Revolutionary struggle in South Africa

This is an abridged version of the address to the National Conference of 
the Food and Allied Workers' Union (FAWU) by Blade Nzimande, General 
Secretary of the South African Communist Party (SACP), on July 26, 1999, in 
Johannesburg.

The SACP is particularly honoured to address your very important National 
Conference, which takes place against the background of a job loss 
bloodbath — a Winter Offensive aimed ultimately at breaking the power of 
the revolutionary trade union movement as part of a broader struggle to 
secure South Africa as a capitalist country.

For the SACP it is always a pleasure to be part of workers' congresses 
since it is organised workers who are the leading detachment of the working 
class.

It is only the working class that can lead the national democratic 
revolution (NDR) to its logical conclusion, the total liberation of the 
mass of our people and a transition to socialism.

ANC's electoral victory 

The overwhelming victory of the ANC in the last elections, winning 66 
percent of the vote nationally, with huge majorities in seven provinces, is 
another historic development in the consolidation of the gains of the 1994 
democratic breakthrough.

Of particular significance is the fact that it is the working class, the 
landless rural masses and the poor who have voted the ANC back into power. 
But there were also very significant gains made by the ANC from the 
Coloured and Indian communities.

As the SACP we had specifically mobilised workers to vote for the ANC in 
order to accelerate worker-friendly change. When we called upon you as 
workers to vote for the ANC, we were not asking you to give an ANC 
government a blank cheque.

We were saying vote for the ANC because of its record in struggle and 
government, and that it will continue to accelerate change that benefits 
the workers of this country.

However, in as much as this electoral victory creates space to further 
shift the balance of forces in favour of the working class, the landless 
rural masses and the poor, this will not happen on its own.

The electoral victory is but a platform, albeit important, to advance the 
struggles of workers and the poor. This is because the very direction and 
content of South Africa's revolution is heavily contested. The deeper we 
move into the transition the more the class struggle is intensifying.

On the one hand there are those forces, of which the working class is the 
core, which stand for the most thorough transformation of South African 
society, and, on the other hand, those forces that seek limited changes and 
the creation of a non-racial capitalist South Africa benefiting only an 
elite.

This therefore means that the election results are simultaneously a victory 
and a challenge.

The first and most critical challenge is to ensure that the very forces 
that voted for the ANC in their millions — the working class, the urban 
and rural poor — should be mobilised to be at the centre of the 
transformation process itself.

For the SACP this primarily means building the political confidence and 
capacity of the working class to play a leading role in the transformation 
struggles.

Race, class and gender contradictions

It is important to understand the totality of the issues to be tackled in 
the struggle to defend and deepen the national democratic revolution.

As the SACP we believe that we need to tackle the race, class and gender 
contradictions in our society simultaneously and in their close inter-
relationship.

Already, sections of the previously oppressed are tending to emphasise race 
at the exclusion of the class question in particular, hence their tendency 
to define black economic empowerment as meaning the creation of a black 
wealthy class, as if this represents the totality of our struggle.

Yet real economic empowerment means the tackling of poverty in the urban 
and rural areas of our country, through the empowerment of the ordinary 
mass of our people who still remain on the fringes of society.

We have largely defeated the workerist tendency — that there is a pure 
class struggle, devoid of struggles against national oppression — found in 
sections of the trade union movement but need to deal with it whenever it 
rears its head.

Again, the tendency to emphasise gender inequalities outside of their 
relationship to the class and national questions, leads us to gloss over 
the fact that it is black, mainly African, working class and poor women who 
represent the most exploited sections of our society.

Main motive force

The only consistently socialist approach to the deepening of the NDR is 
that which clearly identifies the black working class as the main motive 
force of our revolution.

This then points to what is perhaps one of the major struggles facing the 
working class in the period ahead. That is the intensification of the 
struggle to build the capacity of the state, at all levels, to undertake 
social development beneficial to the mass of our people, and fight against 
the tendency toward market-driven development.

This struggle needs to be underpinned and reinforced by a sustained 
ideological critique of economic fundamentalism and the dogma of 
privatisation, liberalisation and cut-backs on social spending.

Job losses

Workers in general, and organised workers in particular, are facing one of 
the most difficult periods in the history of international capitalism and 
in our country in particular. In our country at the moment workers are 
facing large-scale retrenchments, a job loss bloodbath.

The retrenchments are a reflection of the broader tendencies and crisis 
facing capitalism globally. This tendency is that of radical restructuring 
of the global and national economies through privatisation, casualisation 
and contracting out, thus shedding hundreds and thousands of jobs.

This is exacerbated in developing countries where neo-liberalism prescribes 
that in order for these countries to grow economically they must privatise, 
deregulate, liberalise and cut back on social spending, almost irrespective 
of the scale of inequalities and social challenges facing these countries.

