A STATEMENT by National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) National Office Bearers on Sunday outlined the union’s views ‘on the state of Class Struggles in South Africa and the Crisis in Cosatu’.
NUMSA declared: ‘Mankind today is faced with one choice: abandon the capitalist system or perish by it.
‘We at Numsa have no illusion that only a total destruction of capitalism and all it represents can save the Earth and give birth to a new civilisation, a new reordering of common and democratic ownership, production and consumption patterns along a higher human life and Earth respecting human civilisation. Such a civilisation is Socialism.
The South African ‘Democratic Transition’ and squandered opportunity
‘We at NUMSA have taken the trouble of reading the South African economic and political history, ultimately focusing on the imported capitalist revolution in the 20th Century and our “negotiated settlement”, and their impact on the South Africa we live in today.
‘We have come to the following conclusions, very well captured in our policy papers and resolutions of our December 2013 National Special Congress, also found in the SACP “Path to Power” document of 1989:
‘a. The South African capitalist state did not emerge as a result of an internal popular anti-feudal revolution. It was imposed from above and from without.
‘b. From its birth through to the present, South African capitalism has depended heavily on the imperialist centres.
‘c. Capital from Europe financed the opening of the mines. It was the colonial state that provided the resources to build the basic infrastructure – railways, roads, harbours, posts and telegraphs.
‘d. It was an imperial army of occupation that created the conditions for political unification. And it was within a colonial setting that the emerging South African capitalist class entrenched and extended the racially exclusive system to increase its opportunities for profit.
‘e. The racial division of labour, the battery of racist laws and political exclusiveness guaranteed this. From these origins a pattern of domination, which arose in the period of external colonialism, was carried over into the newly formed Union of South Africa. From its origins to the present, this form of domination has been maintained under changing conditions and by varying mechanisms.
‘f. In all essential respects, however, the colonial status of the black majority has remained in place.
Therefore we characterise our society as “colonialism of a special type”.
‘The 1994 “democratic transition” was supposed to lay a foundation for destroying colonialism of a special type in South Africa, a form of colonialism characterised by the existence side by side, of the colonial subjects and the local agents of colonialism and imperialism in the same geo-economic and political space.
‘Today, 20 years after the “democratic transition” nothing best confirms the fact that in all essential respects, however, the colonial status of the black majority has remained in place than of the 26 million South Africans who live in abject poverty, 25 million are Africans.
Further, all economic policies since 1994 have been incapable of defeating Colonialism of a Special Type and the effects of Apartheid capitalism, which condemned the South African black working class to a life of misery and hardship.
‘The South African government’s own 2011 Census so well captures this ugly fact, the fact of the continuing colonial lives of millions of Black and African South Africans, post 1994.
‘Any shallow class analysis of the “negotiated settlement” in South Africa easily reveals the most obvious fact: the “negotiated settlement” was secured on the basis of abandoning the Freedom Charter and the land and property claims of the “natives”.
‘These devices of protecting white property rights in the “1996 negotiated constitution” effectively guaranteed white property rights and therefore, white economic dominance, and the logical and inevitable continuation of imperialist economic and political domination of South Africa.
The Freedom Charter and the Negotiated Settlement
‘At NUMSA we are convinced that the abandonment of the property clauses of the Freedom Charter by the ANC and the SACP (South African Communist Party) formed the basis for the “democratic transition”.
‘We now know that while COSATU was busy putting together the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), ANC and SACP negotiators, together with representatives of South African white monopoly capitalism and their imperialist counterparts were busy stitching together a neoliberal post-Apartheid South Africa.
‘We are not surprised, therefore, that the RDP was quickly discarded in favour of GEAR, which has now formally become the National Development Plan (NDP) . . . . the matter of expropriating land and the commanding heights of the economy without compensation was formally buried.
‘Effectively too, was buried any prospects of a worker friendly “National Democratic Revolution” and all hope of a seamless transition to a Socialist Republic of South Africa.
