Red Alert

Continue strengthening worker democracy and advancing workers’ interests, and fight against corporate capture

Comrade Solly Mapaila, SACP Second Deputy General Secretary  

Dear Comrades,

On behalf of the Central Committee, I bring you revolutionary greetings from the South African Communist Party. We have good news for you, dear comrades.

The SACP continues to grow numerically from strength to strength. The SACP is largest Communist Party in the African continent. It is the second oldest, and with its membership surpassing quarter a million, it is the second largest political formation in South Africa in terms of audited membership, after the African National Congress.

The Party’s membership growth is being tempered in building the SACP qualitatively as a Party not only of theory, including political education and ideological training, but also in terms of practice, in the real theatre of struggle. As Karl Marx’s eleventh and last thesis of the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ states, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it”.

The SACP is strengthening its character as an activist and campaigning political organisation. The Party has the largest campaign base compared to other political organisations in South Africa.

The SACP expresses its sincere gratitude for your activism in its campaigns, and is looking forward to that role being strengthened and intensified. At the heart of our campaign work at present is mainly the financial sector campaign. The campaign seeks to achieve transformation of the financial sector, including publicly owned banks that serve the people based on the developmental needs of our society rather than profit and private capital accumulation.

We are now preparing for the Second Financial Sector Summit to be held under the auspices of NEDLAC, the National Economic Development and Labour Council, in the second quarter of this year. The first summit was held just more than a decade ago. The forthcoming summit must therefore review progress on the outcomes of the first summit and consolidate new targets towards the goal of transformation of the financial sector.       

Advance proletarian democracy and worker control!

The SACP congratulates you for maintaining and developing worker democracy in your union. In many ways your dedicated attention on issues affecting workers on the shop floor; on their interests; the way you have designed and conduct your processes in relation to and your consistent communication about all of these aspects; and all without losing focus on broader political, economic and social transformation questions constitute a good example.

As the revered leader of our struggle for national liberation and social emancipation Comrade Joe Slovo states in one of his popular pamphlets, ‘The South African Working Class and the National Democratic Revolution’:  

“Trade unionism in our country has been guided by appropriate organisational forms and democratic processes. Without open public elections, complete participation of the mass of the membership in all decision-making, day-to-day accountability of officials, etc., trade unionism would lose its effectiveness.”

In this regard, your media briefing on the processes leading up to this collective bargaining conference contains important points from which other progressive unions can take their cue.

You have completed the process of gathering demands from members on time, covering 1 500 workplaces nationally, 6 000 general meetings, an average of 4 per workplace, with approximately 85 000 of your union’s just more than 99 000 members participating in the process.

You collected the demands directly from workers in the sectors where your union organises, the clothing, textile and leather sectors. Collecting approximately 15 000 separate substantive demands as you have done, mainly covering wages and a range of other collective bargaining related demands such as improvements in retirement benefits, shift allowances, health care benefits, maternity rights, holiday pay and general improvements in working and employment conditions is a complex process.

This is not just a demands collection process. It is a robustly democratic process that involves heated debates among members who have to agree in each and every workplace and region on the choice of the demands that must be negotiated as well as on their levels taking into consideration all objectives and subjective factors within the context of the union’s collective bargaining strategy.   

Wield collective bargaining to press for broader workplace transformation!

This collective bargaining conference will serve as a culmination of the entire democratic process that you have undertaken by consolidating workers’ demands and your union’s bargaining strategy. It will simultaneously open the next chapter to face up to the employers in your negotiations process expected to start next month. The SACP pledges its support for your union and the over 100 000 workers who stand to benefit from the collective bargaining settlements you will achieve in the negotiations. Our support is not limited to verbal and written pledges of solidarity. It will actively be expressed in action when you call upon us to do so within the framework of our position as a working class party.

As the SACP, we must also congratulate you for the efforts you have taken to revive the clothing, textile and leather sectors from the ruins of the liberalisation shock therapy that was imposed by the 1996 class project through the economic strategy of GEAR in 1996.  This policy almost annihilated the industry in which you organise, with it workers’ jobs, your union’s membership, and indeed your union organisation. There can be no other characterisation of the offensive content of that strategy on workers except that it was an anti-worker onslaught. There can be no justification why workers, their jobs and livelihoods had to be plunged in the devastation suffered.

Let us therefore also take this opportunity to congratulate your union’s graduate, Comrade Ebrahim Patel, the Minister of Economic Development for his hard work not only in reviving the clothing, textile and leather industry but manufacturing activity working with other ministers in the economic cluster. The importance of the firm-level focus of the Department of Economic Development and particularly the projects it has undertaken to support investment and develop production cannot be over-emphasised.

