Why and how must the working class celebrate ANC’s 100-years?
Input by the Numsa Deputy General Secretary, Karl Cloete, on the occasion of the
Launch of NUMSA Education Programme on ANC Centennial
17-18 September 2011
On behalf of the Numsa National Office Bearers and the Numsa Central Committee we wish to extend our revolutionary greetings to the;
Numsa Shopstewards present here
Numsa Regional Office Bearers present here
Members of the Numsa NEC and CC
Numsa members of staff
Leadership of the ANC
Leadership of Cosatu
Leadership of the Sacp
All invited guests
Numsa has convened this all important event to celebrate the fast approaching centenary celebrations of the African National Congress. We must at the outset thank our education, publications and media departments for working energetically to organise this event.
We hope that our input will in a small and humble way make a contribution to how best we strengthen and build the ANC into a strong and formidable National Liberation Movement.
This political task of building a strong ANC must attend to all the challenges which reside in ill discipline we have seen and the crude attempts to use the ANC as a vehicle for personal accumulation of wealth.
The working class must say without any apology that the ANC is our movement and we shall not allow it to be hijacked by the NEW TENDENCY or any other rightwing reactionary tendency so that the ANC may in word and deed remain a disciplined force of the left.
Preface:
The Numsa Central Committee held on 20 – 23 July 2010 considered an internal discussion document entitled “Workers to the front! Swell the ranks of the ANC: Our strategic task to advance a radical national democratic revolution”.
This particular discussion document responded to the Numsa 2008 National Congress resolution which called on the Union to programmatise a clear plan of how metal workers must swell the ranks of the ANC to advance working class interests in the ANC, and shift the balance of forces in society and in the ANC in favour of the working class.
The document argued that we can only do so on an anti-capitalist program and that this is a protracted struggle which requires constant vigilance. The questions that the document posed in this regard are whether; the ANC is capable of pushing such a program? Are the conditions favorable in the ANC for Metal Workers to do that?
With his injunction as discussed by the July 2010 NUMSA Central Committee, it is quite appropriate that we are ask to say…..Why and how then must the working class celebrate the ANC’s 100 year?
In presenting our input on this subject matter, we wish to make the following brief points to advance a perspective on how and why metal workers must swell the ranks of the ANC to advance working class interests in the ANC, and shift the balance of forces in society and in the ANC in favour of the working class;
1. Growing working class participation as the ANC evolved since 1912;
2. The Global Economic Capitalist Crises, Governance and the National Liberation Movement
3. Numsa’s role within Cosatu and the broader Alliance to build a strong ANC wherein the Working Class is the primary motive force of the National Democratic Revolution
Setting the scene for the July 2010 Numsa Central Committee, the discussion document on swelling the ranks departed with this very challenging quotation;
“In view of our unhappy historical experience with both main types of parties, there can be no hope for the radical re-articulation of the socialist movement without fully combining labour’s industrial arm with its political arm: by conferring the power of meaningful political decision making on the trade unions (thus encouraging them to be directly political), on the one hand, and by making the political parties themselves defiantly active in industrial conflicts as the uncompromising antagonists of capital, assuming responsibility for their struggle inside and outside parliament” Meszaros, (2008: 138)
It is with this background in mind that we proceed to engage with the subject which we were requested to interact with.
1. Growing working class participation as the ANC evolved since 1912;
What the ANC is today is not what it was in 2007, 1985, 1979, 1969 or for that matter in 1912 when it was formed. As we are aware the ANC since its establishment had at its head a leadership drawn mainly form an under developed middle class such as teachers, priests, medical doctors, etc. The main aim of struggle against Colonialism and Apartheid was to petition the Queen of Britain and making representation to the Apartheid government to grant Africans the right to vote on the basis of ONE MAN ONE VOTE.
