Let us unite the working class, our communities and our movement!
16 July 2016
First and foremost let me on behalf of our Central Committee and the entire growing SACP membership thank you for the invitation and this opportunity to address your Central Executive Committee. This is an important meeting. Since you started you have been engaged in strategic reflections on the challenges facing workers in your sector in particular and across our economy in general. We are looking forward to progressive outcomes from your engagements, including reflections on the state of our revolution and the challenges facing democratic national transformation and development.
As the SACP, we believe that the most important task facing the progressive trade union movement in particular and workers in general, now and going forward, is to build and maintain organisational, political and overarching class unity and cohesion. It was with this clarity of thought in mind that, as the SACP, we concluded our Special National Congress, a year ago, with the strategic theme: Communist cadres to the front: Unite the working class, our communities and our movement!
The importance of building worker unity under progressive trade unionism to tackle the never ending challenges facing workers under capitalist exploitation and defend their gains cannot be over-emphasised!
Similarly, the importance of building overall working class unity to move our revolution on to a second radical phase and push it forward to its logical conclusion laying the indispensible basis for advancing to socialism cannot be over-emphasised!
The working class in South Africa, as varyingly in many other parts of the world, is experiencing the negative impact of the ongoing world capitalist system crisis that broke out first in the United States in 2008. The capitalists wielding the economic power that they command pushed the grinding impact of the crisis on to workers, among others by means of retrenchments and restructuring. They aggressively replaced permanent or indefinite employment relationships with ever increasing insecurity characterised by labour brokering, casualisation and irregular employment relationships, including perpetual temporary employment relationships.
All of these are underpinned not only by a reaction to the crisis to safeguard profit rates and maintain an ever rising profitability but also by a broader underlying accumulation regime, including deepening exploitation by undercutting workers gains and benefits. In addition, the capitalist exploiters managed in varying degrees in different countries and internationally to turn workers against other workers by a variety of means.
The result included, and by no small measure, fragmentations in trade union organisations as capitalist crisis period's emotive, populist and opportunist ideological tendencies riding on the increased levels of frustration experienced among the ranks of the working class gained currency. It was in this process that maximalism entrenched as such tendencies competed by inflating or sky-rocketing workers' legitimate demands and promised to achieve them with immediacy without regard to objective realities.
Compounding the difficult situation facing workers and the progressive trade union movement, are tendencies such as business unionism, that have developed to a point where they are causing internal divisions and contributing to fragmentations. Contestation in unions is no longer only a reflection of worker democracy. It is more and more a reflection also of competing sponsored corporate agendas conceiving workers as a lucrative market and union leaders as facilitators of market access.
There is a glut of a wide range of financialised products that are not only marketed by corporations engaged in hyper competition. Promoting their interests, those products are also marketed by SOME union leaders who have been captured in one way or another or have established mutual, albeit unequal, interests with those corporations. In many instances, instead of worker democracy, what is going on in what appears to be internal contestation in SOME trade unions, are corporate rivalries engaged in competition and sponsoring contestation even where there should be consensus and no need for such contestation.
When corporate capture fails, such corporate interests do not hesitate to cause fragmentations, splits and sponsor the formation of new unions.
The nexus between the grinding impact of the capitalist crisis on workers and the rise of corporate influence for business in trade unions has created serious problems. This is impacting negatively on unity and cohesion within the trade union movement and has far reaching implications for the organisation and unity of workers politically.
In the wider political spectrum, the problem of corporate capture, linked on the one hand with business interests seeking political or bureaucratic connections, and on the other hand with political or bureaucratic interests seeking business connections, but both establishing mutual interests, has become a major problem. Associated with this, as is the case with the rise of business unionism and corporate influence in trade unions, are destructive tendencies such as corruption, collusion, factionalism, patronage and their respective networks. The parasitic bourgeoisie for example relies on these networks of factionalism and patronage linked with collusion and corruption to pursue their business interests while factionalists rely on the parasitic bourgeoisie for funding to pursue their factional interests.
The parasitic bourgeoisie has become the most dangerous class of our time against our revolution as compared to the lumpen proletariat of 1848 when Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto. The success of this class will ruin our revolution. It must be stopped and dismantled. The same must happen to factions, patronage, collusion and corruption. The corrosion of progressive and revolutionary fibre and revolutionary moral high ground in many liberation struggles that were affected by these problems eventually culminated in the defeat of the revolution. As the SACP we are warning against this!