‘Today in South Africa, black and African poor people must wait for the profits to grow of white people and their sprinkling of a tiny filthy rich black and African middle class for any changes in their mass poverty and widespread unemployment.
‘It is this cruel reality, post 1994, and 20 years into our “democracy”, which caused NUMSA to hold its historic 2013 Special National Congress, and to take the resolutions it did, prominent among which is the recognition that the ANC led Alliance no longer serves any revolutionary purpose in South Africa today.’
The NUMSA statement went on to say: ‘Marikana sums it all: the bulk of the population remains poorly educated, unskilled, living in abject poverty and in a very uncaring society.
‘Today we are being conditioned to accept that every community protest will lead to deaths of some protestors! . . .
‘Violent crime and crimes against women and children are still intolerably high. An African child in South Africa today is many times more likely to be born in a poor household than before 2004. . .
‘Again, the Marikana massacre speaks volumes about where we are. It is an open secret that the system of local government has collapsed, with very few of them having clean audits. So-called service delivery protests are the order of the day everywhere in the country. . .
The ANC 2014 Budget speech
‘There is nothing in this budget which signals a “radical transition”. This is why the bosses and their political formations have received it very well.
‘A most blatant betrayal of the Black and African working class is the bribery to white and black capital the budget gives in the form of the Youth Employment Incentive Tax. This has been done without exhausting the NEDLAC process and actually by contemptuously bypassing NEDLAC.
‘Rather than abolition of the colonial and apartheid wage as demanded in the Freedom Charter, the budget instead bribes capital with free money, to divide the working class!
‘This budget, more than anything else, confirms the rightwing shift in the ANC/SACP government.
The crisis in COSATU
‘On one hand, there are those among COSATU leaders who see a COSATU guided by the founding values as a threat to their potential careers in the ANC or its government. These leaders have long abandoned Socialism and are only paying lip service to the struggle for Socialism.
‘On the other hand, there are those leaders such as in NUMSA and the affiliates NUMSA is working with, who are determined to defend and advance the ideals for which COSATU was founded, including defending a Socialist COSATU.
‘Given the abandonment of a radical NDR by the ANC and the cooptation of the SACP into the ANC and its government, it is inevitable that COSATU must be plunged into a crisis by the fight to the death between these two class positions in COSATU – one for a COSATU that simply transmits the wishes of the right wing ANC nationalists among the working class and the other which wants to fight for a COSATU with its original values.
‘NUMSA has thus become the “enemy within” among the COSATU leadership clique that is imbedded in the ANC and SACP. It so happens that this clique is numerically strong in the CEC of COSATU.
‘This pro rightwing ANC and SACP clique in COSATU wants to engineer the expulsion of Numsa from COSATU. It has already engineered first the paralysis, and later the suspension of the General Secretary of COSATU – Zwelinzima Vavi.
‘This right wing Clique ignores the COSATU Constitution at will. It has refused to abide by the COSATU Constitution that demands that when a third of COSATU affiliates demand the convening of COSATU Special Congress, the President of COSATU must convene such a Congress or be replaced by a convener.
‘This rightwing clique, knowing very well that its positions have no mandates from its own members, is very scared of a Special National Congress because it knows the Special National Congress, besides exposing this right wing, may also trigger leadership removals in their unions.
NUMSA’s positions are very clear and quite simple:
‘1. Zwelinzima Vavi’s unconstitutional public humiliation, harassment and suspension must be lifted immediately.
‘2. All mischievous and unconstitutional efforts to frustrate and expel NUMSA from COSATU must stop forthwith.
‘3. A COSATU Special Congress as requested by the appropriate number of unions must be convened immediately, to resolve all the causes of the crisis in COSATU.
‘4. NUMSA will do everything possible to achieve these objectives, including using the courts to stop the violations of COSATU Constitution.
‘5. NUMSA is calling upon all members of COSATU affiliates to defend their federation from being swallowed into the ANC/SACP right wing camp.
‘In the meantime, NUMSA continues to run with its section 77 campaigns.’