The SACP has noted your efforts in line with the afore-mentioned work by the Department of Economic Development working together with other departments such as the Department of Trade and Industry in relation to manufacturing development, expansion and diversification. This, among others, is what we need to transform the basic structure of our economy, to do away with its problematic colonial features, to create jobs and ensure inclusive growth.

In particular, the importance of the projects you have decided to pursue in relation to the study of the labour process, including methods of work and production processes to save jobs, create new ones and respond to the new challenges of global trade cannot be overemphasised. This is a relatively new area in the struggle for progressive trade unionism in South Africa. In the colonial and apartheid past there was no material basis for such a focus as involvement in those matters was highly problematic.

At the heart of this new focus on the study of and strategic engagement with the labour process – and of course not without its own contradictions – should be work security, job security, employment security, income security, in general,  jobs and decent work!! The study of the labour process cannot be avoided at least at an elementary level if we are to defend existing jobs, create new ones and advance the decent work agenda. This micro focus must be complimented by a supportive macro policy framework – which is why it is important for SACTWU in the context of the collective organisation of COSATU as a progressive trade union federation to continue its activism on macroeconomic policy issues to achieve the required complimentarity.

All of this must find expression in collective bargaining, which can no longer only be about wages and benefits but must include job creation, decent work in general and overall transformation of the workplace as a key site of struggle and centre of power as well as a source of income and livelihood!! Collective bargaining must contribute towards addressing the problems of inequality, unemployment and poverty.

For example as discussed in one of the recent African Communist issues published last year, 2015 towards SACP Special National Congress examining the triple challenges of inequality, unemployment and poverty in the context of the perspective of the need to place the national democratic revolution on to a second, more radical phase, finding employment, notwithstanding its importance and the relief it offers, does not automatically uplift one from poverty. This is why there are millions of working poor in our country.  Collective bargaining must be seen contributing towards addressing the problem, both in terms of wage demands and negotiated benefits to fight for equitable distribution of production income at the point of production and ensure overall transformation of the workplace.    

In this context, it is important to strengthen COSATU following the devastating impact it has suffered from the divisions it experienced in the aftermath of the 2008 and still continuing international capitalist system crisis.

Let us therefore confront the entire structure of the material basis and drivers of the problems experienced by COSATU and almost the whole of the trade union movement and the workers themselves.

Let us wage a relentless war against corporate capture!

One of the problems facing the trade union movement in general is the problem of penetration by private corporations in trade union organisations post-1994 and the phenomenon associated with it of business unionism. In other words, there is a variant of the broader phenomenon of corporate capture that has found its way in the trade union movement.

There has been an increase in divisions and fragmentation not only in the aftermath of the economic crisis of capitalism but also as a result of the variant of corporate capture that has found its way into the trade union movement and linked with it the phenomenon business unionism. Business relationships that thereupon emerge, with workers seen as a lucrative market of financial and other products sold by private corporations, but as well as business opportunities associated with worker funds, including trade union investments and other financial resources, are a serious problem. The progressive trade union movement must stand up against the challenge and overcome it!!

At the broader political level, considering all of the issues we have raised in the context of the need to advance the second, more radical phase of the national democratic revolution, let us recall what the SACP’s 1962 Political Programme, ‘The Road to South African Freedom’ said in characterising the South African situation then:

“South Africa is not a colony but an independent state. Yet masses of our people enjoy neither independence nor freedom. The conceding of independence to South Africa by Britain, in 1910, was not a victory over the forces of colonialism and imperialism. It was designed in the interests of imperialism. Power was transferred not into the hands of the masses of people of South Africa, but into the hands of the White minority alone. The evils of colonialism, insofar as the non-White majority was concerned, were perpetuated and reinforced. A new type of colonialism was developed, in which the oppressing White nation occupied the same territory as the oppressed people themselves...”

This analytical reflection underlined the connection between colonial oppression and apartheid in South Africa and imperialism on the other hand. In other words, the twin goals of placing the national democratic revolution on to the second, more radical phase following the 1994 democratic breakthrough are the elimination of the legacy of colonialism of a special type and imperialist domination. The emphasis on fighting imperialist domination is very important, since there are some who only think that the South African problem is historically a domestic problem without an external dimension. As the SACP’s 1962 Political Programme states, colonialism of a special type in South Africa was designed in the interests of imperialism.

