Red Alert: The fundamental importance on the right to life and dignity: Communists celebrating Human Rights month

The SACP this week joined millions of our people in celebrating Human Rights Day. For centuries millions of our people stood up and fought for the restoration of human dignity that colonialism and apartheid had denied them. Many of them gave up their lives in this struggle. Many, like the victims of the Sharpville massacre, were brutally attacked by the regime when all they did was to engage in peaceful protest.

The SACP warmly welcomes the President' message to the nation on this important day. In partiular we welcome the emphasis the President put on socio-economic rights, which was the major focus of his speech, outlining the many transformative interventions government has made on this score. The President's speech is a timely reminder that after all, for South Africans to enjoy full human rights we need to escalate the assault on the class, racial and gender inequalities underpinning our society.

In a hardly quoted judgement of the Constitutional Court in 1995, often deliberately and conveniently ignored by the liberals, concluded that

"The rights of life and dignity are the most important of all human rights, and the source of all other rights. By committing ourselves to a society founded on the recognition of human rights we are required to value these two rights above all others".

Whilst all the rights enshrined in the constitution are important, nevertheless our Constitutional Court has set the priorities right. The right to life and dignity are words with no meaning to our people when their daily experiences are that of grinding poverty, unemployment and a growing gap between the ordinary people and the rich. This is a violaton of the rights to life and dignity.

When our health system is allowed to be driven by profit motives like the DA and the like minded organisations want, this constitutes a serious violation of human dignity and the right of life. Not only is the DA opposed to measures to translate the 'right to life and dignity' into a reality, but even support the genocidal violence and oppression directed at the Palestinian people by the Israeli Zionist government!

When our workers are in slave type relations with some labour brokers, working hard but with no benefits like pension and paid meagre wages, indeed there can be no dignity. The capitalists want to extract as much value as possible out of the workers and when they reach retirement age for instance, and thereafter it must be a burden on the state to look after them. It is in this context that the struggle against labour brokers must be understood, as a fundamental human rights issue. The decent work agenda, which most liberals oppose, is at the heart of the struggle for a right to life and dignity.

When one examines what is prioritised by the liberal agenda is that of checks and balances on government, and no such effort is put into ensuring decent work, the struggle against privatisation and labour brokers, provision of productive land to the majority of our people, and the complete eradication of all forms of racism and patriarchy.

For the liberals these fundamental socio-economic rights are given much less emphasis as their agenda is to use our institutions of democracy to roll back whatever efforts the government is making to elevate the right of dignity and to life. Instead the liberals selectively use parts of the bill of rights, often to frustrate the realisation of some of the fundamental socio-economic rights contained in our Bill of Rights.

That is why liberals, whilst claiming to be 'democrats' and 'constitutionalists', would oppose the National Health Insurance Scheme, affirmative action, skills development initiatives, and a decent wage - matters that are aimed at giving effect to the rights to life and dignity. Dignity includes fair remuneration for one's work, without a portion being stolen by labour brokers.

The liberals have in essence perverted and vulgarised our bill of rights, because they are capitalist bedfellows, and thus would not emphasise rights relating to life and dignity, especially if these stand on the way of capitalist profits. For them the rights that matter are those that can be used as platforms to attack and discredit government. Hence the DA is possibly spending millions of rands to try and overturn, through the courts, the decision of the NPA not to prosecute President Zuma. No such monies have been put to use to protect the abuse daily faced by domestic and farm-workers.

Government's efforts to improve the dignity of our people in the spheres of education and health for instance are continuously opposed by a new liberal onslaught on many other progressive governments programmes.

Dignity will have no meaning when a majority of our young people are unemployed and unskilled. This is the context that must underpin our engagements with the Green Paper on post-schooling education. Ours is to create a system that will restore the dignity of millions of young people who have effectively been told by the capitalist system that they are not any good. This message of doom and despair has its roots in the barbaric system of capitalism

As we celebrate Human Rights Day and month, the celebrations must act as a catalyst to our people to rise up, mobilise against the machinations of capitalism, a system that in the overall knows no human dignity and human rights. The nation must also stand up against the few who are corrupt and are prepared to take short-cuts to steal government tenders. Those who want to use their proximity to political office to accumulate are doing a great disservice to our people and to their dignity.

In commemoration of human rights week and month, the SACP commits to continue to mobilise our people in pursuance of their rights and giving meaning to the Freedom Charter and our Constitution. It is important for the SACP to take up the President's message by seeking to elevate the socio-economic rights as the core of our constitutional priorities of the 'right to life and dignity'. The liberals would never take up these issues as for them private capital accumulation is of a higher order than these rights.

We dare not allow the selectivity of the liberals to define the priorities in the struggle for human rights. As we have said, liberals are political hyprocrites whose mission is to protect the interests of the, often, white elite.

The SACP should in addition take up matters relating to the necessity of expropriation of land, most ill-gotten through colonial and apartheid theft, as an important imperative contained in our constitution. In short, it is only intensified working class struggles that will give concrete meaning to the right of life and dignity and we must use our constitution to the full to realise socio-economic rights, and important requirement for the right to life and dignity.

This article by SACP general secretary Blade Nzimande first appeared in the Party's journal, Umsebenzi Online.

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