President Ronald Reagan once said, “How do you tell a Communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.”
Mr Irvin Jim, general secretary of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa), reads Marx and Lenin. In fact, he is an unabashed admirer of these gentlemen and he devoted his New Year message to promoting a new worker’s party, as yet unnamed and unformed, that every South African should resolve to join in 2018.
Jim stated, “We call on you to help us build a worker’s party which will fight in the interests of the working-class and the poor.” He carried on, “The struggle for socialism is not an end in itself; it is a struggle for a communist classless society which Karl Marx correctly described as: ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’. “
Of course, what both Karl Marx and Irvin Jim fail to understand is that while needs are infinite, the means to pay are not. Margaret Thatcher once put it neatly in a well-known retort, “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”
Winston Churchill said, “Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.” But to balance that he also said, "The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries."
Irvin Jim correctly excoriates the ANC for the current economic situation in South Africa. It is such a pity that his solution is utterly misguided.