The South African Communist Party 94th Anniversary Statement delivered by Cde Blade Nzimande, General Secretary, August 2 2015
Communist Cadres to the Front:
Unite the Working Class, our Communities, and our Movement
Dear comrades,
Today being the second day of our National Women’s month, let us first of all start by paying tribute to the heroic women of our country.
The SACP wishes the ANC Women’s League success at its forthcoming national conference!
The building of a progressive women’s movement, with the ANC Women’s League at the centre is essential. Its importance cannot be over-emphasised!
The SACP has also just concluded its Special National Congress with a revolutionary slogan and theme – that of uniting the working class, our communities, and our movement!
Down with imperialism, down: Hasta la victoria siempre!
We are celebrating our 94 years of struggle in the international context characterised by the most complex, and longest, capitalist crisis since the 1930s. The crisis has negatively impacted on the working and living conditions of a large array of popular strata, both in the developed capitalist centres and the developing world. This has given rise, in turn, to a wide range of popular mobilisations, some with a broadly progressive character, others with a seriously negative and regressive orientation, including here at home.
Over the past 30 years, the sway of globalised financial markets has increasingly displaced and eroded nominally sovereign national electoral mandates, even in the most developed capitalist societies.
Across much of Europe, there has been the strong rise of anti-establishment right-wing neo-fascist, anti-immigrant movements, responding demagogically to the growing stress felt by working class, petty bourgeois and unemployed strata in Germany, France, Austria, Greece, etc. There has also been an important rise of more radical left electoral formations as well – notably in the semi-periphery of developed capitalism.
The election of Syriza, with 37% of the vote in Greece has pitted a national electoral mandate against the banking interests that dominate the European Monetary Union and the wider EU in general. Syriza’s mandate was further supported by a popular referendum – saying no to austerity measures. But at the end, democracy was directly replaced by the dictatorship of finance monopolies. The popular election results were undermined – and the referendum was exposed – as a futile exercise. The financial sector dictated overall direction on the Greek government. It imposed the very same austerity measures that were rejected through elections and a referendum!
This is the international context in which we are facing the task to place our democratic transition on to the second, more radical phase!
Our second radical phase of transformation is about altering our relationship with imperialist forces by advancing the struggle to delink from domination and exploitation by them.
Organisationally as the ANC-led Alliance, and through the state, we must intensify our anti-imperialist struggle and push it to greater heights!
As the SACP, we are proud that South Africa was the first country to host all the Cuban 5 heroes after their release from unjust incarceration by the imperialist United States. The release of all the Cuban Five could not have been possible without international solidarity, without the determination and resilience of the Cuban people! It is indeed a victory to celebrate.
We are calling on the United States to end its illegal economic blockade on Cuba, and to evacuate Guantanamo Bay with immediate effect!
The United States, the self-appointed world police, must stop all the atrocities it is committing against humanity both at the Guantanamo Bay and throughout the world!
Back to the root! Unite the Working Class
94 years ago, on 30 July 1921, our party was founded in Cape Town. The majority of the delegates at the congress came from Johannesburg and the surrounding areas that we now call Gauteng.
Why was this?
Because Johannesburg was the centre of the Gold Mining industry and many of the members of the International Socialist League, by far the biggest of the organisations which had come together to form the Communist Party of South Africa, were recruited from mine workers or others whose employment was dependent on mining.
Today, mining capital has still not transformed, and remains as intransigent as ever!
The arrogant, reactionary and insensitive utterances by the CEO of Anglo American, in defence of retrenchments by his and other mining companies must be strongly condemned. The SACP stands firmly behind the position taken by the ANC in this regard.
The SACP strongly condemns the planned retrenchments by the mining industry. The retrenchments show the continued reckless exploitation of our mineral resources by the capitalist conglomerates, and that they do not care about the working class, that is predominantly black.
At the heart of the 2012 violence and tragedy in the Rustenburg platinum belt lay the consistent push by mining bosses, as Anglo-American is doing now, to pursue narrow profit interests with a DON’T CARE attitude towards the workers.
At the height of super-profiteering by the mining companies when mining resources were in global high demand, the working class never benefitted as bosses swallowed all the profits. When global demand has gone down, it is the working class that is bearing the brunt of these difficulties.
Which is why the SACP, in response to the Marikana Commission report, has said, and we reiterate this, that mining capital must not be left to run away with murder!
Mining bosses must not be left exploiting workers and our country and taking profits overseas in billions of rands whilst the majority of the South African population remains impoverished!
We know that the strategy to divide and weaken the National Union of Mineworkers – the NUM – is part of the strategy of the mining bosses to accelerate the super exploitation of our mining resources and especially the black working class.
We do not believe that the mine bosses in South Africa have any reason to close down mines other than to destroy the NUM; divide workers; fragment trade union organisation; and maximise their profits through workplace restructuring, involving, among others: outsourcing, casualisation of workers, increased use of labour brokers, and intensification of work in such a way that one worker is overburdened with the workload that requires more workers who are then retrenched.
Let us look at the list:
- Harmony Gold at Doornkop, west of Johannesburg, is threatening to make 3,040 workers redundant.
- Glencore is retrenching 628 workers at its Optimum Coal mine in Mpumalanga.
- Kumba Iron Ore is threatening to cut 175 jobs at two mines in the Northern Cape.
- Lonmin is threatening to cut 6,000 jobs.