Overtime, with particular reference to the 1940’s – 1960 period, the ANCYL under the leadership of Mandela, Sisulu and others began to suggest that the forms of struggle employed by the African National Congress could not yield the outcomes of a non racial, non sexist and democratic South Africa, hence the introduction of a more radical programme of action which saw;
• Defiance Campaign
• Worker stay-aways
• Adoption of the four pillars of struggle (mass action, underground work, armed struggle & international isolation)
• Development and adoption of the Freedom Charter
The need for working class participation in the National Liberation Struggle and more cogently put the National Democratic Revolution is best registered by Comrade Joe Slovo in his seminal work of 1988 entitled The South African Working Class and the National Democratic Revolution. He best defined the polemics of the working class role in the NDR at the time in the following articulation;
“A tendency, loosely described as ‘workerism’, denies that the main content of the immediate conflict is national liberation which it regards as a diversion from the class struggle. Even if it admits the relevance of national domination in the exploitative processes, ‘workerism’ insists on a perspective of an immediate struggle for socialism. A transitional stage of struggle, involving inter-class alliances, is alleged to lead to an abandonment of socialist perspectives and to a surrender of working class leadership.
The economic struggles between workers and bosses at the point of production (which inevitably spill over into the broader political arena) is claimed to be the ‘class struggle’. This is sometimes coupled with a view that the trade union movement is the main political representative of the working class.
A more sophisticated version of the left-workerist position has recently surfaced among union-linked academics. This version concedes the need for inter-class alliances but puts forward a view of working class political organisation more appropriate to a trade union than a revolutionary political vanguard.
At the other end of this debate there are views which tend to erect a chinese wall between the struggle for national liberation and social emancipation. Our struggle is seen as ‘bourgeois-democratic’ in character so that the immediate agenda should not go beyond the objective of a kind of ‘de-racialised’ capitalism. According to this view there will be time enough after apartheid is destroyed to then turn our attention to the struggle for socialism. Hence there should be little talk of our ultimate socialist objectives. The working class should not insist on the inclusion of radical social measures as part of the immediate agenda because that would risk frightening away potential allies against apartheid.”
In respect of these perspectives, Slovo asserted that;
“In general, it remains true that our National Democratic Revolution expresses the broad objective interests not only of the working class but also of most of the other classes within the nationally-dominated majority, including the black petit- bourgeoisie and significant strata of the emergent black bourgeoisie. This reality provides the foundation for a struggle which aims to mobilise to its side all the oppressed classes and strata as participants in the national liberation alliance.
We believe that the working class is both an indispensable part and the leading force of such a liberation alliance. But its relations with other classes and strata cannot be conditional on the acceptance by them of socialist aims.
The historic programme which has evolved to express the common immediate aspirations of all the classes of the oppressed people is the Freedom Charter. This document is not, in itself, a programme for socialism, even though (as we argue later) it can provide a basis for uninterrupted advance to a socialist future.”
The SACP and COSATU in its analyses of the first decade of our freedom came to the conclusion that since the 1994 democratic breakthrough, White Monopoly Capital (with a sprinkling of aspirant black capitalists) became the main beneficiaries of the first decade of our freedom and that this phenomenon must be reversed so that working class should become the main beneficiaries of the second decade of our freedom.
The ANC’s 2007 National Congress began to respond to this analyses by changing the leadership (which were referred to as the 1996 class project) and policies/resolutions to change the neo-liberal orientation that became prevalent.
In this respect the working class played a meaningful role in shifting the direction of the movement. The working class acted in concert with many different forces (an unholy alliance but necessary alliance at the time) to depose the so-called 1996 class project. Elements within this unholy alliance has since been defined and characterised as the NEW TENDENCY whose main aim is to use state power to accumulate wealth through tenders and other corrupt means.
In all of this the most potent question to be asked where is the working class? The short answer must be located in the working class struggle for economic emancipation.
2. The Global Economic Capitalist Crises, Governance and the National Liberation Movement:
The global financial capitalist crises which emerged in 2008 resulted in a serious jobs blood bath across the world and in our own country we saw about 1,7 million lost in sectors of the South African economy. Neo-Liberalism and the Washington Consensus became completely discredited to the extent that many a capitalist state adopted bail out measurers such as direct state intervention in sectors of their economy, e.g. the USA government together with worker pension funds became the main owner of a car manufacturing company.
