SACP Central Committee Press Statement
The SACP Central Committee met in Johannesburg in its first plenary session for 2013 over the weekend of 1-3 March. The CC analysed, amongst other things, the current state of our ANC-led alliance, and the offensive against the trade union movement and our hard-won collective bargaining dispensation. We also discussed the scourge of violence and particularly gendered based violence in our society.
The CC congratulated our alliance partner, the ANC, for a highly successful 53rd National Conference in Mangaung in December. Despite dire warnings in parts of the commercial media, and active disruptive activities in the months before, the Conference marked an important step forward in the on-going process of unifying and revitalising the ANC around the task of leading a radical second phase of our democratic transition. It is important that these advances are now consolidated in practice.
Amongst other things, the SACP particularly appreciates the economic resolution from the 53rd National Conference which reaffirms the National Development Plan "as a living and dynamic document" (in other words, it is not something written in stone for all time) that "articulates a vision which is broadly in line with our objective to create a national democratic society." The resolution then quite correctly asserts that "within the NDP vision, critical instruments and policy initiatives will continue to drive government's medium-term policy agenda".
It then specifically refers to the national infrastructure plan, "a flag-ship programme of the state" that "all departments and spheres of government must join in taking forward"; the New Growth Path "designed to shift the trajectory of economic development, including through identified drivers of job creation"; and "the industrial policy action plan" guiding "the reindustrialisation of the South African economy."
These formulations are absolutely relevant. Given the global and national challenges, it is critical that, on the one hand, we mobilise the broadest spectrum of South Africans behind a shared 20-year vision while, at the same time, ensuring that we consolidate state-led economic interventions that decisively transform the structural realities of our society. Without the latter, the vision of a more equal, non-racial and prosperous SA will prove to be a mirage. Attempts by opposition forces to cherry-pick isolated formulations from within the National Development Plan, and to play the plan off against state-led economic programmes must be exposed and resisted.
The relevance of this line of march is underlined by, amongst other things, President Zuma's State of the Nation address which contained extensive data indicating the transformative progress that is now being made on the ground in advancing and unblocking economic and social infrastructure programmes. The State of Nation address and last week's budget speech both underlined the advances that are being made in the midst of the ongoing capitalist crisis. Despite many challenges, government remains committed to major state-led investment in infrastructure, health-care and education, amongst others. This continued investment to place our economy onto a new, more inclusive growth path is in stark contrast to the austerity packages being implemented in many other economies.
Of course, none of this means that as popular forces we can be complacent. On-going working class and popular mobilisation is essential to ensure that the infrastructure build programme achieves structural transformation goals - and does not merely lower the cost of doing business for business. In particular, we need to ensure that our infrastructure programme leverages re-industrialisation, and that it actively contributes to overcoming the many spatial anomalies of underdevelopment between urban and rural areas, between rural areas, within our towns and cities, and across our Southern African region.
The worsening trade balance, high-lighted in the budget, underlines the critical importance not just of attracting investment or improving our export performance - but, above all, of stimulating local, value-added production. This also underlines the imperative of driving a better alignment between the mining and agricultural sectors and our industrial policy initiatives. The SACP will continue to mobilise through our mass-based campaigns to ensure that these strategic objectives are not watered down or blocked.
In taking up the struggle against corruption it is important to remember that it does not occur only in the public sector. The Competition Commission is currently dealing with the multi-billion rand collusive behaviour of the major South African construction companies. This activity is not just a question of anti-competitive, collusive behaviour - it needs to be named for what it - massive criminal theft of the public purse. There should be criminal consequences for those involved, and not mere wrist-slapping. Likewise, the scandal around meat, much of it imported by global multi-nationals highlights the essentially corrupt character of global capitalism.
Challenges in the labour movement
The CC held an extensive discussion on the challenges confronting the labour movement, and particularly our key ally COSATU, in the current conjuncture. World-wide the on-going capitalist economic crisis is leading to an intensified assault on the working class. As always, transnational monopoly capital seeks to transfer its own crisis onto workers and popular strata, with retrenchments and punishing budget cuts while seeking bale-outs at public expense for themselves. A particular target world-wide in this reactionary counter-offensive is to roll-back the organised sections of the working class, and to under-cut hard-won collective bargaining rights.