Secondly, particularly in relation to the gold mining industry, the sale of 
gold by some of the central banks of advanced capitalist countries has led 
to a declining price of gold, threatening thousands of jobs in this sector.

But another reason for growing retrenchments is the ease with which 
employers are able to retrench. This means that at the slightest signs of 
problems or temptation to increase profits, employers simply give notice to 
retrench.

It is for this reason that the SACP supports COSATU's call to make 
retrenchments a collective bargaining issue. This is underpinned by the 
increasing restructuring of the economy, which is projected as meaning 
cutbacks on labour.

We should rather be urgently planning on how to prevent retrenchments and 
create jobs, and not only deal with already retrenched and jobless workers.

We see the convening of sectoral summits, actively developing strategic 
vision and plans for each sector of our economy, so that these are turned 
into job creating rather than job shedding sectors, as of the utmost 
importance.

In the food sector, FAWU should be playing a leading role in pressing for 
the convening of a sectoral summit and also providing a strategic vision on 
the nature and role of the food sector in our economy.

Underpinning and preceding the current wave of retrenchments is an 
intensified ideological attack on organised workers, COSATU in particular, 
as a labour elite.

Organised workers are being demonised by the bosses and the mainstream 
media as being responsible for unemployment and the very retrenchments they 
are victims of, on the grounds that they demand too much.

Related to this attack are the claims that South Africa's labour market is 
too rigid and therefore a chorus of calls for flexibility.

The call for labour market flexibility is in fact a disguised call for the 
erosion of worker rights that South Africa's working class has fought so 
hard for.

Therefore the key struggle for organised workers now is the struggle to 
defend workers' jobs. There can be no job creation without serious 
attention being given to job retention.

Key strategic challenges 

The ultimate strategic objective of the working class is to build socialism 
in South Africa. The struggles outlined above have to be waged within the 
context of this overall objective.

Our cynics, detractors and those who are either opposed to socialism or 
have abandoned socialism, now ask us what do we mean by socialism. It is as 
if they do not know or never knew what socialism is.

By socialism we simply mean a society whose primary objective is meeting 
the social needs of the majority of the population rather than one driven 
by a profit motive. It is a society where the control of the predominant 
means of production is in the hands of the producers, the workers.

The struggle for working class leadership over society, the building of 
people's power, the struggle against patronage, the struggle against 
ideologically driven privatisation, the deepening of a people-driven 
democracy and development are all important foundations for socialism.

The shortest route to socialism is the struggle to defend and deepen a 
working-class-led national democratic revolution. 

An injury to one is an injury to all!

The COSATU slogan of "An injury to one is an injury to all!" has never been 
more relevant than in the current period. Of course it was behind this 
slogan that workers defended and advanced their struggles during the period 
of the apartheid regime.

It was around this rallying call that worker organisations were 
strengthened such that without the role of the workers in the liberation 
struggle there would be no democratic South Africa today. But what does 
this slogan mean in the present period?

Principally this means the building of a strong and united COSATU, 
expanding towards our goal of creating a single worker federation in our 
country that will also draw in other sections of organised workers who are 
still located outside of COSATU.

It means that any attack on any sector of organised workers — as is 
happening with these retrenchments now — must be defended not only by the 
unions in those affected sectors, but by all unions.

This is of absolute importance now, otherwise the labour movement faces 
defeat. 

Strong and united unions

There can be no strong COSATU without strong affiliated unions, just as 
there can be no strong affiliates without a strong COSATU.

It is no secret that your union, FAWU, is faced with one of the most 
difficult periods in its history, that of division, lack of unity and 
consequently severe weakness. A weak, divided and fractional FAWU is in the 
deepest interests of the bosses in the sectors in which you organise.

The most important challenge of this Conference is for FAWU to emerge 
united with a clear programme of rebuilding and repositioning itself as the 
leading trade union in both the food sector and in COSATU.

Do not allow yourselves to be tempted to want to wipe out what you see as 
this or that faction, rather use this conference as a true unification and 
healing process! As the SACP, we have full confidence in you to be able to 
rise above factionalism and build a strong FAWU.

Building a strong SACP

The SACP has identified 1999 as the year for the building of the political 
consciousness of the working class. This is because without a politically 
conscious and confident working class, the very direction of the national 
democratic revolution is at stake.

This means that organised workers themselves must take a direct and active 
interest in building SACP industrial units and branches.

The SACP is intensifying a programme of joint political schools with the 
affiliates of COSATU in order to build the political consciousness of the 
working class.

We wish you a successful Conference, and we are confident that you are 
going to rise to the occasion and build a strong FAWU.

Thank you.