The South African society today is confronted with a triple crisis of deepening levels of inequality, rising levels of unemployment and deepening levels of poverty. The ANC acknowledged in a press statement on Friday 16th September 2011 that unemployment is reaching unacceptable levels and that therefore government and the private sector must interact more closely to find answers to this national crises. The question to pose is whether the ANC can expect solution from a government and private sector alliance whilst the micro and macro economic instruments remain steeped in a neo liberal paradigm?
A cursory look at our current socio economic situation reveals some the following disturbing trends;
• On average, 400 000 young people do not proceed with their studies after writing matriculation exams every year. This pool of young people objectively adds pressure on the employed to accept atrocious working conditions;
• 72% of the unemployed are young people; 95% of them do not have tertiary education because of the limited capacity of the tertiary sector to absorb them and no money to proceed with further studies, among other problems.
• 68% of the unemployed have been unemployed for more than a year and 60% of the unemployed have not been employed in the past 5 years or they have not seen a job in their lives.
• each member of the working class household has to survive on less than R547.34 a month, which translates into R18 a day and that 78% of the unemployed rely on the employed for survival, when the employed themselves could hardly survive on their wages.
• 48% of the South African population, which is almost half of the people in South Africa, live below R322 a month, which is less than R10 a day. Almost 15 million South Africans have inadequate access to food.
Not only are these material conditions to be understood in a purely class sense, the intersection of race and class is still very much with us.
• Almost 45% of the African working class is unemployed, whereas the unemployment rate among whites is around 5.5%.
• Among Africans of working age, only 36% are absorbed into employment whilst on the other hand, 65% of Whites of working age are absorbed into employment.
• For young people, being African reduces the chance of being employed by 90%, in comparison to being white. Despite similar qualifications, whites are on average 30% more likely to be employed than Africans.
This picture is unsustainable and must be corrected with a new economic growth path is redistributive and breaks with the logic of GEAR. In the December 2010 Numsa Central Committee we undertook an analyses of government’s New Growth Path (NGP) and asked the following critical questions in relation to the new growth path trajectory;
• how will government’s New Growth Path deal with growing inequalities and extreme levels of poverty in the country?
• what proposals does the New Growth Path put forward to restructure the economy so that it is equitable and labour absorbing?
• what measures are in the New Growth Path that will enable the majority of our people to share in the country’s wealth?
• how consistent is the New Growth Path with long-held positions of the ANC, Cosatu and the South African Communist Party (SACP) that call for economic growth in a context of redistributive strategy?
The NUMSA Central Committee noted the NGP targets such as the creation of 500 000 jobs by 2020 but felt that the New Growth Path will not meet its own targets because of the conservative macroeconomic package that the policy adopts. The fiscal, monetary and exchange rate measures in the New Growth Path will choke many of the noble objectives outlined in the document.
Our experience with the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) strategy is that any growth path must be judged not by the targets on job-creation it sets but by instruments of macroeconomic management that it adopts. Our Central Committee felt that;
• the fiscal policy in the New Growth Path is too restrictive
• there is nothing new in monetary policy proposals in the New Growth Path
• the exchange rate policy in the New Growth Path is illogical
NUMSA’s Central Committee concluded that the macroeconomic package that underpins the New Growth Path has more in common with policies that led to jobless growth and later job shedding in South Africa. The macroeconomic package in the New Growth Path represents more continuity instead of a complete break with GEAR.
3. Numsa’s role within Cosatu and the broader Alliance to build a strong ANC wherein the Working Class is the primary motive force of the National Democratic Revolution
The Numsa Central Committee of August 2011 undertook an in-depth discussion and reflection on whether our NDR remains on track and came to the conclusion that the structural features of our economy remains trapped in its colonial character with little or no change in the past 17 years. As the ANC government itself acknowledges, as well as all the formations of the Alliance agree, South African society and economy continues to be characterised by Colonialism of a Special Type – the dominance of white monopoly capital and the preservation of white social, economic and cultural privileges, albeit in conditions of a liberal constitutional dispensation. This forces us to conclude that the NDR is off track.
