Building a Working Class-Driven Momentum for Socio-Economic Transformation and Quality Public Education - With and For the Workers and the Poor:
Introduction
The SACP is honoured by the invitation to come and address your 5th National Congress. This Congress comes at a very important moment in the national democratic revolution in our country, as well as in the midst of challenging working class struggles. It takes place just over a month after the 11th Congress of the SACP, and a few months before the ANC's 51st National Conference in December. We therefore hope that you will use your Congress to reflect on some of the key developments in the wake of the SACP's Congress, and also reflect on some of its resolutions. It is important, too, that you use this Congress to prepare your organisation to engage in the run-up to the ANC's Conference.
SADTU's 5th National Congress is taking place immediately after the World Summit on Sustainable Development. As a country, we are very proud to have hosted this historic summit - the largest ever summit to be hosted on our soil. We wish to use this opportunity to congratulate our government and mass organisations like COSATU for their wonderful work in organising the Summit. Whilst we welcome some of the commitments at the summit on provision of water and sanitation and poverty reduction, we dare not forget that even these minimal achievements are going to require a monumental struggle to ensure that they are translated into reality. The behaviour of the developed countries at this summit should be a reminder that the biggest enemy to sustainable development is globalised capitalism, and thus a struggle for sustainable development should simultaneously be a struggle against capitalism.
Defeat the anti-working class offensive
Your Congress also takes place in the midst of what appears to be a concerted offensive against some of the leading working class formations, particularly some of the bigger unions of COSATU. There seems to be a concerted attack being directed at COSATU's biggest unions - SADTU, NUM, SATAWU and NEHAWU. The aim of this offensive is to weaken some of our prime worker formations, thereby weakening COSATU and ultimately the working class struggle as a whole.
We say this because in the week preceding the SACP's 11th Congress, old interviews were downloaded from the Internet. The SACP strongly believes that the downloading of Cde Jeremy Cronin's interview just before our Congress was not a coincidence, but part of an attempt to derail the Party Congress and divert us from the tasks facing the working class and poor of our country. This, together with some of the developments we are currently seeing in a number of COSATU affiliates, is part of a broader offensive to weaken the working class, strengthen the hands of the bourgeoisie, and secure South Africa as a capitalist country - forever.
This is a matter that we will all have to seriously reflect on, without being conspiratorial. Your Congress thus comes at a time when there is an even more pressing imperative for the working class and all its formations to close ranks and unite.
But it is not enough to just close ranks, we need also to keep the working class mobilised and help it to strengthen itself politically, ideologically and organisationally in order to ensure that it is capable of stamping its authority and leadership over the national democratic revolution. Without a strong and politically conscious working class, our revolution will flounder. We need to remind ourselves that the historic mission of South Africa's working class is that of leading the national democratic revolution to its logical conclusion, the building of a socialist South Africa.
Of serious concern as well is the role of some of the media, in particular the City Press, in this offensive. It is completely unacceptable for the City Press to simply accept and print a set of allegations sent to it by "unknown" people. Is this how the media should operate? Does this mean that any individual can anonymously write something about public figures, and then have this published by the media? The City Press needs to be careful that it does take us down the route of gutter and dangerous journalism. If they print because they know such allegations come from "credible sources" then it means that they either know who these sources are and possibly what their intentions are or else they are willingly being used to pursue these sources' agendas. We are neither afraid of nor against critical engagement by the media, but there are decent rules that need to be followed.
In fact, papers like the City Press are disappointing me more and more. Instead of engaging SADTU, however critically, around the huge challenge of educational transformation in our country, all the paper prints on the eve of your Congress are allegations from faceless elements about power struggles and alleged corruption. This paper is on a one-way slippery slope, and does not deserve the respect it seeks as a paper read in the main by the black workers of this country.
It is partly in the light of the above context and issues that our input today will focus on the following issues:
1. The political significance of the SACP's 11th Congress
The 11th SACP Congress, with 844 voting delegates from 337 branches around the country, was the largest Congress the Communist Party has held in its 81-year history. The Congress marked a significant moment in the Party's development, and it had an important political impact on our country. Despite very concerted attempts by sections of the media and other forces opposed to our vision and commitment to socialism to derail and distract Congress, it was a huge success and an important platform for further consolidation of working class and socialist perspectives and programmes.
