SACP with Red, 3.png
South African Communist Party, 26 February 2016
SACP 13th Congress Central Committee 19th Plenary Session
Central Committee Statement
The SACP Central Committee met in Johannesburg over the weekend of 24th-26th
February. The CC discussed a political report presented by the national
secretariat, focusing on the challenges posed by the domestic situation and
the responsibilities confronted by the SACP within this context.
Much of the focus of the discussion related to concerns around the continued
worrying turbulence and factionalism within our ANC-headed movement, which
is also clearly impacting upon the performance of government itself. Over
the past two months, since our mid-December Augmented Central Committee, the
general features of this situation have persisted and in some respects
intensified.
In particular, we are seeing growing recklessness and a disdain for
collective decision-making and for formal democratically elected structures.
Policy shifts with a radical sounding air are being announced randomly.
Existing and even deeper looming crises in the water sector, or in revenue
collection, or in the payment of social grants are left unattended for
apparently factional reasons, while ministers performing patriotic service
in extremely difficult circumstances become the targets for sustained and
factionally-orchestrated undermining.
Over the past two months this factional behaviour has sought to re-calibrate
its public positioning somewhat. While the Gupta family clearly lurks in the
background in many cases, there has been an attempt to downplay links in
this direction and adopt a more radical sounding, Africanist posture. The
SACP strongly supported the ANC's 2012 Mangaung call for a second radical
phase of the national democratic revolution to address the core crises
confronting the majority of South Africans - unemployment, poverty and
inequality. At the time, the SACP sought to engage its alliance partners on
the question of what content lies behind the call for a second more radical
phase. We advanced a wide range of programmatic proposals which we believe
remain relevant.
It is only now, belatedly, that from the side of some within the ANC and
government that we are seeing an attempt to provide a gloss to the notion of
radical transformation. Unfortunately, "radical" in these quarters, is
largely rhetorical and is almost entirely focused on advancing narrow Black
elite accumulation. This very narrow version of BEE evokes "Blacks in
general, and Africans in particular", but in effect, it's about "ME and MINE
specifically".
The reduction of "radical economic transformation" almost entirely to a
question of private Black corporate "ownership, control and management of
the economy" sidelines any notion of SOCIAL OWNERSHIP, or of POPULAR
control, or of WORKER OWNERSHIP and management.
We are told that companies directly controlled by Blacks only own 10 percent
of the JSE, but what is left unexplained is: if individual Blacks owned 80
percent of the JSE how would that impact on the triple (and racialised)
crises of unemployment, poverty and inequality? The same applies to the
constant references to "WHITE monopoly capital" - if it became Black
monopoly capital would that change the lives of the majority of South
Africans? The fudging of class is carried through in the way in which
correct statistics are presented but abbreviated - for instance, we are told
"White households earn five times more than Black households". Shamefully,
that's true, but notice what is missing - the word "average". The StatsSA
finding from which this is drawn says: "The AVERAGE White household earns
five times more than the AVERAGE Black household". That reality is, of
course, absolutely scandalous and is the source of social instability. But
when you omit the word "average", you omit CLASS and wilfully omit the
growing class divisions and diverging class interests within the ANC itself.
All of this is designed to position private accumulation by narrow Black
elite as "radical transformation" for the benefit of the majority in
general.
The Minister of Finance, Comrade Pravin Gordhan was, therefore, absolutely
right to remind us in his budget speech last week of the 1969 ANC Strategy
and Tactics document which asserted that: "Our nationalism must not be
confused with chauvinism or narrow nationalism of a previous epoch. It must
not be confused with the classical drive by an elitist group among the
oppressed people to gain ascendancy so that they can replace the oppressor
in the exploitation of the masses."
The way forward
So what is the way forward? And what are the responsibilities of the SACP in
this volatile situation?
The CC agreed that, while consistently exposing factionalism and holding the
line against looting, we must guard against becoming over pre-occupied with
factional palace politics. Organic links with concrete programs of action
must be deepened with working class and poor communities who are being
battered by unemployment and preyed upon by criminals and drug dealers.
The radical transformation of the financial sector
The financial sector campaign needs to be intensified. We welcome the
announcement that a much delayed, second Financial Sector Summit will be
convened by Nedlac this year. The Summit must review the failure of the
banks and financial institutions to implement many of the commitments made
at the first Financial Sector Summit in 2002 and in the Financial Sector
Charter signed in 2004. Among these is the failure to invest in social
housing and local amenities through community re-investment commitments.
We also welcome the forthcoming Parliamentary hearings on financial sector
transformation and we call on community-based and social movement formations
to actively engage with these hearings.
Over the past two decades the financial sector in South Africa has grown
enormously and the major banks and their corporate elites have made billions
of rands, but this growth has not been for the benefit of the majority of
South Africans, nor is it a sustainable growth trajectory. The much vaunted
Black middle class, lacking historical assets, has been floated on household
debt, and this household debt crisis is threatening all-round social
stability. Nearly, half of all credit active South Africans, over 10 million
consumers, have impaired credit records. Much of this credit is for
immediate consumption, and 40 percent of loans from micro-lenders are simply
to buy food. This dire reality lies behind much of the crisis of
affordability in the higher education sector, for instance.