The SACP remains firmly of the view that we must stop the greed of the mining bosses who sell our mineral resources overseas at super profits but leaving our country environmentally ravaged, socially devastated and economically underdeveloped as they did since the 1800s!
Something radical must be done to alter our relationship with mining capital.
At present, the NUM is still negotiating increases for its members. As the SACP we fully stand behind the union and the struggle for a living wage by workers in all the sectors of our economy!
We are calling on all the workers to unite; for in division there can be no victory for the working class!
The SACP wishes to use this, its 94th anniversary, to call upon all COSATU affiliates and workers to work tirelessly for the unity of the federation, based on its founding principles of one industry, one union and one country, one federation.
We also want to use this occasion, in this city of the ANC, the SACP and COSATU to call upon the metalworkers to remain in COSATU – a militant, independent federation but that remains part of the liberation movement.
Transform the financial sector to serve the people!
Today, as we speak, we are living at a time when the gains of our liberation struggle are under severe attack from another capitalist sector – finance capital – both worldwide and in South Africa. Similarly, the Chamber of Mines is once again attacking the mineworkers through a system of mine closures, redundancies and mashonisas. In addition, mineworkers, as was shown in Marikana, as well as millions of other poor South Africans, are heavily indebted to these mashonisas.
However, the SACP welcomes the establishment of the African Regional Headquarters of the New Development Bank of BRICS in Johannesburg. BRICS constitutes an important component of mutually beneficial international co-operation which has the potential to break down the hegemony of Western imperialism and its organs, the exploitative International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
It is nevertheless important that the SACP and the working class as a whole must intensify the struggle for the transformation of the financial sector here at home as we have been doing over the years. The exploitative link between the banks, the property developers, estate agents, local government officials and corrupt elements in our courts, continue to collude against the working class around evictions in many parts of our country. We further have the case of illegal garnish orders. All these call for the intensification of the struggle to transform the financial sector in our country.
As part of the transformation of the financial sector, the SACP calls for the establishment of state banks to serve the people, principally by transforming the Post Bank into a fully-fledged developmental bank to serve the interests of the workers and the poor of our country, as well as small business and co-operatives
The SACP has called for the convening of a second financial sector summit in order to assess the state of both the public and private financial institutions towards servicing our developmental agenda of economic transformation, industrialisation, infrastructure development and support for SMEs and co-operatives.
Unite our communities, build township and village economies
The SACP Special Congress paid sufficient attention on the important task of mobilising our communities to drive local development, including building vibrant township and rural economies. It is incumbent upon the SACP to isolate and defeat all the tenderpreneurs who often stand between government developmental programmes and our communities. We need to transform our communities into drivers of local economic development rather than being passive recipients of 'service delivery'.
Communist cadres must be in the forefront in driving the alliance’s 'Know Your Neighbourhood Campaign' in order to ensure that we are in permanent contact with our communities, and not only engage with them in the run up to elections.
In order to achieve all of the above it is important for communists to ensure that we have strong VD based branches that are in constant contact with our people. It is as a result of some of the advances that we have made that there is now a campaign to try and discredit the SACP and seek to isolate it from the rest of our liberation movement. We have to call upon our cadres to intensify communist work in all our communities.
The battle of ideas and the transformation of the media!
It is important for communists and our movement as a whole to understand that any class struggle also involves the battle of ideas, including the struggle in and through the media. The two most important aspects in this regard is that South African media is highly monopolised and it is generally against our movement and the democratic government. It is very is important that we do not take this reality lightly. We must intensify the struggle for the transformation of the media in particular and generally the major organs of communication in our country.
Following our Special National Congress, and its critique of Naspers as a media monopoly born out of the apartheid era, Media24 CEO Esmare Weideman has acknowledged the company’s “complicity in a morally indefensible political regime and the hurtful way in which this played out in their newsrooms and boardrooms”, thus apologising for Naspers’s role under apartheid. While this is perhaps a step in the right direction, it is important to note that Naspers and other apartheid media houses refused to go to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and to co-operate with the South African Human Rights Commission on the role media played under apartheid.
The apology is therefore far from sufficient. Our view as the SACP is that if Naspers is serious about its apology it must approach the Human Rights Commission to deal with all aspects of its role under apartheid. This may also help in getting the rest of the media to confront its own role and complicity under apartheid as a crime against humanity.
Our Special National Congress rightly resolved to intensify the struggle for the transformation of the media, including the fight against media oligopolies and support for community media. In addition, the Congress called for the independent regulation of especially print media rather than the obviously inadequate self-, or so called co-regulation.
Preserve and advance the unity of our movement
Our Special National Congress correctly noted that the SACP is currently the most united of all our Alliance formations and ideologically coherent. We must therefore use the unity of the SACP as a platform to fight all divisive tendencies within our movement and seek to unite it so that it becomes stable to drive a second, more radical phase of our transition.
The SACP is seriously concerned that there is a premature putsch of factions positioned by some comrades in our movement towards the ANC National Conference of 2017. Whilst the SACP respects this process as that of the ANC, but some of the factional posturing is adversely poisoning the atmosphere in the Alliance as a whole. The SACP must name and shame such factionalists for their unbecoming conduct so that we can preserve the unity of our movement. It is for this reason, amongst others, that our Special National Congress called for communist cadres to be in the forefront to unite the working class, our communities, and our movement. It is this message that we must carry across our movement and in the Alliance as a whole.
We are also calling upon all our structures to build a larger and stronger SACP, whilst simultaneously building it as a party with political depth and quality.
Issued by the SACP, August 2 2015