The strategic slogan of the Congress was: "With and for the workers and the poor!" The message was clear - eight years into our new democratic dispensation, we have notched up enormous gains. However, our country remains on an accumulation path that is, fundamentally, unfavourable to workers and the poor:
The 11th Congress sent out a very clear message. The SACP, working very closely with its alliance partners (the ANC, COSATU, and the broad mass democratic movement) is determined to ensure that the aspirations, concerns, and perspectives of workers and the broader urban and rural poor become the dominant voice in our country. These are the core motive forces of our national democratic revolution. The SACP will do everything to ensure that these motive forces are not de-mobilised, displaced, or replaced. The workers and the poor are the bedrock of our struggle. Your Congress, its resolutions and programmes must further contribute to placing the working class firmly as the leading motive force of our revolution.
The success and confidence of the 11th Congress reflect many realities. The strategic slogan first advanced in 1995 - "Socialism is the future, build it now!" has, over the past 7 years, acquired greater substance and meaning. It has enabled us to engage actively and confidently on the terrain of the NDR as socialists. This should be the overall guiding programmatic slogan for the working class as a whole, and our own individual programmes and campaigns must be located within this framework. For instance, the struggle for free quality public education must be pursued as part of the overall struggle to build elements and capacity for socialist education.
Since the Party's 1998 Congress, the SACP has, in its own right, more confidently led a series of campaigns and struggles, particularly around co-operatives and for the transformation and diversification of the financial sector. The 11th Congress provided an important forum in which to assess these struggles.
In particular, the financial sector campaign has highlighted the need for, and the appropriateness of, a principled socialist perspective in the present. The SACP unapologetically led the financial sector campaign from our anti-capitalist standpoint. We highlighted how the profit-seeking private banks that dominate the sector are unable to meet the needs of the poor. We campaigned against the extortionate practices of loan-sharks. We highlighted the undemocratic and immoral power of the credit bureaux. We called for a strengthening of public sector and co-operative banking. I will come back to this issue and will give a brief report later on the NEDLAC financial sector summit.
The 11th Congress re-affirmed, with greater emphasis, the SACP's conviction that the NDR itself requires the active propagation of socialist perspectives. In short, the 11th Congress was a moment in the Party's history in which we began to assert more positively and more consistently who we ARE. We deliberately avoided defining ourselves by what we are not, or through reacting to agendas of other class forces, outside of our socialist perspectives and goals.
Of course, many in the media tried to present this strong, independent SACP voice as a "threat" or "challenge" to the alliance. Quite the contrary. We are convinced that a strong alliance requires a strong, independent-minded, but constructive SACP that makes no apologies for its socialist values and analyses. Guided by this general conviction, the 11th Congress adopted several key resolutions and a broad programme of action for the coming five years.
The 11th Congress resolved that local governance and local economic development would become the "centre of gravity" for our Party in the years ahead. We will ensure that our growth and development strategy perspectives are implemented at this level. We will focus on local governance transformation through strengthening the delivery capacity of our municipalities by building people's power (community policing fora, ward committees, school governing bodies, strong party branches and districts, etc). We aim to achieve this by accelerating the elaboration and implementation of integrated development plans (IDPs), guided by our developmental perspectives of local economic development, industrial policies, mobilisation of domestic resources, and building people's power.
The Congress consolidated perspectives on our long-standing call for a vigorous industrial policy - which, while involving core manufacturing, must also encompass mining, agriculture, services and the 'new economy'. By industrial policy we mean a policy-led process of state interventions to drive and promote sectoral growth and development. Industrial policy is broader than a "competitiveness strategy" (to which it is often reduced in our domestic debate) although it cannot, of course, ignore this dimension.
Private capital is objectively incapable, out of its own volition, of planning, investing in, and leading economic infrastructure projects that are often critical to promoting investment in productive enterprises. Domestic and foreign private capital follow growth, they do not lead it. Private capital has failed to invest in viable projects to create strategic industrial capacity in "emerging markets" ahead of a proven record of profitability.
The goals of job retention, job creation and poverty eradication are central to our vision of industrial strategy. We are not convinced that it is a foregone conclusion that jobs must continue to be lost in agriculture, mining and formal manufacturing; rather, we believe that these sectors can and must become sectors of job creation.
