South African Communist Party
Central Committee statement
8 March 2015, @SACP1921
"Insufficient simply to acknowledge symptoms of crisis, both in SA and internationally...": SACP
The SACP Central Committee met in Johannesburg over the weekend of the 6th to 8th March. The CC discussed a comprehensive political report that focused on the current international situation and its impact upon our own national reality. The CC also engaged extensively with an input from Minister of Energy, Comrade Tina Joemat-Pettersson, outlining the energy challenges confronting our country.
The CC noted that the impact of the 2008 global capitalist economic crisis continues unabated. The political and economic elites in the advanced capitalist economies are clearly unable and unwilling to understand, still less address the underlying global systemic features of what has now become a highly financialised global casino economy. Social inequality has widened dramatically over the past three decades, even within developed capitalist societies. The stark reality and dangers of this widening inequality is now increasingly being recognised and condemned in many non-socialist quarters.
However, it is not sufficient simply to acknowledge symptoms of crisis, both in South Africa and internationally there is no sustainable route out of the comprehensive crisis afflicting the great majority of the world's peoples and our environment that is not anti-capitalist in orientation.
In the Eurozone, German banking interests with the support of German industrialists continue to enforce sadistic austerity measures on countries like Greece, insisting on drastic cuts in social grants, the minimum wage, the downsizing of public health-care and wide-spread privatisation. The SACP notes the important electoral victory of the radical left Syriza party with a mandate to resist the punishing austerity package that the unelected European Central Bank, the European Commission and the IMF seek to impose on the working class and popular strata within Greece.
The Greek people as a whole are being made to suffer for the profligacy of the Greek plutocracy, notorious for its tax evasion, as well as for the grave errors perpetrated by previous centre-left and centre-right governments, locking the country into a Euro monetary union designed to undermine the democratic national sovereignty of the semi-peripheral economies of southern Europe. The role of Goldman Sachs in deliberately enabling the former Greek government to disguise the level of its debt, and then speculatively profiting from the crisis is typical of these financial vultures.
Everywhere, from Venezuela to Syria, the imperialist centres seek to bully and inflict regime-change on states that show the will and capacity to defend at least some degree of national sovereignty. In the Maghreb and Middle East, the US and its allies have learnt nothing from the way in which their earlier Cold War support for fanatic extremists in Afghanistan, for instance, inevitably boomerangs against them.
Imperialist military interventions in Iraq, Syria, Libya and elsewhere have now left a swathe of chronic instability across whole regions, with tragic rebounds even into the heartlands of imperialism itself.
The bloody conflict in Ukraine has its origins in the attempts to contain Russia's development and to freeze it into a subordinate role as a semi-colonial importer of high-value commodities, and an exporter of primary commodities to the West. The ambition is to use NATO to re-militarise Russia's western boundaries. In advancing this agenda, the imperialists work actively with openly fascist forces.
South African challenges
Here in South Africa thanks, in part, to our sustained, overwhelming electoral support, we are not confronting any remotely serious regime-change agenda. But let's also keep a careful watch over any early signs of such an agenda through corrective and self-corrective measures. The demagogic leaders of the proto-fascist EFF openly and recklessly boast of their intention to overthrow the current government "by whatever means".
In Malamulele, a handful of agents provocateurs associated with the EFF have been behind the burning down of four schools and one administration block. We shouldn't, of course, exaggerate the potential of the EFF. However, in Parliament they receive tacit support for their wrecking-ball agenda from the Democratic Alliance, and from much of the media. Parliament and our other legislatures need to be defended as important spaces in which the executive can be held to account, but also in which democratic majorities can carry forward their electoral mandates in making legislation and developing policy.
In the face of deliberately provocative anarchistic behaviour in Parliament and out on the streets of our towns and communities, it is important that the ANC-alliance and government counter firmly, without over-reacting, without closing down democratic space and, above all, as defenders of our hard-won democratic constitution and rights.
To deal with destabilising hooliganism in our local communities it is critical that we consolidate our own grass-roots, branch-level formations, and that they become more pro-active in defending communities, in giving voice to legitimate challenges, and dealing with many social disorders. In particular, our alliance formations must campaign to defeat the scourge of drugs, including nyaope, in our communities.
There is now also a growing arrogance from the side of what the SACP has described as the "anti-majoritarian liberal" agenda. The cyber-space is filled with rabid white racism which, for too long, has been tolerated (and often tacitly incited) by key political news-sites. At the same time the SACP unqualifiedly condemns all other forms of counter-racism, hate speech, and xenophobia.
The Central Committee calls for the principled unity of COSATU. Disunity within the federation has had a negative and distracting impact on the ability of the organised working class to play an active and radical role, as in the past, in seeking to roll back the power of monopoly capital on our society. The SACP re-affirms its consistent stand that South Africa requires a militant, radical, socialist-oriented COSATU federation, not an Alliance labour-desk, or a tame "transmission belt" for government policies. We call on all of COSATU's affiliates to re-engage with the federation in order to contribute to the critical task of re-building worker unity.
The SACP continues to engage actively with COSATU and its affiliates. In these engagements we seek to broaden the discussion to focus on the transformational responsibilities of affiliates in the sectors in which they organise - for instance, the important potential role of CWU in ensuring that the Post Office and Postbank are defended and re-built as key publicly-owned assets to address developmental challenges.