In SA, given the strength and central role of the labour movement in the struggle to consolidate a more radical second phase in the national democratic transition, COSATU and its affiliates have become a major target for this reactionary counter-offensive.
The Marikana tragedy of last year had its origins in a strategy by the mining multi-nationals to undercut the organisational and bargaining strength of the National Union of Mineworkers, by funding right-wing factional break-aways, by undermining collective bargaining agreements, by refusing (in the platinum sector) to enter into centralised sectoral negotiations, and by continuing to rely excessively on contracted, labour-brokered workers. The anarchy that now prevails in much of the platinum sector, and the resulting profit-losses is a whirl-wind of the mine-bosses' own making. While this might have led to some sobering up on their part, the tragedy is that many worker lives have been lost.
The same short-sighted, obdurate anti-worker, union-bashing instincts of the capitalist class have been in evidence in the case of the farm-worker and farm community strikes and protests in the Boland. The response of farm-owners to government's recent minimum wage declaration has been to threaten some 4000 retrenchments - and yet, at the same time, they have lodged some 3000 new permit applications to employ non-national labour-brokered workers. A key feature of the Boland farm community strikes and protest actions has been the remarkable unity between African and Coloured workers, and between South African workers and those contracted from Lesotho, Zimbabwe and elsewhere. We salute this important class solidarity achieved in the face of constant attempts at divide-and-rule, led by the DA provincial administration.
The capitalist agricultural sector needs to come to the sober realisation that food production based excessively on an export orientation, and on cheap labour is unsustainable. Their claim that the current minimum wage declaration is "unaffordable" needs to be contextualised within a wider reality - some 45% of the value-chain in SA's agricultural output is captured by outside of our country, by non-South African agro-processing, logistics and retail chains.
Improving the working conditions of farm-workers in SA needs to be located within a much wider national strategy aimed at ensuring national food security and the sustainability of agricultural production in our country. This includes a greater focus on the alignment of our land reform, agricultural, agro-processing and broader industrial policy programmes.
In discussing the onslaught against the labour movement, and specifically against COSATU and its affiliates, the CC agreed that organisational weaknesses and factionalism within our formations plays into the hands of our class opponents, and encourages all manner of populist demagogues to exploit the situation. A principled and radical programmatic unity of COSATU and its affiliates, and between COSATU and its alliance partners is absolutely imperative. Weaknesses and challenges within COSATU and its affiliates have multiple causes. The onslaught from outside must never been forgotten, but there are also internal challenges.
As COSATU itself has high-lighted on many occasions, these include cases of complacency and tendencies towards neglecting the hard-slog of daily servicing members on the shop-floor. We respect and salute the independence of the federation, and strongly affirm the necessity of a militant trade union movement that refuses to become a simple transmission belt for government, or for any political party, including the SACP. However, the SACP has raised with COSATU our concern that, on occasion, a blanket oppositionism or an exaggerated focus on secondary challenges has weakened, rather than strengthened COSATU's ability to impact upon defining and driving a second, more radical phase of our national democratic revolution.
Perhaps the greatest danger to COSATU's unity and militancy lies in the considerable loss of democratic worker-control over the billions of rands within the various investment arms of COSATU and its affiliates. Factional battles within the federation often have their origin in battles over control of these funds. As part of the SACP's Financial Sector Campaign, the Party will be engaging our COSATU ally around an alternative strategic perspective on worker-funds. Currently these funds tend to be outsourced to fund-managers, who are often paid excessive salaries and bonuses, and who make investment decisions based on pure profit-maximisation capitalist principles.
There are also allegations of problematic personal relations between these fund managers and elected union leadership. There is little alignment in union investments with our new growth path and industrial policy programmes. Yet, there are many inspiring examples of the way in which union funds can be used to support an alternative social economy - social housing in Quebec, funding of worker coops in Italy, employee share-owner schemes in local small manufacturing operations in Latin America, amongst other things.
Unfortunately, with some important exceptions, the investment funds within COSATU have become not leverage for an alternative economy, but a capitalist Trojan Horse wheeled into the very heart of the federation. Within this general context, the SACP wishes to salute SACTWU for its R1-million pledge to FAWU to assist in organising the farming sector in the Western Cape. This is a wonderful example of worker solidarity that needs to be emulated. This act of union to union solidarity contrasts with the behaviour of some other COSATU affiliates who are actively poaching from other affiliates undermining the founding "one-industry, one-union" founding principle of COSATU.