While the SACP has focused for some years on the struggle for a more effective industrial policy, the 11th Congress has introduced other complementary themes more forcefully onto the SACP agenda. In the coming months and years the SACP intends to focus more effectively on a variety of issues related to the "informal" sector, and to general social security. These include:
With your welcome thematic focus on jobs, we hope that this provides yet another very concrete platform for direct bilateral and programmatic co-operation between the SACP and SADTU. Our challenge is to make this a living co-operation, based on concrete campaigns, rather than resolutions on paper.
The 11th Congress also adopted an important resolution on the re-establishment of a Young Communist League. In part, this responds to a powerful popular demand from thousands of young people. Young workers, young educators, high school students, students in tertiary institutions and many others yearn for a socialist organisational home. Many young people are disgusted by the selfish dog-eats-dog, made-in-the-USA culture that proliferates in our country. The Congress has outlined concrete practical steps that must be taken to ensure that a YCL is launched by mid-2003. The socialist energies and aspirations of thousands of young South Africans, drawn from a generation that is carrying the burden of unemployment, the African underdevelopment crisis, and the HIV/AIDS pandemic, will become a critical factor in the unfolding NDR.
The 11th Congress of the SACP sent a powerful message to our country. The SACP Congress affirmed the finest traditions of our liberation movement - our commitment to non-racialism, our selfless positioning in the trench of the most marginalised, our preparedness to speak up critically and constructively. It was a message that even the liberal media could not fail to notice. The national prestige of the SACP has had to be acknowledged once more, even by our ideological opponents. In the coming months and years, the SACP and its cadres will take up the strategic perspectives, the programmes of action, and the resolutions of the 11th Congress…With and for - the workers and the poor!
2. The financial sector campaign and the 2002 Red October Campaign
The holding of the financial sector summit in NEDLAC on 20 August 2002, and the agreements reached therein, marked one of the most historic and significant gains for the workers and the poor of our country. Through the SACP-led campaign for the transformation and diversification of the financial sector, far-reaching agreements were concluded. This is indeed a major victory for the SACP and validates our line that building people's power through mass mobilisation - underpinned by democratic state power - is our most crucial weapon in deepening and consolidating the national democratic revolution.
Right from its launch, the campaign won the hearts of millions of our people and thousands of them participated not only in the demonstrations, marches and pickets, but also in hundreds of mass meetings and report-backs throughout the country. We wish to use this occasion to thank SADTU, its leadership and cadres, for your support in this campaign. After only 20 months, the NEDLAC summit reached agreement on practically all the issues we had campaigned for, and mainly along the lines we had demanded.
In the first instance, we demanded a summit at NEDLAC. The banks and financial sector bosses initially rejected this and sought to undermine the convening of such a summit. They tried to seek refuge in the Reserve Bank and government. They vehemently argued that our campaign was going to destabilise South Africa's "first world" financial and banking system through unreasonable and unattainable demands.
Our campaign was launched as part of our year 2000 focus on the mobilisation of our people towards poverty eradication. Through this campaign, we were practically and concretely seeking to challenge the neo-liberal notion and orthodoxy that economic growth and development in our country will come mainly through adopting measures of liberalisation and privatisation in order to attract foreign direct investment. The SACP, through our 1999 and 2000 strategy conferences, correctly argued that no African country, based on past experiences, can ever achieve economic growth and development through FDI - as desirable as FDI might be - without sustained mobilisation of domestic financial, human and material resources.
At the same time, we understood that without the mass mobilisation of our people, there could be no change from the dominant apartheid capitalist system and its financial institutions towards addressing the needs of the overwhelming majority of our people.
During our campaign, we had demanded and, at the NEDLAC Summit, got agreement on legislation and a policy framework for co-operative banks and other types of micro-credit, financial co-operatives. The building of co-operative banks came to be the major demand from our people. Related to this was an agreement on major banks working towards universal access to banking services for the poor, particularly the rural masses and those who receive old-age pensions. We will indeed continue to struggle for these services to be immediately made available and extended to all those who receive state grants, including child and disability grants.
