Cementing the SACP-COSATU socialist axis

In this workers month, and having just celebrated a successful May Day 2012, the SACP salutes the role of the working class in general, and COSATU in particular, for the role it continues to play in the consolidation and deepening of our national democratic revolution. Indeed as we celebrate workers' month, the SACP also celebrates the historic role and contribution in building a progressive trade union movement in our country.

It is imperative that we use this workers' month to cement the SACP/COSATU relationship and strategic unity as the socialist axis of the national democratic revolution, and whose unity must be the basis for safeguarding the unity of the ANC-led Alliance as a whole. The unity between the SACP and COSATU is indispensable not only for the victory of the struggle for socialism, but in the achievement of the more immediate goals of the national democratic revolution.

We need to ensure that we are not diverted by what we have described as three main trends emerging in sections of our society:

The democratic "melt-down" card - the attempts to create a sense of an alliance and revolution that is under siege, often when it is the frustration of elites who are now increasingly experiencing what the working class has always been experiencing - the weight of the current global capitalist crisis.

The personality assassination diversionary card - A media led campaign to project leaders of our alliance partners as being in competition with each other, and selectively elevating some of our leaders in order to condemn others. This is accompanied by a related campaign to try and project an Alliance leadership that is rudderless, yet we are not being judged by what we had committed to do as an alliance and government.

The pessimism about state power card - the growing cynicism of liberal elites about state power, when in fact their real gripe is the ANC's majority that they are uncomfortable with.

The working class must remain focused. Liberal attacks on our organizations and their programmes should only act to spur working class mobilization behind our five priorities of jobs, education, health, fight against crime and corruption, and rural development. It is on the basis of driving these campaigns that we should also seek to strengthen our organisations. The workers' month should be a period for the working class to play its leading role as the principal motive force for transformation of society.

The capitalist class in South Africa has, since the adoption of progressive labour laws in 1996, sought to increase the rate of exploitation of the working class through three closely interrelated strategies.

The first one has been through labour brokerage, and this has now in itself become a multi-billion rand industry.

Secondly, there has also been an increase in casualization of the working class through part-time and temporary work, thus making it difficult to organize workers under these conditions.

Thirdly there has been an increase in the employment of more vulnerable workers from the SADC region, especially from Zimbabwe in the agricultural, services and hospitality sectors.

So far the trade union movement has not had an effective answer to this capitalist onslaught, and instead there is a general weakening of unions organizing in the historically more vulnerable sections of the working class, like domestic and farm workers, as well as now in the services sectors.

It is therefore important, as we say in our May Day message, that we should all go back to the basics, that of organizing vulnerable workers, strengthening work-place organization, and seek to roll back the capitalist offensive against the working class in the workplace.

Organised workers have to play a leading role in seeking to transform South Africa's workplace as part of rolling back the fragmentation of the working class. It is for this reason that the SACP has insisted that for instance the struggle against labour brokers must not only be waged through occasional national mass action, important as this maybe, but must be fought daily where labour brokering is happening - at the workplace.

The SACP is also strongly of the view that the struggles for the skilling of the working class must now be taken to higher levels. It is for this reason that we welcome COSATU's Education Conference that will be held later this month. Skilling of the working class is not only important for our goals to attain economic growth and development, but is a critical dimension in building working class power in the workplace and in broader society.

Let the COSATU Education Conference be used as a critical platform to ensure that workplaces are opened for youth training, as well as to upgrade, for instance, the many highly exploited artisan aides into full artisans. Skills development is an essential component of the struggle for a living wage and for job creation.

Building working class power must also entail broadening the struggle to organize workers to go beyond the fight for wages, important as this is, but also to intensify the struggle for a decent social wage. Workers potentially control trillions of rands through their pension and provident funds and yet have had very little say over how these are invested. Are these funds invested to fund the luxuries of the bourgeoisie and the many ‘middle-men' who handle the investment of these funds OR are they being invested in the productive economy and into infrastructure so that job creation in accelerated?

Why is that some of these funds are not used to devise an affordable housing subsidy scheme for the millions of workers who qualify for neither the ‘RDP' housing nor housing bonds from the banks? It is indeed a cruel irony that billions of rands of workers pension and provident funds have been invested into the very e-tolling system that the working class now has problems with.

It is for the above reasons that the relationship between the SACP and COSATU must also be strengthened through intensifying the struggle for the transformation of the financial sector, so that it plays a developmental role in line with our new growth path. Let COSATU join the SACP in calling for the convening of a second financial sector summit as a critical platform to take the struggle for the transformation of the financial sector to higher levels.

Strengthening shop-floor organization, fighting for a decent living and social wage, must be accompanied by ongoing political education and intensified ideological work amongst the workers. Principled class and ideological struggles by the working class form a crucial basis for strengthening our relationship.

In so doing we must always ensure that the relationship between our two formations is not mediated through, or dependent on the generosity of, individuals occupying leadership positions in both formations at any point in time. In addition it is very important for workers to join and serve in the leadership positions in both the ANC and the SACP. Both the ANC and the SACP will also act as political schools in themselves for the workers, and as platforms for consolidating united alliance political activism.

It is therefore urgent that we establish the joint Ideological and Organisational Commission as we had agreed in our bilaterals, as one concrete way to give effect to a relationship based on principled programmes and struggles. This requires that we revitalize the socialist commissions at district and local levels and deepen Marxist-Leninist education amongst the workers. Whilst the SACP will not blindly support any struggle just because it happens to involve workers, it will nevertheless support all workers' struggles that stand to advance our goal of deepening the NDR as our most direct route to socialism.

In doing all this it will also be important not to be tempted to treat our organisations as the same, but rather as distinct but complementary formations. The SACP is a political party, whilst COSATU is a trade union federation. The respective roles of these organisations must not be substituted for the other, as this can only compromise and weaken the socialist axis in our alliance. That we have in the trenches together in the struggles against privatization and other neo-liberal economic policies must not be taken to mean that we are identical organisations. It is precisely of the unique nature and role of each that we have been able to strengthen each other in daily struggles.

As the SACP we will fight against any attempts to disrupt the unity between the SACP and COSATU. It has always been the intention of our detractors, both from the right and the left, to try and drive a wedge between our two formations. As Lenin warned, the separation between the labour and communist movements can only lead to the defeat of both the workers' struggles and the struggle for socialism. In our case this will also severely weaken the attainment of our immediate goals in the national democratic revolution.

It is also the SACP's considered view that COSATU should continue to discuss the possibility of affiliating to the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU). In the end it is only class-oriented trade unions, like those in WFTU that will advance the cause of national liberation and socialism in the world today.

In the SACP, COSATU has a reliable and principled ally! Let us use the workers' month to deepen and strengthen this relationship.

This article by SACP General Secretary Blade Nzimande first appeared in the Party's online journal Umsebenzi Online.

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