The struggle to achieve complete de-colonisation through transformation and both national independence and democratic national sovereignty through the overthrow of imperialist domination are, however, not fought in a vacuum. This is a process of class struggle and is subject to what Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in the 1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party meant when they said:

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles... in a word, [the struggle between the] oppressor and oppressed, [who throughout history] stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”

As Comrade Joe Slovo stresses in ‘The South African working class and the national democratic revolution’, taking his cue from Vladimir Lenin:

“There is no such thing as ‘pure’ class struggle and those who seek it can only do so from the isolating comfort of a library arm-chair. The idea that social revolutions involve two neatly-labelled armies was dealt with by Lenin with bitter irony”.

Then quoting Lenin (Collected Works, Volume 22, pp.355-6), Slovo wrote:

“So one army lines up in one place and says ‘we are for socialism’ and another, somewhere else and says, ‘we are for imperialism’, and that will be a social revolution! ... Whoever expects a ‘pure’ social revolution will never live to see it. Such a person pays lip-service to revolution without understanding what revolution is”

This proper understanding of class struggle from Marx and Engels, Slovo and Lenin should illuminate clarity assisting those who are still wondering why we are facing contradictions within our own movement while we must all be united behind the imperative of placing the national democratic revolution on to the second, more radical phase. Class struggle is indeed not a purist process. By its very nature it arises out of, and is characterised by, class contradictions. This is what is going on with the problems such as corporate capture that are threatening to hamstring both our national liberation movement and the democratically elected government.

But no matter what happens either momentarily or for a long time to come, we should not give an inch to the possibility ultimately of the victory of the class forces that have been captured and those that have captured them. Such a tragic victory will disrupt the perspective of placing the national democratic revolution on to a second, more radical phase. It will sound the knell of defeat to the dream of achieving the successful completion of the national democratic revolution as we know it. To borrow from Marx and Engels in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, that will ruin the masses of our people – the majority of whom is the working class and poor.

In cannot be correct for some few elements to use their positions of leadership to prioritise defending one single family – and its acquaintances – that is amassing wealth from a web of relationships and decisions made in state institutions, state deployments and state owned enterprises while the masses of our people are languishing in high levels of inequality, unemployment and poverty.

This is one of the reasons why as the SACP we have called for a judicial commission of inquiry into the phenomenon of corporate capture. This is not limited to the allegations of the amassing of wealth by the Gupta family, which, given the specific concerns raised about its conduct must certainly be investigated through a thorough scrutiny of each and every contract, tender or license that its members  and associated corporations have acquired, linked to the state, state deployments and state owned enterprises. The investigation must be broad spectrum both in scope and depth.

As part of the efforts to place the national democratic revolution on to the second, more radical phase, we must de-monopolise our economy in the line of development of the Freedom Charter and intensify the fight against collusion and corruption, perceived or real. It cannot be correct to create or defend the creation of an oligarchy or oligarchies in general, for that matter including kleptocrats.

The ANC on Sunday, 20 March released a statement following an ordinary session of its National Executive Committee. There are important elements in that statement in relation to some of these matters that must be welcomed.

In particular the process that the statement sets up for those who have come up or who want to come up to register their experiences and concerns relating to activities or attempts at corporate capture by the Gupta or any business family for that matter must be welcomed.

The new process that has been opened by the ANC following the NEC to regulate business interests must also be welcomed. 

The condemnation of the Gupta media mouthpieces and the arrogance of the members of that family who see and portray the ANC as factions must be welcomed.  

As the SACP, we reiterate our call to ANC and broader members of our society in different sectors who have come across such attempts at corporate capture or manipulative or intimidating actions to that end to come forward and express their views in terms of the processes that have now been established.

Lastly, let us deal with this other issue. Both as the SACP and the Party’s Second Deputy General Secretary we have never called for President Jacob Zuma to be recalled at the NEC meeting. What we have said is that the relationship between the Gupta family and the President has been contaminated. It is abused and has thus become poisonous. It is unhelpful both to the ANC and our people as a whole. What we have called for – and reiterate – is that the President must terminate it!!   

Thank you dear comrades for the invitation and the SACP wishes you all the best in the battles that lie ahead!!

Comrade Solly Mapaila is an uMkhonto weSizwe veteran and SACP Second Deputy General Secretary. He delivered this address to SACTWU National Bargaining Conference 21 March 2016 in Cape Town in his capacity as Second Deputy General Secretary of the SACP.

This speech first appeared in Umsebenzi Online, the online journal of the SACP.