Agreement on urgent steps towards the regulation of micro-lending and loan sharks is one of the most important achievements of our campaign, as well as an agreement on the regulation of the credit bureaux. These agreements form part of forging a developmental and affordable credit regime in our country. A commitment to exploring automatic insurance cover of up to a bond amount of R150 000 for all, including those of our people who are HIV-positive, is indeed a path-breaking achievement. This will go a long way towards ensuring AIDS orphans have a roof over their heads and towards ending unfair discrimination against the HIV-positive.
The agreements reached on affordable and just access to finance for the working people and the poor are but the first, albeit very important, step in the struggle for transformation of the financial sector. Our ultimate goal as the SACP is the socialisation of the financial sector - a people-centred and people-driven financial sector serving the interests of the overwhelming majority of our people. These perspectives were fostered by our strategic orientation ("Socialism is the future, build it now"). While taking up these issues, we rallied over 50 different formations into the campaign, including trade unions, co-operatives, black business and petty traders, religious formations, and many others.
The challenge for the SACP and millions of our people now is not to demobilise, but to continue with our mobilisation in order to ensure that these commitments by finance capital are implemented. We need to build on the NEDLAC commitment that the task teams will meet on a monthly basis to ensure the implementation of these agreements. This will have to be underpinned by mass mobilisation focusing on public report-backs to our people, and mobilisation to build co-operative banks. This mobilisation must also be directed towards having effective control and a say over the investment of our burial societies and stokvel monies, and for workers to have control over the investments of their pension and provident funds.
As SADTU, you have a very important role to play in taking forward this campaign. The trade union movement in our country needs to embark on massive mobilisation to control how, where and by whom your pension and provident funds are invested. What role are these funds playing in job creation and confronting the legacy of apartheid? We cannot leave these matters to asset managers alone. The owners of these funds, the workers, should guide these managers. As a public sector union, you need to immediately take up the question of trade union representation on the Public Investment Company that handles state pension funds, and seek to have an effective say over where and how these are invested.
The most important lesson out of the financial sector campaign is that without mass mobilisation … "With and For the Workers and the Poor…" we will not realise our goal of a better life for all.
The SACP has an annual Red October campaign to mobilise around specific issues within our programme of action. This year, our Red October campaign will focus on the need to develop a comprehensive social security system, as part of engaging and mobilising around the very debates that are taking place in government about this matter. This campaign is located within our struggles for poverty eradication.
To this end, our 2002 Red October campaign will, amongst other things, focus on the following:
We urge SADTU to mobilise in support of this campaign, using the fact that you are educators to assist many of our deserving people to access state grants where they qualify.
3. Quality public education
Your thematic focus on free, quality public education is an extremely important theme. I am confident that at this Congress, you will elaborate further the tasks and challenges implied in this theme. However, I need to state upfront that I am concerned that we have not managed to translate this into a sustained, real campaign, driven by a mobilised educator force. For me, this is the most crucial challenge for SADTU. It is of no use to take resolutions on this matter, Congress after Congress, without ongoing, sustained, visible campaigns being led by SADTU.
I am saying this because we need to remind ourselves that teachers are not just employees, but are cadres, intellectuals and ideologues of the NDR, the working class and the struggle for socialism. We should therefore not only see the struggle for quality public education as important in its own right, but also as part of combating the neo-liberal offensive towards privatising public resources such as education. This struggle needs to be directly linked to the global struggles for quality public education and against privatisation, building a strong, democratic and accountable public sector.
However, quality public education does not just mean the curriculum and classroom activities. It means, in the first instance, challenging and transforming the gender stereotypes in the hidden curriculum and the racial undertones that still characterise our education system, and, most critically, securing the right to and establishing a conducive environment for women teachers and girl learners. One of the campaigns that SADTU should take up is to directly confront the widespread sexual harassment in our schools, particularly that perpetrated by male teachers on with girl children. The fact that a school principal can be so involved with a 15-year-old girl as to want to marry her is a disgrace to our people's traditions and sacrifices for people's education. This is a shame, a great shame that we must confront. We call on SADTU to target a week each year to focus on this issue, and to ensure that those who do these things are exposed and are removed from our education system. This is a concrete campaign that should be discussed by this Congress.