The Financial Sector Summit must agree on a debt amnesty for the poor and
lower middle class households. The fact that debt is being taken on not to
acquire assets, but for basic consumption on food, education and transport
underlines the imperative of radically placing our economy on to a different
shared and inclusive growth path.
The levels of indebtedness of the working class and poor result in many
oppressive and irrational outcomes. In government's iconic Cosmo City
subsidised housing project, for instance, the overwhelming majority of
original beneficiaries have sold their houses at prices far below the cost
to government for their construction. Indebtedness is also crippling land
restitution and reform, with many intended beneficiaries opting for cash
payments simply because day-to-day pressing needs compel poor households to
forfeit the possibility of acquiring a more enduring asset.
This crisis of poverty and indebtedness is further aggravated by loan
sharks, unscrupulous court officials, estate agents and the major banks.
Bank evictions have reached apartheid-era Group Area removal proportions.
It is in this context that the SACP condemns the hypocrisy of those who have
suddenly and belatedly jumped on to the bandwagon of dealing with the
financial sector. These forces support the call for the Postbank to be
re-capitalised and to function as a core community based bank. But they are
absolutely silent about who crippled the Postbank in the first place by
removing it as one of the channels for paying social grants. The very ones
who proclaim piously about the need for publicly-owned banks are those who
piloted an illegal contract with the Nasdaq-listed Net1/Cash Paymaster
outfit. And they continue to defy the courts in this regard.
The SACP salutes NEHAWU for actively taking up the crisis in the social
grant payment situation. It is imperative that we build and deepen the unity
of the organised working class and communities around common issues that
affect the organised and unorganised, the employed and unemployed, the
working poor and the indebted middle strata.
Let us strengthen our unity in action. Let us intensify our struggles
against an oppressive system dominated by monopoly capital. Let us struggle
for a comprehensive social security system that begins to address the right
to work, and the expansion of the social wage including affordable housing
and public transport.
A great deal of noise is heard from factionalist quarters about collusion in
foreign currency trading among 17 local and international banks. As the SACP
we agree that this kind of behaviour needs to be criminalised and
individuals involved should serve jail time. But what the sudden
opportunistic champions of bank regulation fail to recognise is that the
exposure by our Competition Commission of foreign currency trading collusion
is part and parcel of a wider move to tighten regulation and deal decisively
with illicit capital flows to places like Dubai through closing banking
accounts of companies and individuals involved in dodgy transactions. The
imperative of tightening up the Financial Intelligence Centre Act through an
amendment bill is equally an integral part of the transformation of the
financial sector and of dealing with those who are looting our country and
continent.
The 2014 Global Financial Integrity (GFI) report estimates that South Africa
suffered illicit financial outflows over $122-billion financial outflows
between 2003 and 2012, making South Africa one of the top 10 victims of this
ruthless corporate dispossession of our public wealth. Our Financial
Intelligence Centre says over the last decade South Africa has lost in
excess of R600bn in illicit flows, with trade mispricing playing a major
role.
National Minimum Wage
COSATU comrades presented the CC with a progress report on the National
Minimum Wage agreement. The CC congratulated the COSATU negotiators at
NEDLAC for their tough and principled negotiating stance. While COSATU has
not yet formally signed-off on the R20-an-hour, R3500-R3900 monthly national
minimum wage, the progress made is a major COSATU-led victory, based on its
November 2014 11th Congress resolution. While R3,500 is not a living wage,
6.2 million workers are currently earning less than that and the enforcement
of a national minimum wage will, therefore, represent an important advance
for the working poor in particular.
However, enforcement will not be automatic. The resourcing of the Labour
Department's labour inspectorate is critical, but, above all, it is the
union movement together with community organisations and the SACP on the
ground, that must ensure that this advance becomes a meaningful advance for
the working poor. For many organised sectors, in the public sector, or in
much of mining, for instance, the national minimum wage is far below what
has already been achieved through worker struggles. But the principle of
working class and trade union solidarity must prevail to ensure that there
is a collective advance for the most vulnerable sectors, while, as the
national minimum wage agreement explicitly states that there must be no
downward adjustments for sectors in which much higher levels of wage have
been achieved through collective bargaining.
The SACP calls on the wider trade union movement and all federations to
close ranks in support of the working poor, rather than indulge in sectarian
point-scoring. We note, for instance, that one NUMSA leader, has rubbished
the R20-an-hour rate. We note that on 18 November in its own Motor Industry
Bargaining Council settlement agreement regarding minimum wages for the
period ending 31 August 2019, NUMSA agreed to hourly wage rates for Chars
(R19.07) and Parking Garage Attendants (R14.61) below the R20-an-hour
national minimum wage.
The Land Question
Addressing the land question is a central component of radical economic
transformation. But, here again, we must be careful that radical-sounding
rhetoric is not really disguising either Black elite accumulation ambitions
or perhaps, even, the absence of any serious will to drive substantive land
reform.