Some of the interventions which the August 2011 Numsa Central Committee felt must be executed in the current moment involve the following;
1. Many of our shopstewards are spectators in the ANC and therefore largely unable to influence and give working class content in the direction of our NDR. We are found wanting in ANC regional and provincial conferences. The CC therefore established Numsa Political Commissions at Local, Regional and National level to work very hard to change this picture. The establishment of Numsa Political Commissions at local, Regional and National level must as its express aim and objective;
• To oversee the auditing of ANC/SACP membership at region and local level
• To oversee the recruitment of members for the ANC/SACP
• Distribution of information and resolutions of each Alliance component and Alliance programmes
• To oversee the implementation of political education
• To oversee the active participation of metalworkers in ANC and SACP branches including in the Cosatu Residential & Industrial Locals
• To oversee the regional participation in all the existing economic development forums at local Government and provincial government level
• To oversee the implementation of all the Numsa, Cosatu, ANC and Sacp campaigns
• To oversee the building of factory and industrial area socialist unit/forums
2. Working with the South African Communist Party, Cosatu must draw up a programme of re-invigorating, rebuilding and transforming the South African Communist Party into a militant, fighting and revolutionary vanguard of the working class.
3. Cosatu must quickly produce and cause to adopt a resource mobilisation plan for the SACP from amongst all its affiliates, for immediate implementation.
4. All Cosatu affiliates must be encouraged to participate in building SACP workplace and industrial units and branches, where these are capable of being created.
5. Well before the seminal political events of 2012, Cosatu must produce, debate and adopt a document detailing the fundamental demands of the South African working class today if the NDR is to be brought back on track, and enable this country to move steadily towards a Socialist Republic of South Africa.
6. Cosatu must spearhead the intensification of the fight for a living wage in South Africa. Such a fight must necessarily involve integrating collective bargaining demands with the real cost of reproducing a worker in South Africa and the struggle to abolish the Apartheid wage gap in South Africa.
7. Cosatu needs to develop a fighting strategy to confront the government over the NGP. The Cosatu proposal needs to be advanced, and a formal response from government obtained.
8. The demand for the banning of labour brokers need to be advanced and all the processes at NEDLAC must be understood, from a Cosatu perspective, as flowing from the workers and trade unions demands to ban labour brokers. All efforts to cause Cosatu to participate in reforming labour brokers must be combated, and resisted. The banning of labour brokers must be understood also as a Freedom Charter demand
In conclusion:
It is instructive and necessary to conclude this input with the wisdom of Joe Slovo when he said;
“To eventually win the majority of our people for a socialist South Africa, we must spread socialist awareness and socialist consciousness now, mainly among the workers but also among the rural poor and the middle strata. We must also ensure that the working class emerges as the politically-dominant social class in the post-apartheid state. This can only be achieved if the working class wins a place now as the leading social force in the inter-class liberation alliance…….
The overwhelming majority of the people are working class. This explains why the ANC’s composition and policies show a strong bias towards the working class. It also considers it proper and necessary for socialist ideology to be discussed and understood in its ranks. But, despite the fact that the ANC has an understandable bias towards the working class it does not, and clearly should not, adopt a socialist platform which the so- called Marxist Workers’ Tendency (expelled from the ANC) would like it to do. If it adopted such a platform it would destroy its character as the prime representative of all the classes among the oppressed black majority.
At the same time, for reasons already outlined, its revolutionary nationalism does, of necessity, contain a social content which reflects our specific national liberation aspirations a content which will ultimately facilitate the socialist transformation but is not premised on it. Worker participation in the ANC is one of the important ways in which our working class plays its role in the democratic revolution. But, above all, the tripartite alliance, moulded in the revolutionary underground, between the ANC, the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU), and our SACP, represents a framework which expresses the political interests of our working class in the broad front of struggle.”
This is why and how the working class must celebrate ANC’s 100-years!
Karl Cloete
Numsa Deputy General Secretary
17 September 2011
Why and how must the working class celebrate ANC’s 100-years?