The campaign around equal access to education and free and compulsory education needs to be driven by SADTU as a mass campaign, confronting issues such as the exclusion of poor children by many schools and the need for more funding to redress the infrastructural backlogs in education. In this regard, we must link up with and shape the urban renewal strategy and integrated rural development strategy. SADTU structures should be strengthened, particularly in the nodal points of integrated development. These structures should be reporting back regularly to SADTU's national structures. Similarly, SADTU should work with local governments around the question of functioning schools and community participation in school governance.
Cde President and comrade delegates, you have taken a number of resolutions along these lines, but the biggest weakness has been that these have not been followed up with concrete, visible campaigns. Let us use this Congress to correct this. We cannot afford to have mass campaigns for socio-economic transformation driven only at the level of COSATU as a federation, without consistent related campaigns by the federation's affiliates.
Failure by affiliates to drive socio-economic campaigns in their sectors - eg. SATAWU on efficient and affordable public transport, SASBO on a transformed financial sector, CWU on access to telecommunications by the working class and the poor - leads to three kinds of problems. Firstly, it runs the danger of isolating the federation from its affiliates - a weapon that the enemies of the working class can use to weaken the federation. Secondly, it weakens the very role of the working class - organised workers in particular - to lead and hegemonise over the struggle for a better life. Thirdly, if we do not drive socio-economic campaigns in our sectors, we run the risk of reducing our unions to collective bargaining entities. Even collective bargaining itself needs to be underpinned and made easier through mass based, ongoing campaigns.
If this Congress is to be a success, we need to identify a few, realisable issues around which to mobilise and have sustained campaigns. This is the only way to implement resolutions, otherwise such resolutions are meaningless. To lead a revolution requires organised, visible and sustained action, not only through endless theorisation and the taking of resolutions. Resolutions are only as good as their implementation.
Related to the task of quality public education, SADTU also needs to ensure that within the context of empowering its cadres and members, it also focuses on the fact that amongst its members are people occupying critical managerial positions - principals and other education managers. Empowering these managers, particularly principals, is a very important task for SADTU. Whilst the departments must carry out their responsibilities in this regard, SADTU itself must empower them through the creation of appropriate fora to discuss the management of schools. Principals and other managers must understand the revolutionary importance of their work. This must be done in a manner that does not subdivide SADTU, but rather strengthens its cadres all-round, in their various deployments and location.
A related challenge in the struggle for free, quality public education is that of mobilising policy resources and building capacity to strengthen SADTU's interventions and organisational capacity. The liberation and democratic movements have built progressive policy units like the Centre for Education Policy Development (CEPD) and the Education Policy Units (EPUs), but we are not using, supporting or strengthening these entities. As of now, they are operating in a manner that is not concretely and directly linked to the major issues confronting SADTU, for instance. Let us support and use these entities strategically to build our own capacity as well as their capacity.
4. Building the Alliance
The objective conditions of our revolution, domestically and globally, still dictate that we must maintain and strengthen the Tripartite Alliance. We have not attained some of the key objectives of the democratic revolution. In addition, seeking to deepen the NDR on a terrain of global and domestic capitalism requires the maximum possible unity of all the progressive forces. It is our considered view that the primary contradiction in the current period is that whilst we have consolidated and deepened the hold of the democratic movement over state power, economic power still remains with the same forces as under apartheid.
An alliance therefore must, in the first instance, be based on the objective conditions of the revolution. We must seek to strengthen progressive forces as part of building our subjective forces to shift the balance of forces in favour of the workers and the poor. It is for this reason that we must correctly analyse and understand what it is that we are seeking to build and strengthen.
An alliance is a multi-class bloc of forces, which come together to fight for a particular objective. In our case, it was an alliance formed to fight against national oppression, but from an understanding that that national oppression was closely intertwined with class exploitation. Over the years we also came to understand that gender oppression was one of the key contradictions that our struggle sought to resolve.
Our alliance is based on joint action to consolidate and deepen the NDR. But this multi-class bloc of forces has to be led by the working class - precisely because it is only this class that has the revolutionary traditions and organisational muscle and is the most committed to a thorough transformation of our society. The working class is the most revolutionary class in society and has the best muscle and commitment to overthrow all forms of oppression and exploitation. For this reason, the working class is characterised as the main motive force of the national democratic revolution.