We need to place emphasis on productive capacity. When land reform is
reduced simply to nominal "ownership" quotas in the absence of serious
attention to productive sustainability through active agricultural extension
officers, and appropriate irrigation, logistics, fencing and marketing
measures, land reform will simply produce failure, or elite enrichment.
We need also to recognise that while rural land reform is critical,
increasingly the real land question is an urban issue. Massive land and
asset dispossession did not just occur in the dismal colonial and apartheid
periods - dispossession of the poor is occurring daily in the present. Home
repossessions, gentrification of inner city suburbs like that occurring in
Woodstock or Bo-Kaap in Cape Town, driven by private sector developers
working collusively with Metro authorities, or the proposed dispossession
through shopping mall developments of the small farmers of Philippi are
examples of this continued dispossession.
Cape Town, of course, is not the only municipality affected by these trends.
Again we need to mobilise the widest range of progressive forces in struggle
to ensure that we do not compound apartheid spatial oppression and
dispossession. We need to radically transform the persisting and deepening
legacy of apartheid geography.
Higher Education
The CC discussed a report on the current situation in higher education. The
SACP fully supports the progress made towards ensuring free higher education
for the poor and working class, while firmly rejecting the
revolutionary-sounding but retrogressive slogan of free higher education for
all. Karl Marx as long ago as 1875 noted that in capitalist societies "free
higher education institutions.only means in fact defraying the cost of the
education of the upper classes from the general tax receipts", that is, at
public expense. In a society like South Africa with the enormous
inequalities prevailing, this observation has a special significance.
Together with our alliance partners the SACP will be convening a Higher
Education Summit in the coming weeks. The SACP will raise a number of key
issues, including the importance of producing a new generation of university
academics; providing substantive meaning to the call for de-colonisation of
university and college syllabi, and teaching practices; the deeply
concerning patriarchal and sexual harassment behaviour on campuses; and the
imperative of building, defending and transforming a strong public higher
education system against encroachments by both narrowly elite private higher
education providers, and lower-end fly-by-night operators. Some of the
problems in our higher education campuses are the result of ill-considered
corporatisation and the outsourcing of key functions and these issues must
also be urgently addressed.
Since late 2015 over R1-billion of damage has been caused to campus property
in the course of protest actions. We believe that the great majority of
students reject this senseless and self-defeating destruction. We call on
the Young Communist League and the wider Progressive Youth Alliance and the
wider university community to provide leadership and not to be held ransom
by, or tail behind, tiny and destructive groupings with agendas that have
little or nothing to do with education.
Many of the challenges in the higher education sector are symptoms of a
broader failure of our post-1994 reality. While the 1994 breakthrough marked
a decisive and radical rupture with the political, juridical and
constitutional structures of white minority rule, there has not been a
corresponding cultural revolution based on the values of solidarity, the
defence of national sovereignty, non-racialism, non-sexism and
internationalism.
Xenophobia and the failure of the police service
The CC condemns attacks against foreign nationals. However, moral
condemnation of criminal xenophobic behaviour by opportunistic elements will
not gain traction until we recognise the abject failure of the police in
many poor communities to deal effectively with crime, including
drug-dealing, whether perpetrated by South Africans or foreign nationals. As
numerous voices emanating from besieged communities are telling us, there is
a sense of absolute desperation.
Community activism against the real criminals in their communities needs to
be supported and responsibly engaged by the police through cooperation in
representative and effective Community Police Forums and neighbourhood watch
structures.
INSTEAD OF EMBROILING THEMSELVES IN FACTIONAL, PALACE POLITICS - THE
LEADERSHIP OF THE SAPS AND OUR INTELLIGENCE SERVICES NEED TO FOCUS ON
PROVIDING REAL PERSONAL AND COMMUNITY SECURITY TO THE WORKING CLASS AND
POOR, NOT LEAST FOR WOMEN AND GIRLS IN THESE LOCALITIES. WEALTHY SUBURBS
RELY ON A BURGEONING PRIVATE SECURITY SECTOR WHICH NOW OUTNUMBERS THE
POLICE. POOR COMMUNITIES HAVE NO SUCH RESORT.
Let us re-build the unity of our movement on the basis of principled
programs of action, rooted in working class and poor communities, in rural
and urban areas. Let us rebuild dynamic connections in struggle between the
organised working class and communities. Let us re-build shop steward local
councils. Let us use the major organisational events of 2017, not least the
SACP's July National Congress to take forward this strategic agenda.
Issued by the South African Communist Party
Contact:
Alex Mashilo, National Spokesperson, 076 316 9816
__________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature
database 14999 (20170226) __________
The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus.
http://www.eset.com
--
--
You are subscribed. This footer can help you.
Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this
message.
You can visit the group WEB SITE at
http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options,
pages, files and membership.
To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [email protected] . You
don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. You don't have to put
anything in the message part. All you have to do is to send an e-mail to this
address (repeat): [email protected] .
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"YCLSA Discussion Forum" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to [email protected].
To post to this group, send an email to [email protected].
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum.
To view this discussion on the web, visit
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/yclsa-eom-forum/001c01d29030%24352c2080%249f846180%24%40com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