Input by the Numsa Deputy General Secretary, Karl Cloete, on the occasion of the
Launch of NUMSA Education Programme on ANC Centennial
17-18 September 2011
On behalf of the Numsa National Office Bearers and the Numsa Central Committee we wish to extend our revolutionary greetings to the;
Numsa Shopstewards present here
Numsa Regional Office Bearers present here
Members of the Numsa NEC and CC
Numsa members of staff
Leadership of the ANC
Leadership of Cosatu
Leadership of the Sacp
All invited guests
Numsa has convened this all important event to celebrate the fast approaching centenary celebrations of the African National Congress. We must at the outset thank our education, publications and media departments for working energetically to organise this event.
We hope that our input will in a small and humble way make a contribution to how best we strengthen and build the ANC into a strong and formidable National Liberation Movement.
This political task of building a strong ANC must attend to all the challenges which reside in ill discipline we have seen and the crude attempts to use the ANC as a vehicle for personal accumulation of wealth. The working class must say without any apology that the ANC is our movement and we shall not allow it to be hijacked by the NEW TENDENCY or any other rightwing reactionary tendency so that the ANC may in word and deed remain a disciplined force of the left.
Preface:
The Numsa Central Committee held on 20 – 23 July 2010 considered an internal discussion document entitled “Workers to the front! Swell the ranks of the ANC: Our strategic task to advance a radical national democratic revolution”.
This particular discussion document responded to the Numsa 2008 National Congress resolution which called on the Union to programmatise a clear plan of how metal workers must swell the ranks of the ANC to advance working class interests in the ANC, and shift the balance of forces in society and in the ANC in favour of the working class. The document argued that we can only do so on an anti-capitalist program and that this is a protracted struggle which requires constant vigilance. The questions that the document posed in this regard are whether; the ANC is capable of pushing such a program? Are the conditions favorable in the ANC for Metal Workers to do that?
With his injunction as discussed by the July 2010 NUMSA Central Committee, it is quite appropriate that we are ask to say…..Why and how then must the working class celebrate the ANC’s 100 year?
In presenting our input on this subject matter, we wish to make the following brief points to advance a perspective on how and why metal workers must swell the ranks of the ANC to advance working class interests in the ANC, and shift the balance of forces in society and in the ANC in favour of the working class;
1. Growing working class participation as the ANC evolved since 1912;
2. The Global Economic Capitalist Crises, Governance and the National Liberation Movement
3. Numsa’s role within Cosatu and the broader Alliance to build a strong ANC wherein the Working Class is the primary motive force of the National Democratic Revolution
Setting the scene for the July 2010 Numsa Central Committee, the discussion document on swelling the ranks departed with this very challenging quotation;
“In view of our unhappy historical experience with both main types of parties, there can be no hope for the radical re-articulation of the socialist movement without fully combining labour’s industrial arm with its political arm: by conferring the power of meaningful political decision making on the trade unions (thus encouraging them to be directly political), on the one hand, and by making the political parties themselves defiantly active in industrial conflicts as the uncompromising antagonists of capital, assuming responsibility for their struggle inside and outside parliament” Meszaros, (2008: 138)
It is with this background in mind that we proceed to engage with the subject which we were requested to interact with.
1. Growing working class participation as the ANC evolved since 1912;
What the ANC is today is not what it was in 2007, 1985, 1979, 1969 or for that matter in 1912 when it was formed. As we are aware the ANC since its establishment had at its head a leadership drawn mainly form an under developed middle class such as teachers, priests, medical doctors, etc. The main aim of struggle against Colonialism and Apartheid was to petition the Queen of Britain and making representation to the Apartheid government to grant Africans the right to vote on the basis of ONE MAN ONE VOTE.
