IN recent editions of the News Line we have reproduced in full a speech delivered by Zwelinzima Vavi, former general secretary of the Confederation of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and now Vice Chairperson of the Millennium Labour Council, to the congress of the Food and Allied Workers Union (FAWU).
Now we produce a response by Dave Wiltshire
This speech by Vavi deserves close consideration by every worker and young person not just in South Africa but in every country where the struggle for national liberation against imperialist domination is being waged.
For in the speech Vavi raises crucial issues that demand an answer if the struggle for the victory of the socialist revolution is to be assured, a victory that is essential as world capitalism in its death agony can only survive through declaring war on the working class and masses across the globe, driving forward exploitation and poverty and in the process creating a revolutionary crisis unparalleled in history.
The historic economic crisis of world capitalism, which broke through the surface in the world banking crash of 2008, is in turn creating a huge political crisis in the bourgeois and reformist parties who have taken on themselves the job of imposing on the workers and masses of the world the full burden of the crash.
It has revolutionised the working class, especially youth, across the world as everywhere the capitalist class has sought to solve its crisis through savage austerity cuts, raging unemployment and a massive drive to increase exploitation of workers and young people.
South Africa, the most advanced capitalist nation in Africa with a highly developed working class, has been at the forefront of the mass uprising of workers and youth against a bankrupt capitalist system and the leadership of the ANC government and its twin partners in ruling the country since the end of apartheid, COSATU and the South African Communist Party.
Vavi speaks with first-hand experience of the bitter class struggles that have pitted the mass of workers against this leadership and he has a proud record of fighting for the rights of workers and the poor. It is a fight that has earned him and those who like him have stood firm for the ideals of the liberation movement the undying hatred of the reformists and Stalinist leaders.
In 2015 the Central Executive Committee of COSATU voted to expel Vavi, its democratically elected General Secretary. At the same meeting, the CEC refused to reinstate the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, NUMSA, as a member of COSATU – one of the demands Vavi had consistently fought for.
NUMSA was expelled by an earlier Special Central Executive Committee meeting in November 2014, called to discuss and vote on an ANC ‘task force’ investigation into COSATU aimed at restoring ‘unity’ in the South African trade union movement.
The way forward for unity, according to the ANC and faithfully carried out by the CEC was to expel NUMSA for its opposition to the pro-capitalist policies of the ANC government, a government that rests on the support of COSATU and the Stalinist SACP, and for its refusal to campaign for the ANC in the previous general election.
As Vavi recounts, this huge split in COSATU is firmly rooted in it being tied hand and foot to the ANC. Referring to the history of COSATU as a trade union organisation that was in the forefront of the liberation struggle to free South Africa from the apartheid regime, he states that ‘for many years it (COSATU) was indeed one of the most militant and powerful workers’ federations anywhere in the world.’
Before going on: ‘Tragically it is not even a shadow of its former self and has become little more than a labour desk for the ANC government, whose neoliberal policies are the source of the very attacks we are facing.’ Vavi then goes on to ask, ‘How did we arrive at this point?’
His answers basically boil down to identifying the crisis in COSATU as being the result of ‘the complex and contradictory class relationships which it finds itself having to deal with, on a daily basis, in the multi-class and un-restructured ANC-led Alliance, to which it belongs.’
Secondly he identifies the crisis as springing from ‘the failure of the liberation movement as a whole to resolve national oppression, class exploitation and the triple oppression facing women post-1994, and letting the Black and African capitalists in the Liberation Movement win the day on the policy front.’
He continues: ‘As a result of this, the colonial and capitalist mode of production and its social relations have been strengthened in South Africa, thus worsening unemployment, mass poverty and extreme inequality.’ Having identified the crisis that is ripping COSATU apart what does Vavi propose as the way forward for the South African working class?
At the end of his speech Vavi refers to the nine major unions expelled or who have left COSATU, forming their own separate trade union federation. In other words Vavi, despite his trenchant attacks on the ANC, COSATU and SACP for maintaining capitalism, sees the struggle against them as taking purely a trade union form.
Indeed he states: ‘I may also add there is no tripartite alliance of independent organisations that exists capable of driving a revolution. There is no vanguard for a struggle for socialism.’
This is the heart of Vavi’s political position – there are numerous references to the hardship and deprivation faced by millions of workers, young people and the mass of the African people and the stark contrast between their suffering and the multi-millionaire former leaders of the liberation struggle who have gained seats at the capitalist table and now attack the working class on behalf of capitalism, but nowhere does he speak of the working class as a revolutionary force.