Financial sector campaign
The Central Committee agreed that the financial sector campaign will be our major campaigning focus for 2013. Apart from our engagements with COSATU on worker funds, we will focus on the ballooning of unsecured loans in which all the banks, but particularly those like Capitec and African Bank are preying on the vulnerabilities of the working class and poor. One of the contributory factors behind the Marikana tragedy was precisely the extortionist behaviour of the loan sharks operating in the surrounding communities.
Ten out of the eleven "mashonisas" in the area were brazenly breaking the law. We welcome Minister Gordhan's budget speech expression of concern around the unsustainable and often irregular use of "garnishee" orders against the victims of loan-sharking. We will be campaigning to ensure that government greatly strengthens its capacity to monitor, regulate and deal with reckless lending and other financial sector abuses.
Working with social movement comrades, the SACP has taken up with the South Gauteng High Court our concern around the way in which clerks of the court have been collaborating with estate agents in granting illegal eviction orders against families in central Johannesburg. We are pleased to acknowledge the steps taken by the judges of the high court, once their attention was drawn to these abuses. However, we believe that many abuses may still be occurring in the inter-face between financial institutions, property developers and the courts in dealing with victims of irregular "garnishee" orders, and in evicting black families from inner-city flats and municipal housing. It is not just in Gauteng either, there is strong evidence of these abuses happening in eThekwini, for instance.
The scourge of violence, including gendered-based violence
Several recent high-profile cases of rape, murder and police brutality have once more reminded us that we are living in an extraordinarily violence-ridden society. These high-profile cases are, in effect, examples of countless daily realities that mostly pass unreported. We have spoken of the three inter-related crises in our society - inequality, poverty and unemployment. We need to add a fourth - not unconnected to the other three - the personal insecurity in the daily lives of South Africans, and especially, but not only, the working class and poor communities.
It is, of course, not enough simply to condemn brutality and violence. Nor are there single, silver-bullet answers to the challenge. We need to have a multi-pronged strategy that includes well-resourced dedicated courts dealing with gender-based violence, staffed with trained personnel. We need to support NGOs and community-based organisations that have been doing excellent work in working with rape-survivors, victims of xenophobic attack and other violence. The police service is clearly under severe strain, with brutality and torture apparently rife in some quarters. The lurch towards militarisation in the police service a few years back was extremely ill-advised and has compounded the problem.
We have lost momentum on the important crime prevention strategies that were developed in 1996-97 that underlined the structural nature of crime and violence in our country. Popular participation and mobilisation for neighbourhood watches, street committees and community police forums is essential. Our wider strategies to address social and economic challenges of housing, education and unemployment need also to be understood as part of building a new ethos of community cohesiveness, responsibility and solidarity. We must also resist the obvious temptation of right-wing, "eye for an eye" responses that do not break the cycle of brutality and the belittling of human life.
The SABC
The SACP is appalled at the continuing instability in the senior management and board of our public broadcaster. The current chairperson of the board has singularly failed to provide cohesive leadership. The quality and content of the SABC's broadcasting shows a continuing decline in standards. The business model has opened it up to corporate capture and to the promotion of a shallow bling-oriented culture. The failure to implement the planned 24-hour news channel is a blunder. Underlying all of these problems is, we believe, the plundering of the resources of the public broadcaster by various factions. The SACP calls for a full forensic audit of the SABC. We also urge the Public Protector to move with a greater sense of urgency around concerns of corruption in the institution. We are aware that her office has been sitting on a comprehensive dossier of allegations for over 18 months.
South African medical students in Cuba
The CC condemned the strike by some South African medical students benefiting from the internationalist generosity of Cuba. This is a cause for national embarrassment for all progressive South Africans. Failure to support some of these students from the side of South African provincial authorities might be a factor in some cases and needs to be investigated and corrected. However, there are indications that some of these students are actually the relatively privileged children of South African politicians. This is a programme designed for the children of poor families who would not otherwise have the chance of higher education. In future much more effective screening must be undertaken.
In this overall context, the SACP calls on all South Africans to join together in building a peaceful, more equal, non-racial democracy. Let us all become active contributors, rather than carping observers.
Statement issued by the SACP Central Committee, March 3 2013
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