging of products that get ordered and purchased through the Internet.
There is therefore a need for the state to take immediate and decisive action to build and shape the ICT sector capabilities to position the nation to increase employment, reduce barriers to innovation, encourage social and economic development initiatives and stimulate the need for appropriate and intermediate technologies. Protection measures on government terms relating to low cost access to intellectual property rights material is needed. Open sources of information tools must be encouraged to enable state initiated public access stations for citizens to access information. Information and communication must an affordable reality where ownership is in public hands, preventing the growth and spread of local "cyberlords".
Arivia.kom, the new state owned ICT Company, has the potential to develop local IT intellectual property, especially in applications linked to the security and defence area, the electricity generation, and transmission and distribution areas and in the rail transportation area. The test for the new state owned ICT Company, is its ability to position itself to be a serious player in the ICT sector, to be able to compete with the global companies in South Africa and abroad, to retain the human resource base that will be consolidated in the near future and constantly upgrade skills.
We have deliberately focused on the ICT sector to emphasise the need for the holding of sectoral summits across our entire economy which has become an even more urgent task in the current period. Unless workers, through their trade unions, push harder for the convening of these summits in order to address the question of job losses and restructuring in favour of the overwhelming majority of our people, these sectoral summits will not take place. Sectoral Summits are important platforms for building a people's economy. The bosses are opposed to the holding of these summits. That is why the SACP says "Forward to a Communications Industry Sectoral Summit!"
4. TRANSFORMATION OF SOUTH AFRICAN MEDIA
Also related to the building of a People's Economy is the role of the media in society. For example, the Business Day newspaper daily promotes the political economy of the bosses.
A particular challenge to you as communication workers is to ensure that the means of communication in this country are not allowed to only spread capitalist propaganda. You need to ensure that what is communicated to the broader South African public also reflect the interests and aspirations of the working class, including the communication of socialist ideas. This means that we should educate ourselves about socialism in order to ensure that it gradually becomes the hegemonic mode of thinking of the majority of our people. In particular we need to ensure that the public broadcaster must also reflect the socialist ideas and aspirations of the working class and must actually promote the political economy of poor and working people. This is one of the key challenges of the period, and the SACP is ready to work side by side with you to ensure that this goal is achieved.
The media establishment has simplistically argued that the role of the media is the promotion of the freedom of speech. Whereas the SACP supports the freedom of speech, we also argue that there can be no freedom of speech under the present ownership arrangements. Freedom of speech in these circumstances essentially then means freedom for the white male rich to express its views. A fundamental pre-condition to realise freedom of speech in South Africa is the transformation of these racial and male dominated media oligarchies.
Current media ownership arrangements mean the freedom of the white male elite only, now being joined by a new black elite, to express its interests over and above a broad range of interests in society. Tempering with current ownership patterns means a government led process to introduce new forms of collective ownership and control of our media.
Therefore the strategic location of the public broadcaster is very important in the transformation of South African media. The public broadcaster has a unique role to represent issues and interests of the black working class and the poor and women in particular. The public broadcaster needs to consider playing an additional role of being the mirror of the rest of the media when it comes to issues and interests it represents. The public broadcaster, particularly radio is important means of access by the poor to news and the world as a whole. The question of the commercialisaion of the public broadcaster needs to be approached with absolute care in an environment dominated by racial inequalities, class exploitation, and patriarchy.
Given the depth and gravity of all these matters raised above, the SACP calls on CWU and other media and communication workers to work towards for a Media Transformation Summit out of which will emerge a Media Transformation Charter in order to address a wide range of important issues including labour relations, affirmative action, media ownership and control, the promotion and use of all South African languages in our media, the transformation of the Advertising Industry, public service obligations on all media, and the transformation and funding of the SABC.
5. The key strategic challenge to the working class: The struggle for socialism The ultimate strategic objective of the working class is build socialism in South Africa. The struggles outlined above have to be waged within the context of this overall objective. But what do we mean by socialism?
Our cynics, detractors and those, who are either opposed to socialism or have abandoned socialism, now ask us what do we mean by socialism. It is as if they do not know or never knew what socialism is. By socialism we simply mean a society whose primary objective is the meeting of the social needs of the majority of the population rather than driven by a profit motive. It is a society where the control of the predominant means of production is in the hands of the producers, the workers.
The struggle for working class leadership over society, the building of people's power for a people's economy, the struggle against patronage, the struggle against privatisation, the deepening of a people-driven democracy and development are all important foundations for socialism. The shortest route to socialism is the struggle to defend and deepen a working class led national democratic revolution.
To reach this goal the SACP'S programme commits itself in the first instance to root the Communist Party amongst organised workers. This means that organised workers themselves must take a direct and active interest in building SACP industrial units and branches. Furthermore, the SACP has embarked on a programme of joint political schools with the affiliates of COSATU in order to build the political consciousness of the working class. In this instance we challenge this Special Congress to debate and adopt a specific CWU programme on building the SACP.
Significantly and most importantly, 2001 is the year which represents 80 years of struggle by the SACP for national liberation, peace and socialism. All throughout our history we have always been rooted amongst our people and their struggle. It is this tradition we seek to continue by using the month of July, the month in which we were founded all those 80 years ago, to ask our people to evaluate the SACP and shape its future. The SACP will submit itself to an open evaluation and criticism by you the workers by convening Workers and People's Assemblies on the SACP. We are not afraid of a public evaluation and critical feedback from you. We are your political vanguard and we are rooted in your midst. We therefore call on this Special Congress to use the July Workers Assemblies as part of a CWU programme to build and root the SACP in the working class.
Related to this objective, is the need to build a strong and progressive COSATU rooted amongst workers. One of the most important tasks in the labour movement is the strengthening of COSATU as a whole and the improvement of service delivery to all workers by trade unions. As part of this, the SACP calls on you to look internally and address all weaknesses by going back to the basics and strengthening your structures by being grounded in the politics of the working class. In this way you will be better able to position organised workers as the leading detachment of the working class. When you do this you must bear in mind that without a strong federation there will be no Communication Workers' Union. Without a strong COSATU no single COSATU affiliate will be able to win its battles. This means that whilst rooted in the struggles of workers in the communications sector you must at the same time be able to rise above sectoral struggles.
Also related to this discussion is the role of the working class in the alliance as a whole. Media coverage of recent developments in the ANC and the Alliance as a whole mislead our people to believe that there are serious divisions in the alliance. Without pretending that there are not different opinions within the alliance, the SACP emphasises the need for the alliance, the need for working class led and people-centred alliance. And this calls on working class forces to play a key role in directing and shaping the content, programme and practice of the alliance and all its component parts.
With these words we wish you a successful Congress, and we are confident that you are going to rise to the occasion and build a strong Communication Workers' Union.
Phillip Dexter
Member of the Politburo
South African Communist Party