Overtime, with particular reference to the 1940’s – 1960 period, the ANCYL under the leadership of Mandela, Sisulu and others began to suggest that the forms of struggle employed by the African National Congress could not yield the outcomes of a non racial, non sexist and democratic South Africa, hence the introduction of a more radical programme of action which saw;
• Defiance Campaign
• Worker stay-aways
• Adoption of the four pillars of struggle (mass action, underground work, armed struggle & international isolation)
• Development and adoption of the Freedom Charter
The need for working class participation in the National Liberation Struggle and more cogently put the National Democratic Revolution is best registered by Comrade Joe Slovo in his seminal work of 1988 entitled The South African Working Class and the National Democratic Revolution. He best defined the polemics of the working class role in the NDR at the time in the following articulation;
“A tendency, loosely described as ‘workerism’, denies that the main content of the immediate conflict is national liberation which it regards as a diversion from the class struggle. Even if it admits the relevance of national domination in the exploitative processes, ‘workerism’ insists on a perspective of an immediate struggle for socialism. A transitional stage of struggle, involving inter-class alliances, is alleged to lead to an abandonment of socialist perspectives and to a surrender of working class leadership.
The economic struggles between workers and bosses at the point of production (which inevitably spill over into the broader political arena) is claimed to be the ‘class struggle’. This is sometimes coupled with a view that the trade union movement is the main political representative of the working class.
A more sophisticated version of the left-workerist position has recently surfaced among union-linked academics. This version concedes the need for inter-class alliances but puts forward a view of working class political organisation more appropriate to a trade union than a revolutionary political vanguard.
At the other end of this debate there are views which tend to erect a chinese wall between the struggle for national liberation and social emancipation. Our struggle is seen as ‘bourgeois-democratic’ in character so that the immediate agenda should not go beyond the objective of a kind of ‘de-racialised’ capitalism. According to this view there will be time enough after apartheid is destroyed to then turn our attention to the struggle for socialism. Hence there should be little talk of our ultimate socialist objectives. The working class should not insist on the inclusion of radical social measures as part of the immediate agenda because that would risk frightening away potential allies against apartheid.”
In respect of these perspectives, Slovo asserted that;
“In general, it remains true that our National Democratic Revolution expresses the broad objective interests not only of the working class but also of most of the other classes within the nationally-dominated majority, including the black petit- bourgeoisie and significant strata of the emergent black bourgeoisie. This reality provides the foundation for a struggle which aims to mobilise to its side all the oppressed classes and strata as participants in the national liberation alliance.
We believe that the working class is both an indispensable part and the leading force of such a liberation alliance. But its relations with other classes and strata cannot be conditional on the acceptance by them of socialist aims.
The historic programme which has evolved to express the common immediate aspirations of all the classes of the oppressed people is the Freedom Charter. This document is not, in itself, a programme for socialism, even though (as we argue later) it can provide a basis for uninterrupted advance to a socialist future.”
The SACP and COSATU in its analyses of the first decade of our freedom came to the conclusion that since the 1994 democratic breakthrough, White Monopoly Capital (with a sprinkling of aspirant black capitalists) became the main beneficiaries of the first decade of our freedom and that this phenomenon must be reversed so that working class should become the main beneficiaries of the second decade of our freedom.
The ANC’s 2007 National Congress began to respond to this analyses by changing the leadership (which were referred to as the 1996 class project) and policies/resolutions to change the neo-liberal orientation that became prevalent.
In this respect the working class played a meaningful role in shifting the direction of the movement. The working class acted in concert with many different forces (an unholy alliance but necessary alliance at the time) to depose the so-called 1996 class project. Elements within this unholy alliance has since been defined and characterised as the NEW TENDENCY whose main aim is to use state power to accumulate wealth through tenders and other corrupt means.
In all of this the most potent question to be asked where is the working class? The short answer must be located in the working class struggle for economic emancipation.
2. The Global Economic Capitalist Crises, Governance and the National Liberation Movement:
The global financial capitalist crises which emerged in 2008 resulted in a serious jobs blood bath across the world and in our own country we saw about 1,7 million lost in sectors of the South African economy. Neo-Liberalism and the Washington Consensus became completely discredited to the extent that many a capitalist state adopted bail out measurers such as direct state intervention in sectors of their economy, e.g. the USA government together with worker pension funds became the main owner of a car manufacturing company.