We hope that you will use this rare occasion offered by your Central Executive Committee to reflect deeply on the minute details answering the profound question once asked by Vladimir Lenin: What is to be done?
Without the quality called unity and cohesion, workers will only be a numerical quantity of a majority class. They will not be a serious force to be reckoned with in the struggle to mould and shape change, the struggle to inform the direction of both social transformation and society in general! Without unity and cohesion, workers will find it harder, if not at times impossible, to win battles and secure both their immediate and long-term interests as class.
As the SACP, our appeal to you is that let us work together expending everything in our capacity to secure and further develop the unity and cohesion of the progressive trade union movement in particular and workers in general as a class.
Our last bilateral meeting with our ally, Cosatu, to which you are an affiliate, identified manoeuvres to drive a wedge between our two working class formations of our broader alliance. We committed ourselves in confronting such manoeuvres. As the SACP, we remain steadfast behind that commitment!
We are looking forward to our continued bilateral meetings with Cosatu and its affiliates to strengthen our relationship as well as joint programmes!
As the SACP we are saying let us work together to unite the working class, our communities and our movement!
Working together we can do more to address the challenges facing the working class!
Let us continue our work to ensure that the ANC wins the forthcoming local government elections.
There can be no doubt that there is no political party on the ballot, except the ANC in alliance with our two working class formations, the SACP and Cosatu, that has the capacity required to drive our national democratic revolution towards the achievement of all the goals of the Freedom Charter. In fact, on the contrary, many, if not all, of the political parties to be found on the ballot are organised in opposition to our national democratic revolution and its basic programme, the Freedom Charter.
In the last two decades since our major democratic breakthrough dislodged the apartheid regime, millions of our people benefitted from hugely improved quality of life. The massive social redistributive programmes anchored on the new culture of human rights that we inaugurated in 1994 and guaranteed in our country's constitution have played a major role in improving the quality of life of our people.
Among others:
The ANC in government delivered approximately four million houses, benefitting over 17 million people, for free.
It is the ANC-led government that ensured massive access to electricity, covering over seven million households - that is two million more than in the hundred years to 1994 since the first household electricity connection in Cape Town in 1894.
The ANC-led government delivered a near universal access to education for all children, and a school feeding scheme benefitting over nine million learners by April 2014 so that learners do not attend school on a hungry stomach.
It is none other than the ANC-led government that ensured a massive expansion of access to post-school education and training. The majority of students in public universities and colleges now come from a previously disadvantaged background, in particular Black households that were denied access up to 1994.
The ANC-led government ensured a massive delivery of clean drinking water and roads infrastructure across the country covering many areas with tarred access roads.
All of these and other social and infrastructure programmes include rural areas, where there was none before!
There can be no dispute that South Africa achieved this tremendous level of social progress since 1994 because of the leading role of the ANC in alliance with our working class formations, the SACP and Cosatu.
And, as we all know, Rome was not built in one day.
There is still more work to be done to reverse the damage caused over three centuries of colonisation and colonialism, including apartheid, suffered by our people.
Our major strategic task moving forward, in addition to the fundamental importance of unity and cohesion, is to move our democratic national transformation on to a second radical phase. This means we must change the base structure of our economy by ridding it of its colonial features and imperialist exploitation.
Instead of being dependent on significant exports of raw materials and primary goods and reliant on the imports of finished products, we must develop production through manufacturing expansion and diversification.
It is only through production development and increasing investment in the productive sector, as opposed to the casino speculation economy of hot money, that we can reduce the persistently high rate of unemployment and the poverty associated with it.
At the same time, we must move decisively in altering the patterns of ownership in, and control of our economy. Workers as a class, and not merely some few individuals, must be at the centre of the new ownership structures that we must build, in particular collective forms of ownership.
This must enhance our joint programme to ensure a national minimum wage.
The second radical phase of our democratic transition means driving forward rigorously all other immediate tasks and programmes we have agreed on during our last SACP-Cosatu bilateral. Among others, working together we must:
Recent developments point to continuing entrenchment of serious problems in the media in general and not only at the SABC where administrative and governance decay is corroding whatever is left of our public broadcaster.
Let us not leave aside the media industry as a whole while strengthening our task to hold the public broadcaster accountable.
Let us also support the progressive positions articulated by the ANC this and last week in reasserting its policy perspectives on the public broadcaster.
Viva ANC victory in the 3 August local government elections viva!!
Viva the unity of the working class, our communities and our movement viva!!
Forward to ANC victory in the 3 August local government elections forward!!
Thank you comrades!