The national democratic revolution is the most direct route to socialism. For the working class, the NDR is its minimum programme, with socialism and ultimately communism as its maximum programme. That is why at our 11th SACP Congress, we reaffirmed that the very consolidation of the NDR - even though it is not a socialist programme - can only be thorough and revolutionary if it is led by the working class with a socialist consciousness and the political confidence to lead. It is in this approach that there is a connection between the NDR and socialism.
In order to advance the NDR, we need a working class that is politically conscious of its historic role and informed by its socialist vision. Advancing the NDR requires a socialist strategy and consciousness. It also requires that we struggle for elements of and build capacity for socialism in the current period. Hence our programmatic slogan, "Socialism is the Future, Build it Now", and, of course, the crucial addition to identify the main motive forces, "With and For the Workers and the Poor".
In a capitalist society like ours there are two main social classes - the working class and the bourgeoisie. No revolution can be pursued successfully under these conditions unless its point of departure is from the standpoint of a particular class foundation or orientation. There is no ideology or programme that is above class interests or that runs parallel to such class interests. That is why the programme of the national democratic revolution is the Freedom Charter. The Freedom Charter is not a socialist document, but its point of departure is the class interests of the workers and the poor, and implementing it consistently will inevitably move our society closer to a socialist outcome.
In a capitalist society, to position oneself as catering for, or above, class interests is essentially to position oneself on the side of the powerful and dominant class interests - those of the bourgeoisie. To project working class interests as by definition narrow and sectarian is essentially to privilege the class interests of the bourgeoisie as the national interest. This does not mean that in an NDR we do not have to seek to unite the widest possible range of class interests behind a programme of transformation, but this can only be successfully pursued if the point of departure and framework is unshakably from the interests of the working class.
When the SACP talks about the workers and the poor, we are not drawing mechanical distinctions between these two social categories, because many workers are indeed poor - a reality in our country. Nor do we seek to talk about the poor in order position them against the workers or privilege their interests above those of the workers. There can be no tackling of the conditions of the poor - poverty - in our country without the organised muscle of the workers. Therefore, to position oneself as pro-poor, while at the same time castigating organised workers is essentially to be anti-working class and anti-poor, because to castigate workers is to deprive the poor of their weapon.
An alliance cannot continue as an alliance if some of the class forces in that alliance continue to benefit from it, whilst others are consistently expected to sacrifice their class interests on the basis of a vaguely defined "broader objective" or "bigger picture". In our case, there can be no broader picture that is devoid of the working class interest or that seeks to rationalise the sacrifices of some of the key working class concerns. What this means is that an alliance is neither a love affair nor some historic relic that we have to continuously remind ourselves about or genuflect to irrespective of the extent to which it is advancing the interests of the working class in particular.
This does not mean that in alliances there are no tactical compromises or even tactical retreats that might be required at different points in time. But such tactical moves cannot be made on behalf of, or above, the heads of the working class, for some supposedly broader objective. The working class must never divorce such tactical compromises from the overall short and longer-term objectives of the working class.
For alliances to be effective they require ongoing internal democratic processes and a collective assessment of the balance of forces and the tactical choices to be made. Failure to do this violates one of the very fundamental laws of any alliance. Democratic consultation is in fact an iron law of any alliance. This is based on the understanding that, in our case, no single corner of our alliance has all the wisdom to carry forward our revolution. There can be no such wisdom in the alliance as a whole unless it is firmly based on the collective strength, revolutionary record and wisdom of the working class.
However, it needs to be emphasised that, much as it is important to theorise properly around the class composition of our alliance and the working class as the motive force of the NDR, this must be contested in practice, in struggle. These current attacks on the working class show us that those who seek to consolidate our country as a bourgeois democratic order have turned attacking the working class into their full-time professional habit. Hence the need to keep the working class mobilised.
The point of this intervention is to underline one important point - that the working class is the political centre of gravity and the glue that holds the alliance together. It is from these perspectives that we should seek to build a strong alliance.
One of the immediate tasks we have as working class cadres and members of the ANC is to ensure that SADTU members, in their capacities as ANC members, actively participate in the processes leading up to the ANC Conference. The ANC Conference is an important occasion to further consolidate the NDR. Let us debate the policy and political papers, so that we are able to make a meaningful contribution to strengthening the ANC as a liberation movement and as government, and as our most important weapon in advancing the NDR.
With these words, we wish you a successful Congress!