The South African society today is confronted with a triple crisis of deepening levels of inequality, rising levels of unemployment and deepening levels of poverty. The ANC acknowledged in a press statement on Friday 16th September 2011 that unemployment is reaching unacceptable levels and that therefore government and the private sector must interact more closely to find answers to this national crises. The question to pose is whether the ANC can expect solution from a government and private sector alliance whilst the micro and macro economic instruments remain steeped in a neo liberal paradigm?
A cursory look at our current socio economic situation reveals some the following disturbing trends;
• On average, 400 000 young people do not proceed with their studies after writing matriculation exams every year. This pool of young people objectively adds pressure on the employed to accept atrocious working conditions;
• 72% of the unemployed are young people; 95% of them do not have tertiary education because of the limited capacity of the tertiary sector to absorb them and no money to proceed with further studies, among other problems.
• 68% of the unemployed have been unemployed for more than a year and 60% of the unemployed have not been employed in the past 5 years or they have not seen a job in their lives.
• each member of the working class household has to survive on less than R547.34 a month, which translates into R18 a day and that 78% of the unemployed rely on the employed for survival, when the employed themselves could hardly survive on their wages.
• 48% of the South African population, which is almost half of the people in South Africa, live below R322 a month, which is less than R10 a day. Almost 15 million South Africans have inadequate access to food.
Not only are these material conditions to be understood in a purely class sense, the intersection of race and class is still very much with us.
• Almost 45% of the African working class is unemployed, whereas the unemployment rate among whites is around 5.5%.
• Among Africans of working age, only 36% are absorbed into employment whilst on the other hand, 65% of Whites of working age are absorbed into employment.
• For young people, being African reduces the chance of being employed by 90%, in comparison to being white. Despite similar qualifications, whites are on average 30% more likely to be employed than Africans.
This picture is unsustainable and must be corrected with a new economic growth path is redistributive and breaks with the logic of GEAR. In the December 2010 Numsa Central Committee we undertook an analyses of government’s New Growth Path (NGP) and asked the following critical questions in relation to the new growth path trajectory;
• how will government’s New Growth Path deal with growing inequalities and extreme levels of poverty in the country?
• what proposals does the New Growth Path put forward to restructure the economy so that it is equitable and labour absorbing?
• what measures are in the New Growth Path that will enable the majority of our people to share in the country’s wealth?
• how consistent is the New Growth Path with long-held positions of the ANC, Cosatu and the South African Communist Party (SACP) that call for economic growth in a context of redistributive strategy?
The NUMSA Central Committee noted the NGP targets such as the creation of 500 000 jobs by 2020 but felt that the New Growth Path will not meet its own targets because of the conservative macroeconomic package that the policy adopts. The fiscal, monetary and exchange rate measures in the New Growth Path will choke many of the noble objectives outlined in the document.
Our experience with the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) strategy is that any growth path must be judged not by the targets on job-creation it sets but by instruments of macroeconomic management that it adopts. Our Central Committee felt that;
• the fiscal policy in the New Growth Path is too restrictive
• there is nothing new in monetary policy proposals in the New Growth Path
• the exchange rate policy in the New Growth Path is illogical
NUMSA’s Central Committee concluded that the macroeconomic package that underpins the New Growth Path has more in common with policies that led to jobless growth and later job shedding in South Africa. The macroeconomic package in the New Growth Path represents more continuity instead of a complete break with GEAR.
3. Numsa’s role within Cosatu and the broader Alliance to build a strong ANC wherein the Working Class is the primary motive force of the National Democratic Revolution
The Numsa Central Committee of August 2011 undertook an in-depth discussion and reflection on whether our NDR remains on track and came to the conclusion that the structural features of our economy remains trapped in its colonial character with little or no change in the past 17 years.
As the ANC government itself acknowledges, as well as all the formations of the Alliance agree, South African society and economy continues to be characterised by Colonialism of a Special Type – the dominance of white monopoly capital and the preservation of white social, economic and cultural privileges, albeit in conditions of a liberal constitutional dispensation. This forces us to conclude that the NDR is off track.