Yet it was the mass movement of the working class that erupted in 2012 with long and violent strikes centred on the mining industry that has vastly exacerbated the political crisis in the ANC and COSATU. This revolt by workers against the old conditions and poverty level pay resulted in the ANC government of Jacob Zuma revealing its true hatred of the working class when it ordered the police to break the strike at the Lonmin Marikana mine, which they tried to do by opening fire with automatic weapons on unarmed strikers.
34 miners were killed by the ANC’s police force that day, an act which the right-wing leadership of COSATU and its biggest union affiliate the National Union of Mineworkers excused, with some even blaming the workers for provoking the massacre, while the Stalinist SACP called for striking miners belonging to the more militant AMCU union to be jailed for ‘provoking anarchy’.
The ‘freedom fighters’ of the anti-apartheid struggle thus proved they were prepared to use the full might of the capitalist state and its ‘bodies of armed men’ to smash the working class in order to preserve the profits of the mine owners. The outrage caused by this atrocity has seen the struggle for power erupt in South Africa, leading to the bitter conflicts Vavi graphically outlines in his speech.
Workers in their millions have turned their backs on the ANC and the corrupt leadership of COSATU, leading to the explosive growth of the more militant unions such as NUMSA and the massive decline in the vote for the ANC in recent elections, mainly due to abstentions as Vavi notes.
In trying to explain this, Vavi quotes from the prison writings of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci was a dedicated fighter for the socialist revolution but his imprisonment by the Italian fascist regime from 1926 to 1937 when he died meant that his political theories were developed in isolation from the struggle to build and lead revolutionary Marxist parties.
Through no fault of his own his political theories lack the decisive clarity and analysis of Lenin and Trotsky who built the Bolshevik party which led the first successful socialist revolution. Vavi said: ‘The political theorist Antonio Gramsci described the phenomenon of capitalist crisis thus: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum a great variety of morbid systems appear” (from the selection from prison notebooks).’
He adds: ‘The “morbid symptoms” that Gramsci was talking about are manifesting themselves in South Africa in the following’, before going on to list the crimes of the ANC and COSATU leadership which essentially boil down to the fact that since being swept to power by the revolutionary mass movement in 1994 they have done nothing but ensure the dominance of capitalism across the country, in the process creating a handful of black capitalists who have grown enormously wealthy out of the exploitation of the working class.
This is a very revealing quote, it contains within it all that is wrong with Vavi’s position, namely that if the old is dying and the new cannot be born then this is in medical terms a stillbirth – an abortion of the revolution that inevitably leads to ‘morbid symptoms’.
But to take the analogy of birth even further what is required to prevent a stillbirth is the decisive intervention of a midwife and possibly even a surgical intervention.
The midwife to revolution is the revolutionary party.
For Vavi the only way forward is to rely on the struggle of individual leaders like himself who have not deserted the ideals of the ‘Freedom Charter’ as opposed to the those in the ANC, COSATU and the SACP who he accuses of doing precisely that and to ‘rebuild’ a basically trade union opposition to those in the ANC and SACP who have betrayed these ideals. This is dangerously wrong.
The Freedom Charter, adopted by the ANC in 1995 as the basis for the liberation struggle and which formed their political platform in 1994, was never a programme for the working class taking power and establishing socialism, as Mandela himself always maintained.
The charter is restricted to calling for a non-racial South Africa, universal suffrage and a bourgeois democratic state. Despite its stirring calls for the people to govern it in no way challenged the right of capitalism to rule.
Instead it envisaged a transition from the reactionary white settler racist rule of the apartheid state to a bourgeois democratic state, leaving the capitalist system and the capitalist state intact. This is exactly what happened in the 1990s when the mass uprising of workers and youth, that started in the townships in the late 1980s, turned into a mass mobilisation and uprising against the apartheid regime, rendering the country ungovernable, threatening revolution and crucially the super-profits of the international mining companies.
This forced the then president, F W De Klerk to release ANC leader Nelson Mandela and rescind the ban on the ANC. This was done to avoid the threat of revolution by organising a peaceful regime change with tame bourgeois nationalists of the ANC.
The ANC government guaranteed capitalism as usual.
After 1994 all the mines and major industries along with the banks remained firmly in the hands of the capitalist class, mainly under foreign ownership, as they do to this day. In return for scrapping the pass laws, capitalism was allowed to flourish and continue its exploitation of the South African workers and peasants.
It was a peaceful transition that completely excluded the working class.
The theoretical justification for this was provided by the Stalinist SACP with its ‘two stage’ theory of revolution. This thoroughly counter-revolutionary theory, adopted by Stalin in the 1920s along with the theory of the peaceful road to socialism, socialism in one country and peaceful co-existence with imperialism, holds that in underdeveloped countries the revolution would have to proceed in two stages.
First the move to bourgeois democracy and then at some much later stage when capitalism had been fully developed it might be possible to go forward to socialism.