The Central Committee condemned the attack on the SACP-convened memorial meeting for Comrade Joe Slovo in Mpumalanga. As the national leadership of the SACP we have actively taken up this matter with the ANC national leadership and we are working jointly to ensure that thuggish behaviour, and the underlying interests behind it, are dealt with severely
We are at a critical cross-road for our still young democracy. The task of nation building remains central. With our sustained majority electoral mandate, the ANC-led alliance has the capacity and the responsibility to play the leading role in nation building. Central to this task is, precisely, the defence of our country's right to democratic national sovereignty in pursuing balanced and sustainable development. The greatest threat to the consolidation of our democratic breakthrough lies in the destabilising impact of the crises of mass unemployment, poverty and inequality.
At the heart of nation building, therefore, must be the imperative of advancing boldly on a radical second phase of our national democratic revolution. This means rolling back the choke-hold exerted over our economy by monopoly capital. Re-industrialisation through leveraging off our national mineral resources is a key pillar. In the coming months it will be critical to ensure that legislation to empower cost-plus off-sets for strategic minerals for downstream beneficiation is enacted.
It is critical that stronger measures are introduced to control the draining of financial surplus out of our country through tax avoidance, transfer pricing, and other dodges. State power must be exercised to drive localisation, employment creation and the development of cooperatives and SMMEs using state procurement. We welcome the recent State of Nation Address announcement that we will move towards a 30 percent set-aside target for co-operatives and SMMEs for designated government procurements. Our state owned enterprises and development finance institutions must be defended but also actively transformed to become key instruments for driving a second radical phase.
Energy challenges
The current challenges on the energy front were extensively discussed in the course of a productive engagement with the Minister of Energy, Comrade Tina Joemat-Pettersson. We agreed that energy security, national security and our national sovereignty are intimately inter-linked. The CC reaffirmed its core positions in regard to our country's energy challenges:
Eskom remains a key strategic national asset. Its role going forward in terms of ensuring the great majority of our energy requirements both in terms of generation and transmission must be defended. However, the process led by Cabinet's "war room" has underlined and uncovered many weaknesses within Eskom. It is a national asset that now requires tough love.
While in the middle technical ranks there are many committed professionals doing excellent work, in the senior technical and especially managerial levels there have been many weaknesses and even complacency. There are many indications that Eskom has been treated as a milk-cow by private sector rent-seekers. The pricing and procurement of coal supplies to Eskom power-stations, and indications of serious manipulation of procurement of diesel for the Open Cycle Turbines must be dealt with.
The SACP, in line with decisions taken at the ANC's NEC lekgotla in January, calls for the abandonment of the ISMO Bill which seeks to abolish Eskom's role in transmission, fragmenting the integrity of our core energy system in the name of "competition" and "market neutrality". With the many challenges we face, we don't need a spurious "market neutrality". We need a pro-active bias in supply and pricing towards our developmental priorities, including re-industrialisation and balanced spatial development - sovereign national public interest must prevail over private profits.
While supporting the development of Independent Power Producers (IPPs), particularly in the renewables space, the CC calls for much greater rigour in ensuring that pricing contracts with IPPs do not (as in the first two window periods) lock us into excessively high prices over a prolonged period. Much greater vigilance is also required in IPP contracts to ensure that localisation requirements are indeed complied with.
The CC expressed concern at the slowing down in the critical roll-out of Solar Water Heaters (SWHs) to poor households. While a temporary pause in the roll-out has been justified to ensure that the millions of SWHs we plan to roll-out are locally manufactured and create local jobs. However, the SA Bureau of Standards process that has specified rigorous standards to ensure localisation is now in danger of being watered down to create more space for black-owned SWH manufacturers. The watering down of SABS standards will, in effect, mean that more components will be imported, with black manufacturers acting as fronts for foreign interests. This will have a serious impact on local job creation possibilities.
On bio-fuels the CC expressed concern at long delays in finalising regulations. We believe that delays have been caused by the lobbying of key agricultural sectors. We insist that key ANC and government policy perspectives are affirmed. Bio-fuel feedstock must not be produced on land that is suitable for food production.
Digital Conversion
The CC welcomes cabinet's policy on digital migration, including the decision to retain a control system in the decoders or set top boxes (STBs). The definition of "control" to be gazetted soon should not only ensure that that the local electronics industry is encouraged and jobs created, but allow for new emerging players to enter the pay-TV market, thereby reducing the extremely high level of monopoly. More competition in the pay-TV market will benefit those currently excluded from access to pay-TV, including soccer matches, restricted to those who can pay the high subscription fees. More competition will mean lower subscriptions, more viewers and greater choice. The STBs should contribute to transforming the broadcasting sector as part of the overall economic and social transformation of South Africa.
Welcome home Comrades Moses Kotane and JB Marks
The return of the mortal remains these two giants of our liberation and internationalist struggle comes at a propitious time. The outstanding example they set of building a united alliance, of self-less devotion to the workers and the poor is an example that requires emulation more than ever.
Today, March 8, is International Women's Day
The Central Committee wishes all SACP women activists and indeed the women of the world "Happy International Women's Day"! We welcome that today President Zuma will be addressing an African Women's conference on developing cooperatives in Nelson Mandela Bay. In a world of deepening inequality, in which it is women who are often the most affected, the SACP fully associates itself with this year's International Women's Day slogan: "Equality for women is progress for all!"
Statement issued by the SACP Central Committee, March 8 2015
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