Some of the interventions which the August 2011 Numsa Central Committee felt must be executed in the current moment involve the following;
1. Many of our shopstewards are spectators in the ANC and therefore largely unable to influence and give working class content in the direction of our NDR.
We are found wanting in ANC regional and provincial conferences. The CC therefore established Numsa Political Commissions at Local, Regional and National level to work very hard to change this picture.
The establishment of Numsa Political Commissions at local, Regional and National level must as its express aim and objective;
• To oversee the auditing of ANC/SACP membership at region and local level
• To oversee the recruitment of members for the ANC/SACP
• Distribution of information and resolutions of each Alliance component and Alliance programmes
• To oversee the implementation of political education
• To oversee the active participation of metalworkers in ANC and SACP branches including in the Cosatu Residential & Industrial Locals
• To oversee the regional participation in all the existing economic development forums at local Government and provincial government level
• To oversee the implementation of all the Numsa, Cosatu, ANC and Sacp campaigns
• To oversee the building of factory and industrial area socialist unit/forums
2. Working with the South African Communist Party, Cosatu must draw up a programme of re-invigorating, rebuilding and transforming the South African Communist Party into a militant, fighting and revolutionary vanguard of the working class.
3. Cosatu must quickly produce and cause to adopt a resource mobilisation plan for the SACP from amongst all its affiliates, for immediate implementation.
4. All Cosatu affiliates must be encouraged to participate in building SACP workplace and industrial units and branches, where these are capable of being created.
5. Well before the seminal political events of 2012, Cosatu must produce, debate and adopt a document detailing the fundamental demands of the South African working class today if the NDR is to be brought back on track, and enable this country to move steadily towards a Socialist Republic of South Africa.
6. Cosatu must spearhead the intensification of the fight for a living wage in South Africa. Such a fight must necessarily involve integrating collective bargaining demands with the real cost of reproducing a worker in South Africa and the struggle to abolish the Apartheid wage gap in South Africa.
7. Cosatu needs to develop a fighting strategy to confront the government over the NGP. The Cosatu proposal needs to be advanced, and a formal response from government obtained.
8. The demand for the banning of labour brokers need to be advanced and all the processes at NEDLAC must be understood, from a Cosatu perspective, as flowing from the workers and trade unions demands to ban labour brokers.
All efforts to cause Cosatu to participate in reforming labour brokers must be combated, and resisted. The banning of labour brokers must be understood also as a Freedom Charter demand
In conclusion:
It is instructive and necessary to conclude this input with the wisdom of Joe Slovo when he said;
“To eventually win the majority of our people for a socialist South Africa, we must spread socialist awareness and socialist consciousness now, mainly among the workers but also among the rural poor and the middle strata.
We must also ensure that the working class emerges as the politically-dominant social class in the post-apartheid state. This can only be achieved if the working class wins a place now as the leading social force in the inter-class liberation alliance…….
The overwhelming majority of the people are working class. This explains why the ANC’s composition and policies show a strong bias towards the working class.
It also considers it proper and necessary for socialist ideology to be discussed and understood in its ranks.
But, despite the fact that the ANC has an understandable bias towards the working class it does not, and clearly should not, adopt a socialist platform which the so- called Marxist Workers’ Tendency (expelled from the ANC) would like it to do.
If it adopted such a platform it would destroy its character as the prime representative of all the classes among the oppressed black majority.
At the same time, for reasons already outlined, its revolutionary nationalism does, of necessity, contain a social content which reflects our specific national liberation aspirations a content which will ultimately facilitate the socialist transformation but is not premised on it. Worker participation in the ANC is one of the important ways in which our working class plays its role in the democratic revolution.
But, above all, the tripartite alliance, moulded in the revolutionary underground, between the ANC, the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU), and our SACP, represents a framework which expresses the political interests of our working class in the broad front of struggle.”
This is why and how the working class must celebrate ANC’s 100-years!
Karl Cloete
Numsa Deputy General Secretary
17 September 2011
Source
Numsa Speeches