In the meantime it is obvious that if capitalism is inevitable why not participate in it wholeheartedly.
This explains individuals like Cyril Ramaphosa, erstwhile freedom fighter, founder of the NUM, in the leadership off the ANC and now multi-millionaire businessman and shareholder in Lonmin. The fact that Ramaphosa and ANC president Zuma can leech off the backs of workers while the government is mired in corruption is not down to just the greed of individuals.
It is the outcome of the counter-revolutionary politics of a liberation movement dominated by bourgeois nationalism, justified by the counter-revolutionary theories of Stalinism. Equally, it cannot be dealt with by well-meaning people, committed to the ideals espoused by the Freedom Charter.
It is not a moral issue, as Vavi appears to believe, of good versus bad people. Instead of the works of Gramsci, the working class and youth must study the lessons of history – particularly the hard-won lessons of the Russian Revolution. In 1905, on the eve of the first Russian Revolution, the revolutionary movement faced the same issues as those confronting the workers in South Africa.
This was a bourgeois revolution to overthrow Tsarist autocracy and Russian feudalism under conditions where the Russian bourgeoisie were too weak to carry out the bourgeois democratic revolution themselves. The answer given by the Mensheviks was the two stage theory – that the working class was the only class capable of leading the bourgeois democratic revolution and that after its success it would then have to take a back seat and cede power to the bourgeoisie.
For Leon Trotsky it was inconceivable that the class who led the revolution would then hand power over to the class enemy and passively accept a lifetime of exploitation.
Building on the works of Marx and Engels, Trotsky advanced the theory of permanent revolution.
In his book ‘Permanent Revolution – Results and Prospects’, Trotsky wrote: ‘The theory of the permanent revolution, which originated in 1905 … pointed out that the democratic tasks of the backward bourgeois nations lead directly, in our epoch, to the dictatorship of the proletariat and that the dictatorship of the proletariat puts socialist tasks on the order of the day.
‘Therein lay the central idea of the theory. While the traditional view was that the road to the dictatorship of the proletariat led through a long period of democracy, the theory of the permanent revolution established the fact that for backward countries the road to democracy passed through the dictatorship of the proletariat.’
Trotsky continues: ‘Thus democracy is not a regime that remains self-sufficient for decades, but is only a direct prelude to the socialist revolution. Each is bound to the other by an unbroken chain. Thus there is established between the democratic revolution and the socialist reconstruction of society a permanent state of revolutionary development.’
In their attempt to hold back the permanency of revolution in South Africa by a ‘peaceful’ transition from white capitalist rule to capitalism with a few black capitalists for window dressing the ANC and the Stalinists have created the crisis engulfing the country. It is a crisis that can only be resolved through the working class taking power and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat.
This demands a new revolutionary party to lead the working class, a party that is based on Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. This was the theory, adopted wholeheartedly by Lenin, that guided the Bolshevik Party in leading the working class to take the power in the successful Russian revolution in October 1917.
In February 1917 the Tsarist autocracy was overthrown by a mass strike movement that assumed insurrectionary proportions. But having taken power from the monarchy it was handed over to the bourgeoisie by the reformist Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary leadership that dominated the workers’ and peasants’ movement.
A bourgeois Provisional Government was set up and the working class consigned by these leaders to play a completely subordinate role. It was only Lenin who insisted that the Bolshevik Party, although small at the time, had to be built in complete opposition to all these other parties, an independent revolutionary party that fought ceaselessly to lead the working class to take the power.
This happened in the October 1917 revolution – a revolution that was opposed by all those who adhered to the two-stage theory, all of whom went over to the side of counter-revolution.
In practice, the theory of permanent revolution was proved to be correct. For the South African workers, youth and landless there can be no way forward but to embrace the theory of permanent revolution and build a revolutionary Trotskyist party of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI).
This must be trained and prepared to complete the tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution by mobilising the working class to seize the power and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, to go forward to to socialism in South Africa.
The revolutionary party will immediately fight not just for more militant trade unions to confront the bosses but on a programme of transforming every strike and action into a political struggle to bring down the ANC government and go forward to a workers government that will expropriate the mine owners, bosses and bankers and place production under the control and for the benefit of workers.
A government that will solve the land issue by expropriation and seizures giving the land to those without. A government that will disband and smash up the capitalist state and its armed police and army, replacing them with workers’ organisations and militias under the control of a workers’ state.
This socialist revolution will spread into Zimbabwe overnight and ignite throughout the whole of Africa, creating the basis for a Socialist United States of Africa, which will constitute a huge leap forward for the World Socialist Revolution.
This is the way forward – to build a revolutionary party of the Trotskyist Fourth International that alone can act as the midwife for the socialist revolution and the advance to a socialist society.
